Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
Yeah the SF Masterworks include The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness (both of which I've read but I want to reread) and the Fantasy Masterworks includes The Word for World is Forest, which I haven't read.
I'm not sure if it's his best work, but wind up bird chronicle is unlike any other book I've read.
Also, regardless of baggage, I'd add a heinlein somewhere (Job or stranger in a strange land).
Same with Dostoevsky; Brothers Karamazov just has way more going for it and has more punch than Crime and Punishment.
I'd second this one, yeah. I think C&P is more popular in the western canon because, well, it's about crimes and punishments, and western canon loves that shit. Brothers Karamazov is more thoughtful and humanist, not as plotty, but a much richer and warmer text.
Can anyone recommend any scifi that isn't the expanse books since I saw the show and already have the visual preconceptions from that, and that don't read like starship troopers fanfic?
Can anyone recommend any scifi that isn't the expanse books since I saw the show and already have the visual preconceptions from that, and that don't read like starship troopers fanfic?
Can anyone recommend any scifi that isn't the expanse books since I saw the show and already have the visual preconceptions from that, and that don't read like starship troopers fanfic?
Revelation space trilogy
Children series from tchaikovsky
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Can anyone recommend any scifi that isn't the expanse books since I saw the show and already have the visual preconceptions from that, and that don't read like starship troopers fanfic?
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway is about a post-apocalypse brought about by reality-breaking bombs, where rational time and space are a resource that have to be piped in to an area. Themes: found family, finding love on a battlefield, esoteric martial arts, mimes. Vibes: nested regressions, absurdist humor, justifiably smug about the quality of its own prose.
Mickey7 by Edward Ashton is the first-person account of a disposable clone on a forward colony planet who accidentally survives his own disposal and then has to solve a mystery. Themes: the nature of self, scarcity-driven tyranny, non-humanoid alien contact. Vibes: Insult humor, competence porn, identical twin farce hijinx.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer is about crime, punishment, and revolution in a far-future society, as seen through the eyes of a universally reviled super-genius criminal. Themes: posthumanism, extreme gender-fluid theory, assassination politics, the nature of sin in post-scarcity society. Themes: alien perspective, challenging wordplay, making your brain hurt on purpose.
The Light Years by RWW Greene is about a family of traders who travel between worlds at near-relativistic speeds so that decades or centuries pass between their visits to individual worlds while months pass on board the ship. Themes: tramp space freighter engineering, mail-order bride fetuses, ancient technology scavenging, the dream of faster-than-light travel. Vibes: inescapable family, small-town dynamics, arranged marriage dramedy, stockholder voting tension.
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi is the first in a trilogy of books about a wormhole empire that's about to get turbofucked by all the wormholes collapsing. Themes: trade wars, industrial espionage, the conflict of space royals. Vibes: classic space opera, multiple smart and likable folks on all sides trying to destroy one another and/or fuck, quippy humor.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is about two post-human chronoassassins on opposite sides of a multiverse-spanning conflict getting to know each other by leaving taunting messages encoded at the scenes of their greatest triumphs. Themes: Sapphic posthumanism, the futility of war, massacre-themed meetcutes, brutally seizing love from the battlefield by any means necessary. Vibes: Story through letters, cozy body horror, justifiably smug about the quality of its own poetry, bittersweet longing on a rainy night in a selection of doomed Bronze Age island utopias.
also if you like The Gone Away World, may I recommend Gnomon, and also Hummingbird Salamander (but do not DO NOT get me started on a Vandermeer kick, I will never return to this plane)
Can anyone recommend any scifi that isn't the expanse books since I saw the show and already have the visual preconceptions from that, and that don't read like starship troopers fanfic?
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
Can anyone recommend any scifi that isn't the expanse books since I saw the show and already have the visual preconceptions from that, and that don't read like starship troopers fanfic?
Revelation Space, The Quantum Thief and 3 Body Problem are all good recs
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
Thank you everyone for your book advice for my list. I decided to stick to one book per author so pruned a bunch, added in most of your suggestions, and then did some more searching to fill up the rest.
