Sci Fi Books I Won't Read (Convince Me Otherwise)

I listened to Hitch Hikers Guide as a radio play as a kid, late time slot each week hidden under the bed covers and it blew my mind. I had read funny Sci Fi before eg harry Harrison's silly Bill the Galactic Hero or the amusing Stainless Steel Rat series but nothing quite like its realistic, matter of fact goofiness. There was no fantasy, all the stupid things happening were meant to be real and logical.

When i read the books later I enjoyed them but have to admit they weren't quite as good of an experience and the later books not as good as the first one.

So if you don't like comedy that much maybe avoid but if you get a chance to try the radio play then take a chance on an episode or two. But it has to be the original radio play.

I agree with you on most of these. However, I very much enjoyed all the Stross laundry books I have read, they tend to cross mystery with cosmic horror.
On the Cormac side you could probably read “The Road” in under two hours then move on to “Child of God” or “Blood Meridian” <— one of the best horror novels of all time.

Quite right: do not read any of them. Especially Hitch-Hikers Guide to The Galaxy. It's five books; you'll become so obsessed you will end up sitting in pubs arguing that the film's abysmal; the TV series was crippled by the low budget; and the BBC radio series is even better than the books. But by this time you'll have been banned from most of the pubs in whatever part of the world it is you happen to inhabit.

I thought I was the only person in the western hemisphere that was indifferent to The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I am glad to find a fellow sceptic. To me Douglas Adams is canonised by sci-fi bods the exact same way Freddie Mercury is canonised by rock fans, with a similar level of incongruity.

Like you, I prefer the dark and disturbing in my science fiction. I read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I'm glad it was short. The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels (The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy) by Cixin Liu and Dune are more my taste.

Girl, your tastes are the opposite to mine. I lovebrittish humor, and hate horror.
That said, I did read the Attrocity archives. It's not funny. At all. It is creepy as hell, nightmare inducing stuff.
The story follows a brittish civil servant in a secret department devoted to stopping Things Man was NOt Meant to Know (literally, there were laws that just knowing ofthem withoutthe proper security clearance will get you in prison). In this story, IIRC, nazi necromancers were trying to bring Chtullu through their extermination camps and torture. SOme of those projects were still going on, and the hero's efforts to stop them while fighting government bureaucracy.
One book you might want to read is The Gone World, by Tom Sweterlitsch. It deals with a special agent from the 90s in an organization (NCIS, I think. There's some joke when she time travels to when the show is a hit, and she doesn't know who Gibbs is) dedicated to stop the apocalypse that, due to time travel technology, they know it's coming. Every time the US government sends an exploratory mission to the future this apocalypse happens a few years earlier than the previous expedition. T
he story starts with her investigating a gruesome murder in her best friend's old house, and goes darker, from then on.

I had the same reaction to the Atrocity Archives as you did. I thought it was OK but I can't even remember if I finished it. I read it because I had read Halting State and really enjoyed that. The cyberpunk elements are crucial to the story, are nicely thought out, and drive the thriller. I have tried other books by Stross afterwards, including Atrocity Archives, but have been disappointed. We shall see if I can find another one that I would like.

Hitchhiker's Guide went out of style not long after hitchhiking died.

You have to read The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It's a classic that would take you all of an afternoon to power right through it, so it's not going to take much work to finish it. And then once you finish it you'll know what everyone is talking about in regards to all of the references,

Count Zero: This is, to me, the darkest of the Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive series. Honestly, while reading the other two fills in some bits here and there, this was the STAND OUT of the three, VERY dark, very cool. Minor spoiler: at one point the 13ish year old girl the main character is trying to save turns, looks at him, and says in a DEEP bass voice "Turn left here, Samedi's man..." and it gave me chills. Might want to give that one a try.

As far as Paolini's "To Sleep in a Sea of Stars", that's your loss really. It is slow and builds and builds, but that is part of the reason it is such a good read, because it has one hell of a climatic ending which puts it into a class of its own. I have read it three times now and will read it again. It certainly leans into the style of Asimov, but it will stand on its own as a literary masterpiece for many years to come.

