what are your top 3 scifi series you wish more people read?
Excellent question! Hard to narrow down, too - there's ones I think "okay but that's too obvious, everyone knows that, say, the Sprawl Trilogy is good", but then I'm like, am I doing the xkcd 2501 thing and assuming that everyone is familiar with the print SF canon.
Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Still some of the best books on the settlement of the Red Planet ever written; crunchy, with a landscape painter's eye for prose. A little long in the tooth, although not quite as much as some say - regolith perchlorates aren't a total showstopper, I have a longpost in the works about this. Sort of Advanced Automation for Space Missions-core, self replicating robot factories quietly making all the economics the series hinges on possible for the most part. One of the best sets of "road trip" audiobooks ever, imo - the narrator has a very pleasantly Columbo-esque voice, and it feels very thematically appropriate given all the lovingly described rover traverses across the series.
The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun, by Paul McAuley
Spacers living on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn find themselves in the sights of ecofascist governments ruling large swathes of the post-climate-collapse Earth in the 23rd century. Terribly underrated series - a huge inspiration to me since I was a teenager, some really fun speculative biotechnology. There's a threequel and fourquel set in the distant future of the second book, but I personally found them to be much less fun.
A Deepness In The Sky, A Fire Upon The Deep, Children Of The Sky, by Vernor Vinge
Great stuff here - I'm presenting the books somewhat out of publishing order because I think the series kind of works better that way, personally. Covers a lot of ground - Fire is kind of half massive high-stakes space opera and half "human kid a very long way from home makes an unlikely alien friend". Deepness is significantly more "claustrophobic psychological horror-intrigue", although it has its moments of sweeping space opera too - the Rescue remains one of my favorite depictions of space combat to date. The third book is... hmm. I like it, but it feels strangely like a direct to VHS disney sequel to the Tines World bits of the first book - which is at times very endearing, don't get me wrong!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Culture series by Iain Banks
I personally recommend starting with Use of Weapons or The Player of Games. Very fun setting, the Culture themselves and their colorful collection of weakly godlike AIs remain one of the most iconic factions of the SF canon, to my mind. I thought Excession was very annoying ten years ago but I've been considering revisiting it lately.
The Sprawl Trilogy by William Gibson
Everyone and their mom has been chasing the feeling of reading Neuromancer for the first time for the last 40 years. Accept no substitutes.
the Jackaroo series by Paul McAuley (again)
First book (Something Coming Through) is alright, second book (Into Everywhere) is an all-timer, and stands fairly well on its own. Elevator pitch: enigmatic aliens give the nations of a twenty-minutes-into-the-future Earth access to wormholes to a score of terraformed planets. And so, we boldly go and build Motel 6es and Starbucks there on these gifted planets, but as it turns out these worlds are all ultra haunted by fossil strata of extinct aliens. And while those strata are sometimes very useful (wild nanotech! self-replicating robot wildlife! room temp superconductors!), they're also sometimes very dangerous (wild nanotech diseases! hostile software eidolons! energy weapons!). Kind of has shades of a plausible-nearfuture Roadside Picnic.
The Xeelee sequence by Stephen Baxter
I've got a little bit of a love/hate relationship with Baxter's writing, but it has to be said that he puts big ideas together in a way few others do. Timelike Infinity and Ring were weird and fun!
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
Hyperion is a fantastic book; it's a shame Mr. Simmons never wrote any sequels.
The Revelation Space books were foundational to me as a teenager but I haven't actually read them since like the mid 2010s. So, y'know, YMMV. Ditto the Poseidon's Children trilogy.
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