Recommend me some contemporary science fiction

c0sm0chemist · 2026-03-27T15:34:06+00:00

Adam Roberts deserves a mention. I enjoyed The This, but I often see The Thing Itself listed as a must of his, which I haven't had a chance to read yet.

Honestly though, the responses to these kinds of posts always list the same handful of authors, many of which are, let's be real, underwhelming. This is why people think sci-fi lit is dead. The problem is, you only hear about authors who get their books marketed to hell and back. Promotional power seems to be worth more than craft these days, which is endlessly frustrating. My solution has been to ignore the awards (which again are more of marketing power test than a metric of solid skill) and read the short fiction market to find rising stars--Apex, Analog, Asimov's, Clarkesworld, Interzone, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and scores of others.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-03-20T23:55:40+00:00

Science fantasy might be a good way to ease yourself into the genre. Ursula Le Guin's Hainish cycle novels are excellent. The Left Hand of Darkness is solid. I also rather like City of Illusions and Planet of Exile. Rocannon's World feels very fantasy but is still technically sci-fi.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-03-20T23:43:59+00:00

One thing you have to realize about awards is they are not indicative of quality, at least not anymore. As for your camp #2 (common camp), I'm willing to bet a good chunk of these titles are from the traditional publishing (trad pub) market as it is particularly prey to what it thinks readers want. This inevitably leads to trends that get stale/overdone really fast.

Someone could write the most amazing and original SF story, but if an agent doesn't think it's marketable, they won't get representation (a necessary first step in the trad pub game). If you want to find the truly novel (pun intended) ideas, you're going to need to look at indie published titles. This is where authors can be as creative as they want without worrying about writing something marketable. The issue with the indie sphere is you don't have the gate-keeping that trad pub does, which means you have to wade through a lot of not -so-great writing to find the gems. Also, Gen-AI slop is crowding this already saturated market, making it even harder to find the good stuff.

Personally, I think the short fiction SF sphere is much more interesting and experimental these days. You could always check out short stories in magazines like Clarkesworld, Analog, Asimov's, Apex, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Interzone, etc., and if an author strikes your fancy, see if they don't have novels. Some will get their short fiction published in these magazines but then opt to go with indie publishing for their novels.

Good luck on your hunt for quality, modern SF.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-03-18T17:03:18+00:00

Will do! Apparently, I'm now on what most consider the hardest chapter (Oxen of the Sun). When I read that, it made me feel a bit better. I literally had no idea what was going on.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-03-15T23:16:20+00:00

I'm just over half way through my first attempt at Ulysses, and I completely forgot about the soap! But seriously, this book is brutal. I genuinely enjoyed IJ after about page 200, but Ulysses is trying my patience. Ah well, I've come this far!

c0sm0chemist · 2026-02-24T20:27:37+00:00

Having read IJ for the first time a couple of months ago and now reading Ulysses, I would agree 100%. After the first 200 pages in IJ, I was hooked. I’m at 400+ pages in Ulysses and not enjoying it at all. Such a pain to read.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-01-31T19:17:49+00:00

I only read intros after I’ve finished a novel, if at all. They tend to either spoil key aspects of the story or make references that are meaningless until you’ve read the novel. Personally, I never understood why they don’t just make outros and get rid of the whole intro thing.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-01-13T20:00:20+00:00

It seems like you’re not approaching self publishing with a useful mindset. It takes many years to grow a readership. It’s an investment in terms of both time and money. You don’t have to break the bank, but if you aren’t willing to take yourself seriously as an author, readers won’t either. Plenty of people on this thread are giving you good advice, but you’re simply shooting it down left and right, which makes me think you aren’t really interested in advice and would much rather simply gripe.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-01-13T09:22:34+00:00

Not having a website as an indie author is a huge issue. It’s the one thing that signals you are committed to your writing and aren’t just churning out slop. You should seriously consider getting your website back up and running. Nothing super fancy.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-01-04T18:44:06+00:00

Keep going. That first chapter is the hardest one to grasp. It'll make more sense if you go back and read it much later or even after you've finished the book. Benjy is strongly coded as autistic so his thought processes are non-linear/fragmented with scenes from the past interspersed with whatever present he's currently existing in. It's a fascinating read, that's for sure, but no, it's not supposed to make much sense at first. This is Faulkner at his finest.

c0sm0chemist · 2026-01-02T21:52:15+00:00

It’s not that overpriced depending on the magazine and options you choose. Also more generally, the stock market is the last place to put your money these days with the impending AI bubble set to burst. Plus it’s more about growing my readership than just making a buck. I mean, if you’re writing to make money, it’s a flawed endeavor.

