Science Fiction Books for Beginners
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- čas přidán 22. 07. 2024
- Some SciFi beginners need soft landings, if you are looking to start with a book that will seduce you into the science fiction genre rather than throw you into the deep end, this is the video for you!
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Chapters:
00:00 - Pet Peeves
1:02 - 6 types of beginners
1:37 - Preteen
3:14 - Young Adult
4:36 - New/Occasional Adult Readers
6:08 - Classic/Modern Lit Readers
8:01 - Fantasy Readers
9:40 - TV/Movie Fans
11:22 - Alliance Outro
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#scifi #scifibooks #booktube #beginners #readers #secretsauceofstorycraft - Zábava
I love this type of video format; highly structured, great editing, great recommendations, and it's entertaining. Thank you.
Thank YOU for watching!
this is the best "SF for beginners" video I have seen. The moon is a harsh mistress is what really got me hooked.
I just got this book! Im sooo excited to start it
By Heinlein, of course. Another of his books I would recommend for new readers is The Door Into Summer. And for fantasy readers: Glory Road.
Keep it up sis, HYPERION HAS AN AMAZING COVER. !!!
Haha! Guess we will have to fight about it ;)
I second that! It's one of my favourite covers.I was so surprised that I had to rewind the video to see if I misread!
Thanks for sharing your video! Some great recommendations that I shall look forward to reading. I'm in my mid 60's and have only just got into Science Fiction.....It's never too late!
Agreed! Love the positive attitude
For your snooty friend who likes Literature, I’d recommend Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg. The sci-fi elements are minimal; it is essentially an autobiography of a man who could read minds his whole life and is slowly losing that ability.
You are third person to recommend this book to me! I will have to check this out
An absolutely beautiful book.
Great cross section of books for beginners but the guestion of where to start with science fiction always baffles me. Once I found the SF section in the library I never left. So much to choose from, sorta like something for everyone. When asked, my answer is "Go to the SF shelves at the library or bookstore and read the back covers and blurbs something will catch your interest."
My problem was never which book to read but which book to read next.
Readers of all genres understand this "plight" ... it's a good problem to have! So many books, so little time.
New viewer!
This was a great video, even though I am an avid Sci-FI reader I heard of a bunch of these books for the first time.
Welcome! Thanks for dropping by and leaving me a comment. I am happy to bring new books to the table. I would guess if you have been an avid reader for awhile these books might not be the typical ones- but that was the point :)
Excellent!! A great idea for a structure and great recommendations as well.
I'm so glad I found you! Absolutely love your videos, excellent structures and recommendations! I haven't read all that you recommended here but for those I have, 1000% agreed!!!!
I'm so glad! 😃 welcome!
I remember buying a Wrinkle in Time as Scholastic reader at school.
Heinlein has a couple YA books aimed at girls Podakayne of Mars. and The Menace from Earth.
some of the good books need to be brought back! will check it out
Podkayne is still one of my favorite books of all time! Make sure you read an edition that carries BOTH endings (the original as printed versus Heinlein's originally intended ending) as it makes for interesting reflection and conversation.
@@andi-roo9426 i read both endings I think editors in the 50"s didn't think kids could handle the original endings. People choose to protect children in different ways in different times. Today's kids get almost no personal freedom thus the helicopter parenting trend.
Thank you for doing this video. Me and my ten year old son enjoyed watching it very much. He is currently reading Jurassic Park and I'm reading Stars my Destination. We are both looking for what's next. Great video
Great video!!! Very concise and to the point!!! I immediately subscribed!
Awesome, thank you!
Another amazing video. Awesome
Thanks michael!!
The White Mountains Trilogy by John Christopher - pre-teen must read.
Not heard of it. Will checkout
Great video
Thank you for the recommendation !! i have read two books ( red rising & project HM ) and i really enjoyed them both.
I'm so glad! 😃 hope you fall in love with sci fi
I want to read every book in the world.
Ha! I dont know about everything but all the good ones, yes!
