TEN science fiction books to read in 2025?

Sweet Scifi of Mine

Hot damn I love your channel Damo. You will make this channel big, i can feel it in my bones. Or as reasonably big as a community of deep sci-fi consumers can be.

Ive fallen off the wagon of reading this year so am getting back into it with trashy Halo books (which i got for Christmas). I dont think there is anything symbolically special in Halo though. Accept maybe its part of whatever evolution of sci-fi Alien, Starship Troopers and more recently Helldivers represents. Its a vision of sci-fi opposed to say, Star Trek and Mass Effect. But the main difference i see between sci-fi things is "design language". Like how do the characters interface with their world.

Your channel, ever since you were on Rebel Wisdom (blast of the the past eh?), has opened the mind to the hidden conceptual depths of Sci-fi. Your Andor analysis blew me socks off i was "wow, didnt know star wars had it in it to be so deep".

Always looking forward to collaborations you have with Vervaeke, who i think youre in the same group of philosopher.

Please do more collab with philosophy nerds on the Sci-fi/philosophy is my hope for the year.

All the best Damo.

These sci-fi stories just address straw-men of capitalism. They are all fundamentally about the state / government. Capitalism is just the scapegoat.

yes! The antimemetics book was my favorite of the year!

Antimemetics? Can't found it

The cat interlude was brilliant

Love the Sweet Child of Mine background

Great video as ever. Loved that you started your list with Adam Roberts 'Lake of Darkness'. I've read the hardback, listened to the Audiobook and met Adam at a sci fi writers weekend. Lake of Darkness is sort of Adam's answer to Ian M Banks culture novels. Loved your podcast with him too. 'Evil as a Virus' that's great. I must also read the other books on your list too. 

I'd fallen out of love with socialism, but I don't love the worst excesses of capitalism or the alt right. Maybe I can get back to socialism through sci fi, and Yanis. Have you watched 'You are not left wing' by Andres Acevedo aka 'The Market exit'?

And don't forget my book when its published! 'The Lords of History Volume 1' 🙂

I respected King as a writer because he described reading his books as the equivalent of eating a bigmac and large fries.

You make everything so interesting. I often find other sci-fi reviewers to be lacking and to be mainly peddling surface level tropes. They and I can learn a lot from you. Have a happy new year's eve btw.

Yanis Varoufakis is more of a tankie / fascist fellow traveller than a socialist

Your video on The Culture is what hooked me on your voice and mind.

Having read Frankenstein I will tell anyone who'll listen that it's not worth it. It's awfully overwritten, loaded down with purple prose and dated shallow moralisms. If you need to get a summary for some reason, go watch OverlySarcasticProductions illustrated version, much more enjoyable than rawdogging the full experience.
If you do want to actually read gothic fiction, pick up a copy of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by the superb craftsman Robert Lewis Stevenson. Or just re-read Dracula.

I'm happy to see a shoutout to fellow swede Simon Stålenhag and his mindblowing work. (Aside: the å isn't an ah-sound, it's pronounced something like more or all. Perhaps "Stallenhag" rather than "Stahlenhag".)

Cheers

With a faux version of Ten Years After's "I'd Love To Change The World" honking in the background, when all you've got is a Hammer and Sickle, everything looks like a nail and sheaf.

Observations (1) the cat seems summarily unimpressed with the future, 2025, and humans - as it should be, and (2) great chuckle: 'no video clips no music' followed immediately by a video clip and music - you got me fair and square there, my cat wondered why I was laughing (3) Lake of Darkness was great (I actually ordered it from the UK to ensure I could read it asap - no regrets) however, it was an effort to actively suppress envisioning the final scene from Disney's The Black Hole whenever I read it (you'll see what I mean).

I only watched for the action packed movie clips

Inspiring!

What country do you live in it? Looks tropical

Cool tailand pants, where do you live bro ?

I hope you've had a Skibidi Rizzmas and wish you a Very Sigma 2025.

Damo has finally succumb to the almighty algorithm and produced a cat video!!

bro why the crotte is there skibidi toilet, THIS IS AWESOME

Hey, enjoy. 💪😎✌️

🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
"Before I start, I must see my end. Destination known, my mind's journey now begins. Upon my chariot, heart and soul's fate revealed. In time, all points converge; hope's strength resteeled. But to earn final peace at the universe's endless refrain, we must see all in nothingness... before we start again."
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
--Diamond Dragons (series)

I loved reading There Is No Antimemetics Division.

It'd be cool to see a collaboration episode with MediaDeathCult on The Dispossesed and Ursula's work overall. Would be pretty cool, just sayin'...

We did ok without higher thought for 3.7 billion years. If we could store it in a box outside ourselves, evidence suggests we'd be fine.

Our two-hundred-thousand-year-old expansion pack hasn't changed us into the gods we think of ourselves as. We're still the emotional animals we've always been - we don't buy a WoW expansion pack and find we're now playing Halo. Evolution doesn't work that way. Rationality is arbitrary. It's an asteroid like the one that hit the earth 65 million years ago, and it's looking to cause another extinction level event - only very very slowly (through global industrialization) this time.

