Top Seven Under-Appreciated Sci Fi Books for Book Club in Honor of the Dune Movie Premiere

What is science fiction? Writing about why we learn. Here’s why it makes a good book club book.

 

 

Let's start with Dune 1965. 

 

In only two weeks from time of publication, we all get to stare at Timothée Chalamet’s beautiful angular face for two and half hours. But this is a blog post about science fiction. That’s the genre Frank Herbert stripped and renovated to produce the Chalamet-less but still exciting book Dune in 1965.

 

Earlier sci-fi like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series (also adapted for the screen this year for Apple TV+, with, we might say, concerning reviews) had treated science as an infallible force for good, a privileged type of learning that could make us rational, and lead us to the right answers. In Foundation, for example, a brilliant mathematician derives an algorithm to predict the destiny of his society, calculating that a thousand-year dark age is coming.

 

It wasn’t so simple for Frank Herbert. Dune has neither robots nor computers. Herbert was more interested in what an algorithm couldn't model: human irrationality. Traits like intuition. Inspiration. Free expression.

When he thought about humanity’s future, Herbert realized it would come from the interaction between various forms of knowledge, and between differing cultures. The bold light of science would not be leading the way like a train's headlight in a tunnel. Spontaneous events would, and should, throw us off course. We would change and be changed.

 

That’s why Dune 2021 is probably going to beat Foundation on screen: Herbert's world is shaped by discordant voices, by many truths, like our own Earth today. It's more real. Yes, Timothée is going to be--get very excited--riding mile-long sandworms into battle. But Asimov wrote as if there's a right answer to us. Can we be so certain?

 

 

Not just spaceships, lasers, and aliens 

 

That conflict between Herbert and Asimov is what sci fi is at its core. It’s writing about why and how we learn, and what the things we learn can do for our lives. In some cases, like Dune, a sci fi author will scale up to imagine whole new types of societies made possible by particular ways of learning and understanding.

 

Space ships and aliens aren't necessarily involved. That may be a relief or a disappointment. But, after all, space ships are just examples of technology refined through the scientific method. And, the scientific method is just a way of learning things: you guess how something works, and test whether that’s the case. 

 

Aliens invoke another type of learning: how we encounter a being that is other to us. We might call that empathy.

 

Octavia Butler, an African-American woman and one of the greatest sci fi authors of all time (featured on our list below) was the first to use sci fi techniques to reexamine the conditions of slavery. Aliens aren't just fantastical creatures that spit acid, Butler says. Sci fi’s “aliens” come from how “we so often project alien-ness onto each other…the human alien from another culture, country, gender, race, ethnicity. This is the tangible alien who can be hurt or killed."

 

Aliens are rarely the enemies in Butler’s books; humans are usually far more dangerous. As she investigates the conditions of empathy--when, where, and between whom it can happen--Butler uses sci fi as an exploratory, emancipatory tool. Her writing turns otherness inside out. You question even the familiar parts of yourself.

 

 

Why sci fi makes a great book club book, even if you hate math and don’t like reading

 

Sci fi writers think aesthetically and logically at once; they’re like inventors, and their books, in the best way possible, are like beautifully functioning machines. 

 

Everything happens for a reason, even if the events are dire. Plot and momentum get established and the book actually goes somewhere. It’s ideal literature for people who don’t like hundreds of pages about sensitive people sipping coffee and analyzing their relationships. Sci fi is an imaginary solution to a real problem.

 

Its great power is to show the unintended consequences of a certain way of thinking. Sci fi is like a simulation of being a chess master: you can see all the moves ahead.

 

If your book club features people with STEM backgrounds or an intrinsic love of science, you probably don’t need me to tell you to give sci fi a shot. But maybe you’re an admin longing to speak to those book club members. Maybe you are one of those science lovers dreading picking a book: one everyone else in your club won’t dismiss as nerdy tomfoolery. 

