Subject: I've been meaning to read Solaris
Author:
Posted on: 2020-02-08 19:39:30 UTC
I've heard good things about it, and alien aliens are one of my highly specific interests. Somehow never got around to it, especially since I'm not sure if I want to flag down the Polish original (I need to get some of the rust off of my Polish).
(and I can confirm that Left Hand does play around with the whole "straight dudes are the default" thing in an interesting way)
Because I've loved speculative fiction since I was five, and I love discovering new things and new voices - which, luckily, there are more and more of in the sci-fi community every year. I've especially been reading a lot of short stories lately - Lightspeed Magazine is an absolute goldmine of contemporary sci-fi, with lots of queer and POC authors -, and I want to share a few I really loved with y'all.
I'm trying to broaden my literary horizons this year, so I've made it my goal to read more women, POC and queer authors, especially in speculative fiction. I've got a long reading list in pretty much every genre, but I've been on a sci-fi kick lately, so here's my sci-fi reading list - let's see how many of them I can get through this year.
Do you guys have any modern sci-fi recs?
They're both good books that I'd recommend, but they're rather different in terms of mood.
Left Hand was a rather serious sort of book. I came out of it satisfied with how the plot went and the experience of reading it, but mostly with a bunch of thinking about government and xenophobia and how biology shapes culture and so on. It's a book that's meant to get you thinking about things while still being enjoyable, and it does that. (And I should probably read more of the Hainish Cycle at some point, since I've only done Left Hand and The Dispossesed)
Long Way, on the other hand, was a much lighter book overall. It left me wandering off to AO3 to get more of that multi-species found family fluff. That also might've been a result of some of the less fluffy plot points though. It's got a lot of nice worldbuilding (especially compared to a lot of space opera) and is a fun read that makes some important point but doesn't have that same philosophical bent as Le Guin's works. The sequels are similar - good stuff, makes a point, but it doesn't have that same feeling of contemplative weight.
I'll probably be starting with Long Way, because the found family trope is my kryptonite, but in between finals season stressathons I'll try to hunt down a copy of Left Hand as well. I love it when sci-fi discusses deep questions about humanity and society under the fantastical elements (one of my favorite books ever, Solaris, had some great meditations on human nature, what it means to be human, and how we would be able to relate to an utterly alien being); and I've heard a lot of praise for Left Hand as an early piece of feminist sci-fi, which is my jam.
I've heard good things about it, and alien aliens are one of my highly specific interests. Somehow never got around to it, especially since I'm not sure if I want to flag down the Polish original (I need to get some of the rust off of my Polish).
(and I can confirm that Left Hand does play around with the whole "straight dudes are the default" thing in an interesting way)
Okay, let me see. I read a lot of sci-fi. And not all of it is ancient.
-First off, Andy Weir's The Martian. Everyone knows this book is great. And it is. What you may not be aware of is the philosophical short story he wrote before The Martian, The Egg, which is also excellent. Weir does have his weaknesses (his next book was pretty universally panned for a lot of reasons), but these really do show him at his best (which is to say, approximately 40 million times more deserving of your attention than Ernest Cline -- no, bad Thoth, stay positive). The other thing that he's known for is "and Bob was there too" which is pretty funny in my opinion, but not sci-fi.
-In slightly less known territory, Cory Doctorow. I read a significant percentage of his novel in elementary and middle school (without paying a cent -- thank you Cory!). Most of his older books are still free downloads, for the cash-strapped. If you like rebellions, activism, tech geekery, anti-DRM protest, and other such nonsense, you'd probably enjoy him. His YA novels (Pirate Cinema and Little Brother) are great fun if sometimes a bit dark, and books like Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and the like are great and occasionally quite surreal. I really need to his collaboration with Charles Stross
-And speaking of Charles Stross, I'm willing to recommend even works of his I haven't read on confidence. The Laundry Files is rock-solid pulp horror sci-fi that borrows from Lovecraft, cold-war thrillers, James Bond, Modesty Blaise, internet folklore, real-world folklore and conspiracy theories, office bureaucracy, institutional computing and science, and all kinds of other resources. It can be blackly comedic at one turn and utterly chilling the next. It's just really good. And there's nothing else like it. ...Except maybe Delta Green. And from what I've heard, Accelerando, Rule 34, and the rest of his books are just as good.
-Speaking of good, Terry Pratchett wrote Sci-fi. Man, I need to finish the Long Earth books. But even the first one was excellent. Cowritten with Stephen Baxter, it's got traces of Pratchett's sense of humor but still more of his empathy and his distinctly warped mind--his ability to look at a world different from our own and not just take real-world parallels for granted. His worlds are full of things that on the face of it seem insane, but as soon as you think about them, they make perfect sense and of course things developed that way. How could they not? That's the hallmark of excellent world building.
-I just read Planetes, and that's also quite good. Near-future, set in space, chronicling the adventures of a ship tasked with clearing space junk out of orbit. It's... flawed (I've heard the anime might be better), but it's still Makoto Yukimura, and his care and attention to detail and latent talents for storytelling shine through even the roughest patches. Even at its lowest point, Planetes has absolutely beautiful moments that I can't imagine any other mangaka writing the same way. It's beautiful and thoughtful and so very human.
-I'm bending all the rules but what the heck, Planetes is well over a decade old so I might as well bring up Cowboy Bebop. I know, at over 20 it's not quite modern anymore but it's just... so... so good. If you haven't seen it, you should. Go ahead, treat yourself. Run, don't walk, grab a copy of the dub, and prepare to sit down for a lot of hours because I don't binge shows ever but I pretty much binged this. It's that good.