1 Things Fall Apart - Achebe, Chinua
2 Watership Down - Adams, Richard
3 Little Women - Alcott, Louisa May
4 Untouchable - Anand, Mulk Raj
5 The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood, Margaret
6 Pride and Prejudice - Austen, Jane
7 Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury, Ray
8 Jane Eyre - Bronte, Charlotte
9 Wuthering Heights - Bronte, Emily
10 The Death of the Heart - Brown, Elizabeth
11 The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov, Mikhail
12 A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony
13 The Secret Garden - Burnett, Frances Hodgson
14 Wild Seed - Butler, Octavia E.
15 Invisible Cities - Calvino, Italo
16 The Stranger - Camus, Albert
17 In Cold Blood - Capote, Truman
18 A Month in the Country - Carr, J. L.
19 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Carroll, Lewis
20 The Long Goodbye - Chandler, Raymond
21 The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer, Geoffrey
22 Journey to the West - Cheng'en, Wu
23 The Awakening - Chopin, Kate
24 And Then There Were None - Christie, Agatha
25 The Woman in White - Collins, Wilkie
26 Heart of Darkness - Conrad, Joseph
27 The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper, James Fenimore
28 The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts - de Bernieres, Louis
29 Don Quixote - de Cervantes, Miguel
30 Robinson Crusoe - Defoe, Daniel
31 Great Expectations - Dickens, Charles
32 The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoesky, Fyoder
33 The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle, Arthur Conan
34 Rebecca - du Maurier, Daphne
35 The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas, Alexandre
36 The Name of the Rose - Eco, Umberto
37 Middlemarch - Eliot, George
38 Invisible Man - Ellison, Ralph
39 The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner, William
40 The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald, F. Scott
41 A Passage to India - Forster, E. M.
42 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
43 Lord of the Flies - Golding, William
44 I, Claudius - Graves, Robert
45 The Arabian Nights - Haddawy, Husein
46 Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Hardy, Thomas
47 The Go-Between - Hartley, L. P.
48 The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne, Nathaniel
49 Catch 22 - Heller, Joseph
50 The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway, Ernest
51 The Odyssey - Homer
52 Les Miserables - Hugo, Victor
53 Their Eyes Were Watching God - Hurston, Zora Neale
54 Brave New World - Huxley, Aldous
55 The Remains of the Day - Ishiguro, Kazuo
56 Ulysses - Joyce, James
57 The Metamorphosis - Kafka, Franz
58 Sometimes a Great Notion - Kesey, Ken
59 Passing - Larsen, Nella
60 To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee, Harper
61 White Fang - London, Jack
62 At the Mountains of Madness - Lovecraft, H.P.
63 Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Marukami, Haruki
64 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers, Carson
65 Moby-Dick - Melville, Herman
66 Paradise Lost - Milton, John
67 Gone With the Wind - Mitchell, Margaret
68 Beloved - Morrison, Toni
69 Lolita - Nabakov, Vladimir
70 There There - Orange, Tommy
71 The Scarlet Pimpernel - Orczy, Emmuska
72 Animal Farm - Orwell, George
73 Bridge to Terabithia - Paterson, Katherine
74 The Bell Jar - Plath, Sylvia
75 The Fall of the House of Usher - Poe, Edgar Allen
76 All Quiet on the Western Front - Remarque, Erich Maria
77 Wild Sargasso Sea - Rhys, Jean
78 Interview With the Vampire - Rice, Anne
79 Midnight's Children - Rushdie. Salman
80 Captain Blood - Sabatini, Rafael
81 Season of Migration to the North - Salih, Tayeb
82 Rob Roy - Scott, Walter
83 The Lonely Londoners - Selvon, Sam
84 Carmilla - Sherridan Le Fanu, J.
85 I Capture the Castle - Smith, Dodie
86 White Teeth - Smith, Zadie
87 The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck, John
88 Treasure Island - Stevenson, Robert Louis
89 Dracula - Stoker, Bram
90 The Secret History - Tartt, Donna
91 Vanity Fair - Thackeray, William Makepeace
92 The Lord of the Rings - Tolkein, J. R. R.
93 The Death of Ivan Ilych - Tolstoy, Leo
94 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain, Mark
95 Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut, Kurt
96 The Picture of Dorian Grey - Wilde, Oscar
97 The Code of the Woosters - Wodehouse, P. G.
98 To the Lighthouse - Woolf, Virginia
99 Carpentaria - Wright, Alexis
100 Dream of the Red Chamber - Xueqin, Cao
101 We - Zamyatin, Yevgeny
Jack McDevitt writes fun scifi stuff that's a mix of hard sci-fi and pop. Space explorations, mysteries etc. Start with A Talent For War and see if you like it.
