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kleinbl00  ·  1507 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Good Sci-Fi books for a fiction book club?

    light science fiction, thrillers, historical and historical fantasy seem to be a common theme recently.

My two recommendations would be Roadside Picnic by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky

And Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.

Roadside Picnic is a 1972 Soviet novella about a hazmat site created by a chance alien encounter and the people who live off the bits and bobs stolen from it. And the drastic impact on their life. It's perhaps the most Soviet story I know. If Science Fiction is about provoking us to contemplate the alien, Roadside Picnic and Solaris are perhaps peak sci fi.

Earth Abides isn't science fiction, but it's been advertised as such for like 70 years. George Stewart was not a science fiction writer, he was a naturalist/historian who was tasked with writing a 1940s "World Without Us" by Collier's (if I recall correctly) and interspersed the factual paragraphs with little point-of-view vignettes from an observer watching the natural world take over the human one. He got about 10,000 words into it and called Collier's up and apologized because he was afraid he had to turn the thing into a novel. The point-of-view vignettes became the book and the factual paragraphs became the interstitials. It is, without a doubt, the best post-apocalyptic novel ever written. It is also, without a doubt, the one nearly no one has read. If you want to find someone who has, stand up in a crowd and say "I really enjoyed Alas, Babylon!" Keep your eye out for the angry person about to hit you. He's read Earth Abides and he thinks you should, too, but first you need to be punished.

Earth Abides was the book that drove Stephen King to write The Stand, Jimi Hendrix to record "Third Stone from the Sun" and Neil Druckman to create The Last of Us.

I would read Ken Grimwood's Replay before I'd read anything from 2016 and I would read Earth Abides long lonnnnng before I'd read Station Eleven.