Several Dogs in a Human Suit

Rather than try to put things in any particular order, I'm just going to write these down as I wander past my bookshelves and go "ah, yes, that goes on the list."

One of my primary influences as a writer of science fiction is Alastair Reynolds, who I first discovered through his novel Revelation Space and the setting built up around it. Space opera has always been a jam for me, but the relatively hard science and the lack of any FTL added a dimension to it that caught my attention immediately. Lighthuggers, the signature starship of the setting, live rent-free in my brain and are gender as fuuuuuck for me, especially the good ship Nostalgia For Infinity. Reynolds has written a ton of non Rev-Space books too, like the Poseidon's Children series and what might be my favorite of all his books, House of Suns, because the deep-time shenanigans of the shatterling lines set my brain on fire in the best way imaginable.

I could talk for hours about Octavia Butler, but I'll save you the trouble and just say "read absolutely anything Octavia Butler wrote." If i had to pick just one, I'd cheat and pick both Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, because it's fucking spooky how she absolutely called the last 25 years of America's decline. If you're here because of HDG (and let's be real, you very probably are), you've likely heard about Bloodchild, which was one of GlitchyRobo's primary inspirations, and Lilith's Brood, which is basically tackling the same subject matter as HDG, just, y'know, not being as horny about it as we are.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is another perennial favorite of mine. He's not everyone's cup of tea; he tends to write big, sprawling stories that have dozens of characters, but he does that because he's examining systems as much as he's examining relationships between characters and how those systems affect them and their ideologies. Red Mars is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of that style set against the colonization of Mars and the massive rift it sparks not only between colonists in favor of and against terraforming, but between the populations of Earth and Mars. The sequels, Green Mars and Blue Mars, follow the consequences of that rift across the better part of two centuries. Absolutely fantastic, a classic, highly recommend.

No list of this sort would be complete without the inclusion of Stanislaw Lem, whose works I pilfered from my dad's sci-fi collection long before I was old enough to understand most of what was going on in them. Lots of folks have heard of Solaris via the Soderbergh film starring George Clooney (or, if you're a cinephile like me, the Tarkovsky film from the 70s). If you're going to read it, I suggest you look for the Bill Johnston translation, because it's the first translation directly from Polish to English, instead of Polish to French to English. I particularly like The Invincible and Golem XIV, which is found in the compilation Imaginary Magnitude.

Other highlights from the stole-it-from-my-dad collection are James P. Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker, which is about self-reproducing robots on Titan and the weird angels of barely-contained heat and flame (read: humans in spacesuits) who visit them; and Joe Haldeman's classic The Forever War in which a single soldier experiences an entire thousand-year interstellar war due to time dilation and falls more and more out of step with the civilization he's fighting on behalf of.

Ruthanna Emrys' Innsmouth Legacy series, The Litany of Earth, Winter Tide, and Deep Roots, resonates pretty deeply with me; they're basically a story of isolation within a prejudiced society and living with the legacy of genocide via reclaiming Deep Ones as sympathetic protagonists. Highly recommend if that's at all your jam. Also, A Half-Built Garden is, I think, a strong rec for anyone who likes HDG at all; it's literally about an alien civilization showing up to a post-climate-collapse Earth and saying "We're here to rescue you."

Olaf Stapledon is an author who sadly doesn't get enough attention these days. We're coming up on a century since the publication of Last and First Men, which is a future history of the next two billion years of human evolution and which was my introduction to his work. I will say, because of when he was writing, not only is some of the science in his sci-fi a little off, but you do have to step lightly with Stapledon's work; he's not a Lovecraft by any measure, but he was writing with the language of his time, and every so often you'll run into something that makes you go "UH." But that's true of a lot of golden age sci-fi, to be perfectly honest, and I think Stapledon's one of the best of that lot.

Ursula K. LeGuin. Just absolutely anything by Ursula K. LeGuin, fiction, nonfiction, whatever. Immense talent and skill, supremely influential, and the clarity of thought she brought to the craft of writing is invaluable for anyone who wants to learn it. I have not read enough LeGuin and I feel deep shame for it and am slowly working to remedy that. The Left Hand of Darkness (another book swiped from my dad's collection) is probably my favorite thus far.

This is getting absurdly long so I think I'm going to just resort to quick recs from here.

Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice and its sequels. A dead starship's last surviving component and her revenge quest on behalf of a particularly beloved Lieutenant? Very Kana-coded.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Hivemind wolves whose shared consciousness runs on sound. How cool is that?

Astro Teller's Exegesis. An epistolary told in emails between a computer scientist and the AI she accidentally turned loose on the late-90s internet. So few people have read this, and that's criminal.

Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle For Leibowitz. If you have not read this, change that. Not optional.

To be honest, I could keep doing this for a while, there are a lot of authors whose work I absolutely adore, but I think this is more than enough to sate most folks' reading appetite for quite a while. I hope this starts a very enjoyable and enlightening journey for all y'all. My advice is not to limit yourselves to what I've written here, but to let it inspire you to keep going beyond it. There's always something new to read, and if you want to become a better writer, there's two things you have to do: write like there's no tomorrow, and read like you're drinking the ocean.

And even if you aren't trying to improve your writing craft, reading is good for you. Literacy is one of the most powerful technologies humans have ever invented, and it underlies not only so much of the technology we have but the societies we have. The ability to write down your thoughts and have them persist until someone else comes along and accepts those thoughts into their own mind is nothing short of magic, and it sadly goes unappreciated by many. Read. Train your mind to interrogate the text, to interrogate the world around, to understand the world around you. The horizon, here representing the growth of you as a reader, is not a destination but merely a step along the way, because the more you read, the more you will find to read.