I read Permutation City with great anticipation and really disliked it. My favorite parts were when big ideas met the tedium of execution (like the avatars having to deal with the cost of spot instances, and running in lower-res slower-than-realtime environments.)

I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals.

I greatly enjoyed Zelazny's Amber series and have tried to get into some of his sci-fi, but failed. Perhaps it's time to give Lord of Light a third try.

> Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?

Egan must be one of the most intelligent people alive… or if not, is at least the highest level I am personally capable of recognizing. I am genuinely curious which is the case. Anyways, I haven’t read Diaspora yet so will do so, thanks!

Egan is quite active on Mastodon. Toots about science and maths among other things and I gotta say, some of the math stuff he works on seems quite impressive (to me at least).

Seconding the Book of the New Sun - It's great as a standalone, and the series is rewarding if you keep reading. It's an excellent 'puzzle' of a story as OP stated.

Delta-V is also described as a "Technothriller" - i.e. in the grey area between action thriller and sci-fi, where the tech is current and cutting-edge, or possibly an inch beyond. I liked the first book, will try the second some time soon.

I really enjoyed his Daemon novel, and I think it would appeal to the HN crowd. Interesting intersection of code and the real world, and it is set more-or-less in the current time.

Daemon is the first of a trilogy. The remaining two books are good, but not quite as good IMO.

Do you know any other hard sci-fi books like this? I loved the Delta-V series, and have been looking for hard sci-fi like it ever since.

Yeah, Project Hail Mary was the only one of the three I'd ever heard of. Still, it was a great book (especially since I read it right on the heels of reading Artemis, which was only "okay").

Bobiverse is fun to read but it’s just pulp nerd fantasy. Not exactly great literature that will stand the test of time.

I read murderbot a few years ago and fell in love with it. It's funny, short, has good characters and they develop overtime. The world building is interesting enough but not drowning out the narrative<3

I agree. The Bobiverse was really great. And Ray Porter’s narration was a perfect fit.

Most definitely, Ray Porter's performances are a masterclass in first-person sci-fi adventure narration.

His Project Hail Mary audiobook is unparalleled.

I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way.

Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.

Weirdly, The City & the City reminds me of Martin Cruz Smith's books like Gorky Park set in the Soviet Union (or more recently post-Soviet countries) in that it is a police procedural set in a culture the reader presumably doesn't understand and so the reader is interested in learning how this society functions as much as they are interested in seeing the mystery solved. The difference of course is the societies in The City & the City are of course fictional.

Seconded. One of those books that gives you a crisp metaphor for something powerful you might not have noticed we all do, thereby letting you observe yourself do it and describe it to others. Best read tabula rasa.

My thing about Miéville is that all the books of his I've read (Embassytown, Perdido street Station, and the one about trains that I didn't realize was pretty YA) felt like the endings dissol into B grade action (IMO Stephenson has the same problem). Everything starts off surreal and philosophical and beautiful and then just fizzles into stuff blowing up

I hated it because it felt like a smug trick. Like, I know you ordered steak and paid for steak, but I'm serving you a salad because it's healthier for you, and if you complain it's just your lack of taste.

Embassytown, also by China Miéville, is traditional sci-fi and really good as well.

A book that was even made into a TV miniseries does not fit my definition of "you may never heard of".

I enjoyed the book, but I'm still not sure how it's been classified as science fiction, despite clearly having been pigeonholed into the category. The book has very little to do with real or speculative science. It was also one of the most awarded "science fiction" books of the last couple decades, so isn't really obscure in any sense either.

C.J. Cherryh's 1981 novel Wave Without a Shore has something vaguely similar, where the human inhabitants of a planet refuse to notice the non-human natives sharing their cities.

I too adore that one - when describing it to people I've found the term "headfuck police procedural" is the most fitting.

You can read the whole thing on his website (that's where I stumbled upon it so many years ago):

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Likewise, this is one I'll never get out of my head. Fair warning to would-be readers: anticipate the rest of your day becoming unproductive.

> No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight?

It was a Hugo nominee and actively reprinted under Tor Essentials label; probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"...but to be fair, anything by Andy Weir or Hugh Howey probably shouldn't have made the list either.

It used the Chinese Room better than Searle ever managed to do.

And evolutionary vampires!

Blindsight is great. Along with Project Hail Mary the best of the sci-fi I've read the past few years.

Reading Egan's works elevated my standard for what constitutes a truly great novel: "If you don't change as a person after having it read it, it wasn't that great."

Permutation City especially made me see the universe and my part in it in a different light, or perhaps casting a shadow onto it. I'll never be the same person as I was before I had read it.

I am surprised there was no Egan book in the list. He's in the top 5 of hard sci fi authors you should definitely read

Wow, I also thought of the work as deeply philosophical. I also read a bunch of other philosophy, and found that Egan's hypothesis overlaps significantly with both Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist concept of soul (pali: puggala). Did anybody else think the same?

That's a great pick! Permutation City is definitely a thought-provoking read. Egan's exploration of consciousness and reality challenges so many assumptions we take for granted.

What's the Bostrom work it obviates? I'd be kind of surprised if he never read the Egan -- it was part of the background to extropian culture back then.

I'm also interested in that remark about Bostrom. What is the relation?

I keep on meaning to get around to a E. M. Forster Short Fiction compilation for Standard Ebooks. Maybe this will tip me over the edge.

There was a TV series back in the 80s which I really enjoyed - I actually checked out the books from the local library after having seen the show at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tripods_(TV_series)

I read the Tripod Trilogy to my little brother and we both loved the story. It's one of my favorites to this day. Going further back, I also liked Wells's "The First Men in the Moon".

The audiobook is excellent.

If you're learning to read it, I recommend listening as well. A quick Kagi search turned up a fantastic production read by Левашёв В. (1).

I can't go without mentioning my favorite reader in Russian. Listening to Peter Markin read is unforgettable; his performance of Stanislav's "The Invincible" brought the massive machinery and energies to life before my eyes (2); Markin also read Hyperion by Dan Simmons and Frank Herbert's Dune (3).

1: https://youtu.be/IAD-ANTvs9Y

2: https://youtu.be/Ad32oH6Cg4Q

3: I've nearly memorized Dune in Russian because I love his narration so much. He also read The Lord of the Rings - as close as we'll get to a Russian Rob Englis, I expect.

It's really one of the most haunting books I've ever read. "Hard to be a God" is also very poignant.

I didn't know they've translated the book themselves! I often feel like translations done by other people are missing something fundamental of the spirit of the original. I'm wondering if there is a list of books "translated into language X by the author" somewhere.

It inspired Darker than Black which is quite good though not a book.

I'm trying to find a legal copy of the original Russian book, but still could not find. Where did you get yours?

That and the original Russian copies of the Metro series..

I'm not interested in learning Russian at all, but if I ever was, I'd want to read Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko.