Good space Science fiction books?

[Pyropaten]

Hello all. Can someone recommend any good Science fictions books? Even better, any with a good audio version?

Thanks in advance

[Loriath]

The Martian.
Ready Player One
Any Asimov
Ringworld by Larry Niven
Honor Harrington - First 3-4 books only. they get too repetative.
The Elite Books

Anything that won Hugo Awards before 1980

[TorTorden]

Dunno about audio books and I haven't done all that much reading past decade

But i can personally recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game is good and written in manner youths find easy to read (or so I keep hearing), even though the author is a religious right wing, bigotted moron...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gap_Cycle is even better, very intense and brutal.
Be warned, it starts with a young female cadet being captured by a perverted pirate and it only goes worse from there on...

I could probably dig up a couple more but for the moment their titles escape me.

The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy is also a given, but then again you probably read it already, maybe you could even find the old radio show version (it was originally a radio theater program)

Update:
Tau zero is also good, classed under hard science fiction and quite old, toying with relativity a bit like interstellar.
(the major premiss of the book is an expanding then contracting universe leading to another big bang)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tau_zero

[Flip]

The Martian (Andy Weir) is really cool indeed.
Ready Player One (Ernest Cline) is absolutely great but has nothing to do with space. I still recommend it, though.
Old Man's War (John Scalzi) and its sequels are just great. One of my favorite authors at the moment.
Orbital Decay, Apollo's Outcasts, and the Near-Space series (Allen Steel) are pretty good hard sci-fi in space.
A World Out Of TIme (Larry Niven) is really good.
Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) is very good, but I found the sequels really boring.
Robert Heinlein also wrote some great space opera, but it's a bit dated, now.
And of course, The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy (Douglas Adams) is an absolute must.

[Roger Wilco Jr]

It depends on what you mean by "good". I prefer lighter reads that are entertaining. I also like some harder science fiction, but other times it just has too much theoretical physics for me. There's other stuff that I just pass on because it looks like you need to be on LSD to enjoy it.

One thing about the old stuff is the authors had no clue about personal computers, thumb drives, and cell phones.

One of my favorites is Mutineer's Moon and the series by David Weber. I readd this might become a movie.
Another is Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (the movie sucked).

David Weber's "March to the ..." series had a good audio torrent in the past.

I generally like most of David Weber's stuff, but after the first several books, they did become repetitive, especially with some series overlapping. They also started getting very long with hundreds of characters (some who die right after spending 25 pages learning everything about them). So most Weber I tend to speed read these days and just skip paragraph after paragraph of exposition, if that's the correct term.

I also liked all the Babylon 5 novels, but if you didn't like the TV show then you probably won't like the books (that goes for Star Trek and Star Wars, too).

David Drakes "Reaches" series. It's been a while, but I think these remind me of Elite.

S.M. Stirlings "The General" series.


For more of a comedic or adventurous experience, try the "Phule" series and the "Myth" series by Robert Asprin.


For something a little harder, try:

The "Rama" series by Arthur C Clarke.
The "Heechee Saga" by Frederik Pohl.
The "Uplift" series by David Brin.
The "Galactic Center" series by Gregory Benford.

[Walter]

Probably showing my age a bit (I have one story in an anthology where a space pilot drops his radio, breaking all the valves - this after having to cut a tape to feed into the computer):

Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov for brilliant ideas, but really weak characterisation.

Anything by Larry Niven or Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Clifford Simak, Frederick Pohl, Robert Silverberg.

Robert Heinlein couldn't keep his rather right-wing bias out of his books, but Double Star is a good read.

For a good laugh, try Harry Harrison or Eric Frank Russell.

For superb writing anything by Ursula le Guin and for a real challenge, any of Doris Lessing's science fiction.

For pure escapism there's (the creator of Tarzan) Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series, in which John Carter mysteriously travels to Mars and has pretty much the same adventures over ten volumes.

For quaintness there's Ray Bradbury and the ultimate cynic was Philip K Dick (but mainly not space adventures).

Decent science fiction seems to have been replaced by fantasy in recent times, but even fantasy writers can produce some decent stuff: try Tuf Voyaging by George RR Martin (it's nothing like A Game of Thrones).

Then there's Cordwainer Smith, Ian Watson, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, JG Ballard, John Wyndham . . .

The first two books of HHGG are better in sound than on the page; the BBC released the two radio series in a CD six-pack.

[TorTorden]

Aye, fantasy seems to have replaced sci-fi. I have too much respect for proper world creation so I would certainly not call it easy, but I could be just a little bit easier when you can say "fuck-off" to all forms of current on going politics or physics in general, and just invent your own system for magic etc.

Then we are also seeing a fair few starting a new'ish genre in my book, and that's the space-fantasy the very opposite of a hard-scifi
A good example of that would be the movie Jupiter ascending.

[clivewil]

some good titles mentioned there.

i also enjoyed 'The Mote In God's Eye' by Niven/Pournelle, but it is more about an alien encounter than space per se

[Loriath]

i also enjoyed 'The Mote In God's Eye' by Niven/Pournelle, but it is more about an alien encounter than space per se

Yep Good Read.

Many have said Enders Game, yes, good, but also one that I had issues with which had nothing to do with the author.

If you want a couple of decent free ones, Check out http://tommerrittbooks.com/ Tom Merritt is the Host of Daily Tech News Show, Sword and Laser and a few other podcasts. He used to do Video Podcasts for CNet and was also on The Screensavers for a bit and was host of Tech News Today on the Twit Network. He is a pretty good writer, and I enjoy his books. You can even get a couple of them for free in Epub/PDF format at his site.

[smartroad]

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