Ranking Every Sci-Fi Book I Read This Year

Very good. Borderline amazing. I really enjoyed this fairly recent cyberpunk release.

This was a tale of two halves for me. This was originally a nolla and it was expanded into a novel. And the first half I felt was pretty strong.

One of my favorite writers and he didn't disappoint. This is part of the Revelation Space Universe, but is the first in a subseries, the Prefect Drafus Emergencies. And it combines detective sci-fi with a space opera.

And this really hit hard. This is kind of an emotional read, quite a tough read. Sarah Margo, I believe, won the Nobel Prize.

I ended up putting it in good just because it lost me a little bit towards the end, but a really interesting creature.

Very good. This was borderline amazing as well. I really liked the first contact story.

I really like the opening. I thought it had a good mystery, a good creepy vibe, but it never developed into anything truly scary. And we kind of get sidetracked by some relationship stuff that I wasn't that interested in.

I didn't like this as much as Roadside Picnic, but I did like it. it puts you in what kind of feels like a medieval world, but there's sort of like a sci-fi connection. And I did like the way that it used that to explore certain themes.

Amazing. This book is so cool. And I thought from the various covers that it has, it was going to be a little bit cheesy, but it's not cheesy.

Not for me. I didn't like this book. It has an interesting premise.

I'm going to put this in decent, but hear me out. There's high points. I think he's a great writer.

Unfortunately though, this really creative language, this kind of future world that Bunch created, it just started to grow a little bit tiresome. Every chapter felt the same.

I've only read one of his books, More Than Human, but I loved it.

Very good. This book will make you think differently about octopuses. So, it's set in the future and there's some great stuff here to do with intelligence and consciousness and comparing humans versus robots versus animals versus aliens, like all kinds of beings and the way in which intelligence and consciousness can be the same or different.

I liked it more on the reread. The first time I read it, it was fairly early on in my sci-fi reading career, and I thought it was interesting, but man, it's it's it does not hold your hand.

Very good. I didn't like it quite as much as Claraara and the Sun, but I just love his writing style. The whole time you're reading an Ishiguro book, it's beautiful yet sad.

There were some great moments in the book because of that, but I didn't feel like that particular concept was as fully explored as I maybe hoped it would be, but I'm just sort of like a concept driven reader, you know?

Amazing. This was one of the surprises of the year just cuz I thought I knew about Planet of the Apes through pop culture, the movies, and whatnot, but I'd never read the original. And man, what a masterpiece.

Very good. I like Permutation City more, but I like Quarantine more than Diaspora. So, I'd reckon I'd rank it second out of the three Egan books I've read.

Very good. I like this quite a lot. we get some good character dynamics, some interesting themes on this little kind of side mission for Hrien, but it kind of connects into some other things a little bit in the future.

I read Radio Free Albamuth and Val and these are kind of two takes on the same book and I like them both.

I liked the colonization on Mars, but it just sort of delved a little bit too much into the character drama, the relationships, and things that I was less interested in, and I found this book a little bit dry and wasn't really compelled to complete the whole series.

This had some high points, but I also had some issues with it. The idea is awesome. Some very interesting things going on here. Cool science, cool aliens, but a little bit dry.

Good. Very inventive cyberpunk here. Some kind of really interesting dynamics between factions, different philosophies on technology. Some cool tech in here. It just sort of needed a bit of a throughine to kind of get me to that ending where I was more invested in the outcome.

I like Station 11 slightly more, but Sea of Tranquility still great. This is a time travel story. We get different periods.

This is my least favoritechaikovsky that I've read so far. Although it wasn't bad, it just felt the first chapter's awesome. The first chapter really hooks you in.

I'm going to put it in very good. I am a little bit disappointed, but that's okay. Most of the Sunita books have been amazing.

Very good. This is underrated cyberpunk. It's It's clever. It's kind of funny.

This book just made me feel things. When I finished it, I just wanted to lie down and I don't even know if I wanted to process what I had just felt, but just to just lie there and experience, just turn my brain off and just feel this book.

It's a little surreal. It's a little trippy. It's maybe a little less focused on the tech and a little bit more thematically influenced and just kind of driven by the vibes and the experience.

Great setup. I like the dialogue, interesting dynamics between the characters. But after the first 50 to 100 pages, it just kind of felt like it wasn't giving me anything new.

I thought there were some really interesting ideas, but there were pretty long stretches where I was struggling to follow, okay, exactly where are we going with the plot? How are all these things connected?

The dispossessed, however, just a little bit dry, very academic. The premise, if I told you the premise and you imagined what the book would be, that kind of is what the book is. And that to me is a disappointment because you want there to be more surprises, plot twists, reveals interesting concepts, and it kind of just focuses on this society's capitalist anarchist and just like explores what they were like.

I had some issues with the pros and I felt like the ending was kind of ambitious, something a little bit different maybe for a zombie book, but it didn't blow me away.

It started out It started out higher for me cuz I was really invested in the mystery, the characters. I love some timey wimy time travel stuff, but I don't know. I felt like we got a little bit bogged down.

Very good. it's a great setup. We have these characters, these teenagers on a walk. Keep walking. If you stop walking, you get shot.

I'm going to put it in good because I think at the time it came out, this would have blown people's minds. And I think it's so cool how influential it was, how ahead of ahead of its time it was, but reading it now, it just kind of feels like, okay, it's a little simple.

There's a lot of great elements going on in The Windup Girl. I'm not sure if they all came together in the most satisfying way for me, but I liked it enough where I would definitely try something else by this author.

It was my favorite. Oh my goodness. This is one of the best time travel stories ever.

I love this book. I love Baxter. It's hard sci-fi. Yeah, he hits you with info dumps and exposition, but man, the ideas are just so cool.

I like the big dumb object subg genre and I think there is some cool trippy stuff going on in Titan, but some odd some odd sexual passages that didn't really add a lot to the book for me. It got a little bit too weird, a little bit too fantasy. Not my kind of sci-fi, but I'm I'm glad I read it.

The plot makes no sense. Almost no sentence flows on from the previous one. Everything is a nonsequittor.

I like Blake Crouch, but this was probably the least favorite of the three that I've read. I'm putting this in good. Yeah, it just didn't quite live up to Dark Matter and Recursion.

They're pretty close, but I think I preferred Val one of the last books PKD ever wrote. And I think in order to fully appreciate it, I think you need to know a bit about PKD.

I'm going to put this in good. This is one of the most confusing books I've read this year. I like the opening and I like the ending, but man, in the middle, I did not really know what was going on.

This is the first book I've read by him and this is great cyberpunk, middle eastern inspired cyberpunk and yeah, cool crime detective story. All of the kind of tropes that you want in your cyberpunk but with a few original ideas and I think executed very well.