Subreddit

Top books from r/printSF

r/printSF is a subreddit for discussing and recommending science fiction books, explicitly excluding film and TV adaptations.

Updated September 2026 — rankings refresh with each new pull of comment data.

148

Books ranked

62,972

Published mentions

sum of exact per-book subreddit rows

360k

Members

Years tracked

About this ranking

Hyperion (5663 mentions) and Blindsight (5232) sit ahead of Dune (4950) here, and none of the three shows up on r/Fantasy's list, where Gardens of the Moon (3986) and The Way of Kings (3461) top the chart instead - two subs sharing a genre shelf but not a single favorite book. printSF also runs cooler on the crossover hits: Project Hail Mary tops r/suggestmeabook with 1457 mentions, but here it trails Children of Time and even All Systems Red, landing at 1852 mentions well behind the harder stuff. That pattern holds throughout - Children of Time (3977) and All Systems Red (3757) beat out Neuromancer and Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness, suggesting a readership that rates recent hard SF and quietly-plotted first-contact novels over cyberpunk touchstones or space opera doorstoppers.

By year

2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

Most-mentioned in r/printSF

Ordered by tracked mention count across all published years. Sentiment is shown as context and does not change the order. The Upvotes toggle re-sorts by comment-score weight — display only, the canonical order stays mention-count.

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

Seven pilgrims travel together to a planet that kills, each one carrying the private story of why they volunteered to go.

5,672 in this sub mixed

Blindsight

Peter Watts

A crew of post-human specialists, one of them a resurrected vampire, gets sent to first contact and finds aliens that may not be conscious at all.

5,265 in this sub positive

Dune

Frank Herbert

Paul Atreides survives his family's massacre on a desert planet and becomes the messiah the empire engineered him to be, then has to live with it.

5,041 in this sub Not scored

Children of Time

Adrian Tchaikovsky

A nanovirus meant to uplift monkeys lands on spiders instead, and eight thousand years later the last human survivors arrive looking for a new Earth.

4,003 in this sub positive

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

Martha Wells

A security android with no interest in gender, romance, or heroics just wants to watch its shows, and ends up saving its clients from a conspiracy anyway.

3,761 in this sub mixed

Neuromancer

William Gibson

A washed-up hacker gets his nervous system rebuilt for one last job, in a world Gibson invented before the internet existed to copy it.

2,414 in this sub positive

We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Dennis E. Taylor

A software engineer dies in 2016, wakes up as a von Neumann probe, and starts cloning himself across the galaxy.

2,173 in this sub positive

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin

A human envoy crosses a glacier on foot with the one alien on the planet capable of ambisexuality, and neither of them trusts the other yet.

2,021 in this sub positive

The Three-Body Problem

Liu Cixin

A disillusioned physicist's daughter answers a signal from another star and invites the invasion of Earth out of spite for humanity.

1,996 in this sub critical

#10

Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson

Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for the Mafia, moonlights as a hacker-samurai, and stumbles into a virus that infects minds instead of computers.

1,963 in this sub positive

#11

Project Hail Mary

Andy Weir

A dying astronaut wakes up alone on a spaceship with amnesia, two corpses for company, and Earth's one shot at survival riding on him.

1,865 in this sub Not scored

#12

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

A physicist from an anarchist moon travels to the capitalist planet his people fled, carrying a theory of time that could unite both worlds or arm one of them.

1,836 in this sub positive

#13

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

A child prodigy recruited into Battle School at six ends up commanding real war fleets, believing until the end that it's all just a simulation.

1,771 in this sub mixed

#14

The Martian

Andy Weir

A botanist gets left for dead on Mars after a dust storm and has to grow his own food to survive until the next mission arrives, years later.

1,733 in this sub Not scored

#15

Foundation

Isaac Asimov

A mathematician predicts the empire's collapse centuries out and plants a colony at the galaxy's edge to shrink the coming dark age from thirty thousand years to one.

1,271 in this sub critical

#16

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Becky Chambers

A ragtag crew tunnels a hole through space for a living, and the alien passenger they're ferrying turns the trip into a slow-burn found-family story.

1,220 in this sub positive

#17

Red Rising

Pierce Brown

A low-caste miner surgically altered to pass as the ruling elite infiltrates the academy that killed his wife, planning to burn the system down from inside.

1,182 in this sub Not scored

#18

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin

An orogene comes home to find her son beaten to death and her daughter gone, the same day a continent starts splitting apart.

1,148 in this sub Not scored

#19

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Earth gets demolished to build a hyperspace bypass, and the last man alive escapes only because an alien researching a galactic encyclopedia needed an assistant.

798 in this sub mixed

#20

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien

A gardener and three friends carry a cursed ring across a continent at war, because the only way to destroy it is to walk it into the volcano that forged it.

792 in this sub Not scored