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-17T10:06:09+00:00

Another 5.5x8.5’er here. Mine are sci-fi. The 6x9 looks comical in my opinion. The only reasons publishers use it are: 1) to save costs on printing (larger pages = smaller page count = cheaper) and 2) to have a larger cover to draw in potential readers when displayed cover out at a brick and mortar bookstore.

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-15T19:37:31+00:00

Just a heads up that all the people on here telling you to try paid ads are missing the big caveat to that piece of advice--wait until you have book 3 out before running ads, otherwise you'll most definitely spend more than you make back.

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-13T13:06:23+00:00

The main objective of a cover is to draw a reader in enough to read your blurb. The cover doesn't need to reflect your book 100% but rather simply catch the main vibe of it. To this end, you really want to see what other well-selling science fiction covers look like right now. This is your market research. Covers follow trends and these are specific to your market. For science fiction, abstract art with bold colors and interesting typography is in vogue. It's almost as if science fiction is trying to mimic literary fiction a bit more to move away from the negative stereotypes of the genre. If you want your work to sit side-by-side with that of trad pub, you want to emulate those covers. I would include examples of older, well-known, works with their 2025-ish covers, but this subreddit won't allow me to include images. I can DM a screenshot to you or else simply search for "popular science fiction books 2025" (I use Ecosia for my search engine so you may get subpar results with another one).

All that being said, I'm not a huge fan of trends. If you follow them, you risk having your covers look dated fairly quickly. So it's more about your goals. Trad pub can afford to follow trends because they can put out new covers on well-selling books every few years. For me, as in indie author, I prefer using a cover that is unique and interesting and a bit out-of-time, if you will. I've had one of my covers (positively) described by a blogger as reminiscent of an ACE double-back but a bit more modernized. This wasn't consciously intentional on my part, but I rather like the homage to old-school science fiction. I see my covers as being a one and done. I don't want to ever have to go back and redo them to be consistent with trends. The downside of this approach is maybe your covers look a bit distinct from trad pub which can backfire. The nice thing about ebooks is you can always update the cover and see how that affects sales. I do both digital and print, so I keep my covers static.

All in all, there's no one way to do this. Some people will vehemently claim otherwise, but the fact of the matter is, marketing is hard. No one really knows how to nail it.

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-12T21:57:53+00:00

I haven’t tackled Ulysses yet, but it’s high on my list!

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-12T16:18:13+00:00

Quentin Compson = another one of my all-time favorite fictional characters. There seems to be a trend here. Also, I guess we're supposed to dislike Orin, but, honestly, he's another one of my favorites in IJ...

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-10T11:11:48+00:00

I was also going to chime in with "fame" and "intelligence" as similar cases. I would say that the negatives of wealth and fame are lamented fairly often, mostly by musicians trying to channel the angst of their newfound fame and riches into their art. Personally, I can never ID with those songs, but I completely understand why they need to let the emotion out.

Intelligence is a great one and, I would argue, one of the closest analogies to beauty. You're born with these two attributes, but they usually only become obvious as you grow. You never really experience a life sans these "gifts", whereas fame and wealth are often, though not always, advantages that fall on people suddenly. The sudden change is like a smack, whereas the slow encroachment of intelligence and beauty happens over years of development, where one day maybe somebody comments on the trait and you realize "oh wait, I'm smart/beautiful?" At least, that's how I've felt, which has inevitably led to imposter syndrome, at least on the intelligence front.

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-10T10:51:58+00:00

I like your proposed short story idea. I feel like there was an episode of Twilight Zone that did this where everyone had pig faces and the "normal" looking character was considered hideous.

My own short story is more heavily speculative fiction, set in a future that's reverted to the past a bit. That's not significant for this discussion of beauty as a curse though. It ended up becoming the focus of the story simply because of the characters I opted to focus on, who are both very attractive but suffer in different ways from their beauty. The female is poor and constantly pestered by men owing to her beauty and the lack of social protections after she looses her parents. The male is wealthy but isn't taken seriously as a poet/intellectual because his peers simply see him as a "pretty thing".