Me too!!
One of the things that keeps me up at night is the thought of all the good books published after my death that I won't have an opportunity to read. It feels so unfair! LOL and yes I know that's ridiculous but I am who I am.
Great breakdown of new readers and great suggestions as well!
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it..
Thanks for recomendations! I really love when we have sugestions for all levels of readers.
Yay! 😀 glad u liked it
I tried a few other book recommendations videos and they felt wrong as I haven’t read in a while and did want more of a beginner’s guide. I have read Enders game decades ago but recently read Project Hail Mary and The Fold. Seeing them on your list made me trust that I could add these others to the list. I also read Old Man’s War by Scalzi and it was good, too.
Excellent post
Lots of great recommendations and some books I need to check out as well! I love the categories, I think they’re helpful!
Also, did you say that Hyperion has the ugliest cover ever??? It’s my #1 cover of all time hahaha
I started out in the fifties buying used paperback scifi books. By the late 60's I had several thousand books. I had them divided up by authors as I often had many books by the best authors. I would suggest for kids that they start with the older classics. Things like a journey to the center of the earth, Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, war of the worlds, just to get a feel for how scifi progressed over the years. Slowly moving toward more modern authors. I always enjoyed the square root of man. The best way to get a broad view is by getting books of assorted short stories by assortments of the most famous authors to compare the different writing styles. I liked some of the lessor know books like the machine men of zaroom, the lensman series, john carter on mars (better known). Moving on to 2001 because the movie didn't cover half the book. I made it a habit when a new movie came out that I wanted to see I always read the book first. It actually increased my enjoyment of the movie because I had a more basic knowledge of what was going on. Don't skip the silly classics either like the first men in the moon, the mouse that roared and so on. I had read so many books that high school literature was almost boring. Today in my 70's I don't read much anymore but prefer to listen to audio books as relaxation. I look back and remember spending many days laying outside reading for hours. I had a tan that looked mahogany brown back then. I don't know why they didn't print more books like subsahara( different title on the cover) but it was printed on olive green paper and you could read it in bright light with no reflection. Really easy on the eyes. for more modern mysteries I suggest all the crichton novels. They'll likely never be beaten and most libraries have a large collection of them.
Pre-teen book recommendations, I couldn’t think of one. You gave six, wow. And the rest of those recommendations…. I have a lot of work to do. Firing up Goodreads now…
Haha thank you! I have so many more if you need them. Let me know
I immidiately thought of the Norby series by Asimov for that category
I'm reading Velocity Weapon right now! Love PHM 🎶
Awesome! I hope you enjoy!
I would have gone for Wyndham novels for the 8-13 category. Easily readable and relatable characters. Also Haary Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld series. Fun romps.
I would whole heartedly agree with stainless steel rat! I considered a bunch of other books that I would have liked at this age, but kids now a days dont have the patience or sense of wonder for lots of the ones many of us started with. Its the hunger games, instant gratification type books they want now. At least from my very limited understanding…
Hi Whitney. Great list and some new titles for me to check out as well. Thank you. May I also add that I finished Arcane a few days ago (I spun it out to enjoy one episode a night) and really enjoyed it. Good storytelling and great characterisation, which don't always go hand in hand with an animated series but do here. You should do a video on this to introduce it to a wider audience.
I am so thrilled that you enjoyed it! I think its the “cartoon” style that throws many people off. Thank you for letting me know. If you need another recommendation, I just started watching “the peripheral” on amazon (yes the one by william gibson) and its been good too
@@secretsauceofstorycraft I agree that many animated movies are cartoonish, but I think the artwork on Arcane is so good that it’s more like an animated graphic novel. Really well done. Thanks for the new recommendation and, as you liked Arcane, may I recommend Lady Mechanika by Joe Benitez. This is a graphic novel but is sumptuously illustrated with a strong heroine, steampunk setting and self contained stories within an overall narrative arc. 7 volumes so far, all available on Amazon.
@@alans3023 will get right on that!
