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Recommendations

Lists of stuff I like, roughly sorted into categories, ever expanding.

Books

Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

A manual for colonizing Mars, a birth of a post-capitalist nation, chronology of immortal meta-humans. My favorite series in all of literature. A bit heavy on technical side, but that's to my liking.

Goodreads link

The Broken Earth Series by N.K. Jemisin

Captivating fantasy premise, deep world and rock solid characters. Every single book in the trilogy won a Hugo for the best novel. If you haven't already just read this. Drop everything and read it.

Goodreads link

Revelation space series by Alastair Reynolds

Gloomy, expansive, atmospheric, hard sci-fi universe filled with everything from personal vignettes, detective storyies to space operas. My favorite fictional universe.

Goodreads link

Culture Series by Iain M. Banks

This is also my favorite fictional universe 😅️. Masterful world-building plus witty humor plus thought our and well interwoven themes. Each novel in the series tells it's own story.

Goodreads link

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

Mostly short stories, told from first person perspective of a self proclaimed murderbot. Wonderfully humorous while touching upon some serious topics as well.

Goodreads link

The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts

A first contact story that captures the incomprehensibility of alien intelligence. The book gets an A+ for concept and is just wonderfully strange.

Goodreads link

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

The one science fiction book I'd recommend to a book club, or someone curios about the genre. It has it all: space battles, personal stories, interpersonal drama, mystery and a bunch of imaginative sci-fi concepts. I suggest you skip the squeals. I don't believe that a squeal can take away from the quality of the original, but this example just might make me reconsider.

Goodreads link

Movies & series

I'm a great Start Trek fan, but I'm going to assume you know about that series and have seen enough of it to have made up your mind about it. With that, here are a few lesser known recommendations:

The Man From Earth

No aliens, no space travel, no CGI. Just a classic sci-fi premise and a masterful script woven around it. With a run-time of hour and a half it fits into most dense of schedules. Treat yourself to it!

IMDb link

Taken

The 2002 mini-series follows a few families through a couple of generations of their interactions with extra terrestrial visitors. Show has 10 episodes covering events starting with 40s and ending in present day. I like it for it's comprehensive overview and different perspectives on alien encounters.

IMDb ink

Starship Troopers

Adaptation of the Robert Heinlein's book of the same title. The movie manages to simultaneously offer blockbuster fun action set pieces and a thoughtful rebuke of the books fascist ideology. It delivers critique of militarism through satire that's fun to watch in its own right.

IMDb link

Youtube channels

It's hard for me to judge the renown of certain YouTube creators, so I'll try to list some of them that I enjoy but I think might be overlooked.

CGP Grey

Interesting, highly informative and whimsically written essays on variety of topics. The amount of research that goes into videos is on professional level.

YouTube channel

SFF180 by Thomas Wagner

Features SF and fantasy book reviews and coverage. My little window into a broader BookTube community. There are other similar channels, but I find Thomas' taste relatable, his opinions informative and his voice pleasant to listen to.

YouTube channel

Companion website

Artifexian by Edgar Grunewald

Channel dedicated to construction of fictional worlds and languages. You can find detailed, science backed instructions for anything from designing a star system, to tectonics, calendars, number systems and, of course, languages.

YouTube channel

Errant Signal by Chris Franklin

Thoughtful essays on video games. Author approaches them as art form and offers mature critique.

YouTube channel

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