Currently

SF is at its best when the setting and the aliens and whatnot are window dressing over a study of our own mundane humanity. No book has ever done this better, for me, than Blindsight. On paper it’s a first-contact story, but the aliens are almost incidental to the big idea (and that big reveal).

I won’t say more than that, because going in cold is most of the fun. What I will say is that I came out the other side looking at other people a little differently (probably not for the better). It’s cold, dense, and so clever it’s almost rude about it.

Everything here is vast and slow and faintly dreadful: sub-light ships crawling between the stars, ruins on a dead world, and one deeply stubborn archaeologist prodding at a silence that really ought to be left well alone.

It’s the first of a trilogy, but it stands perfectly well on its own two feet. And, unusually for a trilogy, the sequels get better and better.

Oh, and the Nostalgia for Infinity is the best spaceship in all of science fiction, bar none. Sorry, Serenity. I don’t make the rules.

You wake up freezing, soaking wet and with no memory at all, on a generation ship that has gone very badly wrong, and something down the corridor is already hunting you.

It’s a proper puzzle box: figure out where you are, what the ship was for, and yourself - Heart of Darkness along the length of a starship, in and in, deck by deck, towards whatever is sitting at the middle of it. Two hundred-odd pages that read like a fever.

And then the ending, which still has me questioning the nature of identity, self-determinism, and love, of all things.

A steamboat crawls up the Congo to fetch a company man who stopped sending reports and started being worshipped instead. A hundred pages of fog and ivory and dread.

The horror on offer is almost entirely administrative, and an alarming amount of fiction has been living off that ever since. Kurtz is a monster the company built, staffed and shipped upriver. Take the paperwork out of Control and you’re left with a nice building; same goes for every SCP file you’ve ever lost an evening to.

Coppola moved it to Vietnam and everyone still talks about that. Buffy put Principal Snyder in army fatigues for one dream sequence and got closer.

There’s a department at the SCP Foundation whose job is fighting ideas nobody can remember. It can’t remember them either. A lot of the work involves finding notes in your own handwriting and trying to work out what they were for.

That could have been one clever short story. qntm builds a whole escalating structure on it instead, where losing is the default state and any win is one nobody gets to keep. The dread compounds, because you can’t hold the thing in your head any better than the characters can.

It’s free on the SCP wiki, which I can’t say about anything else on this shelf. No excuses.

Forty-one books, and you’ll read all of them, because he’s the best writer of the last thirty years. There are a dozen ways in and this is mine: skip the first two, start with Guards! Guards! - a drunk copper and a city that doesn’t deserve him - and follow the Watch.

Do that and you arrive, five books later, at Night Watch: Vimes thrown back into his own past, teaching a younger and stupider version of himself how to be a decent man. It only works because you’ve spent thirteen years watching him become one.

He was also, quietly, the most humane. The jokes were the delivery mechanism.