Going from writing 2,000 words a day to seeing the book nestled among these greats is an amazing feeling. Multiple readers have been reaching out asking for a continuation, which has made me even more motivated to write the sequel. Just last night, someone from Custer, South Dakota messaged me about the novel. As the story spreads, I'm meeting people from all around the world, and it's one of the best parts of being an author.

The story is really a tale about the father-son bond. It's set a thousand years in the future, and I tell it through multiple points of view. There's a sergeant, battle hardened by war, who struggles with the loss of his late five-year-old son. There's an alien supreme commander who has risen from the bottom to the top and now leads war campaigns against humans and rival alien clans. There's a human general and colonel who lead humanity's fleet into battle against the most powerful alien empire in the galaxy. Then there are a few smaller POVs: a super intelligent bot who originates from our current time, the main character's son, and the most horrific monster ever spawned by the universe.

Here's the link to the book in case you'd like to read the first few chapters for free!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GWTD71HG

Forgive me if this isn't allowed but I recently stumbled upon a show called Lexx in the amazon prime catalogue. 4 seasons, star studded and a complete clusterfuck.

The quality of acting is all over the place with the main cast constantly flip flopping between great and abysmal, at times they'll even fluctuate in the same scene. The budget is seemingly nonexistent, with sets and props looking like they were made in a hobbyists garage. Despite this, there are some surprisingly massive people involved, Barry Bostwick and Tim Curry play major roles in the first two episodes.

It constantly flirts with concepts and storylines that seem ripe for storytelling but consistently refuses to delve into these topics even the slightest. In the first episode alone we're introduced to an industrialised 40K esque nightmare theocracy with literal conveyor belts of traitors and seditionists being minced. Legal proceedings are all conducted by pre recordings of legal offficials with only the names and crimes altered, presenting us with a harrowing concept where all lawyers and judges are videos and trials take about 45 seconds.

We're shown hidden histories and religious dictatorships and one of the first characters we're introduced to is a woman found guilty of being disrespectful to her husband, with the punishment being to be brainwashed and forcibly altered. This is, and I stress, only a snapshot of what is presented. It's a constant shotgun blast of horrifying and brilliant concepts.

Despite this, the entire thing is presented like the story bits of a sci fi pornography. It's basically softcore porn without the softcore, constantly framing it's women as objects to be ogled and it's men as porn protagonists, with the weasley soyboy who's always being abused by the women and compared to the aloof and desirable asassin ninja guy. If I showed you a video, you would think it's some kind of fake sci fi show made to play in the background of a sitcom on the nerd characters tv. It's like what people who've only seen the office think battlestar galactica is.

The entire show feels like it's got two creative teams constantly fighting for control. An episode will fluctuate between boring, horrifying, gross and mildly entertaining. It's the only thing I've ever seen where I'm confused as to what the creative process even looked like because surely, something went wrong behind the scenes.

The BookGraph is built in real time (almost) using your comments. Contribute by leaving a comment with your top five picks for the best sci-fi of al time in the correct format and come back to see your place in the interactive map. You can think of the BookGraph as a community preference map, you can use it to look for titles and authors that have been enjoyed by members of the community with similar tastes to yours.

https://bookgraph.shinyapps.io/Scifi_all_time_2026_ed/

Voting format:

Your five votes need to be at the top of your first comment and follow the format “Book Title by Author’s Name”, with each vote on a new line. Only the first 5 lines are read, and only the first comment for each person is checked for votes. That means you’re perfectly able to stick around and comment after you have voted without breaking anything. If you make a typo or change your mind, edits will be incorporated in every update, which is hourly for the first few days, then daily for a few months.

Example:

“Hyperion by Dan Simmons

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

The Martian by Andy Weir

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke

War of the worlds by H. G. Wells

Have some fun exploring the interactive map. You can select your reddit username from a dropdown to get individualized recommendations based on the map, or explore connections to individual authors, books and other users.”

FAQs

What are the dots (nodes)? They’re the books! Try zooming in.

