Reading List -- Recent SF (Part I)

Thunder and Lightning -- John Varley

1. Red Thunder (2004)
2. Red Lightning (2006)
3. Rolling Thunder (2008)
4. Dark Lightning (2014)

A Heinleinian garage spaceship story -- a group of teens build a spaceship out of a railroad tank car to win a race to Mars.  Sequels follow.

Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Bowl of Heaven (2012)
Shipstar (2014)

An expedition to a star is interrupted when it encounters an immense bowl-shaped structure in space.  Alien encounters and revelations of human's place in the universe ensue.

The Quantum Thief Trilogy -- Hannu Rajaniemi

1. The Quantum Thief (2010)
2. The Fractal Prince (2012)
3. The Causal Angel (2014)

Broken out of a quantum prison, a con-man is given a chance to finish the heist he left unfinished.  Two more books follow.  Reportedly the middle volume is the weakest of the three.

Redshirts (2012) -- John Scalzi

What if the redshits realized the danger they were really in?

My Real Children (2014) -- Jo Walton

A woman at the end of her life looks back at her two sets of memories of her life. Spoiler: alternate histories, two of them.

The Three-Body Problem (2014) -- Cixin Liu

Signals sent into space from a secret Chinese military project in the 1960s reach aliens whose civilization is on the brink of collapse.  The aliens decide to invade Earth.

Lockstep (2014) -- Karl Schroeder

A seventeen-year old ends up being in suspended animation for 14,000 years and wakes up to find that his family is (still) in control of the Space Empire.  And his family isn't very nice.  Adventure ensues.

The Expanse -- James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck)

1. Leviathan Wakes (2011)
2. Caliban's War (2012)
3. Abaddon's Gate (2013)
4. Cibola Burn (2014)
5. Nemesis Gate (2015)

The series that the TV show The Expanse is based on.  Starts with an ice miner stumbling on a secret in a derelict, abandoned ship that could throw the solar system into war.