21 Books, Free, Including 7 You've Never Heard Of

Episodes 1 through 7 of Book Battles are now open to everyone. No account, no paywall.

That's 21 books and series argued over across 7 episodes. 8 of them have dropped out of the conversation, and those are the ones I'd start with.

What Book Battles is

Each episode does 3 things in the same order.

Sci vs Fi puts two genre landmarks head to head and asks what each one believes. Something Old pulls a book back out of obscurity. Something New(er) reviews something recent enough to still be worth arguing about.

No spoilers, and no five-star inflation. It runs monthly.

The eight that stuck

Something Old is the segment I built the show around.

Every book in it is one I read and never quite shook. Some I found in a library, some in a used bookstore with the price penciled inside the front cover. They stayed with me, and that's the entire qualification.

A few of them you'll already know. Zelazny won a Hugo. Clarke won a Hugo and a Nebula for the same novel. Others sold badly, went out of print, and survive now mostly in the memory of whoever happened to pick them up.

I'm one of the people who picked them up.

So this is the least objective segment in the show, and I'd defend that. Every book below is one I can still describe the ending of without looking it up, decades later. That's a harder thing for a book to earn than an award.

Paratime, H. Beam Piper. Piper's whole universe is having a revival now that comic book movies have made the multiverse a household word. He started from a far more mundane premise and built something that still holds up against the science and the fiction being written today. In 1809 a British diplomat walked around a team of carriage horses outside a Prussian inn and was never seen again. Piper's 1948 story "He Walked Around the Horses" explains it, and it's the seed of everything else in the Paratime sequence. His copyright lapsed, so you can read that story on Project Gutenberg for nothing. Episode 1.

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny. Won the 1968 Hugo. Zelazny wrote what it costs to become a god, and he built the machinery to go with it: colonists who seized the ship's technology, set themselves up as the Hindu pantheon, and wired a karma machine to judge everyone else's next life. Their powers are called Attributes and their public faces are called Aspects, which any LitRPG reader will clock on sight. Fun fact, in 1980 the CIA acquired a proposed film adaptation, complete with production art by Jack Kirby, and used it as the cover story that got 6 Americans out of Tehran. They renamed the fake project Argo. Episode 2.

The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke spent an entire novel treating the space elevator as a construction project with a budget, a schedule, and a body count, back when it was a thought experiment. A Japanese construction firm has had one on its corporate roadmap since 2012. He did cheat to build his, though. A space elevator only works from the equator, and Clarke wanted his in Sri Lanka, which sits a few degrees north. So he moved the island 500 miles south and raised the mountain while he was there. Nebula 1979, Hugo 1980. Episode 3.

Red Thunder, John Varley. Four teenagers, a washed-out astronaut, and a device that shouldn't work, racing two national space programs to Mars. In 2003 that was a tall tale. The book came out a year after SpaceX was founded, back when private spaceflight hadn't proved anything, and the outsiders went on to win that argument in public. Varley's version is still the better story, because his kids build the thing in a Florida junkyard and have to explain themselves to their parents. Episode 4.

Wildside, Steven Gould. Portal stories are everywhere now, and Gould got there in 1996 by way of a Texas barn and a tax problem. A tunnel at the back of that barn opens onto an Earth where humans never happened, with mammoths still grazing and gold still in the streambeds. Gould writes it as a logistics problem: airfields, freight, payroll, and what happens when the IRS notices 5 college kids buying a Cessna. He's better known for Jumper. I think this is the better book. Episode 5.

The Quiet Pools, Michael P. Kube-McDowell. This is the most obscure book on the list and the one I'd fight hardest for. Earth is spending its last fortune flinging generation ships at the stars, and the project's geneticists find a sequence in human DNA that pulls us outward whether we choose it or not. The argument underneath, about whether leaving is a decision or an instinct we dress up as a decision, is the same argument now attached to every billionaire with a rocket. It sat on the 1991 Hugo ballot and lost to The Vor Game, which is the other half of that same episode. Episode 6.

The Uplift War, David Brin. In Brin's galaxy no species reaches intelligence on its own. Each is raised into it by a patron race, and then owes that patron a hundred thousand years of service. Humans bootstrapped themselves, which nobody believes, and then adopted dolphins and chimpanzees anyway. Brin wrote that in 1987 as galactic property law. It reads differently now that people argue in public about whether the things we build and train owe us anything back. Won the 1988 Hugo. It's the third Uplift book, and you can drop straight into it without having read the first two. Episode 7.

Footfall, Niven and Pournelle. Most alien invaders in fiction are people in costume. The Fithp are herd animals whose entire psychology runs on submission, so when they drop an asteroid into the Indian Ocean and wait for Earth to reconsider, they have no way to read a species that keeps getting back up. Earth's answer is a battleship launched on a stack of atomic bombs. Pournelle chaired the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy in those years and Niven sat on it, so the two of them were writing space policy for the Reagan administration and an alien invasion novel at the same time. Episode 8, which is the members' one this month.

One honest note: Piper is the only one on that list you can read for free. His copyright lapsed. The rest are in print, and the authors or their estates are owed the money.

The eight battles

The eight newer ones

About those verdicts

I pick one question for each matchup, and the verdict only answers that question. Which is why a book can lose here and still be the one I'd hand you first.

Ringworld against Discworld is a draw because the question was what we'd do with a world we could build, and Niven answers with engineering while Pratchett answers with people. Both answers are right. Pern beats Game of Thrones on a technicality I still think is correct: the dragons were engineered, Threadfall is orbital mechanics, and the whole thing is a colony survival story that forgot it was one. Draws are allowed. I've used 2 in 8 episodes and been accused of cowardice for both.

The closest call is Episode 3.

I gave it to The Hunger Games because Collins makes Katniss pay for what she decides, and Rowling puts the world back the way it was. Katniss ends the series sent home wrecked, with a life she had to be talked into. Harry gets a train platform 19 years later and a son named after the dead.

The best case against me is that Rowling's cost is real and it lands on everyone except Harry. Fred, Lupin, Tonks, Dobby. Harry walks into the forest knowing exactly what's waiting there. And she takes 7 books to get to it, slowly enough that the reader ages into the ending alongside him.

That's a real argument and it's why this is the closest call. It still comes out the same way for me. The people around Harry pay, and Harry gets the platform.

The second table uses the word differently. Something New(er) is a recommendation segment, so the filtering happens before the review starts. A book I can't recommend doesn't take the slot. By the time one is in an episode it has cleared that bar, and all that's left is how hard I'm pushing and what I'd warn you about first: read book 1 before this one, or clear a weekend for 1,049 pages.

Where to start

If you want to pick a fight, take Episode 2. The argument that Pern was always science fiction, and that the dragons were engineered, tends to get people typing.

If you want a book you haven't already been sold on a dozen times, take Episode 1 for the Piper. It's free and it takes 20 minutes.

If you want something recent to read tonight, Episode 4 or Episode 7.

Episode 8 is out now

Xanth against The Wheel of Time, Footfall, and Bryce O'Connor's Fire and Song. There's a live poll on that one, and the vote is closer than I expected.

Episode 8 is the members' episode this month. It opens to everybody when Episode 9 lands, which is how this works from here on: the newest one is for members, and the one before it goes free.

A free account opens it, and it's how the newsletter finds you when Episode 9 is ready. It costs nothing.