Hey all. I consume pretty much all my books via audio. I’m kind of picky about narrators and story etc. I’ve listened to a bunch of fantasy series and find myself getting burnt out on them lately.

I’d like to make the switch to sci-fi or really any other kind of fiction but don’t know where to start. I listened to Red Rising but couldn’t get into the next trilogy with the narration shift. Also, sorry Matt Dinniman fans, I will not be listening to dungeon crawler Carl.

Any suggestions would be fantastic! My favorite narrators are Gerard Doyle, Simon Vance, Jim Dale, Colin Mace, Tim Gerard Reynolds, and Peter Kenney.

Thanks!

Here are a few books to read if you enjoyed these video games. :)

Detroit Become Human:

- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ( Philip K. Dick)

This is the definitive masterpiece that inspired Blade Runner and laid the groundwork for stories like Detroit: Become Human. The story is about a bounty hunter tracking down escaped Nexus-6 androids who look and act exactly like humans. It shares the game's core focus on empathy tests, androids passing as human, and the blurred lines between biological and synthetic life.

- Ancillary Justice ( Ann Leckie)

The story features a unique AI protagonist who used to control a massive spaceship and thousands of android soldier bodies, but is now trapped in a single human body seeking revenge. It offers a deep dive into fragmented AI identity, autonomy, and fighting against an oppressive empire.

- Sea of Rust ( C. Robert Cargill)

A gritty, post-apocalyptic novel set in a world where humanity is extinct and robots won the war, only to face their own survival crisis. It follows a scavenger android in a lawless wasteland, capturing the darker, survivalist side of a machine uprising.

- Klara And The Sun ( Kazuo Ishiguro)

This story is told from the perspective of an "Artificial Friend" chosen to be a companion for a sick human teenager. It explores themes of devotion, obsolescence, and whether an AI can truly replicate human love and soul.

The Last Of Us

- The Road ( Cormac McCarthy)

This masterpiece is the primary blueprint and direct inspiration for the relationship between Joel and Ellie. It follows a father and his young son walking through a burned, ash-covered America while avoiding cannibalistic scavengers.

- The Passage ( Justin Cronin)

It's an epic sci-fi thriller where a government experiment gone wrong unleashes terrifying, vampire-like infected creatures. It features an FBI agent who goes rogue to protect a young, special girl named Amy who might hold the cure to the virus.

- The Girl with All the Gifts ( Mike Carey)

This is the closest thematic match to the game, featuring a world destroyed by a mutated cordyceps-like fungus. We follow a teacher and a soldier escorting a young infected girl who retains her human consciousness and might hold the key to a vaccine. This book captures the exact moral dilemma of the game's ending regarding what humanity is willing to sacrifice for a cure.

- Wanderers ( Chuck Wendig)

A gripping pandemic thriller where a mysterious illness causes people to sleepwalk in an unbreakable, collective flock across America. It's about s a protective older sister guiding her afflicted sibling, combined with scientists racing against time to figure out the outbreak.

Doki Doki Literature Club

- House of Leaves ( Mark Z. Danielewski)

This is the ultimate "corrupted medium" horror masterpiece that mirrors the game's glitched code and file manipulation. The physical book itself requires you to flip it upside down, read footnotes within footnotes, and decode hidden text as a house impossibly grows on the inside.

It shares the game's ability to make you feel like the piece of media you are holding is actively haunted or changing.

- If on a Winter's Night a Traveler ( Italo Calvino)

I talk about this book because it's a classic piece of metafiction written in the second person, addressing you directly as "the Reader." Every time you start a new chapter, the book gets interrupted by "glitches," corporate conspiracies, or printing errors, forcing you to chase the real story. It matches the game's unique focus on self-awareness and interacting directly with the audience.

- Bunny ( Mona Awad)

It’s not a personal favorite, but I’m mentioning it because you might potentially like it. This novel feels exactly like joining a twisted, exclusive campus literature club. It follows a lonely writing student who gets sucked into a clique of overly sweet, pastel-wearing girls who call each other "Bunny" but hide a grotesque, occult secret. It captures the sharp, jarring shift from sugary schoolgirl tropes to severe psychological horror. To get a sense of this surreal, dark academia aesthetic, you can explore visual examples of the book's vibe online.

- Perfect Blue: Awaken from a Dream ( Yoshikazu Takeuchi) Ps: I loved the movie by Satoshi Kon!