It's love it or hate it on this one, but Red Shirts by John Scalzi is about an ensign on not the enterprise in not start trek that starts wondering how the senior crew keeps surviving when it seems like they don't actually know what they're doing.
Sea of Rust by C Robert Cargill is a post apocalypse future where the only life left is the sentient A.I.s and bots that caused said apocalypse.
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling is a sci fi caving psychological horror with an emphasis on grief
Providence by Max Berry follows the 5 man crew of a warship the size of a state that is run by A.I.
For a dabble of military sci fi that's definitely not rah rah starship troopers
Miles Cameron - Artifact Space. Something is killing humanities giant great ships that are the primary way to move between the stars and have long been thought to be indestructible. It's very much a military book (series, book 2 out soon) but it's not rah rah in any way.
Palladium War series by Marlo Kloos is a multi pov that has pretty realistic deep space combat, some ground action, detective work, conspiracies, politics, market economics. Pretty well rounded series.
i really like The Murderbot Diaries for some more recent good sci-fi. The protagonist is an asexual, neurodivergent (reads as autistic to most people but i don't think the author has confirmed), cyborg who is recently freed from his governor module that prevents him from having free will. They are short and sweet.
Librarian question: My city has been recovering from a ransomware attack for like 2 weeks now. Most of the library's various online and computerized services are still down including "most databases" and the online catalog, and most incoming call capability. They can still check out books. If I show up at a branch is there a chance they might have enough stuff working to know if a book is in stock at any branch or is better just to go to a book store or something and save them some trouble?
If the online catalog is down then there's a pretty good chance they're running their checkout services locally and won't be able to access their end of the catalog, but there's absolutely no harm in showing up and asking and you might find something else you want while you're there!
Nobody should be afraid to go to their library and ask them a question, people who work at libraries love answering questions, it's pretty much our whole job.
Thank you everyone for your book advice for my list. I decided to stick to one book per author so pruned a bunch, added in most of your suggestions, and then did some more searching to fill up the rest.
