Scientific American's alien book picks

In anticipation of this coming Wednesday's discussion of the first set of stories in Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, I found this article from Scientic American quite timely.

In it, the magazine's staff recommend 24 books that "have kept us curious about alien life and encounters with it that could change us as humans." Although I've always loved the science fiction/fantasy genre, I've only read a few of these (though I have read other works by some of these authors).

Only a handful of them have an LGBTQ connection, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which we discussed in 2024, but one in particular intrigues me: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, which the staffer who nominated it describes as follows: "This is the multispecies future I want to live in. A lovable crew of diverse aliens and humans work together to understand each other and the universe."

I plan to order it, and if it lives up to that description, I'll nominate it for our next reading list.