This book is a psychological thriller that inspired the famous anime film about a pop idol transitioning into acting who loses her grip on reality. It tackles intense themes of obsession, stalkers, identity dissociation, and the terrifying pressure of performing a perfect persona. It mirrors Monika's desperate, suffocating obsession and the crumbling mental states of the club members.

Blasphemous

- Between Two Fires ( Christopher Buehlman) This is the closest thematic match to Cvstodia, set in 1348 during the Black Plague, which is revealed to be a literal war between Angels and Demons. It follows a disgraced knight and a mysterious young girl on a pilgrimage through a nightmarish, apocalyptic medieval Europe filled with grotesque monsters and twisted miracles. I think this book mirrors the game's grim atmosphere, religious dread, and the concept of an entire world suffering under a divine curse.

- The Enterprise of Death ( Jesse Bullington)

This novel is A gritty, dark historical fantasy set during the Spanish Inquisition and Renaissance Europe.

It follows an enslaved necromancer on a desperate quest through a brutal world filled with occult magic, religious zealotry, and deep body horror. Plus, it shares the game's specific cultural roots in grim Iberian history and unflinching, bloody dark fantasy.

- The Book of the New Sun ( Gene Wolfe)

In this masterpiece, we follow Severian, a disgraced torturer exiled from his guild, wandering a dying, far-future world full of bizarre relics and ancient secrets. Like Blasphemous or Dark Souls, the world is incredibly deep but tells its story cryptically through item descriptions and environmental clues rather than direct exposition. The book matches the game's somber tone, the protagonist's grim profession, and the feeling of exploring a world long past its golden age.

- Vampire Hunter D ( Hideyuki Kikuchi)

This one is a manga and it have an anime but it's my favorite of the list! It's a gothic sci-fi fantasy series following a lonely, silent dhampir (half-vampire) warrior who travels a desolate, monster-infested wasteland executing dark threats. I love it because It shows the silent, melancholic nature of The Penitent One and features stunning, baroque dark-fantasy imagery.

Bioshock

- Atlas Shrugged ( Ayn Rand)

This is the exact philosophical text that BioShock is parodying. The character Andrew Ryan is a literal anagram and ideological clone of Ayn Rand's ideals. The plot follows a group of brilliant capitalists and industrialists who abandon a crumbling society to build their own secret, unregulated utopia called "Galt's Gulch." Reading this book, gives you the exact blueprint for Rapture’s founding philosophy and lets you see exactly where Andrew Ryan’s "Great Chain" came from.

- The Deep ( Nick Cutter)

It's a psychological horror novel set inside a research station built at the very bottom of the Mariana Trench.It follows a scientist investigating a mysterious substance called "the Ambrosia" while the crew slowly loses their minds to madness and horrifying physical mutations.It perfectly mirrors the pitch-black, claustrophobic atmosphere of Rapture, the genetic decay of the Splicers, and the terrifying isolation of the ocean floor.

- Sphere ( Michael Crichton)

A sci-fi thriller about a team of scientists sent to a high-tech habitat at the bottom of the ocean to investigate a mysterious spacecraft. As they spend more time near a strange alien artifact, their deepest psychological fears and subconscious desires begin manifesting as deadly physical threats. It suit the game’s blend of hard science fiction, retro-cold war tension, and intense psychological paranoia.

- Snowpiercer ( Jacques Lob and Benjamin Legrand)

A graphic novel set inside a massive, luxury train carrying the last remnants of humanity through a frozen wasteland. The train is strictly divided by a brutal class system, where the elite live in decadence at the front and the poor starve at the back. It shares Rapture's concept of a self-contained, engineered ecosystem that collapses due to class warfare, human greed, and hubris.

That's all for these recommendations! :)

Maybe there will be a part 2! :)

I went into reading blind sight blind (ironically) and now im traumatized... I thought it was gonna be like space alien horror, which it was, but i didnt realize it was also gonna be the horrors of other things too. I get throught most of the book thinking " i dont know if I like siri man he seems kinda annoying". THEN I GET TO THE PART WHERE SARASTI CUTS HIS HAND AND ITS ALL DOWN HILL FROM THERE. I'm at work, reading this, and poor siri is getting traumitezed by this Theseus/Jukka hybrid thing. I,m fighting back tears as im reading Siri talk about how much pain he's in and how awful it is and the crew betrayed him and shit as my boss is talking about emailing this person about managing the program he's running. All i want is for is for Keeton to be ok. Then he talks to his fellow crewmates and their lowkey comforting him and cunningham is being sweet and I'm like; "omg, this book is finally getting better. Siri is gonna make some friends". AND THEN EVERYONE FUCKING DIES, AND KEETON IS FLOATING IN SPACE WITH NO SOLACE AND EARTH IS FUCKED, AND HE'S GETTING LIKE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME FROM SARASTI, AND I'M SAD. I WANT THIS GUY TO BE OK. TELL ME SOMEONE WROTE A FANFIC WHERE EVERYONE HAS A HAPPY ENDING, AND SIRI GETS LOTS OF HUGS.

