10 of the BEST Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books from the 90s

[@mikesbookreviews]

Thanks a ton for the invite, amigo! And for the SF recs. I'm adding Ring to my list, for sure.

[@WordsinTime]

You’re welcome, thanks for joining me! Ring is part of a series but can be read as a standalone. It has some info dumps haha but the ideas are great!

[@reynoldsmathey]

HUGE props for mentioning 'The Carpet Makers' - one of the most epic, galaxy-spanning revenge tales of all time. This one really stuck with me. Superb list for both.

[@WordsinTime]

I’m glad you enjoyed it too! I hope to encourage more people to try it!

[@timbye]

"The carpets themselves are fairly carpety"... This quote made me chuckle and absolutely made my day! Intrigued by this book! 😀

[@WordsinTime]

@@timbye Haha hope you enjoy the book!

[@Talking_Story]

A little Fall of Hyperion love I can dig it!

[@WordsinTime]

Team Fall appreciates your support haha

[@DeHeerKarim]

I like these lists! Keep 'em coming!

[@WordsinTime]

You’re welcome! Glad you enjoyed!

[@stevenlamb8726]

Really looking forward to diving into some fantasy books later this year. Just gotta get through my short SciFi TBR first! I think I’ll start with A Game of Thrones. I have never actually watched the TV show so I’ll be going in completely green!

[@WordsinTime]

That’s awesome, hope you enjoy!

[@liamschulzrules]

Snowpiercer was originally a comic book series from France/Belgium

[@WordsinTime]

Thanks for the info Liam!

[@willk7184]

Jonathan so glad you gave some props to FoH. Of course the first book is hard to top but I really loved the second book too. It's filled with interesting ideas and places and character developments and near the end of it has one of my favorite dramatic scenes in all of sci-fi.

[@WordsinTime]

@@willk7184 I felt the same way! Glad you loved it as well!

[@colin1818]

Excellent collab! I've been a fan of Mike's channel for a while and definitely enjoy his material. Oh, and Jonathan is at least above average too :)

[@WordsinTime]

“Above average” is going in all future marketing material.

[@colin1818]

@@WordsinTime - I get my own blurb and everything!

[@ReadingIDEAS.-uz9xk]

Not read a lot of science fiction but read Dune this year and just reading the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy. Recently picked up a Frank Herbert and Ron Goulart book hauls and building up a collection of Philip K. Dick. Best wishes.

[@WordsinTime]

@@ReadingIDEAS.-uz9xk Nice! Those are great choices and PKD is one of my favourites.

[@TroyThatFilmNerd]

this collab was absolutely fire

[@WordsinTime]

I appreciate it! 🤜🤛

[@bartsbookspace]

Your choices here Johnathan are great! Like Mike, I want to read Permutation City! Diaspora was a tough read for me though… I’m reading Wizard and Glass now. Love it. 😀 Fall of Hyperion is 🚀 I’m with you on the raft.

[@WordsinTime]

Glad to have you Bart! And I found Permutation City to be easier to read than Diaspora so I hope you enjoy it!

[@kohhna]

The was a bit of dark Sci-Fantasy being written in the 90s, Brian Stableford's Genesys series and Inversions from Bank's Culture series would fit that description. One of my favourites The Iron Dragon's Daughter is incredibly dark, cynical and quite Meta and that was from '93 so it was at the beginning of the upwards slope of that curve. Prior to Martin, Robin Hobb and others were doing big emotional grounded well written fantasy with a historical tinge. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay is from 1990 and hits a few notes thatwe would associate with Martin to the point that you'd assume he introduced them to fantasy, but nope. David Gemmell was doing cracking hard-as-nails fantasy too. Even before GRRM Fantasy was growing up.

[@WordsinTime]

Thanks for the recommendations! So far I’ve read 4 of the Culture books and they do have some darker elements.

[@pj8648]

My favorite has always been Stephen R Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series.

[@WordsinTime]

I’ve heard good things about that and The Gap Cycle.

[@khod3337]

Need to read more Baxter definitely only read proxima upto now but really enjoyed it

[@WordsinTime]

I need to read more Baxter as well!

[@Joe-lb8qn]

Is The Carpet Makers the same as "the hair carpet weavers" both by Eschbach and very similar descriptions.

[@WordsinTime]

Yes, it’s the same book. Different publishers used slightly different titles.

[@Kim_Miller]

I's funny listening to you 'young guys' about 2001 A Space Odyssey, book vs movie. I was twenty when it came out, my university years, and with many others fell in love with it immediately. What seems to be forgotten is that Kubrick wanted to make a movie of an expanded version of Clarke's short story, The Sentinel. Clarke wrote the screen play even as Kubrick was making the movie, swapping things in an out as they went, and by the end of it all Clarke had the novel completed as well. The result was an interaction between the two of them and I suspect they were letting the story be as trippy as it wanted to be and just see where it went. And so we get the crazy ending.

