Somehow I managed to listen to alot of audio books lately (by alot I mean more than my 1-2 books a year). Here is my ranking: - What I talk about when I talk about running (turns out murakami is a crazy runner) - project Hail Mary (the same guy who wrote the Martian) - gifts , leguin - voices, leguin - the Martian - a deadly education, novik Actually all of them were nice. If you have sci-fi or fantasy recommendations, send them my way!
The most creative thinker out there right now is, I think, Paolo Bacigalupi. They're technically "young adult" but let's be honest, so's Clive Cussler, Dan Brown, James Patterson and 80% of what grownups read anyway. Wind-Up Girl is really thought-provoking. Ship Breaker less so. I really hated The Water Knife when I read it but I keep thinking back on it, and it's the book that made me read Cadillac Desert and City of Quartz, in no small part because Bacigalupi references them in Water Knife enough that you can tell they were the two works that directly inspired it. William Gibson mostly works in trilogies. Neuromancer and the rest of the Sprawl trilogy are spectacular but old (and coming to Apple TV, by damn). Virtual Light and the rest of the Bridge trilogy are... okay. The Blue Ant trilogy is interesting? But you'd best be a Gibson fan. The Peripheral, the first third of which is on Amazon, is maybe the best stuff he's done since Neuromancer. I will recommend Midnight at the Well of Souls just because it's really wild in this total '70s way that, if you were Douglas Addams, you would want to parody the shit out of for BBC Radio, then write a book, then a series of books because it's really just that hilarious and then you would be so successful that nobody even remembers that all this started with a parody . You can hear the Hawkwind playing in the background.