No matter what galaxy you find yourself in, we’ve put this little guide together for you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bookclubz’s Top Seven Under-Appreciated Sci Fi Book Club Recommendations

 

 

1. Ted Chiang, Exhalation. Brisk, understated genius.
   
   Ted Chiang is a very smart person. He wrote Stories of Your Life And Others, a 2002 short story collection with the titular story, “Story of Your Life,” adapted into the heartbreaking/moderately incomprehensible 2016 film Arrival, also by Dune 2021 director Dennis Villeneuve.  Amy Adams stars as a linguist who has to figure out how to speak to aliens newly arrived on Earth. It turns out learning the aliens’ language rewires your brain to see the future, up until the moment of your death. Amy gets to deal with that.
   
   Do you see what I mean about sci fi letting you think like a chess master? Try to imagine what the consequences of that ability might be. Chiang realizes so many in his story, far more than in Arrival. He leads you by the hand through the rigors of living with them.
   
   Exhalations is just as good, and lesser known. Each short story is a multi-faceted crystal, formed by starting with a simple what if, and then constructing the twists and turns of a plot from the consequences. My favorite, “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” is about zookeepers trying to save intelligent digital pets ("software objects") that are going out of fashion and getting deleted.
   
    
2. N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became. Sexy, contemporary detail.
   
   It’s hard to call anything by N.K. Jemisin under-appreciated, especially since The City We Became is a front-runner to win the 2021 Hugo Award (one of the most prestigious for sci fi). It’s just that Jemisin is still so principally known for The Fifth Season and the rest of the Broken Earth trilogy, and its age-bending epic narrative of ecological collapse.
   
   The City We Became is like a modernist cuisine single-bite version of all that epic flavor and drama. Jemisin is a master at using voice, and inner monologue—the words someone uses to think, essentially—to form a character. In this case, it’s a queer black homeless teenager that embodies the life essence of New York City, racing to stop a nameless evil that’s claiming it street by street. We feel with him, and with the other characters of the book--many of whom personify cities, or interact with them in strange, sultry, and mysterious ways.
   
   Imagine what a city would sound like if it could talk: novels famously help you do just that. Urban life is one of the favored sites for a novel to take place. Cities offer a ready palette to paint background with, or a variety of chance encounters to form a story. So a lot of novels get set there. Jemisin, however, actually manages to do something new with the city, where many many other novelists don’t. Highly recommended.
   
   
    
3. Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Thoughtful, well-paced world-building.
   
   Did you have to read The Giver in school? Have you grown out of your admittedly fond youthful romance with The Hunger Games and are looking for a dystopia for adults? Do you feel like you live in one? Consider The Dispossessed.
   
   Ursula Le Guin wrote The Wizard of Earthsea, which belongs on any fantasy list, and The Left Hand of Darkness, one of the first sci fi novels centered on sexuality and gender expression. The Dispossessed is less famous but still a Hugo award winner, about an antagonistic two-party system defined by deeply entrenched political and cultural differences. It’s possible it’s still relevant today.
   
   In fact, The Dispossessed may be telling us some things we don’t want to hear, about the importance of balance and considering (some) ideas from (some) people you don’t agree with. The main character is a physicist from a poor background who revolutionizes communications by designing the ansible, which allows instant messages even across galactic distances.
   
   But he’s in danger of having it exploited by mega corporations as well as censored by a USSR-like regime that restricts speech. To fight back, The Dispossessed takes on the impossible: imagining a realistic pathway to global equality and the end of predatory capitalism for everyone.
   
   If you want to indulge your inner anarchist, this is the book for you.
   
   
    
4. Yevgeny Zamyatin, We. One-of-a-kind, classic sci fi.
   
   We is a Russian novel from the 1920s, which sounds frightening. It’s not. It’s delightful.
   
   Meet a sarcastic mathematician from the far future named D-503. He makes little diary entries organized around keywords (“A Jacket. The Wall. The Table of Hours”) that become the chapters of the book. The story is familiar: someone in their early middle age finally discovers their soul. As may be the consequences.
   
   We comes at the end of an era of Russian art when poets believed everything was possible and a better world could be designed anew by artists. Modern film editing, abstract art, sound poetry based on a “language of pure reason”, and—hey—a new kind of science fiction about the cosmic destiny of human beings: all of those were launched in Russia in this period.
   