[@WordsinTime]

Clarke’s foreword about working with Kubrick was an interesting read!

[@Kim_Miller]

Permutation City was a really trippy read. It took a lot of concentration for me to keep up with it but it repays for that. And along with the trippy writing, Greg Egan is known for his statement that there are no photos of him on the internet. It's a weird flex. You start out with mention of the Sun Eater series and how you've both spoken to often of it. I've just finished book 2, Howling Dark. It got very dark and was like being hit by a truck. I needed a break before going on to the next book so I'm reading Sirens of Titan. Vonnegut has such a cool way of poking fun at his readers with his sly humour. Empire of Silence had me wondering through most of the book about how the title made sense. And then the phrase was mentioned only once towards the end but didn't explain itself. Similarly, Howling Dark as a title didn't make sense until late in the book the phrase is mentioned. And then I thought, 'Hey, that's making a bit of sense when coupled with the first title". So I started to wonder if their shared theme was pointing forward into the series, and then book six came out, and there's that word again hidden in the title. Anyway, that's my thinking so far.

[@WordsinTime]

Haha yes there’s lots of little hidden nuggets on Sun Eater when it comes to titles and chapter titles!

[@robyoder583]

Hey just a suggestion here . can you do something with Vernor Vinge being he just died last month . He gave as some much be nice to do a little tribute to him .

[@WordsinTime]

Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve only read A Fire Upon the Deep but would like to read more!

[@robyoder583]

I think a deepness in the sky is better . I have children of the sky on the TBR shelf . Also the peace war is great

[@cloudbloom]

I love Mike, his channel is wonderful

[@WordsinTime]

Glad you enjoy his channel!

[@OmnivorousReader]

The Carpet Makers was a MOST excellent book, very different or unexpected. I usually don't love short stories but the way the mystery develops is stunning. Yes! Respect for how the Harry Potter series grew, aged, got darker, harder and more adult. The Prisoner of Azkaban was the one that made me, too, sit back, think 'whoa - we have some serious adult concepts creeping in here'. The whole question of punishment vs rehabilitation and human rights in general is a strong subtext and that is not what most people expect from a 'children's book' . I just recently finished Rendezvous With Rama and it completely exceeded expectations.

[@WordsinTime]

I’m so glad you also enjoyed Carpet Makers! And Clarke is one of my favourite writers.

[@MarkusFFFF]

Andreas Eschbach is such a great german author, i have read every book from him. Another amazing german sci fi author is Philip P. Peterson, but i don't know if his books are translated into english languages. He's amazing! The last few weeks i tried to read Hyperion, but honestly, i had to give up. I managed to get through the first three "short stories", which was a pain. The moment he described a house with 30 rooms on 30 different planets, connected through farcasters (i don't know if that's the correct word) i closed the book and never opened it again. I really wanted to like it, but it didn't work.

[@WordsinTime]

I wish more Eschbach works were translated into English!

[@callmeal4183]

The Carpet Makers is awesome. One of the best translated SF novels I have read.

[@WordsinTime]

I’m glad you loved it too!

[@colin1818]

15:22 "I'm going to tell you about this character walking through the snow...for about 40 pages" Sounds like an Ursula K. LeGuin novel.

[@WordsinTime]

Haha this is an accurate description of The Left Hand of Darkness. I think The Lathe of Heaven might be more to my reading taste!

[@colin1818]

@@WordsinTime I loved The Lathe of Heaven!

[@j.p.lovecraft1826]

3 Body Problem- it’s common to hear people claim there is no good character work but……they are not thinking big enough. For me, the character work is great. Not on a scale of a single person but in the human race as a whole. We, all together, are the human character of the book. How humans react, change, move on and through the new circumstances is one of the things that blew me away. 3BP is one of my favorite series ever. The journey of the ideas matched with how the human race acted as a whole is 🤌. True, I cannot latch onto or identify with a single person but I was entirely wrapped up in how ‘we’ went through the whole thing.

[@WordsinTime]

Some people found the character decisions frustrating but I actually found them to be believably human.

[@wildmanz8233]

Snow Piercer is based on a French graphic novel series "Le Transperceneige". 💯

[@WordsinTime]

I’ll have to check it out!

[@wildmanz8233]

@@WordsinTime I know Titan Comics has translated the French into English

[@blackcatseye22]

Snowpiecer is a comic book I believe.

[@WordsinTime]

@@blackcatseye22 I looked it up and apparently it’s a French graphic novel titled Le Transperceneige.

[@BenchedForAirBud]

I prefer The Fall of Hyperion to Hyperion. THINGS ACTUALLY HAPPEN!

[@WordsinTime]

Glad to have you on the team! 🤝

[@km-bo3zx]

I’m about half way through the 1st book. For the most part it’s been YAWNNNNN…….what was I saying…….

