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torgo posted:Can anyone recommend some sci-fi books about contact with incomprehensibly alien aliens? Blindsight is a good example of what I'm looking for. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is another book that touches on this theme, but I have the feeling if I read the rest of the trilogy, the aliens' motivations will be revealed to be pretty "human" in the end. Embassytown by China Mieville. The aliens are truly alien and one of the book's major strands is about humanity's efforts at communicating with them and living alongside them.
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Jun 28, 2013 13:35
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torgo posted:Thanks for these recommendations. I'm hoping at least some of them will turn out to have some real alien conflict, instead of the "whoops, we just didn't quite understand each other at first, but it turns out we are all the same" endings I've come to expect from alien contact stories. Embassytown definitely isn't a 'we're all the same' book. It goes pretty deep into notions of different ways of thinking, different physiologies, and even how spoken language's mental underpinnings could differ. I found it fascinating and enthralling, particularly as there is most definitely a conflict at the centre of it.
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Jun 29, 2013 14:19
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Snuffman posted:And maybe I totally mis-read Iron Council, but I found it fairly satisfying that all the way through the book the dissidents go on and on about how much better New Crozubon will be when they're in control but after they kill the mayor, things get significantly worse. Not stating that "yeah, the rebels were WRONG, the old guard were AWESOME" but that "Yeah, the rebels just don't have any idea where to go once they achieved their goals and civil change doesn't happen overnight There's some very good discussion of Iron Council (including from Mieville himself) here: Debating Iron Council Mieville discusses some of the issues he faced, as a revolutionary socialist, in writing about a revolution. I found it very insightful: quote:For a socialist, an irruption of fundamental social change – the revolution – represents a necessary horizon, a defining part of the social imaginary. Many novelists have depicted revolution. The paradox is that for a novelist committed to the potentiality and necessity of revolution, that revolution is both of vastly more importance than to her/his uncommitted colleagues, and yet is concomitantly, unlike for those colleagues, unrepresentable. Mieville's Marxism isn't omnipresent, though. Iron Council is by far the most explicit novel in dealing with it. Some of his other books have slight nods towards his general politics (even Railsea) but there are others like The City & The City and Embassytown which are basically politics-free.
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Jul 13, 2013 21:08
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Try Joe Abercrombie's First Law books. I find myself recommending them an awful lot, but they seem perfect for what you're after. Start with The Blade Itself, which is the first book of a trilogy (the others being Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings) and if you enjoy those then you've got three follow-up books to go through - Best Served Cold, The Heroes, and Red Country.
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Jul 17, 2013 16:39
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Ha, fair enough. It seemed like a notable gap in the post and something you'd enjoy. I'm out of ideas now though.
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Jul 17, 2013 16:50
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Charlz Guybon posted:Anyone know if these books are as much pulp fun as the titles/covers indicate? The title of the third book in particular is fantastic. They're definitely ripping off the Flashman aesthetic as hard as they can. I've never read them but my instinct is to say that they'd be inferior to George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books by a country mile. Flashman isn't science fiction - it's blackly comic historical fiction - but just read those instead unless you've got some pathological need for lasers and aliens, I think.
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Jul 18, 2013 08:51
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Geek U.S.A. posted:Anyone know any good sci-fi about the discovery of a big unidentified object and that's not written by Clarke/Reynolds/Niven? Excession by Iain M Banks. You can't really enjoy it properly without reading some of the other Culture books first though (which you should because they're fantastic).
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Aug 10, 2013 11:38
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Fallom posted:What's up with the weird-rear end availability of Iain Bank's books in Kindle format? I want to continue the Culture series with Excession, but while all the other books are available that one isn't. I have Excession on Kindle so I don't know what to say.
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Aug 12, 2013 08:23
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That would explain it. I assumed there'd be no difference.
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Aug 12, 2013 10:30
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Player of Games is the other one that's recommended as a starting point. If you're interested at all, just keep reading in publication order, although you'll know by Player of Games whether you want to keep reading or not.
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Aug 25, 2013 10:57
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I don't think there's ever been a good book about winning a video game. Only You Can Save Mankind, one of Terry Pratchett's Young Adult things. As an artefact of early 90s gaming culture it's a total nostalgia trip for anyone who remembers that, and it has a much more mature attitude to the whole thing too. Of course it's not really about winning the video game as such.
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Aug 27, 2013 16:26
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fritz posted:Who wants to see more terrible opinions from a white dude about the state of science fiction today? Everybody does? Cool. This guy just comes across as Roman from Party Down. "I'm into hard sci-fi."
