I don't know which of these you have read and which you have not, so here is "The List" I give to people.
Sci-Fi:
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is easily the best fiction I have read in at least the past 18 months. The all too plausible dystopian future that Bacigalupi's paints blew my mind. In the not so far distant future, the oil has run out, world economy collapsed, and the white man sent scurrying back home. Global warming has claimed coastal cities. Kink spring-powered skiffs and airships are the new face of global trade. Bio-engineering agriculture corporations control the food supply with constant releases of new varieties of engineered crops that are one to two seasons ahead of the now out-of-control bio-engineered plagues that these corporations long ago released. The Oil Economy is long dead. Welcome to the new Calorie Economy. Anderson Lake is a "Calorie Man", an executive for AgriGen. He is working undercover as a factory manager in a kink spring factory in Thailand. His true job is to locate the source of Thailand's pure, untainted fruits and vegetables so AgriGen can exploit them for their own uses. There he meets Emiko, a windup girl, aka, a New Person -- an engineered being with perfect skin, hypnotizing non-fluid jerky movements, and a genetic predisposition to obey. Jaidee is an officer of the Environmental Ministry, aka, white shirts, whose group is locked in a battle with the Trade Ministry as well as foreign interests who seek to exploit Thailand. Their paths crossing sets in motion a chain of events that changes everything.
This book was ridiculously good. So good that it won a Hugo award.
Armor by John Steakley. One of my favorite Sci-Fi novels of all time. It's an easy and quick read about warfare in the far future.
Old Man's War by John Scalzi. Another good one about warfare in the far future where everything in the universe is out to kill everything else.
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi. I think this image best sums up the book:
If you're familiar with the Star trek franchise, you're going to love this book. I had this stupid grin on my face the whole time I was reading it.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Earth barely survived the first two Bugger Wars and the third is looming. The military responds by selecting the best & brightest youngsters and training them in the art of war. Read it before the movie comes out this Fall!
Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. Second in the Ender's series. A new alien race is discovered and humanity wrestles with what to do based on what happened in
Ender's Game. Each subsequent book in this series gets a little worse (IMO) so you might want to stop here unless you absolutely must know how it all ends.
Xenocide by Orson Scott Card. Book three in the Ender's series.
Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card. Book four of four in the Ender's series. If you've read
Xenocide then you probably should read this one too so you know what happens to Lusitania.
Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card. The events in
Ender's Game as seen from the perspective of Bean. It's actually pretty good.
Shadow of the Hegemon by Orson Scott Card. This picks up where
Ender's Shadow leaves off and follows the events that take place between
Ender's Game and
Speaker for the Dead as seen through Ender's Jeesh.
Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card. This series ends up being better overall than the original Ender's Game series and is if you read the first two, you better read this one as well as the final one.
Shadow of the Giant by Orson Scott Card. Bean and Petra leave Earth to live out their own lives. Last book in the series.
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. Classic tale of man's first contact with alien life. The ending of the book haunted me for a week.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. This is pretty much a treatise on Libertarianism. The colonists on the moon are tired of being abused by earth and stage a revolt with the help of a supercomputer.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov. The greatest minds of The Galactic Empire are assembled on one planet for one mission: catalog all of the scientific knowledge of man before the Empire grows too big and collapses. This is the first book in a series. Asimov has a gift for combining hard SciFi with psychology.
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Great story about First Contact with a race that has a dark secret.
The Killing Star by Charles Pellegrino and George Zebrowski. I ain't gonna lie: this book scared the shit out of me. The story of the survivors after humanity is destroyed by relativistic missiles from an alien civilization.
Ringworld by Larry Niven. A classic. A habitable ring around a star with six million times the surface area of Earth. And it's been abandoned by its creators. A team of scientists are sent to investigate.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. In the future American has outsourced so much that they only lead the world in three things: microcode, rock n' roll, and high speed pizza delivery. Hiro Protagonist, a newly unemployed pizza delivery driver and coder, finds himself investgating why hackers are falling into comas. A fast, fun read.
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Possibly my favorite Neal Stephenson book. This book is full of some great ideas of what happens when nanotechnology is ubiquitous and national borders cease being meaningful. This review sums it up best: John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw's daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian society. But Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book" has fallen into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to change.