1 Things Fall Apart - Achebe, Chinua
2 Watership Down - Adams, Richard
3 Little Women - Alcott, Louisa May
4 Untouchable - Anand, Mulk Raj
5 The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood, Margaret
6 Pride and Prejudice - Austen, Jane
7 Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury, Ray
8 Jane Eyre - Bronte, Charlotte
9 Wuthering Heights - Bronte, Emily
10 The Death of the Heart - Brown, Elizabeth
11 The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov, Mikhail
12 A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony
13 The Secret Garden - Burnett, Frances Hodgson
14 Wild Seed - Butler, Octavia E.
15 Invisible Cities - Calvino, Italo
16 The Stranger - Camus, Albert
17 In Cold Blood - Capote, Truman
18 A Month in the Country - Carr, J. L.
19 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Carroll, Lewis
20 The Long Goodbye - Chandler, Raymond
21 The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer, Geoffrey
22 Journey to the West - Cheng'en, Wu
23 The Awakening - Chopin, Kate
24 And Then There Were None - Christie, Agatha
25 The Woman in White - Collins, Wilkie
26 Heart of Darkness - Conrad, Joseph
27 The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper, James Fenimore
28 The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts - de Bernieres, Louis
29 Don Quixote - de Cervantes, Miguel
30 Robinson Crusoe - Defoe, Daniel
31 Great Expectations - Dickens, Charles
32 The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoesky, Fyoder
33 The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle, Arthur Conan
34 Rebecca - du Maurier, Daphne
35 The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas, Alexandre
36 The Name of the Rose - Eco, Umberto
37 Middlemarch - Eliot, George
38 Invisible Man - Ellison, Ralph
39 The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner, William
40 The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald, F. Scott
41 A Passage to India - Forster, E. M.
42 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
43 Lord of the Flies - Golding, William
44 I, Claudius - Graves, Robert
45 The Arabian Nights - Haddawy, Husein
46 Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Hardy, Thomas
47 The Go-Between - Hartley, L. P.
48 The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne, Nathaniel
49 Catch 22 - Heller, Joseph
50 The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway, Ernest
51 The Odyssey - Homer
52 Les Miserables - Hugo, Victor
53 Their Eyes Were Watching God - Hurston, Zora Neale
54 Brave New World - Huxley, Aldous
55 The Remains of the Day - Ishiguro, Kazuo
56 Ulysses - Joyce, James
57 The Metamorphosis - Kafka, Franz
58 Sometimes a Great Notion - Kesey, Ken
59 Passing - Larsen, Nella
60 To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee, Harper
61 White Fang - London, Jack
62 At the Mountains of Madness - Lovecraft, H.P.
63 Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Marukami, Haruki
64 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers, Carson
65 Moby-Dick - Melville, Herman
66 Paradise Lost - Milton, John
67 Gone With the Wind - Mitchell, Margaret
68 Beloved - Morrison, Toni
69 Lolita - Nabakov, Vladimir
70 There There - Orange, Tommy
71 The Scarlet Pimpernel - Orczy, Emmuska
72 Animal Farm - Orwell, George
73 Bridge to Terabithia - Paterson, Katherine
74 The Bell Jar - Plath, Sylvia
75 The Fall of the House of Usher - Poe, Edgar Allen
76 All Quiet on the Western Front - Remarque, Erich Maria
77 Wild Sargasso Sea - Rhys, Jean
78 Interview With the Vampire - Rice, Anne
79 Midnight's Children - Rushdie. Salman
80 Captain Blood - Sabatini, Rafael
81 Season of Migration to the North - Salih, Tayeb
82 Rob Roy - Scott, Walter
83 The Lonely Londoners - Selvon, Sam
84 Carmilla - Sherridan Le Fanu, J.
85 I Capture the Castle - Smith, Dodie
86 White Teeth - Smith, Zadie
87 The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck, John
88 Treasure Island - Stevenson, Robert Louis
89 Dracula - Stoker, Bram
90 The Secret History - Tartt, Donna
91 Vanity Fair - Thackeray, William Makepeace
92 The Lord of the Rings - Tolkein, J. R. R.
93 The Death of Ivan Ilych - Tolstoy, Leo
94 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain, Mark
95 Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut, Kurt
96 The Picture of Dorian Grey - Wilde, Oscar
97 The Code of the Woosters - Wodehouse, P. G.
98 To the Lighthouse - Woolf, Virginia
99 Carpentaria - Wright, Alexis
100 Dream of the Red Chamber - Xueqin, Cao
101 We - Zamyatin, Yevgeny
This is a good list I’m probably gonna steal and check off myself, but when I focused on classics a bit last year two standouts I don’t see here were Frankenstein and the Haunting of Hill House.
JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Plus it'll give the older staff members a chance to flex on the younguns by busting out the Big Green Book of Dewey Decimal if you ask about nonfiction.
Or just saying "yeah I know where that is" and walking to the shelf to get it, which is also fun. I like to imagine that it makes me look cool, it probably doesn't, but I am keeping my illusions.
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
Thank you everyone for your book advice for my list. I decided to stick to one book per author so pruned a bunch, added in most of your suggestions, and then did some more searching to fill up the rest.