   Zamyatin saw the naive impulse to change society twisted into the horrors of Stalin’s regime. 1984 and Brave New World both ripped off We, so they could go on to appear in the authoritarianism unit of high school English classes everywhere. But We is weirder and better than Orwell and Huxley. It’s much more beautifully written and a better love story. Shout Bookclubz out on social if your club does read We and I’ll interview you. Get the Natasha Randall translation from The Modern Library.
   
   
    
5. Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower. Powerful anti-racist milestone.
   
   Butler is the best writer on this list and Parable of the Sower is the best novel. Like A Handmaid’s Tale, it’s set in an eerily plausible near-future United States full of violence against vulnerable people. Social protections have evaporated and the rich hide in walled-off enclosures. Lauren, the novel’s protagonist, is a black teenage girl who lives in a California village—precariously poised between short term safety and long term certain destruction.
   
   Lauren is a “hyperempath,” who can feel the pain of others in her own body just by witnessing it. Faced with her likely death, she begins to write a “book of the living” called Earthseed, intended to leave behind teachings for an ethical life.
   
   “God is change,” she advises: accept the impermanence of your existence, but adapt to survive as long as you can, and never give up. Lauren’s one hope is for a human future as an extraterrestrial civilization after Earth fails completely. I won’t say what happens in regards to that, but even if I did, this novel is unpredictable enough that you’d never see it coming.
   
   Writing in 1993, when a lot of sci fi glamorized disaffected white people in a hyper-technological cyber-verse, Butler makes it about so much more. The sequel, Parable of the Talents, is also spectacular. It finishes Lauren’s story, so you get two books for the price of one if you pick Butler. Don’t miss out on this.nishes Lauren’s story, so you get two books for the price of one if you pick Butler. Don’t miss out on this.nishes Lauren’s story, so you get two books for the price of one if you pick Butler. Don’t miss out on this.
6. Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun. Sci fi against colonialism.
   
   When we think of science fiction, we imagine space ships plotting their way across the stars—images indebted to a Western version of astronomy that launched things like NASA. While NASA was built on insights as old as the Egyptians and Babylonians, the science it needs was mostly developed in Europe from about 1610 on.
   
   Rebecca Roanhorse changes all that. The Mayans had sophisticated star charts, and an astronomy of their own famous for predicting the end of the world in 2012. What would indigenous science fiction look like if Europeans never reached the New World?
   
   Black Sun is one answer. It creates an accessible, prismatic world from Latin American historical sources, with some of the best costume design, ceremonial pageantry, and rich folklore you will find in any sci fi story ever. It’s not the real Yucatan peninsula, but the allusions are clearly if faintly there.
   
   Instead of space ships, huge canoes ply an endless and dangerous ocean; scientists chart the stars from a sun temple and fight a plot to throw the whole Tovan nation back into ignorance before the next solar eclipse. Roanhorse’s book is some of the fastest-paced sci fi you can read. Plot twists, sudden realizations, and impossible challenges are the name of the game. You should play.
   
   
    
7. Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary. Dazzlingly clever imagination.
   
   The sun is going out. A man wakes up in a windowless science lab with no memory of how he got there. Using only string, a test tube, and a tape measure, he determines he’s on a spaceship, the only crew left alive, flying to re-ignite it.
   
   Meet author Andy Weir. If that predicament reminded you of Matt Damon figuring out how to farm potatoes on Mars in The Martian, that’s because Andy Weir wrote the novel that movie was based on. He loves scientifically literate protagonists in tight spots where you or I would immediately give up. Project Hail Mary is no exception, including the inadequacy issues it’s giving me.
   
   Weir kind of writes as if Reddit came to life, but you get to appreciate the snarkiness, melodrama and the clever solutions his characters keep on finding to stay alive. Project Hail Mary is wackier than The Martian and slightly less claustrophobic. Ryland, the spacefarer in question, makes a friend (I’m not spoiling anything), one might even say a sidekick, and the degree to which I became emotionally invested in this book is alarming. I read it in one sitting.