[@harvirdhindsa3244]

Fall of Hyperion makes Hyperion amazing in retrospect, I liked them both and had Fall above the first in my ranking just after finishing the duology. But after letting there be time to reflect and appreciate the strengths of both, I have the first one as my favorite Sci-fi book once again. The technical prose and switching of styles in the first is incredible and I am a bit biased in that regard

[@dragonrambles]

I was surprised by the statement that in the 90s you had to write like LOTR to get published, and ASOIAF was the change. There was plenty of fantasy being published prior to ASOIAF that were very different. Unless you’re meaning that any book with magic is like LOTR. Just some examples: Deverry by Katharine Kerr (started in 80s but book 4 was in 1990, so that fits with several examples given here) Wars of Light and Shadow by Janny Wurts Witches of Eileanan by Kate Forsyth Those are just 3, but I could go on to list a lot more.

[@WordsinTime]

The way I interpreted what he said was that ASOIAF wasn’t necessarily the first (for example he said Martin was influenced by Tad Williams and others) but that it was the first to have mainstream success and be highly profitable for a publisher of fantasy.

[@dragonrambles]

@@WordsinTime I felt that the comment was more that ASOIAF was where Fantasy changed from being the same-old. Yes, he did later say that Martin was influenced by Williams, but that was in a different context. I guess I'm just disappointed that a "best of the 90s" list wasn't reflecting a wide read of the time period.

[@bfitzger2]

Hmm. Most of these are really good books. But really they're from a top 50 of 1990s, or maybe even a top 100. These books from my collection would displace at least half the books you mentioned (I can only credibly talk about books I've read): - Queen of Angels, Greg Bear - Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold - Earth, David Brin - Prince of Chaos, Roger Zelazny - The Phoenix Guards, Steven Brust - The Garden of Rama, Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee - Web of Angels, John Ford (credibly predicted the Internet, albeit in galactic form - it's even called "the Web") - Jumper, Steven Gould (best YA SF since Heinlein) - Doomsday Book, Connie Willis and I haven't gotten out of 1992. If I'd continued to 1993, the next one would have been Against a Dark Background by Iain Banks. You lose lots of points for putting The Halfling's Gem and Prisoner of Azkaban in a top 10, and you get points back for mentioning The Carpet Makers and Permutation City.

[@bfitzger2]

IMO, you have to read all the books that Great Bear, David Brin, Gregory Benford, and Vernor Vinge published in the 1990s before you can talk at all about a "top books from 1990s" list.

[@WordsinTime]

Lots of good authors on this list and some that I haven’t read yet but need to try.

[@chokog2446]

I know everyone ooints to GRRM for the darker, ambiguous characters, but even he was influenced by Glen Cook... Also, Vorkosigan Saga for an early 90's Sci-fi...

[@WordsinTime]

@@chokog2446 I’ve only read The Vor Game, so I need to try more Vorkosigan.

[@FrankOdonnell-ej3hd]

snow crash is in my top ten cyberpunk novels and I've read a lot of baxter in the past but haven't gotten around to ring yet. Crichton was the master of the techno-thriller and so sorry he's not around anymore.⚛😀

[@WordsinTime]

That’s awesome! I’m a fan of Stephenson, Baxter, and Crichton. Need to read more from all of them!

[@OfJaggedRisings]

Funny how in the 90s everyone thought we would lean towards calling it some variation of ‘the web’.

[@WordsinTime]

Haha that’s great

[@DZIGIN]

I like Fall of Hyperion more, too 😁

[@WordsinTime]

Haha welcome to the team!

[@DZIGIN]

@@WordsinTime Yes Sir 😁🙏

[@LivingDeadEnby]

Mike just explained why Wizard and Glass was my least favourite book of the series 😄 I'm generally not a Fantasy fan.

[@WordsinTime]

Haha I didn’t expect to, but I ended up loving the Roland and Susan story.

[@Zivilin]

Best of 90's? ✅ Best opening line from a book ever? ✅ You need to get around to The Dark Beyond the Stars by Frank M. Robinson, Jonathan. I think you'd really love it. And it is one of the rare standalone novels within the space opera subgenre too.

[@WordsinTime]

That’s sounds pretty cool, I’ll have to look it up!

[@Zivilin]

@@WordsinTime The opening line part might be debatable, but i'd at least say top 5.

[@phridged]

Vorkosigan saga

[@WordsinTime]

Good choice! I’ve only read one book so far, need to try more.

[@chocolatemonk]

you should do this without combining SF and Fantasy. Plenty of content for 2 videos, then change your time frame and more videos

[@WordsinTime]

I have lots of sci-fi book videos on all time periods and subgenres.

[@wheelz1325]

Don't watch the Snowpiercer show it should have been called trained cops😂

[@WordsinTime]

Haha good to know