Recommendations for science fiction novels please.

[LiveLifeWithPassion]

Has anyone read any recent sci fi that they would recommend?

mars trilogy is supposed to be excellent. kim Stanley Robinson.

OP - There are many different kinds of SF recommended on this thread. Here is a short overview of the genre imho, and some recommendations:

Sci-fi used to be about space travel, first contact with other races, colonies, etc (around the time that man went to the moon). Here is some classic sci-fi that has survived from those days:

Dune - Frank Herbert (Consistently voted #1 sci-fi of all time, although it is published in 1965)
2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C Clarke (Brilliant story, a true classic)
The Foundation (series) - Isaac Asimov (Interesting premise, another classic)

I really like Philip K Dick. It is not the kind of book where the beauty of the prose blows you away, but the ideas are incredibly original and he was a genius imho. I'd recommend his short stories (including Minority Report, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (= Total Recall), and his books Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (= Blade Runner), A Scanner Darkly, and Martian Time-Slip. In each, you will find that the book is much better than the movie.

This fantastic book, I would say, is a bridge between classic sci-fi and new generation sci-fi that builds on internet technology:
Hyperion - Dan Simmons (Named after the poem by John Keats, the book refers quite a bit to Keats. Interesting and poignant, it is considered one of the best sci-fi out there. And it's an easy read.)

New generation sci-fi that deals with the near future on this earth, how things change with technology that we already have (internet etc) or are about to have (nanotechnology, etc):
Neuromancer - William Gibson (The book that started cyberpunk, where Gibson coined the term 'cyberspace'. If you like it, Gibson has written several more in the same vein)
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson (No doubt one of the best sci-fi ever, impossibly connecting ancient Sumerian myths with programming languages, hacking the brain, etc. Impossible to explain. Time magazine chose it for its list of 100 Best English-Language Books since 1923)
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson (One of my favourites, about the day after tomorrow, when nanotechnology is everywhere. Social structures have significantly changed. Little girl finds a high-tech educational book that interactively educates her and guides her intellectual development through the years. Fascinating discussions about politics, society, morals, and pretty much everything else.)

Some recent books that were most impressive in their breadth, scope, and incredible world-building in detail:
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. The moon shatters and people realise that the Earth is doomed. How best to plan for the centuries ahead to keep the human race alive? Brilliant book, meticulously constructed.
The Three-Body Problem & its 2 sequels by Liu Cixin. Written by a Chinese author and translated into English, these three books are nothing like you have ever read. They are philosophical, scientific, and incredibly ambitious. Anyone with any interest in SF must read them at some point.

And a lighter read:
Ready Player One - Ernest Cline. Everyone in the world is playing this one game where keys to immense riches have been hidden. It's a fantastic puzzle, being solved bit by bit, with loads of 1980s cultural references)

I'm loving all of these recommendations, thanks.

My favourite kind of science fiction is stuff set on different worlds to our own. For example I've recently read the left hand of darkness by ursula Le guin, where there are no sexes.

I also like alternative histories like the years of rice and salt.

Hyperion would definitely be your thing, then. Lots of worlds to enjoy

Also, try Dark Eden.

Thanks cote, I'll add them to my list

Thanks Cote for that detailed post. The categorising has really helped me. I might start on Hyperion mainly because you mentioned it's an easy read and other worlds appeal to me.

So many fab recommendations on this thread. I'm looking forward to enjoying this genre

Cote just that I find that long explanations of the science and technology in sci-fi fell out of fashion for a while. Has been a while since I read pages and pages of science theory in sci-fi.

I enjoyed 'Leviathan Wakes' by James S. A. Corey, and also enjoyed the TV series that was made from it ("The Expanse").

My favourite Frank Herbert book evah is 'The Dosadi Experiment', although the first 6 Dune books are great, obviously.

The CJ Cherryh 'Alliance-Union' books are fantastic, although don't seem to be on kindle unfortunately.

I'll second/third 'The Three Body Problem' - it's a great book.

