This page collects our Season 2 reading recommendations in one convenient location, sorted by episode! For Season 1 recs, see here.
Episodes
Season 2, Episode #1: Make It Make Sense, part 1
If you’re interested in a weird, fucked-up story about alien life-forms using another planet to host their reproduction, Lleu recommends Sofia Samatar’s short story “Honey Bear”.
If you’re interested in a story about alien contact and communication that digs into the details of linguistic first contact (with diagrams!), Nazh recommends Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life,” also the basis for the (very Hollywoodized) movie Arrival.
If you’re a science nerd looking for a sci-fi novel aimed at science nerds, Roxie recommends Liu Cixin’s Ball Lightning (tr. Joel Martinson), about obsessive scientists attempting to unravel the mysteries of ball lightning.
If you’re STEM-curious and interested in a break from all the fiction we’ve been recommending, Tequila recommends Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem (also published in the US as Fermat’s Enigma), a history of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which she emphasizes is accessible to non-mathematicians with appendices for those curious about the math.
Season 2, Episode #2: Make It Make Sense, part 2
If you’re interested in Weird Creatures, Tequila Mockingbird recommends Patrik Svensson’s The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World (tr. Agnes Broom), both a memoir of his relationship with his father and their eel-hunting trips and an exploration of the history of science of eels.
If you’re interested in the mechanics of why plants, rocks, and various weird creatures look the way they do, Roxie recommends Philip Ball’s Patterns in Nature, spanning biology, geology, and mathematics to explore the recurrence of shapes in nature (with a lot of pictures!).
If you’re interested in evolution and species change over both long and short timescales, Nazh recommends Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, about Galapagos finches and the people who have studied them from Darwin to the present.
If you’re interested in the question of genre and what “science fiction” is, Lleu recommends John Rieder’s Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, a solid introduction to the idea that genre is a social construct rather than (just) a set of characteristics inherent to a given text.
Finally, if you’re interested in some science fiction with dragons — among many other things — that engages with their relationship to a broader planetary ecology, Lleu recommends Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, which he also considers to be both the greatest science fiction novel of all time and the most science fiction novel of all time.