Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read

Posted by bwb 10/28/2024

Sci-fi books that you may never have heard of, but definitely should read(shepherd.com)

315 points | 314 commentspage 3

lavelganzu 10/29/2024|

"Too Like the Lightning" by Ada Palmer. (First of four books called the "Terra Ignota" series.)

It's one of the handful of books that genuinely changed my mind about serious questions -- in my case, relating to gender, politics, & religion. But it's definitely not coming from anywhere you'd expect.

I compare it loosely to Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed". The author paints a picture of a utopia, and gradually we see deep human flaws tear it apart. It starts off with investigation of a puzzling criminal tresspass, which slowly spirals upward into greater and greater consequences -- and it intensely rewards careful reading, or a second reading, as major reveals are subtly foreshadowed early and often.

dannyobrien 10/29/2024||

Just because they're both books that are hard to stumble upon and are a bit out of the usual recommendations, and yet everyone I have recommended them to have /deeply/ enjoyed them:

"Constellation Games" by Leonard Richardson (also known for the Beautiful Soup Python library!) https://constellation.crummy.com/

"Happy Snak" by Nicole Kimberling https://www.nicolekimberling.com/happy-snak

mariusor 10/28/2024||

After I finished the two Frank Kittridge novels from S.J. Morden I was surprised I haven't heard of him until now.

They start as a "The Martian" cribbed story, but the development arc takes in better places. It was less geek/efficiency porn and more character development and required less strain on my suspension of disbelief overall.

m463 10/30/2024|

I read the petrovich stories (metrozone) and although fun, I recall my suspension of disbelief had to be turned all the way up. :)

ang_cire 10/29/2024||

Legend of the Jade Phoenix trilogy by Robert Thurston: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/488118.The_Legend_of_the...

Legend of Zero quadrilogy by Sara King: https://www.goodreads.com/series/103017-the-legend-of-zero

insane_dreamer 10/29/2024||

An old but excellent book (written in the 1920s in Soviet Russia) is We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

I also like Solaris though I suppose everyone has heard of that one.

cmpalmer52 10/29/2024||

I read Solaris years ago and was unimpressed. The philosophy and science’ish elements were poorly described and it felt like a lit-fic attempt at trippy SF by someone ignorant of the genre.

Then, a year or two ago, I read about how bad the early translations were, so I picked up a new English translation. Wow, what a difference. Now it’s one of my favorites.

Keysh 10/30/2024||

Do you recall the name of the good translator?

robterrell 10/29/2024||

Re-reading Stanislaw Lem (i.e. The Cyberiad) in the era of LLMs has been a joy for me.

cydmax 10/31/2024||

I‘ll chime in and recommend The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Not really hard sci fi, but very entertaining and fun to read!

MrVandemar 10/29/2024||

I'd throw in The Saga of Exiles by Julian May. Excellent exploration of psi power, set in Pliocene Europe (by way of time travel). Sounds mad, but May both grounds her characters and casts them archetypes, and it's fantastically dramatic.

One of the first books I read where the cumulative trauma and psychologies of the main characters inform their actions.

mnky9800n 10/28/2024||

Actually I made a website that’s mostly sci-fi books I’ve read

https://mnky9800n.github.io/booklist/

It uses a google spreadsheet as a database so you just need to update the spreadsheet and it adds a book to the website.

I have a life goal to read every thing written by Phillip k dick as well as every book on David Pringle’s 100 best sci-fi list. Some of the books are hard to find though. Like I’ve been searching for years for the peoples republic of Antarctica.

I would suggest the following novels if you haven’t read them yet

Gene wolfe shadow of the torturer series aka book of the new sun

A scanner darkly by pkd, this, imo, is his best book even though all his books are compelling. But I think also, yes we can build him, its amazing because it really shows off pkd ability to come up with a wild premise but that’s simply the universe the characters live in and they don’t really care about that premise they have other problems.