I second Cote's recommendations. I love Liu Cixin's books and hopefully we'll be getting more sci-fi translated from Chinese soon.
A random one here - it's kind of sci-fi - I just read The Bees by Laline Paul and thought it was excellent.

The problem with Hyperion is that it's a bit marmite. Having heard people rave about it for years I picked it up and got almost nothing out of it at all. It is not an especially coherent book for some readers.

The Sci-Fi book I enjoyed the most over the past few years was Children of Time. It gives a perspective very different indeed to much of the Sci-Fi out there.

Would second the Ancillary Justice books.

Also Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed (but not the sequel) and quite like Timothy Zahn's The Icarus Hunt.

I love China Mieville. The City & The City is outstanding- such a clever idea. Maybe more speculative fiction than sci-fi, though? Embassytown is more classic science fiction and very well worth a read. I must give Hyperion a go.

Ancillary Justice is just great. I love the fact that while it's perfectly readable there's a surrounding weirdness to it that opens up as you read the book. So on the surface you feel that you know what's going on but you know you don't really.

I have just taken three books out of the library thanks to this thread!

The Moon and the Other by John Kessel
Gauntlet by Holly Jennings

I think you'd enjoy The Expanse series by James A Corey (who is actually 2 people). There are 6 fat books in the main story - will keep you going for quite some time, and I think they're marvellous - proper space opera stuff :) There's a TV series (2 seasons so far) too - the first season got as far as halfway through the first book - so you can see there'[s quite a lot to get your teeth into!

I second Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Really great series.

Not many people know that CS Lewis wrote a space trilogy, I enjoyed them - totally different from Narnia series.

Sadik, loved Gemsigns. Thanks for the recommendation.

The Expanse. Adapted to a tv series too.

There are about 6 books in the series.

Another vote for Dune! I am just rereading for the third time after many years and still totally in love with it.

If you want some scifi with no spaceships on it, then I'd recommend Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood , and most of Connie Williams books.

For alternative worlds, definitely Iain M Banks and the Culture novels. They have a great selection of sentient machines.

I also like Anne McCaffrey's Crystal Singer series. Some of the characters in these novels first appeared in the Continuum anthologies, which are worth a read if you like short stories.

I'm a post-apocalyptic book lover too. On that front I'd recommend Jean Hegland's Into the Forest and the classic Alas Babylon by Pat Frank. Alas Babylon isn't recent, but it's still chilling.

If you like technology and space-based sci-fi, Iain Banks writes sci-fi novels as Iain M. Banks to distinguish from his regular novels. I love his Culture novels; the Culture are a technology-based culture numbering billions that embraces different species, AI and cybernetic creatures who all live in a pan-galatic setting. The Culture is planet-based, but also on space stations, converted moons and asteroids and on vast sentient spaceships that roam galaxies.

Iain M Banks writes incredibly thought-provoking sci-fi, highly imaginative, sometimes challenging, often philiosphical. One of the better writers in recent years (sadly recently deceased).

I would echo an earlier poster; Julian May's 4-novel Saga of the Exiles starting with The Many-Coloured Land is one of the best fantasy/sci-fi series that I have ever read. There is also a bridging novel called Intervention, and then a trilogy (all in the Galactic Milieu series). I have lost count of how many times that I have re-read them. They cover time travel, first contact with alien species, the next evolutionary step for mankind (mental powers including telepathy, telekinesis, healing, coercion and far-sensing) with a focus on the Remillard family who prove to be a nexus for world-altering events. There is a cast of hundreds; her characters are compelling and you really care about them and invest in them. Her imagination is superlative and again, thought-provoking. She changed the way that I think about religion and God! When you read the first novel, there is a lot of expostition about the characters who are a group of co-travellers going through a one-way time portal into the Pliocene era seeking a technology/alien-free existence in Earth's past. It may seem a little slow, but stick with it. You need to understand the motivations for their journeys (literal and emotional) as this underpins their later choices as the plot develops. About 150 pages you'll be off, and the action does not let up!