Everybody recommends the Vorkosigan series, and they’re a popular topic on Dope SF discussions, but nothing I’ve read makes me think I will like them. Plust I have read other Bujold stuff and not been all that impressed. But so long as I’m in a sampling mood, I’ll sample the first book.
To everyone who has responded: I will check out each and every book recommended, it is the least I can do. I have this thread on the browser on my Kindle, I just open the thread, pull up a title, then go to the Kindle bookstore and download a few sample chapters to read. Really gives me a feel for the author’s writing style (it’s important to me, I love good, smooth prose. It’s like good, smooth whiskey.) I’ve checked out Vast, Revenant Space and one other, can’t recall the name offhand, and all three looked like good reads. Bookmarked.
Keep 'em coming!
Some seconds:
Absolutely! James SA Corey is awesome. It’s a pseudonym for the team of Daniel Abraham and some dude that works as George R.R. Martin’s assistant, and they’re great together. Wonderful space opera action, some gah! horror moments, and well-written women.
Speaking of which, Daniel Abraham by himself is a great writer. His “Long Price Quartet,” four books about a world in which poets perform magic by embodying a principle (such as “stone softens”) into the form of a “god” with limitless powers within this principle, are really well done.
Spin is great: very hard SF with interesting characters and a lot of surprises. I didn’t much care for the sequel, though.
More excellent fun. The humor in the book is bone-dry, and it starts a bit slow, but it works up to a great climactic few hundred pages.
I’m a bit Mieville dork, although I find him very uneven. Some of his books are actively bad (I’m looking at you, Un Lun Dun), but The City and the City and Embassytown and Perdido Street Station are among the best F/SF I’ve read in my life.
For sci-fi/fantasy mix, try Jack L. Chalker - almost anything he wrote. All of the “Well World” series, the “Four Lords of the Diamond” series (I bought the original covers for those - they hang in my office), The Dancing Gods series, the Quintara Marathon… all great.
Chalker does have a little fetish though - almost every book deals with some kind of body transformation. But that doesn’t detract from and often enhances the plot.
How were the Wizard Knight novels?
How was Railsea? My friend recommended it.
Have you read Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World and its “sequel” The Rise of Ransom City? The word “steampunk” is often used in descriptions of the two but do not let that put you off! They are in a class of their own, sort of a fantasy Western novel, about two factions in this world – The Line (monstrous Order/Bureaucracy embodied by giant trains and their stations) and The Gun (monstrous Chaos embodied by demon-possessed weapons and their handlers) – who are competing for supremacy as the known world expands its frontier.
They’re hard to describe but are really well-written with very lively prose.
I enjoyed it, but for me it’s second-tier Mieville. Totally weird and totally socialist and anti-authoritarian, as are all his books, but it was preachier than it had to be and not quite as cerebral as he is at his best.
I’m definitely paying attention to this thread…the OPs tastes seem much like my own.
4th-ing China Mieville*, superb tech-fantasy reads.
Did you mine John Varley’s works yet? Ophiuchi Hotline and Steel Beach are must-reads, and he’s the best short story writer since Bradbury. The Titan trilogy is also some wonderfully fun space opera.
I really enjoyed Glen Cook’s Black Company series, they get a little formulaic, but there’s some wonderfully fresh upturnings of fantasy tropes.
How about David Gerrold’s War Against the Chtorr series? The first book, A Matter For Men, is a fantastic story as well as an homage to Heinlein, but they grow increasingly strange with each new novel. Of course, there is a downside: we’ve been waiting for the 5th book, A Method For Madness for more than 20 years now. Seriously. I have had it on pre-order at Amazon for more than 3 years, but the publishing date keeps getting pushed back. Still, awesome series.
For space opera, try the Starfire books by David Weber & Steve White. The first one is called Insurrection.
Ooh, I just finished reading a really good book which no one has mentioned…
The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach.