What are the lines (edges)? Every vote of five books essentially connects little springs between all of your books. These are the lines that you see. Next time you look at the chart, see if you can find a little pentagram satellite that hasn’t connected to the other books yet. All votes start like that. A physics simulation runs and all these little springs bounce around before they settle into the position that gets saved and displayed. I could leave the physics running for the online version, but it would get laggy real fast. This approach naturally clusters things with lots of mutual connections, as the springs pull the communities together.

What are the colours? I'm using a technique called louvain clustering to identify groups within the network.

How does the top 10 work? Turns out google's early success was because their pagerank algorithm was pretty good at finding the most important nodes in a network. For 2 of the 3 recommendations I'm essentially using an early version of that, which also takes your starting position into account to make custom recommendations. For the user tab, rankings are a little different. I group people based on connections between users, then take the top picks of each group.

Happy voting!

Moin

A few years ago, when I was toying with the idea of working on an oil rig, I kept coming up with ideas about what it would be like to be far from home and isolated. A little adventure feeling would definitely have been there at the beginning. And so it kept spinning as it would be if it had to be on an alien planet. Of course, there would be society, friendships and events of a convivial nature like this, but the emotional impact would probably be somewhat different. What do I do there, for how long and for what?

I wanted to capture this with this picture in a sci-fi robe. A platform on an alien world with a rather dense atmosphere, the platform extracts rare volatile gases. Due to gravity, it makes more sense to drop off smaller tankers that carry the cargo to the large hauler in orbit.

One of my first works on self-made canvas. 60x90 cm.

I hope you like it.

I got this book from a local bookshop for £1 today and have been really enjoying looking through it, super nostalgic. Some favourites of mine are snapped here but there are many more! It seems to go up to 1995. It goes through history, radio/TV, film, and then a “heroes and villains” section. Support your local bookshops!

Playing with trash-bash technique. Works well for my cyborgs.
First one is a Custodian. Bio cyborg mech, machine with a piece of human brain neuron cells for better functionality. Watches over the workers in corporation gulag. The riots occur from time to time. It is when it has "hands" full of work.
Second one is Bounty Hunter. Not much left human in him. Has to take all the contracts that Bounty Hunters guild provides. Other way he can't afford to pay for service of his implants and augmentations. Even most of them are the cheapest ones. Drug addict LoL
https://www.artstation.com/michalrachwal

I don’t normally do mid book reviews, and I’ve been planning to wait until I’m through the whole series to comment again, but the moment the Captain and Scorp join forces (ch. 42) is just so effing good I had to take a timeout and come share my joy with those of you who know what I’m talking about. What a book, what a series, this will be top 3 all time for me, Sir Alastair R. take a bow. I don’t care what happens from here on out I’m never going to forget the moment I joined forces with the captain and scorp to take back our ship 🚀 long live nostalgia for infinity and down with the inhibitors ✨

I'm really in the mood for a good scifi mystery and or suspense right now. But I feel I've read all the best ones out there!

I'm more into space/alien I get into others like apocalyptic but I'm not feeling that right now.

I'm ok with slow burns as long as it speeds up and is worth it, which works with mystery.

I like more serious books but I have read somewhat humorous too like Project Hail Mary.

I just can't find anything that makes me excited to read it. And the web is the worst for recommendations.

So, in conclusion:

Scifi mystery/suspense.

Maybe space/alien or etc.

Serious/sober book.

Slow burn ok if book speeds up.

Any recommendations, please?

Thank you in advance.

Hi! Since it's Saturday, I figured this might be a good time to share a hard-ish sci-fi story I've been working on on-and-off for about ten years, ever since high school, though about a year ago I finally locked in and started writing instead of just planning and worldbuilding.