Whaaa? I really like the Hyperion cover😢😢
Haha i made a whole video on the topic! Maybe its only because you havent seen the other covers 😝 go check it out, maybe ill change your mind?? Maybe not. 🤷🏼♀️
Good video! I have not read all the books but I feel that they are good recommendations. I was surprised to see
Pray' in there as it does not normally receive the love it deserves :) I am a sci/fy fan too in either movies and/or books and as far books I normally recommends Jules Verne to teens which is actually an author which most of sci/fi predictions have come true not like most of the cream of the authors who have us far in space like Clarke and others and we are not passed the moon yet lol. I think like modern authors like Gibson (Peripherical) are more grounded. For adults who are not really in Sci/fy I always recommend short stories like "All you Zombies" from Heinlein which is mind blogging time travel short story( there is a movie based on called "Predestination"). keep the good work up! Subscribed :)
Welcome! I agree about Prey! And your reccs are welcome!
Those are all good choices. I would recommend The Coldfire Trilogy in the fantasy reader category. It starts out as supposedly grim fantasy/magic and ends up as SF and the characters and world completely seduce you into the story.
The category I most often come across is the romance reader who has dabbled in SF Romance which typically isn't very scientific and they want to try romantic SF. They're really hungry for this. I always recommend Bujold and the Vorkosigan series starting with Shards of Honor, the Liaden universe by Miller and Lee starting with Agent of Change, and the Samaria series by Sharon Shinn which is a a direct homage to Pern.
Wow i completely left them out! Will ponder this and thanks for bringing it up
I had forgotten Vorkosigan. Early stuff was serialized in Asimov's, as I recall. I will dig those out.
A classic SF novel that I think could fit in most of the categories would be Le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness". It's relatively short and Le Guin is a great writer. And for mainstream literature readers I would recommend Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside.
I havent read either but they are both on my TBR!
Great video. I recognize many, L'Engle in particular, was brought home by our daughter throughout her school days. She still has them.
Are you familiar with Andre Norton's youth novels? Before she turned to fantasy, she wrote a lot of great adventure SF. "Storm Over Warlock," "The Beastmaster," Galactic Derelict," a lot more, many are interconnected books with native American protagonists in a bunch of them. Storm Over Warlock is very good.
No i had never heard of them!
@Secret Sauce of Storycraft I have about 10. She was a great writer, I don't know why she is not on the Radar, now. She did not publish much in the magazines, I guess. Close to her section, I noticed James H. Schmitz' "The Witches Of Karres". I have read it 10 times. I think you may get quite a kick out of the book! It was really unique in SF at the time, 1966. Leiber's "Conjure Wife" predated it by about 15 years? It's not a close comparison, though. There were a lot of great novels in 1965 and 66 that should have won awards.
Oh man Michael Crichton is great! I would say Jurassic Park over Prey, for beginners who enjoyed the movie. It's just different enough to not be an identical experience, but sometimes straddling that line of movie and book can smooth that transition to reading Sci Fi. And both Project Hail Mary and The Martian would also be great for those newer to Sci Fi. I absolutely love Andy Weir and hope to see more books by him in the future!
I don't remember Flowers for Algernon very well anymore because I read it so long ago, I just remember really really liking it, especially for a required school reading book.
For Fantasy Fans: I would say Helix, by Eric Brown. The adventure of the story gives me a lot of fantasy vibes, it was a ton of fun. It was just a FUN book.
I loved 🥰 project hail mary and the martian. I agree with you. And i even think artemis was okay despite the flack it got. I just finished sphere by crichton- it was good too
Larry Niven Inferno. Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land released in unedited form. And maybe for younger readers, Red Planet, which is connected to Stranger. I would also suggest to literature readers that Gravity's Rainbow is science fiction. And why not throw in something that will really twist their melons - Ubik. Oh, one more: A book with a spectacular first chapter "The Book of Ptath". On a par with the first chapter of Dune and any Hemingway first chapter.
