The best science fiction is about more than just cool new worlds, wild new technologies, and aliens (though it’s very much about those things too). It’s about politics, economies, the very human condition itself. Just, you know, in a super-exciting way. Science fiction isn’t for a specific kind of person. It’s not “just for nerds.” Science fiction is awesome, and it’s for everyone.I recently read a WIRED article that listed 23* introductory gifts for sci-fi noobs - as the author of the article admits, not a list of the best, but a list of the best places to start. The item on the list were:
David Pierce, WIRED 12.05.15
- Star Wars: The Original Trilogy
- Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Blade Runner
- Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (audiobook format)
- Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
- Dune, by Frank Herbert
- The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
- The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowlings
- The Magicians Trilogy, by Lev Grossman
- Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
- Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
- The X-Files
- Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
- The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
- Dark City
- Beasts of the Southern Wild
- Firefly
- The Wool Trilogy, by Hugh Howey
- The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
- The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker
- Alien and Aliens
- The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
- Total Recall
Overall, this list looks like more of a reflection of the author's interests than anything else - which in no way renders it invalid, I think that's how most people would approach this - but it's not what I would think of as a scholarly approach to the topic.
So, although I don't generally approve of lists as a mechanism to generate content**, I've done up a 25-item Science Fiction Starter Pack, which I've tried to base on the accessibility of the material for the neophyte, and a broad representation from the genre. In the interests of keeping it to a more readable length, I'm going to split it between two posts following this one.
- Sid
* Lord knows why 23, maybe they wanted a prime number.
** Which must make me a member of an awfully select club, at least on the Internet.
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