1 Things Fall Apart - Achebe, Chinua
2 Watership Down - Adams, Richard
3 Little Women - Alcott, Louisa May
4 Untouchable - Anand, Mulk Raj
5 The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood, Margaret
6 Pride and Prejudice - Austen, Jane
7 Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury, Ray
8 Jane Eyre - Bronte, Charlotte
9 Wuthering Heights - Bronte, Emily
10 The Death of the Heart - Brown, Elizabeth
11 The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov, Mikhail
12 A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony
13 The Secret Garden - Burnett, Frances Hodgson
14 Wild Seed - Butler, Octavia E.
15 Invisible Cities - Calvino, Italo
16 The Stranger - Camus, Albert
17 In Cold Blood - Capote, Truman
18 A Month in the Country - Carr, J. L.
19 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Carroll, Lewis
20 The Long Goodbye - Chandler, Raymond
21 The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer, Geoffrey
22 Journey to the West - Cheng'en, Wu
23 The Awakening - Chopin, Kate
24 And Then There Were None - Christie, Agatha
25 The Woman in White - Collins, Wilkie
26 Heart of Darkness - Conrad, Joseph
27 The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper, James Fenimore
28 The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts - de Bernieres, Louis
29 Don Quixote - de Cervantes, Miguel
30 Robinson Crusoe - Defoe, Daniel
31 Great Expectations - Dickens, Charles
32 The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoesky, Fyoder
33 The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle, Arthur Conan
34 Rebecca - du Maurier, Daphne
35 The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas, Alexandre
36 The Name of the Rose - Eco, Umberto
37 Middlemarch - Eliot, George
38 Invisible Man - Ellison, Ralph
39 The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner, William
40 The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald, F. Scott
41 A Passage to India - Forster, E. M.
42 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
43 Lord of the Flies - Golding, William
44 I, Claudius - Graves, Robert
45 The Arabian Nights - Haddawy, Husein
46 Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Hardy, Thomas
47 The Go-Between - Hartley, L. P.
48 The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne, Nathaniel
49 Catch 22 - Heller, Joseph
50 The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway, Ernest
51 The Odyssey - Homer
52 Les Miserables - Hugo, Victor
53 Their Eyes Were Watching God - Hurston, Zora Neale
54 Brave New World - Huxley, Aldous
55 The Remains of the Day - Ishiguro, Kazuo
56 Ulysses - Joyce, James
57 The Metamorphosis - Kafka, Franz
58 Sometimes a Great Notion - Kesey, Ken
59 Passing - Larsen, Nella
60 To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee, Harper
61 White Fang - London, Jack
62 At the Mountains of Madness - Lovecraft, H.P.
63 Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Marukami, Haruki
64 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers, Carson
65 Moby-Dick - Melville, Herman
66 Paradise Lost - Milton, John
67 Gone With the Wind - Mitchell, Margaret
68 Beloved - Morrison, Toni
69 Lolita - Nabakov, Vladimir
70 There There - Orange, Tommy
71 The Scarlet Pimpernel - Orczy, Emmuska
72 Animal Farm - Orwell, George
73 Bridge to Terabithia - Paterson, Katherine
74 The Bell Jar - Plath, Sylvia
75 The Fall of the House of Usher - Poe, Edgar Allen
76 All Quiet on the Western Front - Remarque, Erich Maria
77 Wild Sargasso Sea - Rhys, Jean
78 Interview With the Vampire - Rice, Anne
79 Midnight's Children - Rushdie. Salman
80 Captain Blood - Sabatini, Rafael
81 Season of Migration to the North - Salih, Tayeb
82 Rob Roy - Scott, Walter
83 The Lonely Londoners - Selvon, Sam
84 Carmilla - Sherridan Le Fanu, J.
85 I Capture the Castle - Smith, Dodie
86 White Teeth - Smith, Zadie
87 The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck, John
88 Treasure Island - Stevenson, Robert Louis
89 Dracula - Stoker, Bram
90 The Secret History - Tartt, Donna
91 Vanity Fair - Thackeray, William Makepeace
92 The Lord of the Rings - Tolkein, J. R. R.
93 The Death of Ivan Ilych - Tolstoy, Leo
94 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain, Mark
95 Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut, Kurt
96 The Picture of Dorian Grey - Wilde, Oscar
97 The Code of the Woosters - Wodehouse, P. G.
98 To the Lighthouse - Woolf, Virginia
99 Carpentaria - Wright, Alexis
100 Dream of the Red Chamber - Xueqin, Cao
101 We - Zamyatin, Yevgeny
This is a good list I’m probably gonna steal and check off myself, but when I focused on classics a bit last year two standouts I don’t see here were Frankenstein and the Haunting of Hill House.