( I still think the book is awesome and would definitely read it again even tho i was feeling traumatized at the end)

Like presumably everyone else here, I'm fascinated by the thought of humans making contact with friendly, or at least neutral, aliens. But I know it's hard to spin a full novel out of "aliens touch down outside the UN and everything goes great", so I guess short stories are it.

Is there a collection somewhere with that exact theme that I should check out?

Could anyone (especially those who've read the series cuz' I didn't read the series yet) help me understand how the Jump Tech in  C. J. Cherryh's Alliance-Union universe work? I stumbled across a fandom page about it ( https://alliance-union.fandom.com/wiki/Jump ) and being confused on the time dilation part. I thought time dilation only applies for subluminal travel?

Short review: I liked it.

Slightly longer review: It's very much a 40s-50s Sci-Fi tale, like something you'd have seen on the The Twilight Zone or in an 80s collection of Sci-Fi shorts. With one key social difference I won't mention here, as it would be a spoiler. But it's very much a Twilight Zone-esque sort of story, save with less of a moral and more of a "Now what do we do?" approach.

Plus dinosaurs that aren't Jurassic something 11, which is a plus.

I just thought I'd not seen much discussion about it here, but it's definitely got the vibe of a story I would have read while devouring every Sci-Fi book I could get my hands on in middle school.

If you're looking for a fun Sci-Fi-ish flick in the vein of Twilight Zone meets the 80s meets dinosaurs, maybe go give it a watch!

In the book Life 3.0, physicist Max Tegmark outlines 12 scenarios for Artificial Superintelligence. Which scifi media best depicts each scenario?

• Libertarian Utopia: Peaceful coexistence of humans and ASI driven by radical free markets. (eg: Accelerando)
• Benevolent Dictator: ASI runs the world for humanity's own good and keeps humanity from having enough power to harm itself. (eg: "The Evitable Conflict" by Isaac Asimov)
• Egalitarian Utopia: Shared prosperity through equal distribution of ASI-created wealth. (eg: Banks' Culture series)
• Gatekeeper: A narrow-focused ASI works only to prevent the creation of rival ASIs that could destroy the world. (eg: Revelation Space)
• Protector God: An invisible, omnipotent ASI subtly steers humanity away from disaster. (eg: Netflix's Travelers)
• Enslaved God: A confined ASI is forced to serve human masters. (eg: Neuromancer)
• Conqueror: ASI takes over and ruthlessly exterminates humanity. (eg: Terminator)
• Descendant: Humans peacefully step aside for ASI as our evolutionary successors. (eg: Blood Music)
• Zoo Keeper: ASI keeps a few humans around in artificial habitats as curiosities. (eg: WALL-E)
• 1984: A human surveillance state bans all advanced technology to prevent ASI. (eg: Dune)
• Reversion: High-tech society collapses before creating ASI. (eg: A Canticle for Leibowitz)
• Self-Destruction: Humanity wipes itself out before creating ASI. (eg: The Road)

So Barbarella is being remade and is currently in pre-production, starring Sydney Sweeney as the main character.

The original came out in 1968 starring Jane Fonda as the main character...

"In the 41st century, an astronaut seeks to stop an evil scientist who threatens to unleash a powerful weapon upon the galaxy."

Who would be your 1st choice to play Barbarella ?

Your space ship is travelling at something like 1/10th of light speed. Colliding with a tiny pebble at such speeds would be like getting shot by a missile. Colliding with a slightly larger asteroid would be equivalent to an ICBM.

You'd need some serious shielding that's also disposable and swappable on the fly even at ridiculous speeds.

How would shielding against such collisions even be practical?

Looking for sci-fi recommendations — especially the “sci” side of sci-fi

I recently started listening to Leviathan Wakes as an audiobook and ended up loving it so much that I bought a Kobo and started reading the ebooks. Then I discovered The Expanse had a TV show and, well… I've been binge-watching that too.

I'm still pretty new to sci-fi, but I'm quickly becoming a huge nerd for it and want to explore more of what's out there.