Kind of hard to describe without giving it away, but it starts as a weird cultural study of a fascinating alien human culture and artists who spend their entire lives weaving a carpet out of human hair, and goes in all sorts of interesting directions from there.
I second the Silo series.
I totally agree with this evaluation of Dread Empire’s Fall, awesome set up, great development, lame ending. Still worth it for the ride though in my view.
Pretty good, perhaps a bit ‘Wolfe-lite’ compared to the New Sun or the Latro books but it’s a fun read with more depth to it than most fantasy books.
Hey, no worries - you’re not the only one making a reading list based on this thread.
I earlier suggested Mieville, as have a few other people. But given what you have said about your tastes - that you like hard science and tech better than magic or ccult - I would start with Embassytown over Perdido Street Station or Kraken or even The City And The City. Embassytown is set on a far planet, features some extremely alien aliens, and is partially based on futuristic tech. The others are more magical/occult, or steampunk.
A second here for an upthread recommendation of Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs series (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies). In these novels, Morgan takes a new technology (body-switching by means of digitized personalities) and explores all the implications of the tech. Plus, they’re interesting hard-boiled whodunnits. I don’t know if “cybernoir” is a word, but that’s what they are. Morgan is a good world-builder as well - his society is not just about technology, crime and dystopia. He gives Harlan’s World - Kovacs’ native planet - a logically consistent folklore, and even has one character deliver a brief disquisition on the anthropology of shopping. Well-written, too.
I love almost all of John Varley’s works. Skip Slow Apocalypse, though. It reads like a bad imitation of a Niven/Pournelle disaster book.
I’d call it more of a modern take, but it does live up to the name - incredibly slow-paced. It read like something an author had done a crap-ton of research for and didn’t want to leave anything out.
Now that you’ve said its at the top of your list, I feel safe in offering the caveat that I, my wife, and the two friends of ours who have read it all initially gave up on the book a tenth of the way through the book or so. Then for various reasons in each individual case, we tried again. In the end, all four of us loved it.
They are about as far away from religious or occult as you can be, no FTL, at least not yet. Don’t know who the wolves are yet, and he still has not , as far as I know explained the time travel yet.
Excellent series, from someone who has traveled the same literary sci/fi road.
As far as Scalzi goes, most of what I have read from him has tended to be on the meh side, and thats what he has written up to Redshirts. Other people like his books, so its an aquired taste, but I find him more on the lite side of scifi, rather than the full flavor.
I don’t think they’re religious at all, though the third book in the RS trilogy (that I already told you not to read—read Chasm City instead) has a gigantic church that plays a role in the narrative. The occult plays a much bigger role in the Laundry Series from Stross, but it’s played with consistent rules, and usually for laughs. I don’t find either wishy-washy or Lovecraftian in turgid, vague descriptions of how their societies and technologies work. There is some handwavium with the tech, but RS is set in a slower than light world, so it isn’t that onerous. Now, the RS stories can be extremely Gothic in tone, but I wouldn’t call them mystical. There’s a puzzle at the heart of the first book and it has a finite answer.
As a point of order, when we’re recommending “new” books, are we talking about books that might be new to a particular reader or are we talking about books that were recently published? Because I see some people recommended books that were published forty years ago and that stretches my definition of recent.
I had asked for “new” books in my OP, but didnt define it too well, but in a subsequent post clarified I meant books written in the last 20 years, last 10 years more likely, as I had stopped keeping track of new works with any great scrupulosity about twenty years ago, concomitant with the rise of the Interwebs as a place to read. Now I got a Kindle, I find myself having renewed interest. But I’m not really being a stickler for dates and as the thread has proven useful to others, I’m not gonna be a stickler.
I suggest trying out Max Gladstone’s Craft cycle. There are currently two books, Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise. The author frequently cites Zelazny as his single greatest influence, and the setting definitely transforms some classic fantasy tropes, with it’s ‘religion as economics/law’ thing. They also definitely qualify as ‘new’ books, released ‘last year’ and ‘last Tuesday’, respectively.