Library Genesis. The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8) (Part 1 of 8 in "Three Worlds Collide") This is a story of an impossible outcome, where AI never worked, molecular nanotechnology never worked, biotechnology only sort-of worked; and yet somehow humanity not only survived, but discovered a way to travel Faster-Than-Light: The past's Future.
Ships travel through the Alderson starlines, wormholes that appear near stars. The starline network is dense and unpredictable: more than a billion starlines lead away from Sol, but every world explored is so far away as to be outside the range of Earth's telescopes. Most colony worlds are located only a single jump away from Earth, which remains the center of the human universe.
From the colony system Huygens, the crew of the Giant Science Vessel Impossible Possible World have set out to investigate a starline that flared up with an unprecedented flux of Alderson force before subsiding. David Brin's List of "Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy Tales" Many folks have created tallies of favorite Science Fiction novels.
I've already weighed in with my Top SF for Young Adults and my Top Ten list. For more insight into Science Fiction, see also these essays: A Comparison of Science Fiction vs. Fantasy and How to Define Science Fiction. But now let's try something much more ambitious -- a bigger, broader reading compilation.