-While you're at it, Firefly is good. Obviously.
-I should stop going back or pretty soon I'll be recommending Snow Crash (go read Snow Crash, it's excellent), so let me talk about a book I've basically never seen anyone talk about that I read years ago. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu, is a truly surreal novel about a time machine mechanic looking for his father... sort of. If you appreciate comprehensible, clear narratives, this may not be your book. But it definitely has a distinct charm to it.
Yeah, Andy Weir and Cory Doctorow both contributed to Press Start to Play. See previous comment for my review, obviously. :)
Now that you've brought up the Long Earth books, I get to indulge in some Pratchett Sr. fanning. As Thoth said, the series is co-written by Pratchett and Baxter, and it's obvious much of the world-building was Pratchett. It has his signature all over it - plus, y'know, the original short version appears in one of his short story collections. That's a hint. ^_^ But I got the impression that the actual writing was mostly Baxter. There's one character who screams Pratchett at me, but overall it felt like Pterry had an idea that he really wanted to see written, but either didn't feel he could write serious scifi, or knew he was out of time to do it.
Which, for me personally, is a real shame, because I've never really liked Stephen Baxter's writing. I've taken a run at it several times: I've read various Xeelee works, the Time Odyssey trilogy with Arthur C. Clarke - another 'let's get this done before I go' - the Long Earth series, the Northland trilogy, at least one of the Manifold books... um... okay, this list is getting unwieldy. Looking at his bibliography, I've actually read some or all of most of his series - but there's very few that I've re-read once they were complete. (This includes the Long Earth, sadly.)
I just keep bouncing off the general... not even grimness, the griminess of his writing. I think he's aiming at realism, but it comes across as a combination of 'by golly, there was a lot of biological nastiness going on' and a deep pessimism about humans as a species.
Which is a real shame, because I adore his worldbuilding. The Northland trilogy, which starts from an AU Stone Age, is a fantastic alternate history - in which every single character seems to be barely suppressing the urge to shag and then stab someone. It's just... grimy.
(Also, I was bitterly disappointed at what the last book of Time's Tapestry did to the coolest lines of the previous books. The feathered serpent, plague-hardened/Flies over Ocean Sea/Flies east... But this goes back a good bit longer than that.)
But I've always had a penchant for the lighter side of fiction. If you love intricate and grounded worldbuilding, and like or don't mind unsympathetic and kind of messy humans, I can highly recommend... probably everything Stephen Baxter ever wrote.
Meanwhile, I would unreservedly recommend everything Terry Pratchett wrote. If you want scifi, there's Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun from his older works, and Nation on the edge of the genre from near the end.
hS
A Blink of the Screen, his short fiction collection, includes quite a bit of good SF. I'm quite a big fan of "#ifdef DEBUG 'world/enough' + 'time'" because of course I am, but other standouts include "Hollywood Chickens," "FTB," "Kindly Breathe in Short, Thick Pants," and of course the fantastic "Once and Future".
ED: That one especially Pratchett character you were thinking of was Lobsang, wasn't it?
It has a lot of fire, and I mean a lot of fire. It also takes place in the late 2010s apparently, because the seashells remind me of AirPods.
~SomeRandomPersonAccount Recommending books because they have fire, and question marks
Having been published almost 70 years ago, and all.
~SomeRandomPersonAccount Still can’t find recently released books that piques his interest.
It's called 'Press Start to Play', and it has a foreword by Earnest Kline ('Ready Player One'), so you know right away what sort of style you're getting in for.
The book is themed around video games, and specifically about blurring the lines between video games and what we laughingly call reality. There's one story centred on a game character looking out at her player; another protagonist unexpectedly respawns when he dies; another plays a famously unwinnable video game and finds some unexpected things.
It's a bit tricky to say how it does with author representation: a few of the writers have gender-neutral names or just initials, but I'd say it's over one-third women writers, possibly close to half (though not, I think, reaching it). A fair number of the contributors have non-Anglo-Saxon names (mostly Japanese, for obvious reasons), so I think there's a decent non-White contingent. As for queerness, I can't say for sure, but I do know that several of the stories by women jumped out as having lesbian protagonists, so the characters at least have representation. None of it comes close to overturning the cichetwhitemale majority in the book, but it's more than you'd have got a decade or so back.
Would I recommend the book? I'd say yes. Some of the stories aren't easy reading - sometimes because of their subject matter (one is themed around Oregon Trail, which... yeah), sometimes because it's waaaaay outside my genre, but I don't remember any of them being bad. Also, one of them is by Rhianna Pratchett ('Tomb Raider', plus her dad wrote some fantasy or something), so that's always a win!
hS
I have some... opinions about Ernest Kline, but if he only wrote the introduction, I can deal with that. And this is a pretty interesting premise for an anthology.
I shall put it on the TBR list. :)
Check out You: A Novel, by Austin Grossman. It's about a guy trying to track down a glitch after being hired by a video game company. It's a bit weird and floaty and probably not as clever as it thinks it is, but I remember enjoying it. It's certainly a better tribute to gaming than anything that hack Cline put out: Grossman was a real writer and game designer at (among others) the legendary Looking Glass Studios and puts that experience to work in writing the book.
He's also, by curious coincidence, the brother of Lev Grossman, who wrote the Magicians trilogy. I don't think that he got this book published through nepotism, though, because before this book he wrote Soon I Will Be Invincible, which is extremely well-reviewed.