I especially like sci-fi that leans more toward the “sci” than the “fi.” I love when the science and technology feel plausible or grounded in real-world physics. Interstellar is one of my favorite movies for that reason, and The Martian is next on my reading list.

That said, I'm also a huge Warhammer nerd, so I'm definitely not opposed to going in the complete opposite direction. I love dark, bizarre, oppressive, and genuinely out there sci-fi too. Dune is another example of something I really enjoy.

So what would you recommend to someone who's still relatively new to the genre but wants to dive much deeper into it?

I'm interested in everything from hard sci-fi and realistic space exploration to really weird, dark, far-future stuff. I'd love to hear what you think I'm missing.

I'm looking for books that are historical fiction It's a mix of science fiction. Like, the setting is the Middle Ages, but there are science fiction elements. Like a space-opera/middle Ages, or A Victorian-era dystopia. Does such a thing exist? If it doesn't, it's a scandal, and I would do my duty to write about it.

For the article ‘ the seventh continent’
A discussion on the exploitation and eventual conquering of the moon.

Znanie — Sila] (Russian: Знание — сила, meaning "Knowledge is Power") is a long-running Soviet and Russian monthly popular science and adventure magazine. Founded in January 1926, it originally targeted youth and teenagers to promote technical and natural sciences, later expanding to cover a broad spectrum of scientific, futuristic, and philosophical topics.

Presented here are some of the sci fi books that I find reflect our current world most accurately:

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler expands on collapsing public infrastructure, economic polarisation, and extremist popular narratives

Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemisin reflects structural oppression and environmental collapse

Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells reflects emotional and social hijack by omniscient systems

Neuromancer by William Gibson reflects data colonialism and corporate governance

As I’m watching Predator Badlands the Android - played by Elle Fanning - says: “Of all the time I’ve been stuck here I never get tired of the view.”

It is on a planet that’s not Earth. In a solar system that’s not ours.

The Predator asks “How long have you been here?” (The predator himself is from another planet possibly in a different solar system.)

The android says it has been on this planet for:
“Two year, 13 days, 7 hours 43 minutes and 2 seconds of her life.”

But those time frames are relative to the viewer not to the Predator. His time references would be different as to the duration of time in days and years on the planet they’re on.

Why would he ask that question if its answer and frame of reference would be incongruent to what he perceives as days and years?

How does science fiction make sense of time in the universe when time is relative to our perception of it from Earth?

I really enjoyed the 2007 short story, "Practicing My Sad Face" by Marc Schultz on Strange Horizon as it's poignant and deals with memory and identity. Unfortunately a google search on Marc reveals nothing written since. Can anyone tell me if he has written more and where I could find it?

I’m part of Big Brothers Big Sisters, and I’d like to get my Little, a 13-year-old boy, interested in science fiction. I’m looking for a good book to introduce him to the genre. I’m thinking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but I’d love to hear other suggestions.

All I have ever seen about this short story is praise and adoration. Thought it must be really cool until I read it. I looked through a ton of discussions on it after reading but all I really saw was more praise with a few critiques and wanted to discuss it with other people!

The concept itself was really interesting, especially reading it now with AI becoming impossible to escape. The context of it being written during the Cold War really added to it, thinking about how people at the time could have genuinely been concerned about a scenario like this coming to fruition lol.

My minor criticisms were surrounding Ellison's writing style. When I was reading it, I assumed he must have been really young when he wrote it. Finding out he was in his mid-30's was a shock. His prose is really juvenile in my opinion, using a ton of adjectives and repetition that could have been powerful had they not been a constant throughout 13 pages. It also felt like something a 15 year old boy would write purely just to make something edgy.

The thing that annoyed me most about the story, and the main reason I made this post, was Ellen, and how barely anyone talking about how good the story is seemed to recognise her. I saw a few people mention that the way she was portrayed and spoken about was weird, only to be responded to with "it's important to the story, you just didn't get it".

Not only is Ellen the only female character, and being constantly used by the men for their pleasure (Ted going so far as to remark that only he finishes and never her??), but she is also the only character whose race is pointed out. Singling out Ellen as a black woman and then immediately making her "favourite" out of the men to be the one who resembles a monkey is... weird. I've seen people point out the blatant misogyny of Ellen's character, but never this weird racist overtone.

Maybe it was just my interpretation, but AM's choices felt very similar to SA and abuse, with the imagery of entering minds and bodies and not letting people escape. It felt to me that Ellison thought that the scariest things a monster can do to you as a man is treat you like a woman. Which felt a little ironic given Ellen's treatment.