They did a short film series on "There is no antimemetics division"... pretty creepy.

The Nerf gun your home defense? Or your guard cats?

Happy New Year!

When we meet the aliens, they, no doubt, we’ll have Science Fiction too. That is the most awesome and scariest idea I’ve ever heard of that I’ve never thought of…! The only thing that’s ever come close to that is when I was joking around my friends in seventh grade Talking about how gross the aliens were and then my friends and I started ragging on each other about, “what about the way we look don’t you think we’ll scare the shit out of some alien?” and although that’s not exactly the same that idea definitely lives within. The realm of aliens will have science fiction, which means that they will imagine many different kinds of cultures and societies and we might just be as scary to them as they are to us.

I have read Frankestein some time ago. I have also read Mary Shelley's The Last Man.
As for Varoufakis, I despise that man and his party. He destroyed what was left of the Greek economy with his capital controls. We could not buy anything from outside Greece. I had to get my bf's brother to send me money on paypal to be able to pay for some subs. Varoufakis is in it for the money, and nothing else. I wouldn't be surprised if he used a ghost writer to write his "visions".

I suggest we might be in Heinlein's "Crazy Years" which he put 10 years earlier, but quite similar!

I listened to the audiobook version of, ‘ all the light we cannot see’ and loved it a lot until I didn’t. I didn’t even realize that it had been a four series miniseries on Netflix, but the concept that the military wanted to discover if people from completely different times in the world could actually live together without completely going crazy, not to mention the off mentioned trope that they would destroy the world was a welcome change of pace for me. One of the odd things in the book was as time progressed one of our time travelers eventually became completely invisible to the ever increasing security cameras in and around London. It was a great idea, but one huge flaw was there was absolutely zero explanation of any hard science behind who would come up with the idea on bringing five or six different people from deeply, wildly, different errors into one time slice was never even broached. It kind of made the whole thing a little bit like the grade school, “ if you could pick any superpower, would you be invisible or would you rather be able to travel the speed of light. Of course everybody wants to be invisible so they can go into the girls gym locker, or what have you.

I’m glad I found this channel as I have said and I will continue to support the best I can

this is the coolest bloody channel i've ever followed. Happy 2025 mate thanks for the brilliant content you consistently put out

Happy New Year Damo. Could the antidote to the up and coming movie, Electric State, be another Stalenhag adaptation, The Loop. In my opinion the whole series had it’s very profound passages and it was well worth a couple more revisits?
Also I was hoping that you’d mention Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven and/or The Dispossessed for purely capitalist/marxist critique (as Le Guin was a self confessed anarchist), but I suppose I can’t always get what I want! Thank you for the recommendations 🎉

Where the eff is my jetpack?!?

Commenting for algo's sake! Also, interesting suggestions. I may follow up on them.

happy 2025, may we survive it.

Halfway throygh lake of darkness since recommended by you excellent work definitely reminds me of Iain m banks work a bit

The smartest booktube video i ever watched 😂

Am I crazy or is that a piano rendition of Sweet Child of Mine?

Okay so I just finished Lake of Darkness this book was absolutely phenomenal I liked it an awful lot, I felt like it had a great hard sci fi edge I love the Gentleman as well as the utopian society, I love how it tackles the idea of AI almost being used as much of a crutch to us in the same way electricity has been and basically humanity becomes infantile and essentially unable to function without AIs, no one can read or write even it's very intriguing

WE. perhaps influenced 1984? OMFG. 1984 is pure plagiarism

Just finished Lake Of Darkness. I found it not too exciting actually. It was a little bit preachy and simplistic for my tastes. Didn’t leave a lot for the reader to figure out. Or maybe i’m just too spoiled with what I’ve been reading lately! 🤭 Something else from Adam Roberts you recommend next?

Great piece - and I've read Frankenstein, We and sone of the others you mention - albeit 40-odd years ago so they've become dim memories now! On another point, you said at 8.53 mins that 'our sci-fi future cannot begin until late state capitalism collapses'. Such a collapse could certainly free up ideas. But I've seen SF, the most imaginative of it, and some other fiction too, through a different lens as expanding the Overton window of what's 'thinkable' in society and imagining the consequences of social change - if admittedly mostly dystopian change. But I also have the sense that capitalism developed out of mercantilism/feudalism and through industry partly because it became 'thinkable' and was promoted in book form. We probably don't know much about what proto-capitalists read (Adam Smith? Not fiction as we think of it...) or who they conversed with but the idea of using capital and industry and specific structures such as joint stock companies in concert needed to be in place as ideas before they were used for real. And we could do with fiction now that creates the possibilities to see what could be done to make a better world as capitalism seems to be either slowly falling apart or mutating again (after the last big mutation in the 1970s/80s into neocapitalism). Because most of the stuff I've read on this seems based on quasi-anarchism on a community scale and maybe isn't very realistic.

you're making me excited for 2025
also got some PewDiePie book review vibes