r/printSF · 2020
Top books in r/printSF during 2020
Ranked by mentions in r/printSF threads dated 2020. Useful for spotting what r/printSF was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 Hyperion
Dan Simmons
Seven pilgrims journey toward a monster that grants one wish and kills everyone else, and each tells the story of why they came.
#2 Dune
Frank Herbert
A duke's son survives his family's betrayal on a desert planet and becomes the prophet who leads its people to war.
#3 Blindsight
Peter Watts
A crew of post-human specialists meets first contact and reports back that consciousness might be what's holding humanity back.
#4 Children of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
A terraforming experiment goes wrong, a nanovirus lands on spiders instead of monkeys, and evolution builds a civilization nobody planned for.
#5 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)
Martha Wells
A security robot hacks its own governor module, gains free will, and spends its days streaming soap operas instead of killing anyone.
#6 Neuromancer
William Gibson
A burned-out hacker banned from cyberspace takes one last job to breach the AI that might already own a piece of him.
#7 Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
A six-year-old is drafted into a war academy that trains him to command a fleet, and he doesn't find out what he actually did until it's over.
#8 The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin
A Chinese radio astronomer's decades-old reply to an alien signal puts Earth on a collision course with an invasion fleet centuries out.
#9 Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
A pizza-delivery samurai and a skateboard courier chase a mind-hacking virus through a franchised, corporate America.
#10 The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
An envoy is sent alone to a planet where everyone is genderless most of the month, and he has to unlearn who he assumes is in charge.
#11 The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
A woman searches a dying continent for the daughter her husband stole, while the world ends again on schedule.
#12 The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin
A physicist from an anarchist moon colony travels to the wealthy world that exiled his people, carrying a theory that could reunite them or arm their enemies.
#13 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
A ragtag crew takes a multi-year tunneling job to punch a wormhole through space and mostly just has to get along with each other for the ride.
#14 The Martian
Andy Weir
A botanist gets left for dead on Mars and has to grow food on a planet that wants him gone, one duct-taped fix at a time.
#15 Foundation
Isaac Asimov
A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and hides the fix inside an encyclopedia nobody will read for a thousand years.
#16 Red Rising
Pierce Brown
A miner's son fakes his way into the ruling class's brutal war-games academy to bring down the system that executed his wife.
#17 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Earth gets demolished for a hyperspace bypass minutes after a man's house is demolished for a road, and his best friend turns out to be an alien with a towel.
#18 The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
A gardener, a burglar's heir, and seven others walk a piece of jewelry to a volcano because destroying it is the only way to stop a war.
#19 Gardens of the Moon
Steven Erikson
An empire quietly marks its own soldiers for death, and the gods are already choosing sides before the Bridgeburners find out.
#20 A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin
A prideful young mage summons a nameless shadow to prove his power, then spends years learning to face it instead of running.
#21 Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
A pandemic collapses civilization and a traveling troupe keeps performing Shakespeare in the wreckage twenty years later.
#22 Recursion
Blake Crouch
A detective investigating a woman's impossible suicide finds a chair that implants false memories, and reality starts fracturing under the weight of them.
#23 The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
A suicidal bridge slave assigned to the war camp's deadliest crew starts hearing storms answer when he gives orders.
#24 Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
A man with a low IQ undergoes surgery that turns him into a genius, and has to watch the intelligence, and everyone's honesty, fade back out.
#25 Leviathan Wakes
James S. A. Corey
A detective investigating a missing-persons case on an asteroid and a scavenger spaceship crew are chasing the same conspiracy without knowing it yet.