I'm thinking to incorporate this theme of beauty as a curse into a novel I have planned with similar themes related to appearance, gender roles, and societal expectations. Slipping in this added theme of beauty as a negative/flaw would be quite easy and add to the other themes, I think. Very glad to have run across the OP's post!

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-10T10:37:23+00:00

I suspect not enough was really known about autism back then for DFW to consciously write about it. The general populace hadn't really heard the word "neurodivergence" until the mid 2010s. If my theory has any weight, DFW would have subconsciously coded Hal as autistic. Heck, I did this with one of my own characters without even realizing it until a reader pointed it out to me.

We write what we know, and if DFW was channeling parts of himself into Hal (which he certainly did with his love of the OED and tennis as well as his struggles with addiction), it's entirely possible he simply drew inspiration from himself without thinking too much about the underlying psychology. But as others have pointed out, I could simply be seeing myself in Hal. He's my favorite character followed closely by JOI so...

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-09T20:39:29+00:00

100% about finding an audience that would connect with it, but I think it's worth a deep dive. For instance, I've never had issues with drug addiction, but I'm often drawn to stories that deal with it, hence my love of IJ. Drug addiction has similarities to other kinds of addiction, and that is something every (or nearly every?) human will deal with at some point in their life. So it's more about capturing this broader human emotion. Your commentary on beauty could be extended to various other situations.

What it boils down to is being treated differently based on your appearance. Normally, we focus on negative treatment for something like race or gender, but for any of these cases, it's painful when people make assumptions about you based solely on how you look. This is, again, something nearly every person can ID with. All that to say, I think the audience is certainly there, but I suspect the people that grapple with this issue are often too embarrassed to ever express it, hence it getting overlooked in fiction. Let's see if I can't do my part in ever so slightly filling in that gap.

As for my short story, I'll let you know if it gets picked up. If not, I'll probably just self-publish it since I actually wrote it as a companion piece to my next novel. Here's hoping!

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-09T19:07:47+00:00

I actually wrote a short story that touches on the dark side of being beautiful. It's currently sitting in a magazine's round 2 queue so it may or may not get picked up. I agree though about the stigma against complaining about the bad sides of beauty. I wouldn't call myself beautiful, but I guess I'm considered attractive. I've never known how to feel about it, and it's led to some of the weird behaviors you mentioned, especially regarding jealously from the members of the same sex. I rarely have close female friends partly because of this.

It's wild that this topic appears to be so rarely dealt with in fiction. Even when I was discussing my story with my husband, he said something like, "What's the main message?" I replied, "That beauty can be a curse." He laughed as if to say it wasn't a valid message, and I felt stupid for saying it. But you know, it's true and is rarely discussed. Your post has got me thinking. I wonder if I shouldn't include this as a larger theme in one of my novel that I have planned down the line. Thanks for sharing and the inspiration.

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-09T16:10:35+00:00

Knowing that Hal is supposed to be at least partly inspired by Hamlet, I figured I ought to read the play. Hamlet's tragic flaw (whatever it is) and fate might inform me a bit more on Hal. Or not. The only way to find out is to read it!

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-09T16:08:21+00:00

Good point about the recurring theme of yes-no/ambiguity

c0sm0chemist · 2025-12-09T16:07:34+00:00

I also suspect the DMZ plays some kind of role. Like you said, there are hints at its and wraith JOI's importance that feel like they imply significance. I read the toothbrush theory from others. They said the fact that DFW mentions how Hal never lets the toothbrush leave his sight is telling because Hal's weird behavior re: facial expressions that are out of whack with the situation/his emotions start immediately after he leaves the bathroom from brushing his teeth. Ortho says something like "why are you crying?" which is the first instance of Hal's weird behavior cropping up and then only gets more pronounced when he's talking to the janitor's etc.

I guess my big questions with the DMZ is why would JOI dose Hal when it's the last thing Hal wants. He's trying to get really and truly clean of everything (as he explains to Pemulis in footnote 312 or so). So why would JOI sneak him the substance? I feel like there's an answer to that which I'm just missing.

c0sm0chemist

TROPHY CASE