Frankenstein is on the SF Masterworks list. But I can add Haunting of Hill House. I've never read a horror book I actually found scary so I'm keen to try some good ones.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
It's time for a Shirley Jackson fight because I'm here to say that We Have Always Lived In The Castle is way better than Hill House
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
I'm reading The Forever War by Joe Halderman. It was written in 1975 and it has this line
Some of the new people we'd picked up after Aleph used 'tha, ther, thim' instead of 'he, his, him' for the collective pronoun
Did 'they, their, them' not except in 1975? I know there's controversy from idiots about singular they now, but collective they has just always been a thing, hasn't it?
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knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
It has, but the ones in the example look more “alien” and one of the themes of the book is how the longer the war continues, the more the main character is alienated from the civilization he’s fighting for
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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JedocIn the scupperswith the staggers and jagsRegistered Userregular
Yup. There are other indications in the book that the generation the main character is from is significantly more conservative and reactionary than that of 1975.
Since the contemporary audience for New Wave science fiction consisted largely of disaffected hippies numbly watching the 60s dissolve into a grey Nixonian slurry, this is a future trajectory they would instinctively grasp and have some rough chuckles over.
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
It's time for a Shirley Jackson fight because I'm here to say that We Have Always Lived In The Castle is way better than Hill House
That one is definitely on my list but I haven’t run into it when I trawl my local used shop and I cut myself off new book buying while I’ve been unemployed
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Hill House is widely accepted as the better of the two and as Jackson's best novel, to be clear. I think it's one of those instances where I read it after I'd seen adaptations or things inspired by it already, so it didn't really hit as hard as it should have. Meanwhile Castle is a tight little New England Gothic, which makes it essentially made for me and my tastes.
Yup. There are other indications in the book that the generation the main character is from is significantly more conservative and reactionary than that of 1975.
Since the contemporary audience for New Wave science fiction consisted largely of disaffected hippies numbly watching the 60s dissolve into a grey Nixonian slurry, this is a future trajectory they would instinctively grasp and have some rough chuckles over.
Posts
That's pretty much all I got. Good fight everyone.
Gonna have to disagree with you about Catch-22
Sorry. Regs say you can't submit a disagreement until you file an affidavit agreeing with the original statement.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Also, regardless of baggage, I'd add a heinlein somewhere (Job or stranger in a strange land).
Also definitely this version of pride and prejudice:
https://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-But-Darcy-Vape/dp/1087966523&ved=2ahUKEwjw0N-e66SGAxXEjIkEHQ8NCwIQFnoECCYQAQ&usg=AOvVaw24Z-B54mWnIaLQZs38WYfx
I'd second this one, yeah. I think C&P is more popular in the western canon because, well, it's about crimes and punishments, and western canon loves that shit. Brothers Karamazov is more thoughtful and humanist, not as plotty, but a much richer and warmer text.
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198004484595
Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
the gap cycle
Revelation space trilogy
Children series from tchaikovsky
The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway is about a post-apocalypse brought about by reality-breaking bombs, where rational time and space are a resource that have to be piped in to an area. Themes: found family, finding love on a battlefield, esoteric martial arts, mimes. Vibes: nested regressions, absurdist humor, justifiably smug about the quality of its own prose.
Mickey7 by Edward Ashton is the first-person account of a disposable clone on a forward colony planet who accidentally survives his own disposal and then has to solve a mystery. Themes: the nature of self, scarcity-driven tyranny, non-humanoid alien contact. Vibes: Insult humor, competence porn, identical twin farce hijinx.
Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer is about crime, punishment, and revolution in a far-future society, as seen through the eyes of a universally reviled super-genius criminal. Themes: posthumanism, extreme gender-fluid theory, assassination politics, the nature of sin in post-scarcity society. Themes: alien perspective, challenging wordplay, making your brain hurt on purpose.
The Light Years by RWW Greene is about a family of traders who travel between worlds at near-relativistic speeds so that decades or centuries pass between their visits to individual worlds while months pass on board the ship. Themes: tramp space freighter engineering, mail-order bride fetuses, ancient technology scavenging, the dream of faster-than-light travel. Vibes: inescapable family, small-town dynamics, arranged marriage dramedy, stockholder voting tension.
