Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?

The one that sticks in my head the most (and which I did not think I would enjoy based on the book jacket blurb) is "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I highly recommend to anyone who listens. I also recently encountered "The Fifth Science" by someone named 'Exurb1a' and enjoyed it so much that I am now reading another of his books named "Geometry for Ocelots" Andy Weir's "Hail Mary" is an imaginative and fun read, as is "The Startup Wife" by Tahmima Anam. Oh! And "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' (or almost anything else) by Becky Chambers.

SciFi The Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor The Singularity Trap and Outland, also by Dennis E. Taylor The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi

SciFi + Comedy Expeditionary Force Series by Craig Alanson

Military SciFi The Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell The Palladium Wars Series by Marko Kloos

A bit of all of the above Murderbot Diaries Series by Martha Wells

SciFi/SciFantasy + Comedy Magic 2.0 by Scott Mayer

The one really first rate recent SF novel I can recall is: "This is how you lose the time war" [0] by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It's far from being Hard SF if you like that (I do) but the humour and poetry of it won me over very fast. I bought it purely on the basis of the delicious title!

The "Lady Astronaut" series [1] by Mary Robinette Kowal is not first rate, but it is reliably entertaining and a fairly Hard SF alternate history with some interesting choices.

I'm going to take a liberty and also recommend a much older SF book that I rarely see mentioned; "Fiasco" by Stanisław Lem. This one's all about the characterization and the big picture of humanity's fatal flaws. Not hard SF as such, but he tells a good tall tale when he needs to mess with space and time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How_You_Lose_the_Time_...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/193730-lady-astronaut-unive...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

Martha Wells' Murderbot series is a fun holiday read. It's about an autonomous humanoid bot that does security work for expeditions on distant worlds in a corporate-dystopian future and is going through an adolescent emotional crisis

Try "The Three-Body Problem". It opened my eyes when I first read it, and every re-read still mesmerized me. The original text is in Chinese but the translation to English was done very well.

It's a trilogy in three books. If you are not sure, just purchase the first one. But I bet you would regret about only purchasing the first one.

Blindsight by Peter Watts, it's available for free [1] (CC-License on his website), he releases all his books like that, except for the most recent one, which is only available through publishers.

You can also download it on the site as epub or PDF.

Edit: Also, it's one of the few Sci-Fi books I know (all from Watts) that cites scientific literature and has a bibliography, to make an argument for plausability and give explanations in an afterword. Watts worked as a marine biologist before writing scifi, IIRC.

[1] https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

I recently read and liked A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace.

Ken Liu has some excellent short stories. His collection The Paper Menagerie from a few years ago was particularly great. (The titular short story won a Hugo.) He also translated the first and third books in the Three-Body Problem series.

Ted Chiang is another great SF short story writer.

Definitely Maybe by the Strugatsky brother is excellent – though it was published in the 70s so maybe not "modern."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe_(novel)

I really enjoyed “XX” by Rian Hughes — a completely new kind of sci fi. Like my other fav sci-fi book Three Body Problem, it all starts with a signal from space, but then... very boldly imagined book and deserves much more praise than it seems to have gotten.

Amazon.com: XX (9781419750694): Hughes, Rian: Books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419750690

NK Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy (each of which won a Hugo award) is phenomenal; it has more of a fantasy flavor, but plot/character-wise is amazing.

I loved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Hutchinson#Fractured_Euro... for the unexplained but totally compelling technology. Full of thrilling intrigue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)

Is it really so wise and ethical to launch a mission to another star system? With KSR's usual deft handling of complex systems.

The Ted Chiang books are great. Short stories. 'Arrival' the movie is based on one of them.

Hydrogen Sonota came out in the last 10 years. There are also 9 books that came before it that I really enjoyed too. You don't really need to read them in order though.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is a great one

Terminal Boredom, Izumi Suzuki

Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, Ken Liu

Becky Chalmers books are worth a read

The Expanse Series, Murderbot Series

The Three-Body Problem.

It would help to know the flavor of sci-fi you like.