A science-fiction month on the channel spills into the podcast, and Daniel (@dungeondive) reads out ten novels from a physical stack, in stack order, with the back-cover copy quoted from the actual editions on his lap. Explicitly not a top ten and not a list of books you must read — just ten he loves.
Rudy Rucker’s White Light (1980) opens as “math punk,” a transrealist comedy about proving a number greater than infinity. Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius (1944) is the oldest and the saddest — a dog with a human mind, and the only book to make him cry in public. Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams (1992), each chapter a dream about time. Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), darker on every reread than he remembers. Sturgeon’s To Marry Medusa (1958), read in one sitting on a two-hour bus ride. Philip Palmer’s Version 43 (2010), the fun one — gonzo, ultraviolent, underrated. Russo’s Carlucci trilogy for noir cyberpunk. Simak’s Way Station (1963), pastoral SF he owns in seven editions.
Two get the strongest claims: Bester’s The Stars My Destination as the best SF novel ever written, and Martian Time-Slip as the best Philip K. Dick — blue-collar protagonists on Mars, madness as subject.
Which of these ten would you hand to someone who says they don’t read science fiction?