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi is the first in a trilogy of books about a wormhole empire that's about to get turbofucked by all the wormholes collapsing. Themes: trade wars, industrial espionage, the conflict of space royals. Vibes: classic space opera, multiple smart and likable folks on all sides trying to destroy one another and/or fuck, quippy humor.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone is about two post-human chronoassassins on opposite sides of a multiverse-spanning conflict getting to know each other by leaving taunting messages encoded at the scenes of their greatest triumphs. Themes: Sapphic posthumanism, the futility of war, massacre-themed meetcutes, brutally seizing love from the battlefield by any means necessary. Vibes: Story through letters, cozy body horror, justifiably smug about the quality of its own poetry, bittersweet longing on a rainy night in a selection of doomed Bronze Age island utopias.
also if you like The Gone Away World, may I recommend Gnomon, and also Hummingbird Salamander (but do not DO NOT get me started on a Vandermeer kick, I will never return to this plane)
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
The Punch Escrow, by Tal Klein
2 Watership Down - Adams, Richard
3 Little Women - Alcott, Louisa May
4 Untouchable - Anand, Mulk Raj
5 The Handmaid's Tale - Atwood, Margaret
6 Pride and Prejudice - Austen, Jane
7 Fahrenheit 451 - Bradbury, Ray
8 Jane Eyre - Bronte, Charlotte
9 Wuthering Heights - Bronte, Emily
10 The Death of the Heart - Brown, Elizabeth
11 The Master and Margarita - Bulgakov, Mikhail
12 A Clockwork Orange - Burgess, Anthony
13 The Secret Garden - Burnett, Frances Hodgson
14 Wild Seed - Butler, Octavia E.
15 Invisible Cities - Calvino, Italo
16 The Stranger - Camus, Albert
17 In Cold Blood - Capote, Truman
18 A Month in the Country - Carr, J. L.
19 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Carroll, Lewis
20 The Long Goodbye - Chandler, Raymond
21 The Canterbury Tales - Chaucer, Geoffrey
22 Journey to the West - Cheng'en, Wu
23 The Awakening - Chopin, Kate
24 And Then There Were None - Christie, Agatha
25 The Woman in White - Collins, Wilkie
26 Heart of Darkness - Conrad, Joseph
27 The Last of the Mohicans - Cooper, James Fenimore
28 The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts - de Bernieres, Louis
29 Don Quixote - de Cervantes, Miguel
30 Robinson Crusoe - Defoe, Daniel
31 Great Expectations - Dickens, Charles
32 The Brothers Karamazov - Dostoesky, Fyoder
33 The Hound of the Baskervilles - Doyle, Arthur Conan
34 Rebecca - du Maurier, Daphne
35 The Count of Monte Cristo - Dumas, Alexandre
36 The Name of the Rose - Eco, Umberto
37 Middlemarch - Eliot, George
38 Invisible Man - Ellison, Ralph
39 The Sound and the Fury - Faulkner, William
40 The Great Gatsby - Fitzgerald, F. Scott
41 A Passage to India - Forster, E. M.
42 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
43 Lord of the Flies - Golding, William
44 I, Claudius - Graves, Robert
45 The Arabian Nights - Haddawy, Husein
46 Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Hardy, Thomas
47 The Go-Between - Hartley, L. P.
48 The Scarlet Letter - Hawthorne, Nathaniel
49 Catch 22 - Heller, Joseph
50 The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway, Ernest
51 The Odyssey - Homer
52 Les Miserables - Hugo, Victor
53 Their Eyes Were Watching God - Hurston, Zora Neale
54 Brave New World - Huxley, Aldous
55 The Remains of the Day - Ishiguro, Kazuo
56 Ulysses - Joyce, James
57 The Metamorphosis - Kafka, Franz
58 Sometimes a Great Notion - Kesey, Ken
59 Passing - Larsen, Nella
60 To Kill a Mockingbird - Lee, Harper
61 White Fang - London, Jack
62 At the Mountains of Madness - Lovecraft, H.P.
63 Wind-up Bird Chronicle - Marukami, Haruki
64 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers, Carson
65 Moby-Dick - Melville, Herman
66 Paradise Lost - Milton, John
67 Gone With the Wind - Mitchell, Margaret
68 Beloved - Morrison, Toni
69 Lolita - Nabakov, Vladimir
70 There There - Orange, Tommy
71 The Scarlet Pimpernel - Orczy, Emmuska
72 Animal Farm - Orwell, George
73 Bridge to Terabithia - Paterson, Katherine
74 The Bell Jar - Plath, Sylvia
75 The Fall of the House of Usher - Poe, Edgar Allen
76 All Quiet on the Western Front - Remarque, Erich Maria
77 Wild Sargasso Sea - Rhys, Jean
78 Interview With the Vampire - Rice, Anne
79 Midnight's Children - Rushdie. Salman
80 Captain Blood - Sabatini, Rafael
81 Season of Migration to the North - Salih, Tayeb
82 Rob Roy - Scott, Walter
83 The Lonely Londoners - Selvon, Sam
84 Carmilla - Sherridan Le Fanu, J.
85 I Capture the Castle - Smith, Dodie
86 White Teeth - Smith, Zadie
87 The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck, John
88 Treasure Island - Stevenson, Robert Louis
89 Dracula - Stoker, Bram
90 The Secret History - Tartt, Donna
91 Vanity Fair - Thackeray, William Makepeace
92 The Lord of the Rings - Tolkein, J. R. R.
93 The Death of Ivan Ilych - Tolstoy, Leo
94 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Twain, Mark
95 Slaughterhouse-Five - Vonnegut, Kurt
96 The Picture of Dorian Grey - Wilde, Oscar
97 The Code of the Woosters - Wodehouse, P. G.
98 To the Lighthouse - Woolf, Virginia
99 Carpentaria - Wright, Alexis
100 Dream of the Red Chamber - Xueqin, Cao
101 We - Zamyatin, Yevgeny
Basically anything, but especially the Mars trilogy.
It's love it or hate it on this one, but Red Shirts by John Scalzi is about an ensign on not the enterprise in not start trek that starts wondering how the senior crew keeps surviving when it seems like they don't actually know what they're doing.
Sea of Rust by C Robert Cargill is a post apocalypse future where the only life left is the sentient A.I.s and bots that caused said apocalypse.
The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling is a sci fi caving psychological horror with an emphasis on grief
Providence by Max Berry follows the 5 man crew of a warship the size of a state that is run by A.I.
For a dabble of military sci fi that's definitely not rah rah starship troopers
Miles Cameron - Artifact Space. Something is killing humanities giant great ships that are the primary way to move between the stars and have long been thought to be indestructible. It's very much a military book (series, book 2 out soon) but it's not rah rah in any way.
Palladium War series by Marlo Kloos is a multi pov that has pretty realistic deep space combat, some ground action, detective work, conspiracies, politics, market economics. Pretty well rounded series.
Steam - Talon Valdez :Blizz - Talonious#1860 : Xbox Live & LoL - Talonious Monk @TaloniousMonk Hail Satan
PSN:Furlion
What!?
I guess I have my holiday weekend plan now.
Nobody should be afraid to go to their library and ask them a question, people who work at libraries love answering questions, it's pretty much our whole job.
This is a good list I’m probably gonna steal and check off myself, but when I focused on classics a bit last year two standouts I don’t see here were Frankenstein and the Haunting of Hill House.
Frankenstein is on the SF Masterworks list. But I can add Haunting of Hill House. I've never read a horror book I actually found scary so I'm keen to try some good ones.
Did 'they, their, them' not except in 1975? I know there's controversy from idiots about singular they now, but collective they has just always been a thing, hasn't it?
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Since the contemporary audience for New Wave science fiction consisted largely of disaffected hippies numbly watching the 60s dissolve into a grey Nixonian slurry, this is a future trajectory they would instinctively grasp and have some rough chuckles over.
we have always lived in the castle makes me sad
That one is definitely on my list but I haven’t run into it when I trawl my local used shop and I cut myself off new book buying while I’ve been unemployed
LieBot, what is the saddest story?