Herovits world by malzburg, this book is hilarious and about how you must be a terrible narcissist to believe someone should read your fiction especially science fiction

The Brian Daley series about Han Solo, these are super interesting because they were written in 1979 so before empire strikes back came out. So Daley basically only had Star Wars to go on to create a whole trilogy of novels starring Han Solo. I think these are probably my favourite Star Wars novels because they have such little constraints.

tiltowait 10/29/2024||

Though I wouldn’t say A Scanner Darkly is my favorite PKD novel, I’d have a harder time arguing it isn’t his best. I can see it; it was just too heavy for me to actually enjoy all that much.

Ubik is probably my favorite, or (to be cliche) Androids.

PKD says more in single paragraphs than many authors manage to say in entire books.

bwb 10/28/2024||

Nice, I like the photos, classic covers are so beautiful :)

Added the Brian Daley series about Solo to my list, I'd never heard of those!

mnky9800n 10/28/2024||

I should reread them. They are so much fun. I’m the only person I know who has ever read them. Although that’s not saying much I suppose haha.

bwb 10/29/2024||

One of my hopes for the website is I could help books that are lesser known get noticed and "pop." Working on getting more to help in that capacity as there are so many good books that don't get enough notice. Aiming to come out with some features this Winter to help around that.

mnky9800n 10/30/2024||

Are you asking for help because I will help you. I love to read sci-fi novels as well as discuss them.

bwb 10/30/2024||

I'd love to talk! Do you know Python/Django :)

My email is ben@shepherd.com and I'd love to chat!

mnky9800n 10/31/2024||

Sent you an email!

bwb 11/1/2024||

Sweet, responding shortly!

yaky 10/29/2024||

The most unusual book I read this year is Radiance by Catherynne Valente.

It's set in an Art-Deco "future" of our fully habitable Solar system (jungles and oceans on Venus, flowering fields on Pluto, etc), that started to be colonized in the 1860s. Of course, it is a play on early science fiction tropes, but somehow, it all fits together.

Keysh 10/30/2024|

Amusingly, I have made three tries to read that book, and kept giving up (getting a little further each time). Partly it was the peculiar sense of aesthetics (e.g., the idea that of course audience would reject color movies) and partly it was the Looney Tunes solar system, which turned out to be something I could accept in a Daffy Duck cartoon but not in a novel.

(But then I'm an astronomer, so I'm primed to get annoyed by random mistakes and carelessness that other people wouldn't notice or care about. I mean, I could kind of momentarily accept the silliness of a habitable solid surface for Uranus, but when you describe the Sun as fainter than Jupiter seen from that location... and then we're told that wheat can't tolerate cold climates the way rice can, and I realize the botany is just as nonsensical as the astronomy...)

I've read most of one of her short-story collections and really liked it, so it's not a generic problem with her writing.

_s_a_m_ 10/28/2024||

The problem with Project Hail Mary is that the audio book is good but the book is not. First read the book and then listen to the audio book and you know what I mean.

sevensor 10/29/2024||

Weir doesn’t write characters, or dialog to speak of, but he writes decent prose and well thought out engineering puzzles. I enjoy his books for the imaginative exercise.

closewith 10/28/2024|||

That's interesting. I found Project Hail Mary to be once of the most disappointing second novels ever written and am surprised at its reception. Is the audiobook meaningfully different?

mariusor 10/28/2024|||

For pedantry's sake, "Project Hail Mary" is not Weir's second novel. I think "Artemis" followed after The Martian. It's a story set on the Moon with a strong female character, but I can't remember much else about it. :D

bwb 10/28/2024||||

I liked it, he has his own style, and I love the "productivity porn" vibe of it. Sometimes I need that in this wild world.

