Roderick at Random

Stable Strategies and Others

Eileen Gunn2004

Short stories featuring corporate workers who use genetic engineering to become more competitive. The tone is satirical and surreal.

Same sardonic register, still satire

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Saturn's Children

Charles Stross2008

In a future where humans are extinct, an android courier transports a package across the solar system while being hunted by rival factions.

Same sardonic register, still artificial intelligence

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Yellow Blue Tibia

Adam Roberts2009

Soviet writers are forced by Stalin to invent an alien threat, only to see their fiction become reality decades later.

Same sardonic register, still satire

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The Player of Games

Iain Banks1988

A champion of a post-scarcity society travels to a repressive empire to play their national game, where the winner becomes the ruler.

Same sardonic register, still fish out of water

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Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace1996

A sprawling narrative centered on a tennis academy, a halfway house, and a lethal film. The text includes hundreds of pages of detailed endnotes.

Same sardonic register, still satire

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Against the Day

Thomas Pynchon2006

A massive ensemble cast navigates the globe between the 1893 World's Fair and WWI. The plot spans airships, math, and secret societies.

sardonic → playful

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Year zero

Reid, Robert2012

Aliens discover that Earth's music is the best in the galaxy and they owe humanity trillions in copyright fines.

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Redshirts

John Scalzi2012

Low-ranking crew members on a starship realize they are disposable characters in a sci-fi television show. They attempt to escape their fate.

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Artemis

Andy Weir2017

A porter and smuggler on a lunar colony takes a high-stakes sabotage job to pay off a debt. She uses technical knowledge to solve problems.

sardonic → propulsive, still scifi

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Get Jiro!

Anthony Bourdain2012

In a future Los Angeles, master chefs rule as warlords. A sushi chef who kills rude customers is caught between two warring food factions.

Same sardonic register, still satire

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Dhalgren

Samuel R. Delany1975

An amnesiac wanderer enters Bellona, a city cut off from the world where time and geography shift. He joins a gang and writes poetry.

sardonic → dreamlike

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Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino1972

Marco Polo describes fifty-five imaginary cities to Kublai Khan. The book is a series of short, prose-poem meditations on urban existence.

sardonic → meditative

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A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess1962

A teenage gang leader is imprisoned and subjected to state-mandated psychological conditioning. The story is told in a slang called Nadsat.

Same sardonic register, still satire

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The Stepford Wives

Ira Levin1972

A photographer moves to a suburb where the wives are unnervingly submissive. She investigates whether the local men are replacing them with robots.

sardonic → tense, still satire

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