Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009) ( Wikipedia) ( Amazon ).

It’s the first of a trilogy, but the book stands alone very well. It focuses on biology, consumerism, and the digital world. One of the most famous books on our list, and an example of the literacy-genre fiction hybrid The novel begins as a dystopia, and then things get worse. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003) ( Wikipedia) ( Amazon ).I’ve also linked to Wikipedia, Goodreads, publisher, and author pages as I can. I’ve linked to Amazon pages through my bookstore’s referral system, so anything you buy that way benefits my work (so thank you!). I’ve added a tiny summary of what the book’s about, based either on my having read it or on online commentary. I’ll run this for a few days, then announce the results.Īnd here is the mega-list. The poll itself is randomized to keep things interesting. Scroll past it to see the full, annotated, alphabetical-by-author list of every title. In these stories future worlds are reshaped by nanotechnology, plagues, conspiracies, economics, wars, and satire, for starters.

Authors are diverse by gender and race, including literary titans, first-time novelists, genre greats, and people you haven’t heard of. There’s literary and very genre-ish science fiction, award winners, and titles flying under the radar.

Over the past few years I’ve built up a big, annotated list of candidates (see below), helped enormously by fellow readers and commentators. We read all kinds of nonfiction – the future of universities, sociology, education theory and practice, media history, higher education, economics, technology, financial aid – and also turn to science fiction as it imagines possible futures. The book club (founded in 2014) is all about the future of education and technology. Which science fiction book should our book club read next?

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