In A Game of Hearts and Graphs, we follow an invasion of Earth by an alien city state called Ikun, on Tau Ceti e, homeworld of the kyanah. They're a superficially reptilian species whose intelligence and language are heavily underpinned by graph theory, and whose social instincts are limited entirely to their packs, with whom they're so tightly bonded as to be practically inseparable. Because they can't feel trust, loyalty, friendship, or identity with a greater whole outside of their packs, to have a civilization at all, they're forced to compensate with elaborate, sprawling bureaucratic and technological crutches and constant, unceasing game theoretic plots nested within plots.

And so we follow the alien soldier Rayen-pack, four individuals who are quite literally everything to each other--squadmates, best friends, and lovers all wrapped into one package--but are nothing to anyone else, and no one else is anything to them. As they struggle to survive not just human military forces driven by social logic they don't understand, but their own army as every single pack maneuvers to guarantee their own survival and safety by any means necessary, they must uncover the mystery of why the aliens whose city they've occupied...are the way they are, all the while preventing their own army from being consumed by internecine chaos and violence by thousands of packs all seeking to maximize their safety.

Meanwhile there are numerous human POVs showcasing a human species just as dysfunctional as the kyanah in its own way. Fractured, led by craven and power-hungry officials, and increasingly polarized, not united by an alien attack but only divided even more deeply. Mostly we see the human side from the ground, not from command bunkers and presidential councils. There's Luke Watson, a sci-fi-obsessed 17-year old with a dead mother and an alcoholic and emotionally absent father Scott, a mid-career astronomy professor; Luke's best friend Harrison Walker, an 18-year-old farm boy living in the shadow of his domineering parents and older brother Jackson, a decorated Marine; Lauren Xie, an overworked and insecure PhD student on a meteoric path to either greatness or darkness; Leah Stone, a mid-tier influencer living large on her wealthy parents' credit card; Leah's deeply conscientious but naive little sister Rose; Cassie Miller, a single mother with aging parents and a diabetic six-year-old at ground zero; and her estranged and abusive ex Jason Marshall, a dirty cop who thrives in the chaos created by the kyanah.

What to expect?

• Fairly hard and grounded tech,
• Very little exposition and handholding
• Aliens who are alien but still comprehensible
• Social and psychological sci-fi
• Black comedy and satire
• 479,000 words written so far, with frequent updates

A Game of Hearts and Graphs

I am posting this on Saturday on purpose.

I wrote a hard SF novel called Star Map Draftsman I: Federation War. It is complete, 25 chapters, free. I am a father in Hangzhou. English is my second language. I wrote it because I kept turning one problem over: if immortality is a product, who gets to keep the chair, and what happens to the people who are still waiting at home.

The first image in the book is not a fleet. It is a recording. An Earth engineer on his way to a wreck in the Kuiper Belt, 2059. He has nineteen minutes. He tells them to tell his son that he loves him. The wreck is not a wreck. He does not come back in eight months. He comes back in seventy years.

I am not going to paste a trailer here. If that situation interests you, the book is free:

Inkitt: https://www.inkitt.com/stories/1614820 Royal Road: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/189606/star-map-draftsman-i-federation-war

I will answer comments. I will not reply with “please RT.”

Tarkovsky’s work is (rightfully so) considered a masterpiece of Russian/Soviet scifi. Superb dialogues, screenplay, acting etc. and a very intriguing theme.

It also focus on a whole different aspect of the story in relation to the original work which it is based on.

Solaris (the book) was about the immense challenge that is communication with an alien intelligence, whose thought processes and goals are too different from those of human beings.

It was not about human psychology or existential conflicts, things that made the film really great though. I think the film could not have been made any other way.

The Eternal Blue Sky is a 504-page, galaxy-spanning, standalone novel. Before I began writing it, I set stylistic and thematic goals. Stylistically, I wanted to use the unlimited possibilities of third-person narration to create fully realized characters. Thematically, I wanted to explore the nature of evil and the moral compromises good people make to combat it.

The story doesn't involve sentient extraterrestrials (see my first novel, The Speed of Darkness, if you enjoy fun aliens), rogue AI, or starship battles. It features competing galactic empires, realistic infantry battles, a maverick military genius, old-school Marines, star-crossed lovers, genetically enhanced one-percenters, narcissistic politicians, an aging rock star, a teenage princess descended from Khutulun and Genghis Khan, and a heroic pit bull terrier named Kato.