HHGG is a lot of fun, but nerds quoting it back to you incessantly is irritating

I made it about half way through the Paolini book and just couldn’t take it. The characters were awful, made one stupid mistake after another, and apparently the big mystery in the book they’re trying to get to is never answered

If the book of Hitchhikers Guide wouldn't work for you, might I put forth to you for you approval, The Radio Play of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

I personally like Space Opera but your mileage will vary

The Road is very depressing, and I liked it, but it's a hard read because he doesn't use punctuation. Watch the movie instead. The movie is good.

Never Let Me Go is all payoff. It’s a slow burn. You HAVE to push through to the end. It’s probably my favourite ever.

Woman reviews SF and calls it "sci fi". Instant ban.

the only book beside hitchhikers guide that i have read on your list is the Road and yes it is a depressing story but it also compelling and engrossing.

William Gibson is worth giving a try and not judging by one book. If you didn't like Neuromancer you probably will not like Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive that complete the Sprawl trilogy but there are style changes and pace changes and what not in other work and something like Pattern Recognition (the Blue Ant trilogy) would be a very different read and experience.

Similarly, if hitch hikers guide isn't for you, the Dirk Gently books might still work as they are much less humor forward. I prefer them, but if you don't like humor at all, then it might not still work for you, but if you are open might be sort of a way to be half way between a normal straight no humor book and hitch hikers guide level of absurdism.

Based on what you said in this video regarding your tastes, I concur with all your opinions on the 5 books I knew from this vid (no opinions on the books I didn't know).

I will recommend a work of space opera by CS Friedman called "In Conquest Born."

There are several things to like about it, but a big selling point for me (short attention span) is that each chapter is sort of a little vignette, so you can read or reread your favorite chapters plenty of times because they all have beginnings, middles, and ends of a sort. Eventually, all the vignettes tie together in one of the tightest plots I've ever seen in literature. It's a little dark and the only horror in it is about abuse of people...

The Hitchikkers Guide is actually very dark

Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" could be a good sci-fi to try out if you haven't read it.

LIft yourself out of your world and read "The Road."

One reason why I would recommend giving Hitch-hiker's Guide a go is that it is short - you could probably read it in a day. It is indeed funny, side-splittingly, burst-your-spleen funny, and as such isn't really SF so much as satire.

I enjoyed Under the Dome, though not really his most memorable. It is true that King doesn't know enough science to write really good SF, though I did enjoy some of his forays into the genre, particularly Tommyknockers, even though he wrote it in a haze of cocaine, and as such it is not without its flaws.

The problem with almost all cyberpunk from the early days of the genre is that much of it has since turned into reality, so the books tend to lose a lot of their shock and awe. And thus, I have not read Neuromancer either, and probably won't. A somewhat unknown book along the cyberpunkish line I might recommend is Paul Theroux's O-Zone.

I would agree about The Road - I saw the film version, and that was quite depressing enough, thank you. :-)

Stephen King doesn't write sci-fi. It's horror. You may THINK that it's sci-fi, but it will eventually show as horror. And "Christine", the GREAT American novel. Read it if you haven't.

Yeah....the novelisation is an aftermarket cash-in and I would argue as such doesn't really fit into the genre of sci-fi literature. Listen to the radio series and leave the novelisation. The TV and cinematic adaptations should also be avoided....

Why restrict yourself so much? Read everything, set yourself free. Some books are for critique, some are just for fun, some are life changing and some are meh! however, they're all an immersive experience if you read properly :)

100 % agree about "Never Let Me Go," to my surprise. One of those books I went into with fully positive expectations; I love Japanese literature in general, and wanted very much for this to be great. But it's a story that has been done before, over and over, by other authors, and even though I finished it out of obligation to my beloved Japanese literature, I was deeply disappointed.

Shocked to see Hitchhikers Guide here. I would assume that, if you dislike this, you dislike the incredible array of hilarious British comedy TV shows: Upstart Crow, Blackadder, Cunk on Anything, The IT Crowd, Peep Show, Catherine Tate, Fleabag, and of course Monty Python and The Office (British version). I know, I know, TV vs. Book, Apples vs. Oranges. Maybe I just can't imagine anyone not liking this and not laughing at every sentence of the six-volume "Trilogy." I guess I just love the Absurd in any medium...

