Comment by arjie
7 hours ago
Haha yes, these are all fantastic. But they're not 'modern' right? i.e. some of these I read as a child. They're all pre-2000s, and we're a quarter of the way through this century.
Thank you to everyone else for recommendations. I'll have to give KSR's Aurora a shot. I couldn't get into New York 2140 very much but I'm down to try again.
QNTM's There is no Antimemetics Division. It was a free set of short stories that he self-published. They were so good he got a publishing deal, and now you can buy the reimagined version at any bookstore. I personally prefer the original. Easily my favorite book of the last 5-10 years. https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
The Wikipedia article has every winner and nominee, including 2025, and all (?) of the books seems to have an article themselves so you can get a quick synopsis to see if the book matches what you want. You can probably do worse for a short list of reading candidates.
There are Youtube channels that focus on scifi reading, and they probably have recent 'best of 2025' videos.
(I haven't read "modern" sci-fi as much relative to my youth (GenXer), since I'm most doing non-fictional lately.)
The Expanse, The Captive's War, The Divide (Dewes), any of David Weber's series, The Palladium Wars, The Interdependency, The Light Brigade, Seveneves. All relatively recent publications. Certainly some interhuman conflict involved in many of them, but they're not banging you on the head that humans are ultimately bad.
Hugo’s have shifted towards the soft scifi / fantasy / new weird. It’s not an absolute shift, but hard sf space operas seldom win nowaday