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Sep 6, 2013 10:01
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I decided to finally address the gaping hole in my literary knowledge and read some Ursula Le Guin at long last - bought The Dispossessed and The Left Hand Of Darkness. I've only read The Dispossessed so far but I loved it. I devoured it in a day or so as it just grabbed me and wouldn't let go. Le Guin's prose style is efficient and beautiful and while the setup of the book seems absolutely focused on allegory and thematic discourse - anarchist planet compared to archist planet (with specific analogues of the USA, USSR, and Vietnam/other proxy war states as nations on the latter planet) - it's the very human story that arises from it which is the most compelling thing about it. I can't praise it enough, really. There's an emotional subtlety to it and the world created is utterly convincing. I've now just started on The Left Hand Of Darkness and have very high hopes for it on the basis of this one, so thanks to everyone in these threads who's banged on about Le Guin for so long. Especially General Battuta - I really do need to read more female SF authors (up to now it was basically just Atwood).
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Dec 18, 2013 14:03
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Consider Phlebas is fine as a starting place although it's quite different from most of the books that follow.
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Dec 26, 2013 16:54
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General Battuta posted:This post is mostly correct except that instead of 'forgettable' I'd say the others range from 'charming and indulgent' to 'really quite good'. Even the weakest Culture novels, like Matter and Consider Phlebas, usually contain some scenes worth the price of admission. Yeah this is right. I've also now read The Left Hand Of Darkness and loved it just as much as The Dispossessed, if not more for the beautiful use of language in the sections where Le Guin describes the Gethenian oral tradition. Her anthropologist's background shines through there.
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Dec 26, 2013 18:23
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I think it's fine for people to start with Consider Phlebas (I did) but if you must skip it and start somewhere, else The Player Of Games is where to go rather than Use Of Weapons. I think Use Of Weapons relies much more on you knowing at least a little about the Culture beforehand.
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Dec 28, 2013 17:17
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On the Arthurian note, I'll throw in a recommendation Bernard Cornwell. He's best known for writing the increasingly formulaic Sharpe novels about a Napoleonic soldier, and some equally formulaic medieval novels, plenty of bloody battle scenes and mild teen-friendly raunchiness, but he's written four books that are of actual literary value, I think. One of them, Gallows Thief, is a pure historical novel and outwith the purview of this thread; the other three are his take on the Arthurian legend. They are The Winter King, Enemy of God, and Excalibur, and I think they're actually great. Cornwell adapts the Arthurian legends into a form more grounded in real history, but with a really nice approach where magic is present but possibly all just in the characters' minds. They're set during the Saxon invasions of the Welsh-speaking Brythonic kingdoms around 500 AD, and they're written as if being chronicled by one of Arthur's companions, Derfel - a Saxon bastard raised as a druidic pagan by Merlin, but who converted to Christianity at some point in his life and is writing the story of Arthur in a monastery as Saxon invaders approach. The books tell a very engaging version of the Arthur legends (as well as peripheral legends like Tristan and Isolde) and there are nice explorations of cultural/religious tensions as well. I devoured Cornwell's books when I was in my teens but these ones are properly good books. I recommend them.
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Jan 21, 2014 02:59
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spider bethlehem posted:You're a bolder person than I. I waded into it and was chased out by a wave of grandpa fumes and get-off-my-lawn. Can you expand on this? It's almost 2 years since I read Year of the Flood and don't remember anything like that.
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Feb 19, 2014 19:59
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That sounds like he wasn't so much 'inspired' by the bog-standard fantasy of Oblivion as determined to emulate certain bits of it pretty precisely. At least tell me that 'The Emperor's Blades' doesn't refer to some kind of elite troop of bodyguards who are based in said mountain monastery.
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Mar 14, 2014 02:31
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The Lies of Locke Lamora is an absolute ton of fun and very low-fantasy, not much supernatural stuff in it at all unless I'm misremembering. I haven't read the follow-up books because I've heard bad things but I absolutely loved this as a standalone. I'm also going to toss out a recommendation for Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy, which absolutely fits your criteria of not having lots of extraneous characters and being a good story. It does have some supernatural stuff in it (and it's not really subject to rules) but it's not a dominant element, I wouldn't say.
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Apr 27, 2014 13:45
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General Battuta posted:Thanks everybody Awesome. Having a commission is a great feeling, as you know the work you put in will be rewarded in the end. Looking forward to seeing the end results!
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May 1, 2014 08:25
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