If Under the Dome has one of Stephen King’s worst endings, it has to be really, really bad! I think he’s a very good writer that simply doesn’t end his stories well.

I don't need to read anything depressing.

I'm am 74 yr old male. Have read sci-fi since 5 yrs old (Heinlein & Asimov juvies, etc.). I consider Never Let Me Go one of the very finest novels of the genre. And the film is one of the best adaptations of a book since The Godfather.  
FYI, my other favorite sci-fi novel is Macroscope by Piers Anthony. Written in the 60's, it is a rollicking galactic adventure that predicts the internet, albeit on a galactic scale. Love your channel.

I will encourage you by saying if you read these books you will not start a sentence with 'so' :)

‘The Road’ is so good, so good, but you’re right, it’s a book full of depression that I wouldn’t recommend.

Nice idea. Two more conventional SF books by Stross you may enjoy are Singularity Sky and its semi sequel, Iron Sunrise. Also, (available for free) cyberpunk without the complexity of Gibson though it does, well, accelerate as the story goes on, is Accelerando.

I think you might be missing out on Charles Stross. His tales tend to be "Lovecraftian, with a British sense of humor" you still might like him, but try some of his less humorous stuff. :)

The Road, though depressing, was very readable and not as harrowing as I'd imagined it might be. It's not a slog. I couldn't get into the Hitchhiker's Guide myself, which i thought i would love. I just found it too whacky, i think (i don't really recall).

🎉 Great 🎉

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars may start a little slow, but it has highly imaginative aliens, and hints at a wider, deeper mythos future books can be based on. It gets better.

You have a couple of entries which I found quite endearing. How to Lose the Time War & Hitchhikers Guide. As far as my list of do not reads, right on the top would be anything by Philip K. Dick. I read the 3 books in the Valis series, hoping something would actually happen but never does. He just drones on for the entirety of the 3 books. Then just to prove I didn't learn my lesson I read A Scanner Darkly. My opinion didn't change.

The Road is in my opinion a bleak yet powerful and touching story of love between a father and a son. I agree that you won’t have fun reading it, but it’s one of those books that (if you’re like me) will stay with you forever.
Never let me Go might be my least favorite Ishiguro, but I still found it excellent; I love the author.
Hitchhiker does not get better 😂

Great video

The hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy was initially a BBC radio drama, and it was absolutely charming. The sound effects the voices. Everything worked perfectly. I have never liked the books. I have not liked the TV show. I have not liked the movie. The thing that he did that was so great was the radio drama the music everything was perfect

Have you read "The Stainless Steel Rat" by Harry Harrison? Has a humorous premise, but I don't remember it having a lot of humor.

I think Pattern Recognition and Peripheral are better than Neuromancer or Count Zero. But Pattern Recognition is barely sci-fi (if at all).

Concerning The Road; a new graphic novel adaptation just came out - that is a good way to read it without actually reading it.

👽 🚀

I agree with you on some of these for sure... .although I LOVE Hitchikers, but I don't actually see it as Sci Fi.

All of that said, Gideon is AMAZING... but it takes a number of chapters to get into. I would have stoped listening probably around where you did if it wasn't for the fact that I was listening while I was working on our deck and didn't want to look for something else.

Knowing your tastes (just from your video) I think Gideon is really something I think you would also love. You need to power through until about 1/2 way then from there on it's just fantastic!

I love Stross...it's got humor in it, but it also has some seriousness in his stuff. This series is a very unique blend of spy thriller pastiche, cosmic horror, and oddball humor. He does a great job of nerd-dropping to bring cosmic Lovecraftian horror into a sci-fi setting.

I've read Count Zero and The Road, you're missing out on those.

I did love all the Hitchhiker's Guide books way back when I read them in college - but I very much have the feeling if I read them now they wouldn't hit the same. And Space Opera - I did read that, and it very much reads like a BAD homage to Hitchhiker. I'm also not a big fan of silly humor (and have become less so over time), and most especially if it's not even done well. Low-key hated that one, and it's kind of put me off of other Valente (though I did really like Radiance, which I read previously).

I also really disliked the all-vibe squishy nonsensical hyperflowery love fest that was the Time War book. And I've no plans to read The Road for pretty much the exact same reasons you state...