The first book I remember reading that had an impact on me was Wrinkle in Time. It was for school. I cant really remember what came before or after for a while in school reading so it clearly left a mark.I have a niece that is 8 going on 9. I am thinking for xmas . .
Yes!! More young people should get their hands on it!
I first read Dune when I was 11 so might skew the grading scale.
Would suggest Neuromancer - a clasic that was the influence on so many thigs. But you might have to explain what a payphone is as he didnt think about cell phones.
Snow Crash - on the surface it might seem silly but there are some deeper themes.
Hm i wouldnt recommend neuromancer to a beginner of these categories- its a very difficult book to get through. Would wait until they have a few books under their belt first. Probably same with snow crash although its a much easier read!
Dune might be a better classic to start with - its a fun read!
Just curious, where would you place John Norman's Gor series? It was an entry point for many young male fans of sci fi and fantasy.Just kidding but those types got a lot of youths hooked on reading.
I have never read them! Haha
I liked your Classic/Modern Lit Readers list the best. I made my starter list for aliens like myself, with books I wished I had at age 14.
That's awesome! You will have to share it at some point.
@@secretsauceofstorycraft czcams.com/video/pW7E8fHnKMQ/video.html
Good call on Prey--not mentioned enough. Earth Abides (1949) is excellent low key post apocalypse book which is about people and how they will handle it.
I have heard of earth abides -- i need to pick it up!!
Just give me a truly compelling story and I dont care what genre it is or isn’t.
Good for you not being defined by genre!!
Clear
Yay 😁
Pre-teen: You're right - _Wrinkle_ is great...but that bad "guy" reveal might be a little scary for 8-year-olds. _The Star Beast,_ also by Heinlein, will resonate for any kids who have pets (Lummox is both dopey and cute).
YA: _Binti: The Complete Trilogy_ is very accessible; I would also recommend the rest of L'Engle's _Time Quartet,_ each of which deals with a different science-fiction concept.
Occasional (and Classics/Modern Lit): The original novel(la) _The Time Machine_ by H.G. Wells. Elegant language, easy to read, the future is scary, and the author's idea of what the far, _far_ future would look like is intriguing.
Fantasy: _Dark Lord of Derkholm_ by Diana Wynne Jones. It seems like fantasy at first, but the science fiction elements do creep in (bonus: You get a scientific explanation for why dragons need gold!).
Fans of SF TV/Movies: Elizabeth Bear's _White Space_ duology. It's a grab bag of everything that makes SF cool, with a big dollop of humor and some epic peril thrown in. Also, they could read either book ( _Ancestral Night_ or _Machine_ ) as a standalone.
P.S. I love the outro with the pseudo-Ballantine logo! They were my favorite SF publisher when I was a youngster.
Wow great recommendations!! Thank you!!
What about dune? What category does that belong?
Haha im not sure. Id say scifi books for fantasy fans maybe-- I need to finish that series!!
Ty
🔥 anytime
I'm reading one of Stephen Baxter's Xeelee books (#4 - Ring). Definitely not for beginners, lol.
Hahaha! I heard so much about the xeelee series tho!
Unlocked book 0 sets the stage for Lock in.
I just got it!! I cant wait!
My biggest pet peeve is with Golden Age sci-fi writers (Niven, Pournelle, Heinlein) who supposed a far-distant future, but whose societies didn't advance beyond the Victorian era.
Thats a good one!!
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With 27 Jurassic Park movies, Coma, Congo, Andromeda Strain and Timeline......I'll never understand why no one ever produced a Prey movie.
Agreed!! Its a perfect movie
Ender’s Game all the way!
💜
Dd
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Ugliest cover ever?! It's one of the only things I liked about that one 😅 (even though it's not completely book accurate)
Whaaa?? U didnt like hyperion?? At all? Really??? I thought that was impossible
@@secretsauceofstorycraft I was blown away by Scholar's Tale. And liked Priest's Tale. But the rest was meh to bleh for me 😅 Fall of Hyperion was definitely not for me either