Hugonauts: The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

Jim Holden is XO of an ice hauler making runs from the rings of Saturn to the asteroid cities of the Belt. Out in the darkness, they detect a distress signal, and move to investigate. Holden leads the away team to check on the signal, and they find a dead ship called the Scopuli that seems to have been boarded with military precision. Moments later, a stealth ship fires nuclear torpedoes at the ice hauler, killing the entire crew, leaving Holden and his away team as the only survivors. All the evidence points to the Martian military, and system-wide war threatens to break out unless Holden can find out who set the trap, and why. 

Miller is a detective on Ceres, and he is looking for a girl. When the trail leads him to the Scopuli and Holden, they realize that this girl may be the key to everything. 

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations—and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe. 

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video

Similar books we recommend: 

• House of Suns - Alastair Reynolds - https://youtu.be/qTKm46YrIiQ
• The Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson - https://youtu.be/D7OrjGfKUj4
• Murderbot Series - Martha Wells

Guy Montag is a fireman - one whose job is to burn books, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag and his wife, Mildred (who spends all day with her television ‘family’) had never questioned his life as a fireman, until he meets his eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse. Clarisse introduces him to a bigger world and new ideas, and Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video (and see the short videos we've started posting every other week)

Similar books we recommend:

• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
• The Giver - Lois Lowry

Substance D is a new drug sweeping the nation and slowly destroying the minds of its users. As the connection between the two halves of their brains degrades, they grow increasingly disoriented and confused before suffering irreversible brain damage. 

Fred is an undercover narcotics agent working to uncover where the new drug is coming from. But to find the source he has to pose as Bob Arctor, a user, and soon Arctor is as addicted as the junkies around him. Can he see through his psychosis long enough to tell which leads are real and which imagined? Or will he be consumed, like his friends, by substance D?

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video

For all six of the nominated books we'll give you a quick summary (with no spoilers), a review, and a rundown of what kind of reader is likely to love (and who might hate) each book.

Featuring: 

1. The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler 
2. Babel by R.F. Kuang 
3. Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree 
4. Spear by Nicola Griffith 
5. Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher 
6. Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

And join us for our next episode on A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick!

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video (and see the short videos we've started posting every other week)

Set in a futuristic, unified World State, Brave New World tells the story of a very different kind of dystopia. The population is not tightly controlled in the traditional sense - instead they are free to do what they choose, and live phenomenally happy lives. However, people are born in test tubes and modified in-vitro to fulfill their role in the caste system, to love their work, and to love the hedonistic lifestyle that the World State provides. 

Bernard Marx is not perfectly happy though. He arranges a trip to a reservation to see a different way of living, and there meets someone born outside the system - The Savage - who begins to question the social order and chafe against the World Controllers who mastermind the system.

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video (and see the short videos we've started posting every other week)

Four soldiers are serving a four year tour of duty as the only crew members on a super-advanced AI battleship, dispatched to fight the alien Salamanders who have been spewing black holes everywhere and killing humans in space. 

The ship is fully controlled by AI, and as the mission goes on our heroes feel more and more like window dressing - they sure are killing a lot of aliens, but are they anything more than passengers on this ship? Or are they just window-dressing for the military industrial complex?

Thanks to Lori from the Hugo, Girl podcast for joining us for this episode! Hugo, Girl is a monthly show featuring three very funny space feminists reading and discuss Hugo Award-winning fiction. Cody joined them on their most recent episode, talking about the hugely underrated book Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. 

• Join the Hugonauts book club on discord!
• Related books we recommend:
  • The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  • Blindsight by Peter Watts
  • Lexicon by Max Barry

Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video (and see the short videos we've started posting every other week)

All of Becky's writing is excellent, but if you haven't read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet  it's a great place to start. It's a wonderful, warm, and character-driven space opera that follows the tight-knit crew of a wormhole-drilling starship working their way across the galaxy. 

We talked with Becky about:

• Growing up in a 'space' family
• Going from self-publishing to winning a Hugo 
• Her process for creating her wonderful characters 
• Using the search for identity as central conflict 
• Becky's biggest influences

Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video (and see the short videos we've started posting every other week), or join the Hugonauts book club on discord!

Ellie is a brilliant radio astronomer who has often felt alone in the world. When she detects an indisputably intelligent signal emanating from the Vega system, that all changes - for her and for the entire human race. 

The nations and people of the world begin to come together in the face of the alien intelligence, and humanity faces a simultaneous revival and crisis of faith. Ellie works with an international team of scientists to decode the layers of the Message, and eventually, they realize the Message contains plans for some kind of Machine. Should humanity invest the resources to build the Machine? And if they do, what will happen when they turn it on?

• Join the book club on discord!
• Related books we recommend:
  • Cosmos by Carl Sagan
  • Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
  • The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video (and see the short videos we've started posting every other week).

Hope you love it, keep reading y'all!

Hiro Protagonist is a self-described hacker working as a pizza-delivery driver and living in a storage unit at LAX. He lives in a US that has been fully corporatized - from Judge Bob’s Judicial System to Pastor Wayne’s Pearly Gates. 

To get away, Hiro spends much of his free-time in the Metaverse, where he wrote many of the subroutines that underpin the virtual world. One of his hacker friends, Da5id, is given a new virtual drug called Snow Crash that not only crashes his computer, but also destroys his brain in the real world. Hiro (and a hilarious cadre of friends) are drawn ever deeper into the worldwide conspiracy that is spilling out of the virtual world to threaten the real world.

• Link to buy the book (and help support the show!)
• Join the book club on discord!
• Written (and more shareable) review
• Related books we recommend:
  • Neuromancer by William Gibson
  • Babel-17 by Samuel Delany
  • Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video.

Keep reading y'all!

Michael Crichton was fresh out of Harvard Medical School when he wrote the Andromeda Strain - and we're so glad he did! The book that launched his literary career and all that followed, from Jurassic Park to Sphere.

Here's the setup:

A US government program is sending satellites with scoops into orbit, looking for alien organisms that can survive the void of space. When one of the scoops comes down in the Arizona desert two soldiers are sent out to pick it up. But as they get closer, they realize the signal has moved - someone has already picked up the object and moved it into the tiny town of Piedmont. As the two men pull into town, bodies line the streets. In less than five minutes they are dead too. 

The United States government is forced to mobilize Project Wildfire, a top-secret emergency response protocol. Four of the nation’s most elite biophysicists are summoned to a clandestine underground laboratory where they must race to understand and contain the crisis. But the Andromeda Strain proves different from anything they’ve ever seen - and what they don’t know could not only hurt them, but lead to unprecedented worldwide catastrophe.

• Link to buy the book (and help support the show!)
• Join the book club on discord!
• Related books we recommend:
  • The Hot Zone
  • Jurassic Park
  • Children of Ruin
  • Rendezvous with Rama
  • Red Mars

Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video.

Keep reading y'all!