r/printSF · 2021

Most-mentioned books in r/printSF during 2021

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/printSF within the published source unit for 2021. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

123

Books ranked

9,180

Tracked mentions in 2021

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

826 in 2021

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

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

768 in 2021

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.

619 in 2021

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.

613 in 2021

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.

511 in 2021

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.

349 in 2021

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.

343 in 2021

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.

324 in 2021

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.

306 in 2021

#10

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.

294 in 2021

#11

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.

272 in 2021

#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.

262 in 2021

#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.

250 in 2021

#14

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.

249 in 2021

#15

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.

213 in 2021

#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.

208 in 2021

#17

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin

A proud boy on a poor island learns real magic, casts one spell out of arrogance, and spends the rest of the book hunted by what it let loose.

168 in 2021

#18

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.

168 in 2021

#19

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

A man alone in an endless house of statues and tides slowly realizes he used to have a different name.

140 in 2021

#20

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.

139 in 2021

#21

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.

128 in 2021

#22

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.

114 in 2021

#23

Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson

A continent-spanning empire's mage-soldiers besiege a city that might already be doomed by gods playing a board game with human pieces.

99 in 2021

#24

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline

A teenager hunts an Easter egg hidden inside a global VR world, and the hunt is built entirely from 1980s trivia.

79 in 2021

#25

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins

A teenage girl volunteers to fight to the death on live television in place of her younger sister, then spends three books resisting everyone who wants to make her a symbol.

78 in 2021