Hugonauts: The Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time

The story is told via the diary of a Handmaid - a young woman living in Gilead, an extremely repressive, patriarchal society that has taken over the United States. We explore the dark world through her eyes, and follow her struggle to express herself, escape, or just take control back over any part of her life. What are the rules of this brutal society? And will the Handmaid ever see the people she loves again?Link to buy the book (and help support the show!): https://amzn.to/3DqPTxPJoin the book club on discord! https://discord.gg/fHejh3PpR2Related books we recommend:1984 - https://amzn.to/3Y71TMOThe Testaments - https://amzn.to/3XTM1OaBrave New World - https://amzn.to/3kW4CKMNever Let Me Go - https://amzn.to/3DsPFWPOr you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video.Keep reading y'all!

Jason Dessen is walking home one night when he realizes he is being followed. A strange man in a geisha mask abducts him at gunpoint, drives him to an abandoned building, takes his phone and clothes, and injects him with a strange drug. When Jason wakes up, he’s surrounded by strangers congratulating him for something he’s supposed to have achieved. In this world he’s not a college professor - they say he’s created something that seems impossible. He looks for his wife - but in this world she says she’s not his wife. His son was never born.Is this world real, or a dream? And no matter what this place is, how can he get back to the people he loves?Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video.We also launched three new things this week!A website - hugonauts.org - where you can read written reviews & see related books!A Hugonauts book club discord to talk about books together (and everything else)! We're giving away 8 great sci-fi books to kick off the channel, enter to win on the discord channel.Providing links to buy the books we recommend. It doesn't cost you any extra, but a percentage of anything you buy after clicking these links goes to the show, and the support really means a lot!Keep reading y'all!

The story is told from the first person perspective of Laurence Smith—the self-styled “The Great Lorenzo”—a down-and-out actor who spends most of his time in bars. He's approached by a space-pilot who offers him a drink and, despite some trepidation about Lorenzo’s high opinion of himself, offers him a dangerous job at a very high pay rate. One of the solar system's most important politicians has been kidnapped, and they need someone to impersonate him until he's rescued. Lorenzo is quickly pulled deeper and deeper into the conspiracy, and has to keep up the act to avoid his own death and an all-out planetary war.Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video.Drop us a line:https://twitter.com/hugonautspodhttps://www.instagram.com/hugonautspodcast/https://www.tiktok.com/@hugonautspodcast hugonautspodcast@gmail.com

It’s the year 2025, and society is descending into anarchy in the face of climate change and other disasters. We see the world through the diary entries of Lauren Olamina, a teenager living in a walled-in neighborhood in the exurbs of Los Angeles. Jobs are scarce, food and water are increasingly expensive, and armed gangs and drug addicts control the streets outside. Lauren’s father, a pastor and professor at a local college, tries to keep their little community safe, but Lauren feels things going to pieces and is always preparing for things to get worse. When it all comes crashing down, will she be ready?Or you can watch the episode on YouTube if you prefer video.Drop us a line: https://twitter.com/hugonautspod https://www.instagram.com/hugonautspodcast/ https://www.tiktok.com/@hugonautspodcast hugonautspodcast@gmail.com

Seth Fishman, a notable literary agent, represents prominent authors like Cixin Liu and Ann Leckie. He shares insider knowledge about current trends in the sci-fi publishing landscape, discussing the balance between originality and commercial success. Seth offers invaluable advice for aspiring writers on perseverance, the importance of agent relationships, and creative pitching. He also delves into the growing impact of audiobooks and the challenges of securing audio rights, highlighting the evolving dynamics of the publishing industry.

Aliens have taken a snapshot of the entire earth, down to 1 meter of resolution - we know because they lit the entire sky on fire to do it. Then, humanity detected something out at the very edge of the solar system sending a signal - but not to us. The signal is being sent out, into deep space, to another planet, or to something already on the way to Earth. A ship is dispatched with a crew of five - including two technical specialists who have been deeply biologically and technologically enhanced, a soldier, a resurrected Vampire who interfaces with the ship AI to lead the crew, and our protagonist, Siri, whose job is to understand those specialists and translate their insights for the people back home. What will they find, out in the darkness? As always, we also recommend and discuss some similar books if you are looking for more great books to read. This week we recommend: The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry PournelleChildren of Ruin by Adrian TchaikovskyThe Dark Forest by Cixin LiuOr you can watch the episode on YouTube here.