_s_a_m_ 10/28/2024|||

Yeah I also didn't like the book at all, it read like a cash grab. However, just listen to a sample of the audio book, it's just hilarious how much effort Ray put into making the characters become alive. Certain significantly improving the lack of writing, of course it can't fix the writing.

bwb 10/28/2024||

Please be kind; being an author is an incredibly hard career, and people do it for the love of creating and sharing a story. It is not a cash grab, and if you don't like his writing style, just don't read his books. Books are deeply personal and no reason to make a personal attack because it isn't a match for your desired book style.

marliechiller 10/29/2024||

The great thing about opinions, as youve pointed out with books, is that you can disregard them. Personally, I agree that PHM was not particularly good compared with The Martian, but to each their own.

BobaFloutist 10/29/2024||

I thought PHM was a fairly well crafted nerdy action book, like a classic B-movie catered to a more educated audience. It's good at tuning itself to its target audience and maintaining interest with pacing and interesting, fun ideas.

What's frustrating is the number of people that list it as the best sci-fi of the last decade and try to elevate it as doing something truly groundbreaking. I don't really understand where that's coming from.

lynx23 10/28/2024|||

I am curious, is the audio book abridged and the book far too long? Or what else could it be?

_s_a_m_ 10/28/2024|||

In my opinion Andy Weir is not a very good writer anyways, he is ok. When the story is interesting enough that is typically fine, like in The Martian. Hail Mary is too long certainly, characters a little flat, however, Ray can fix the flat characters in the audio book a little with his good voice acting.

progbits 10/28/2024|||

Without getting into spoilers, the very high quality narration makes the story better.

Suppafly 10/29/2024||

I can understand people preferring to have things narrated to them, but I fail to see how narration can make a book from something you don't like at all into something you like. Ultimately no matter how good the narration is, either you like the story or you don't.

kadoban 10/30/2024||

Audiobooks can do a lot to give _character_ to characters that are otherwise quite flat.

globular-toast 10/28/2024|||

I also found the film of The Martian way better than the book. I got so sick of reading about concentrations of gases and stuff in painful detail. So yeah, good story, but not so good writing. If Project Hail Mary is anything like that then I'll give it a miss.

dagw 10/28/2024||

If you didn't like the 'painful detail' in The Martian, you will positively hate Project Hail Mary. Much more of the 'painful detail' as you call it with much less interesting characters. If you loved The Martian (like I did) and enjoy lots of random science-ish tangents and pseudo-engineering problem solving, you'll find stuff to like in this book. But it is a too long, worse written version of The Martian, with a less interesting protagonist.

Weir tries to make the story more interesting by adding an extra mystery to solve (the main character wakes up with amnesia and has to piece together where he is and what he has to do), but to me it really didn't work.

tokai 10/29/2024||

>worse written version of The Martian, with a less interesting protagonist

That is actually impressive if true. Watney was by far the worst thing about the book.

Suppafly 10/29/2024||

>the audio book is good but the book is not

I don't know how that can possibly make sense.

redfern314 10/29/2024|||

It's difficult to explain without spoilers... one of the characters feels significantly more fleshed out and real because of some artistic choices in the voice acting.

I am not sure I'd go as far as GP and say that the book is not good, but this is one of the cases where the audiobook feels more like a "production" and not just a book in a different medium.

cmpalmer52 10/29/2024||||

I found the audiobook to be a superior experience to reading the book as well. It think PHM is an excellent primer on that type of SF for someone who hasn’t read something like it before. My daughter, who never reads hard SF, loved the audiobook.

I once commented on Twitter that the Anansi Boys audiobook read by Lenny Henry was better than the book. Neil Gaiman responded, “I agree”.

tiltowait 10/29/2024|||

The performance can make a big difference. There are books I like more as audiobooks and books I like more as visual books.

I read PHM and didn’t love it; my friends who listened to it all loved it. Maybe I should give it a try.

tombert 10/29/2024|

Not a "book", but a short story: The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin.

I read that story when I was pretty young, and it's shaped my opinion on cold, uncaring bureaucracies in a way that I'm not sure anything else could.

hersko 10/29/2024|

Looks like it's available for free here: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-cold-equation...

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