Soliciting scifi/fantasy book recommendations to read while traveling this week.
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@drewdevault Ursula le Guin - "The Word for World is Forest"
als le Guin - "The Dispossessed"
Thomas McMahon - "Loving Little Egypt"
Roy Underhill - "Calvin Cobb Radio Woodworker"
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Drew DeVaultreplied to Drew DeVault last edited by [email protected]
From Tchaikovsky I recommend The Final Architecture trilogy. The first book opens with a moon-sized alien ship appearing in the solar system and turning the Earth into a giant, esoteric sculpture, then disappearing. No, they didn't have time to evacuate. The human diaspora scatters throughout the galaxy, regroups... and then a similar ship appears over another populated world.
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@praxeology have read both le Guin's -- the Dispossessed and the Left Hand of Darkness are two of my favorite books
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Brian :python: :flask: :html5:replied to Drew DeVault last edited by
@drewdevault I enjoyed Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's about the people aboard a generation ship.
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- Octavia Butler might be for you.
- N.K. Jemisin, pick anything but if you ask for specific recs. start with the "Great Cities"-Books or her short stories collected in "How long 'til black future month"
- "This is how you lose the time war" by Amal El Mohtar & Max Gladstone, had some buzz last(?) year and is great
- Martha Wells, The Murder Bot Diaries.
Her other stuff is good to great as well, esp. her most recent, Witch King. -
Someone reminded me to recommend Ursula le Guin. She wrote two of my all-time favorite books. The Dispossessed is a fascinating and honest look into an anarchocommunist society exiled to a planet neighboring a capitalist society.
The Left Hand of Darkness is the most fascinating and affecting tale of masculinity and gender that I've ever read.
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Drew DeVaultreplied to Brian :python: :flask: :html5: last edited by [email protected]
@brianb oh nice, Kim Stanley Robinson isn't one of my favorite authors but I've always enjoyed his books. Will pick this up
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Credit where it's due, the "someone" who reminded me of le Guin is @praxeology
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Brian :python: :flask: :html5:replied to Drew DeVault last edited by
@drewdevault I liked it more than the Mars trilogy (admittedly, I never finished the Mars series). It's a good look at what it might _actually_ be like to live on and maintain a ship that needs to survive hundreds of years.
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@einsiedlerspiel thanks! I've tried Butler but found it hard to get into, I think probably because Imago is not a great place to start. I have "time war" on my shelf waiting to be read!
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Drew DeVaultreplied to Drew DeVault last edited by [email protected]
And a lesser known recommendation: Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh. Not sure how to explain why I like it without spoiling it, but if you like sci-fi and you're a feminist take a look
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@drewdevault I only know le Guin from the first Earthsea novel which is easily one of my favorite fantasy stories
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@datarama @drewdevault Ohh, I loved the cosy feels of Legends & Lattes and Bookshops & Bonedust. For similar cosiness but more scifi you might want to take a look at Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series and Monk & Robot duology.
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@petrichor @drewdevault I liked Wayfarers a lot, but for some reason Monk & Robot didn't really do much for me, unfortunately.
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checking in to make sure you've read the greatest science fiction novel: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr
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@khm I have not, added to list
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KristĂłfer ReykjalĂnreplied to Drew DeVault last edited by
@drewdevault I’m a big fan of Andrew Rowe’s whole book universe. Either War of Broken Mirrors and Arcane Ascension are the best entry points into his world.
Both feature really fun magic systems, and I personally really enjoy his story telling. He’s also very active and releases a new book roughly every year or so.
There’s an overarching story he’s telling across all his different series, and it’s all based on homebrew DnD campaigns he’s run with his friends, with their permissions AFAIK.
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@drewdevault A significant change of pace and more historical, but "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It created many of the tropes and conventions of dystopian scifi, thirty years before Nineteen Eighty-Four and the like. Wikipedia tells me The Dispossessed was directly inspired by We, although it does something very different with the ideas.
Similar to 1984, it's not a cheery read, so maybe not what you're after, I dunno.
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@drewdevault Diaspora, by Greg Egan is a personal favorite. Set in a future where humanity has diverged into many biological and digital forms, and goes exploring.
Permutation City also by Egan is another great one, about uploading consciousness and what it means to be alive.
The Light of Other Days by Clarke & Baxter. Takes a now-tropey scifi idea (wormholes/FTL communication), and explores how society reinvents itself accordingly.
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Przemysław Pawełczykreplied to Drew DeVault last edited by
Isaac Asimov's Robot series / R. Daneel Olivaw novel:
1. The Caves of Steel (1954)
2. The Naked Sun (1957)
3. The Robots of Dawn (1983)
4. Robots and Empire (1985)
IIRC 1st and 4th were the best, but would need to reread them all to be able to justify nowadays why.Philip K. Dick's:
- The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964)
- Ubik (1969)
- A Scanner Darkly (1977)
I liked Ubik the most years ago, but not sure if today my rating would be the same.