This week we are so excited to interview Ken Liu! All of his writing and translation work is excellent, but if you haven't read his short story collection The Paper Menagerie  we recommend you start there, it's full of incredibly memorable stories.We talked with Ken about:Growing up in both China and AmericaRobo-Ken - the neural network he built to help write a storyThe singularity and uploading your consciousnessHis background as a programmer and lawyerThe importance of family in his storiesThe meaning of silkpunk and his series The Dandelion DynastyWe'll be releasing more bonus content from the Hugo Awards on YouTube over the next week - check those out on our YouTube channel if you haven't already subscribed!Next episode we'll be discussing Peter Watt's Blindsight - look forward to talking with y'all then. Happy reading everybody!

We had a great time rolling out the red carpet in Chicago, and we're excited to release the first set of interviews!The Seanan McGuire interview starts at 2:10. Seanan is a multiple Hugo award winning fantasy and sci fi author, most well known for her Wayward Children series and her Newsflesh zombie series (published under her pseudonym Mira Grant). We talked with her about how she manages to create so much content, what made her want to write about zombies, and her approach to researching her stories (she once gave herself a tapeworm to prep for a book about parasites!)The Ryka Aoki interview starts at 15:47. Ryka's breakout novel Light from Uncommon Stars came second in the Hugo voting this year. We talked with her about the book, making music, why she loves donut shops (and how she managed to include them in a sci fi novel), and queerness and what it means to be 'normal'.The interview with Joe and Gay Haldeman starts at 42:13. Joe is most famous for his novel The Forever War (which we talked with him about in a previous episode), as well as the Nebula award winning book Camouflage. We talk with Joe and Gay about Camouflage, the Bataan death march, as well as hanging out with Arthur C. Clarke, Gene Wolf, and Robert Silverberg at sci-fi conventions over the years. If you want to see photos from the red carpet, check them out on twitter or instagram! And if you want to see the rest of the interviews from ChiCon with other content creators, we'll be releasing those on our YouTube channel.

The vast majority of the world's fossil fuels have been expended, leading to a climate and economic catastrophe. In the aftermath, calories from food become the world's most important energy source, not only for human consumption, but also to power industry and technology. A few mega-corporations produce almost all the world's food, and have become the most powerful entities on earth, thriving by genetically engineering new foods, while also trying to destroy the competition by biohacking diseases to attack other sources of nutrition they don't control. The novel is set in a future version of Bangkok. Thailand is one of the few countries that has maintained its sovereignty from the calorie companies, but it has it's own troubles, and is plagued by corruption, rent-seeking, and factions struggling for control over the kingdom. The cast of characters is complex and full of deeply flawed people, all trying to get a piece of the pie in this land of relative prosperity. We can't remember ever reading a book so thoroughly populated by people who feel both real and so ruthlessly self-interested - it's brutal, but also so refreshing to read something so out of the ordinary! This book calls for a trigger warning - there are two fairly brutal sexual assault scenes that are quite disturbing. If you are reading a chapter with some bad things happening at a sex club, know that it will get worse before it gets better - you can skip to the next chapter to avoid those scenes.As always, we also recommend and discuss some similar books if you are looking for more great books to read:The Water Knife by Paolo BacigalupiOryx and Crake by Margaret AtwoodThe City and the City by China MiévilleOr you can choose to watch this episode on YouTube here instead.

Breq used to be the Justice of Toren - the huge, complex AI that inhabited a colossal starship and all of its thousands of ancillaries in the service of the Radch, the largest of the human empires.Ancillaries are human bodies that were captured in previous Radchaai annexations (or colonizations) – those who resist the takeover are killed and their bodies frozen and stored, ready to be activated and controlled by Radchaai AI in future annexations. The ancillaries are terrifying soldiers – each one is protected by almost impenetrable armor, and the AI never miss a shot.But now Breq has been reduced to only one ancillary body. The book follows two parallel timelines – one as she closes in on the end of her quest for revenge, and the other showing how she was betrayed twenty years ago.There are two small things that hold this book back just a little bit. First, it’s fairly complicated – perhaps too much so. Second, it starts off slowly – but once it gets going, it is incredibly propulsive. So, push through the first 50-80 pages, and know that it’s an incredible experience once you are immersed in the world!We also talk a bit about the two sequels in the Imperial Radch trilogy – those books aren’t as good and are a lot smaller in scope, but if you absolutely love Ancillary Justice, they can still be worth a read.As always, we also recommend and discuss some similar books if you are looking for more great books to read. This week we recommend:The Murderbot series by Martha WellsA Memory Called Empire by Arkady MartineThe Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le GuinOr you can watch the show on YouTube here.