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Sorry.. my mistake I meant to write The Fifth Season. I probably won't read the rest of the trilogy. I've edited my original post.

"The Fifth Season" is pretty heavy in LGBT concepts. If you don't like this tag, then be aware that this book contains pretty "graphic" descriptions of gay sex. I'm not saying this is a good nor a bad thing, it's just something I would like to know before reaching out to this book.

The Fifth Season by N K Jemisin
(and then the rest of the Broken Earth series)
great dystopian sci-fi

Not the The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin - recommending it is when the Nebula awards became a joke.

Other than that, it used to be a trusted resource: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula_Award_for_Best_Novel

Lots of disposable scifi in this thread. And there is nothing wrong with that so let me chime in with the hard stuff: The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin is one of the best scifi/fantasy (it is hard the classify) novels I have read in recent years. Fair warning, it gets pretty grim.

I also enjoyed reading Ignition! by John D Clark. It is a dated (written in the 70s) but fascinating look at all the different chemicals tried to make rockets during the space race. Very interesting even if, like me, you only have a simple understanding of chemistry. There are some hair-raising (or hair razing) anecdotes.

I keep a list of books I've liked to answer questions like this:
https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#book

It's worth noting that all three of her Broken Earth trilogy won Hugo awards.

It's not uncommon for series to win like that (getting a Hugo award for the first book means people will start the series, and since the awards are popular voting having people read your book is half the struggle).

I think the first two books (The Fifth Season and the Stone Sky) were great, but I didn't love the final book. I think Ann Leckie's Provenance should have won that year - it's in the (Hugo award winning!) Ancillary Justice universe, and deals with lots of issues around AI that I think many at HN would enjoy.

And as for the dead comments complaining that her winning is some kind of conspiracy because it's not hard SF: Fantasy has long won Hugo awards.

Also: (a) go read it - it's got a system of magic that is as hard as any magical faster than light technology in a space opera, and (b) Gaiman won with American Gods and The Graveyard Book. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won in 2008. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won.

Not an exhaustive list but these were the books I felt moved to record[0] reading:

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Welles --> kind of trashy but fun and enjoyable.

Priest by Matthew Colville --> terrible, don't read this.

It's Behind You - The Making of a Game by Bob Pape --> Interesting if you grew up in the 8bit era

Jade City by Fonda Lee --> Basically Jedi street gangs, pretty great

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson --> Near future hard sci-fi with a Big Dumb Object, excellent

Making the Monster by Kathryn Harkup --> Non-fiction about Mary Shelley, disappointing

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer --> Effectively creepy and well written

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin --> Absolutely fantastic, highly recommended

[0] https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#book

This quote drew my attention:

“This book is about slavery, a false oppression narrative that equates having legitimately dangerous magical powers that kill people with being an oppressed minority, like a person of color. This whole story is absolutely repulsive.”

It immediately reminded me of Jemisin's "The Fifth Season", because that's pretty much the central plot device there: people with dangerous magical powers being discriminated against, out of fear, in ways that directly and obviously parallel racial discrimination of blacks in real world USA.

Except that book won Hugo for best novel in 2016.

So, what was actually so offensive about this book? I'm genuinely curious to see for myself now.

Be warned: the article contains some (imho) significant spoilers for "The Fifth Season", the first book of the "Broken Earth" trilogy.

I read the Broken Earth books and thoroughly enjoyed them (especially the first). I found Jemisin's worldbuilding and protagonists writing to be very compelling.

I strongly recommend to read at least the Fifth Season to see if her writings are to your taste.

The fact that some would object that she is a Sci-fi writer seems... rather reductive to me at the least. Sure Jemisin does not write "hard" SF, and the Broken Earth has some strong fantasy tropes. But so did Frank Herbert and Ursula Le Guin, two among the most revered writers of the genre.

[EDIT] I should not even say that she does not write hard SF, since I did not read her other books (yet). I should have kept it at "The Broken Earth trilogy is not hard SF"

My favorite sci-fi and fantasy books are those that come up with a world different from ours and then take that difference and explore its effects on society. I'd like to offer some examples:

- "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael Coney

- "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood (the first book in the Maddaddam trilogy)

- "The Fifth Season" by N. K. Jemisin (the first book in the Broken Earth trilogy)

- "The Mechanical" by Ian Tregillis (the first book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy)

- "Nexus" by Ramez Naam (the first book in the Nexus trilogy)

- "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson

- "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton (part of the Commonwealth Saga)

- "Hyperion" and "Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons

- "Lock In" by John Scalzi

- "Blindsight" by Peter Watts

I provided two books as requested - an old favourite (The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams) and a recent fantasy novel (The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin). My recommendations were... unhelpful? Lots of children’s books and comics (including Calvin & Hobbes), peppered with the occasional P. G. Wodehouse.

The latter is particularly strange to me, since Douglas Adams was a huge fan of Wodehouse, used very similar humour, and even wrote forewords for Wodehouse re-printings.