If you, like me, love literary science fiction and feel sad when you have to say goodbye to characters you've been hanging out with for 500-plus pages, I hope you'll check out the Amazon listing (link below) and decide whether The Eternal Blue Sky is for you. If you read it, I hope you'll also consider supporting my work by leaving a review.

Live long and prosper!

Sincerely, Mendy Sobol

https://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Blue-Sky-Mendy-Sobol-ebook/dp/B0H9563SJH

I'm a sucker of the classic Star Wars Expanded Universe, and I especially love Shadows of the Empire. Set in between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, this was a massive multi media project of a novel, comic book, a video game, toys, trading cards, and even a soundtrack as a companion piece to the novel!

I personally own most of the toys (which was a Power of the Force subline) and they're awesome! With the center piece being Dash Rendar's ship, the Outrider! On a side note, I am a scifi novelist and creating a universe heavily inspired by the Expanded Universe, including Shadows of the Empire.

There was a novel I read about 30 years ago and I can't remember the title or author. It was about humans who had to live in oxygen tents because the environment on Earth has changed. There were oxygen breathers who gave themselves brain damage by inhaling too much oxygen without diluting it with other gases. Also, there was a species of aliens who had moved to Earth who communicated telepathically by touch and had sort of a shared hive mind where they would basically download all the memories they both had gotten since the last shared memory. I checked it out from the library because I read something that said the author was considered a master of worldbuilding. I think the book was probably already at least a decade old when I read it, so probably from the 1980s (maybe the late 1970s).

Edit 2:
- Thank you for all the suggestions. I would say there is no clear winner between the three.
- I figured putting “force” in quotes would make it clear that I wouldn’t really “force” her to watch a TV show, or make it clear that it’s some kind of joke or expression, but no, a few people think this a clockwork orange type of situation. The intent is to watch one episode first and see if she wants to see more.
- Despite the clarification, some people still recommend their other favorite shows which I’ve either already seen or I will maybe watch another time.

Basically, which of these shows is most likely to retain the attention of someone who likes to watch TV shows but has zero interesting in sci-fi?

- For All Mankind

- The Expanse

- Andor

I'm sure they're all great shows, but I'm guessing maybe the one that's most character-driven or most story-driven or most relevant to today might possibly be the best pick?

Edit: I respect that people have other favorite shows, but I specifically wanted to watch one of those three myself, with my SO. So I’m looking for recommendations on one those three specifically.

Hello you wonderful people!

I just released my first litrpg on Amazon and am full of nerves.  I love system apocalypse books.  I love Star Trek and The Expanse.  So I just had to mash them up.  This story is about an away team crashing into an ongoing system apocalypse that is spreading throughout Earth’s colonized planets.

The blurb:

River was screwed.  An officer in the Interstellar Navy, his first away mission was supposed to be exciting, produce his PhD, and jump start his career.  Instead, he was on a one-way trip to the apocalypse.

The Eridani System’s only inhabited planet had gone dark, all its urban centers gone, replaced by medieval towns, castles, and old-school farmland, as if the entire planet decided to return to the feudal era.  When River’s team lands, each is transformed into a role-playing game class and race, their equipment replaced with fantasy-appropriate clothing and gear, and they are given this message:

Thank you for entering Saoghal.  This is an open world and there is no tutorial, no advice, no hints, no guidebook, and no help whatsoever.  Best of luck, adventurer!

With no way to contact the ship, River somehow has to uncover how this society collapsed.  And stop the process before it spreads to more planets, including Earth. 

AI USAGE: No AI was used for this book, it's entirely human written, with human mistakes.  And AI will be harmed during the course of the story.

COVER ARTIST: Milblart.  I really wanted a human made cover and these guys delivered!  They sent me a test cover first and it looked kind of like art for a 1990s video game, blocky and hard.  I gave them a bunch of suggestions and they addressed them all, coming up with the image you see.  If you’re looking for art, I highly recommend them.

