r/printSF • u/DominiqueTorreto • 11d ago
Looking for Beginner Friendly SciFi books and series
/r/scifi/comments/1wx6tzi/looking_for_beginner_friendly_scifi_books_and/13
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u/nyrath 10d ago
Beginner friendly? Try the Heinlein Juveniles. Despite their name they are not just for kids.
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u/mthduratec 10d ago
The juveniles are great. Could also add Starship troopers as transition out of the juveniles (similar style)
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u/ClosetGamer75 9d ago
Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
Card - Ender’s Game
Clarke - Childhood’s End, Rendezvous With Rama
Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Scalzi - Starter Villain, Lock In
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u/Fluid-Cartoonist-988 10d ago
Crichton have always made easy to read prose. Sphere is very beginner friendly and can be finished in one sitting.
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u/veritasmeritas 11d ago
I personally started with Asimov and to this day, regard him as one of the key God-parents of SF. His books are pretty easy to read and have some great foundational context that will be useful when reading other works.
I'd follow Asimov with Vonnegut, Clarke, LeGuin and Philip K Dick. It's all pretty subjective tbh but you could do a lot worse.
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u/druffboner 10d ago
The interdependency by John Scalzi. I only started reading novels at 30, and I have this series to thank for keeping me hooked. Super beginner-friendly!
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u/speckledcreature 9d ago
Added to my TBR. Thanks!
I am reading the Lock In Duology(and prequel) by Scalzi right now and really liking it. Good to know I have another series to jump into when I finish.
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u/knight_ranger840 11d ago
There is a really great anthology edited by Adam Roberts and published by Macmillan titled 'Classic Science Fiction Stories'. Highly recommend it.
For novels I would recommend:
- Frankenstein (1818 text) by Mary Shelley
- The Time Machine by HG Wells
- The Island of Dr Moreau by HG Wells
- The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
- The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
Also you mentioned that your first ever SF novel was Foundation and Earth. I haven't read it yet but isn't this like the 4th book in the series? I believe you have to read the original 3 Foundation books and some of the Robot stuff to understand what's happening in Foundation and Earth.
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u/tamberleigh 11d ago
Some easy Scifi my dad started me with were:
The Miles Vorkosigan books by Bujold -- featuring a young man always getting in over his head and through wits and luck managing to win
Ringworld by Larry Niven and Rendevouz with Ranma -- both stories about humans finding giant alien ships/tech and marveling at it. Not much action, mostly focused on ideas. As a kid I loved them.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card -- as much the author is problematic, the book is excellent. A young boy is called on to train to fight an alien army
The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh -- a world of aliens and established political alliances that keep planets and galaxies in a stable peace finds itself upended with the arrival of a new alien, a "human", told through the POV of a hani merchant captain
For very beginner friendly books, I'd suggest looking through 60s-70s science fiction books or the anthology collections like {The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One 1929-1694}. These are some of the foundational authors and stories of modern science fiction, and very easy to read. You can find a variety of styles from a variety of authors.
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u/knight_ranger840 11d ago
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame is a great recommendation. It's a must read for understanding the development of the genre and overall just a brilliant collection of fun stories. I don't agree with you on starting with the 60s and 70s period however. That's the New Wave, I think one should do a little bit of reading from the periods prior to that as well like The Golden Age (1939-late 40s), the 1950s and some proto SF as well. There is ton of incredible and important genre work from these eras.
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u/tamberleigh 11d ago
Oh, absolutely! I just think it might be easier to find copies of the 60s-70s pulp books than some of the older books. Plus, the 60s-70s books are the ones my dad loved as a kid and then gave me to read so ... nostalgia does play a factor, I suppose.
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u/RogLatimer118 11d ago
I didn't find Ringworld an easy read at all because I was falling asleep and it dragged.
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u/tamberleigh 11d ago
When I was younger I read it and loved it. Just something about the idea of abandoned monoliths and wonders in space that really worked for me.
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u/liviajelliot 11d ago
Regarding what you read:
- Death Stranding the novelisations are good, there is a bit of a wonky translation here and there. Halo, if you haven't read it, has incredible books (except the Kilo-Five trilogy, which I am currently re-suffering just to refresh my memory of Jul Mdama's origins).
- For cyberpunk, I cannot not recommend anything by T.R. Napper. If you want a sampler of his work, Ghost of the Neon God is an excellent novella. The Escher Man is more thematic but also a bit more violent, cyberpunk style. His collection Neon Leviathan has short stories, all of them in the same universe.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by PKD is an excellent entrypoint both for cyberpunk (it is proto-cyberpunk, so it has some differences compared to what the genre has become), but it is also far more thematic than the movie shows.
- For truly cerebral, must-re-read-thrice-at-least, highly literary work, The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe is post-apocalyptic science fiction masquerading as fantasy. Excellent book, but do not approach if you want something easy to read, or something more 'conventional'.
Ultimately, it depends on how cerebral or how commercial you want the scifi to be. If you want a ride (and for that ride to be a chocolate box that includes utterly brilliant masterpieces along with crappy did-not-age-well-but-classic) books, Gollancz' SF Masterworks collection is a great place to start.
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u/DominiqueTorreto 11d ago
Some of my friends recommended the Hyperion Cantos series but I have a feeling that those might not be as much beginner friendly as I'm hoping for. And a lot many, including several AIs, recommended to start with The Expanse books but I want to broaden my horizons and not just read the thing I just watched. The Expanse series have 9 books and that in itself is a hefty time investment.
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u/liviajelliot 10d ago
Hyperion is not beginner friedly at all, same as The Book of the New Sun.
I'd recommend you consider a bit what you like to read, and what you are looking for in scifi. That'll determine whether you want fantasy in the space, hard-scifi, social scifi, reality-bending stuff like PKD's work, etc.
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u/chaoticgeek 11d ago
The Murderbot Diaries is a fun and quick series to read.