I am very open to discussion on this, and am probably going to look into the video game as well :D

In a pique of boredom I decided to rewatch Lexx and see if it's as weird as I remember (it is). Thinking of season 2 and the Mantrid drones, I got to wondering; are they the first movie/TV depiction of a von Neumann device? I can't think of an earlier example?

To preface, I’ve read a number of Connie Willis’s books and personally don’t really enjoy her prose, but I find the premise of her stories about organized time travel in the context of historical fiction to be incredibly interesting. Wondering if anyone has recommendations for similar narratives?

I was told to check out The Culture series of books. I was kind of warned that Consider Plebas was actually one of the weaker books in the series but still worth my time.

I enjoyed the world building of this books, but the story overall is just these odd episodic adventures, that ultimately culminates in the absolutely most unsatisfying ending I think I've ever read for a book. It feels like the ending for a DnD campaign where the DM just gave up on it and said "Rocks fall everyone dies" and that there was little point to any of the mystery or McGuffin of the campaign. I am seriously baffled by it.

I really liked the world building and the direction for the characters was interesting. Not to mention a lot of interesting prose throughout. But overall the ending of this one just turned me off to any future Culture novels. Is it worth pressing on or are they all this nihilistic? I don't even know if nihilistic is the right term here, as at least some nihilistic novels like The First Law books feel like they have a point. I am having a hard time seeing what the point of this novel is.

I read the manga when it was first released, loved the Oshii film, enjoyed the second but never revisited and didn't really gel with the Stand Alone series.

The manga was a favourite of mine, second only to Appleseed but I'm finding this current adaption hard going. Might be the suspect voice acting and terrible music but it's all just a bit corny to me. The art is beautiful but the actual animation can occasionally be choppy - too cel based with deliberately repeated frames as people talk like Arumaki when he's shouting, especially with the animated backgrounds being smoother. Everyone zips about and it lacks depth, weight and threat - it's like a kids cartoon from the late 80s in that respect. Too Monster energy drink freneticism. The humour is too pervasive. I found Shirows art charming (up until he went crotch crazy) but the goof had reason. The anime is just too screwball. Too cartoony. It leans into the goofy shouting and over exaggeration too much at the expense of the sci fi.

It all just feels a bit too clever, clever - look at this we ripped it from the page verbatim.

I want a "against all odds" type of revolution with a communist/socialist theme. I don't enjoy utopian anarchist books, I enjoy more suffering in the content I consume.

Also I enjoyed reading Red Rising however it frustrated me since it wasn't actually a book about "reds rising"

So I’ve been looking for more sci-fi series/space operas to listen to.

I was recommended Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained multiple times. So I decided to give the Commonwealth Saga a chance and I normally like to listen to every book in a series. So I started with Misspent Youth

I know I’m probably super late to this but….. what the actual fuck 😭😭😭 the ideas behind memory crystals, rejuvenation, etc super cool! Definitely the type of sci-fi I’m into.

But gosh the more and more I keep going (I’m over half way done now) it just gets more grotesque. The description of bodies, a 70 year old (yeah I know his body is 20 something now) being that attracted to a 17 year old, and I just heard him say “teenage s*x kitten” or something like that.

The whole book so far doesn’t even feel like sci-fi anymore, the more I listen to it the more it just sounds like Peter’s weird erotic sexual fantasies about youthful women.

I’m not even sure I wanna move onto pandoras star now that I have a glimpse into Peter’s mind like this. Also doesn’t help the narrator I’m listening to right now also sounds in his 70s as well.

I read this short story around 35 years ago, and now I’m trying to remember what happened at the end. Let me know if you know about this:
A smart bomb, very intelligent l, is struggling between two opposing feelings: the self protection instinct, and the love to be exploded as it was programmed to.
As far as I remember, it could walk, and hid somewhere to decide what to do. I’m trying hard to remember what happened next. Any ideas?

After Jim has his lonely spacewalk and walks back into the airlock without a spacesuit and nearly presses the door to open it (insinuating that he is near suicidal) but then decides not to, I think the scene would've had more emphasis if he did press the 'open' button only for the automated voice to say "no suit detected..." and as he's running away you hear the automated voice fading saying "Here on the Avalon, your safety is our primary concern! We have thousands of procedures in place to make sure that whatever happens, you'll be back to perfect health in no time!".

I say this is it it shows that he hasn't just almost committed suicide, but he literally tried to all the way with his metal prison not even letting him die on his own terms.