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Two parallel stories: WWII Bletchley Park codebreakers who must devise a way to use the information from Enigma messages without tipping off the Germans that their precious code has been broken and the efforts of a contemporary group trying to set up a data haven in the South Pacific that will be financed by finding a cache of lost Axis gold.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson. In this long(!) tale, Stephenson paints a picture of a world where scientists sequester themselves inside of monestaries to preserve scientific knowledge as the world outside the walls goes though cyclic rises and falls.
REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. Take one part
Snow Crash, add two parts William Gibson contemporary Cyberpunk stuff (minus the ultra-hip techno-Hipsters), a generous dollop of post-9/11 Tom Clancy, and blend on HIGH for 30 seconds and you get
REAMDE. It's a quick, action-packed read that did not disappoint. Hell, it even has a nice, tidy ending. inorite?
Speaking of William Gibson...
William Gibson's older cyperpunk stuff is great but I think that his last three contemporary novels are some of his best work. Especially when you realize that these three predict some things that have already come to pass.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Cayce Pollard has a unique allergy. She is allergic to brands. She is hired by an enigmatic advertising mogul to discover who is behind the creation of a series of mysterious B&W videos that have taken the internet by storm. This novel was written two years before YouTube came out and pretty much predicted the phenomenon of viral videos.
Spook Country by William Gibson. A sequel of sorts to
Pattern Recognition, this follows the story of a man who is trying to locate a mysterious SEAVAN that always remains at sea and is moved from ship to ship. This novel features augmented reality and something which closely resembles Google Glass. Not bad for 2007.
Zero History by William Gibson. Gibson seems to like to write his novels in bursts of three and this one wraps up the trilogy. This time around it is the world of secret branding (on raw denim of all things) and who is designing the next generation military clothing.
Dune by Frank Herbert. One of the most popular sci-fi novels of all time. Can you believe it is over 40 years old?
Halting State by Charles Stross. What we have here is a well-written whodunit in near future that rings a little too close to home for comfort. It's 2018 and augmented reality is, well, a reality. China, India, and the EU are in the midst of waging a never ending infowar, while the United States is rendered obsolete by the crumbling of its aging data infrastructure. Oh, and Scotland has its independence and is a full EU member. Against this backdrop, Edinburgh cop Sgt. Sue Smith gets pulled into an investigation involving the bank heist of an on-line game. Seems that Orks from an entirely different game, show up in another game's bank and made off with a small fortune of in-game magic items. Stuff like that is not supposed to happen. This theft of 1s and 0s equates to several million Euro. Turns out, it's not just items in a game's database that have been compromised. If it sounds similar to
REAMDE, that's only because they both feature an online game as its backdrop. That is where the similarities end. Warning: the story is told in second person so be prepared.
Rule 34 by Charles Stross. A sequel to
Halting State, this story looks at a world where 3-D printing is everywhere and what kind of problems are going to arise. As in
Halting State, the story is told in second person. Highly recommended.
The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. The Cthulhu mythos meet James Bond in this well-done story about an insane billionaire trying to destroy the world by summoning That Which Should Not Be Summoned. Oh, and by the way, it turns out magic is just applied high order mathematics.
Fantasy:
American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Set in the midwest, the old gods (Odin, Osiris, Ra, etc.) and the new gods (TV, credit cards, internet, etc.) aren't getting along and an ex-con is caught in the middle of the brewing war.
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Loosely a sequel to
American Gods, boring old Charlie Nancy learns not only that his father was a god but he has a brother he never knew about.
Stardust by Neil Gaiman. A fairy tale for grownups and different enough from the movie to be worth reading.
The Mongoliad Book One, Book Two, and Book Three by Neal Stephenson, Erik Bear, Greg Bear, Joseph Brassey, Nicole Galland, Cooper Moo, and Mark Teppo. It's the 13th Century and the Mongol Horde is threatening to conquer Europe. For a secret order of knights, the mission is clear: ride East and assassinate the Khan. This trilogy came about as a way for the authors to justify their learning Historical European Martial Arts (sword fighting). The fights are detailed and accurate and the story engaging.