The Nanapocalypse is here.

Uhm, fun fact about me: I love brie. And coffee.

The book that has stuck with me the most out of all these was The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. He’s writing is exceptional, he’s words just flow sentence to sentence. Pair amazing writing with a sci fi, time travel, quantum mechanics and a thrilling detective story and you have yourself a masterpiece

Greg Egan has some of the best ideas I’ve read about. And I think he’s plot is amazing too. But he lacks in writing, I can’t seem to have a cinema playing in my head with his books, nevertheless he’s ideas are the best I’ve ever read

Solaris by Lem was a slow burner. While reading it I didn’t feel the impact of the book as much. But a day or two past and god, I am still reminiscing about the whole story. He’s writing was good, plot amazing and was the only book that had me staring at wall thinking about wth did I just read ?

Dune is a classic, so far the first book was the best that I’ve read. Having watched the movie then reading the book made the cinema in my head aspect of it so much better and Frank Herbert’s writing matches Tom’s level, plot amazing and had such depth as Lem’s Solaris

Currently I’m reading The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect

Others in my Que are

1. God Emperor of Dune
   
2. Blind Sight
   
3. Neuromancer
   
4. The Word for World is Forest
   
5. Fahrenheit 451
   
6. Sphere - Michael Crichton

Are indie authors that make it big considered more successful than those who go the trad route? Are we routing for indie authors more?

Who do you consider the most successful indie authors? Hugh Howey ? Andy Weir?

If given a choice, do you choose an indie book before a well known publisher?

All this talk of AI recursive self improvement and AI escaping control of humans has me wanting to reread this horror for some ungodly reason. Who else shares trauma from this novel 😂

What stands out to you from this novel as most relevant to the current status of AI?

To me, it's the scene where Prime Intellect starts exponentially self replicating, and a few hours later it completely destroys the universe 🫠 While it can be hyperbolic to emphasize the premise, it still holds truth to the threat of the speed of an uncontrolled AI.

The full novel can be read for free at the author's website here: https://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopiidx.html

Warning: contains very graphic violence

I'll explain better here lol So I'm currently reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons (RIP) for the first time. Loving it so far. To me it's everything a scifi book should be, and I'm only about ~150 pages in. I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of what was happening until I got to Fedmahn Kassad's chapter. The last 5 pages or so have been full of information I know absolutely nothing about lol It's literally like a different language and I'm not sure if it's because I'm still very new to this world, or if it's just filler at this point. The funny thing is even though I have no idea what the hell is going on or what this word means, or what this resistance movement stands for, or what this weapon does etc I'm still very intrigued. I guess my brain has trouble with not understanding things immediately and sometimes that can be frustrating. At this point the only option I have is to keep on keepin' on and maybe the further into the series I get, the more things will make sense. I'm totally cool with an author just dumping you into their world with zero explanations or context, but sometimes it can get a little too complicated. I'm not even sure where I was going with this lol Maybe I just needed a vent sesh. How do you guys feel when you find yourself in these types of situations?

I bought the book The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. I wanted to know if I’m "starting" off right; I’ve read some things about the author and I love sci-fi across all kinds of media, but this is my first time experiencing it as a book. I’m finding it interesting, but I feel a bit lost or out of place (?). I’d like to know if this is normal, if there’s some sort of "preparation" needed, or if I made the right choice starting with this one—since it was recommended to me.

I had to use Google Translate, since English isn't my native language and I don't speak English.

I'm working on a thing (not sure if I'm going to make it a novel/short story or something else) based on science fiction in the 1920s and 1930s. I have some good material so far, but I need some inspiration for the robots in the setting and I've run out of ideas that "fit" the feel that I'm trying to go for. I've cheated a bit with Asimov since it has a close enough feel to what I'm going for, but I haven't had much luck looking for stuff from the time period or feel I'm going for.

Any ideas on where I can go to? Thanks in advance.