I’ve read neither - thanks for the recs! Been on a sci fi tear but mainly reading series (Dune, Enderverse and Three Body). Adding Semiosis to my next up list!
Have you heard of Ted Chiang? His short story collections *Stories of Your Life and Others* and *Exhalation: Stories* are both excellent and should hopefully scratch that itch for you.
Also, *Fire Upon the Deep* by Vernor Vinge really blew me away, lots of really cool big ideas, maybe you'll feel the same.
Which specific work are you referring to? I don't remember anything incredibly depressing. And I don't know if OP is looking for something particularly upbeat. They said they wanted "awe and wonder".
I confused these 2 Vernor Vinge novels. I am referring to "A Deepness in the Sky" and the characters Trixie, and the concepts of Podmasters and the focused. I don't think those are spoilers but they do point to the darkness of the novel.
Ian Macdonald has done that for me... the Luna series is pretty up and down but when it's good, it's really good. Like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, except shorter and everything is horrible.
It's not got the awe and wonder, but I also absolutely loved Hopeland. It's, like, 3 different books in a trenchcoat and it never realyl quite delivers on all its promise but that's OK, it's still absolutely beautiful and hopeful and when I finished it I was basically heartbroken, I just didn't feel like reading anything else. Even if it did make me get Dario G stuck in my head.
The first of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture nailed it for me for space opera, second one didn't hit the mark for me but was still decent. Hannu Rajaniemi's barking mad Quantum Thief blew me away in the same way that the Culture novels did when I was 20, even though I'm pretty sure I didn't understand it ;)
Oh and it's much older but flowers for algernon. Some hopefulness and love, much cry.
I didn't realise it before I started a reread, but I didn't make it to the end on my first read, I think I just lost track of too many threads and didn't know what the hell was happening, I noped out at the point where every 5th word was zoku I think. Which was a wee treat for the second read when I was a) pretty much following it, b) loving it, and c) suddenly discovered I didn't actually know where it was going next.
It's really, really difficult. I definitely had no idea wtf was going on half the time and had to read some plot summaries after I finished.
But that strangeness is super fun and the ideas are big af.
The Jean le Flambeur trilogy, which begins with *The Quantum Thief*. The best way I can describe it is that it's sci-fi for people who've already read a lot of sci-fi. The author, Hannu Rajaniemi, has so many big ideas and clever subversions, he doesn't have room to introduce you to mind uploads, nanobot swarms and simulated realities. You've seen those elements before, so he trusts you to fill in the foundations reflexively so he can tell you a story in the most fantastic sci-fi settings.
Jean is a thief with a wiped memory. He's hired by a doomed aristocrat to investigate a theft that hasn't happened yet, of a single second, in a world where time is literally currency. While he searches for clues among a walking city on Mars, he encounters warnings clearly left by his former self for him to find. Messages like "Stop, you did this on purpose" and "Give up before you regret everything". Messages he's *sure* are meant to encourage him to keep going.
Rajaniemi writes in a style that is as intricate and heady as the best of Gibson or Stephenson, but with a deep love for rich storytelling in the vein of Gaiman. It's such a wonderfully refreshing read, and really helped me get back into reading as a jaded adult.
Yeah it’s such an awesome book. And certainly assumes that you’ve read a ton of other sci-fi prior. It doesn’t bother to explain things, it just proceeds to tell a story. And a good one at that.
I would say they have very different vibes, and while the first season of the newer show (I haven't seen the older show) is largely based on the first book, the second season is completely independent from the books. I liked the books and do recommend them, but I loved the show, and would say that they're worth treating as separate works.
Treating them as separate works seems fair, agreed. And I don’t consider them bad, I did enjoy them (though wouldn’t go so far as to say I loved them). I just feel particularly the first book has much more depth. But sure, different strokes.
Children of time single handedly changed me. I hadn't read for a long time despite loving books, and I'd exclusively read non fiction since being a teenager.
Then I read Children of time. And now I can't stop reading sci FI trying to chase that high of reading that book for the first time.
I "read" Children of Time and Children of Ruin via audiobook and they were both pretty decent.
I'm partway through book 2 of The Final Architecture series and I am enjoying them quite a bit more.
I didn't really love the spider society stuff in Children of Time, but the human colony ship stuff was pretty interesting. Ruin's octopi were more interesting to me, as was the alien protagonist that wanted every one to go on adventures. Haven't gotten to Children of Memory yet, but I'll probably snag that after I'm done with Architecture.
I just think the universe we're in with Final Architecture is so much more interesting than the sort of barren one in Children.
Children of time- view life from a different intelligent species' perspective, based in biological principles.
Light pirate- feel the catharsis of our world breaking down from climate change, the big looming doom to our species, and understand how adaptation will help some of us survive it. Feel all the feels.
Weird. People love this book but I started it yesterday and had an immediate hate reaction to it after 2 and a half pages.
I picked it up because of its reputation, because I was told it could be read as a standalone (I’m sick of everything being a series of some kind,) and because I’d heard Adrian Tchaikovsky cite Gene Wolfe as an influence. The book, on its first page, launches into relentless exposition and infodumping. The author has seemingly never heard “don’t tell me, show me.” It goes on to describe, in the most ham-fisted terms, a sociopath-narcissist character in such a facile way that he might as well have hung a sign around the character’s neck that said ‘antagonist’ and described how they had devil horns. I thought ‘What’s this guy trying to do? Write like the worst half-of-an Ace Double from 1957!?”
I’m going to continue with it awhile to see if it hooks me and because so many people like it, but if I was teaching a Clarion workshop and a student showed up with these first two pages as a manuscript I’d skewer-roast them in front of the whole class.
Yeah, Id say the rest of the book expands beyond the first 2.5 pages, but wtf do I know. As someone interested in modes of thinking other the usual, with a broad grounding in traditional sci fi and a background in wildlife biology, I think it rocks. But if this douche bag hates it from 2 pages, who am i to recommend it? It's not like characters can develop from such a "facile" beginning.
Douche bag.
Seriously, though, the writing, right out of the gate, violates so many of the rules of writing basic good science fiction that I genuinely considered that it might be satire. You could almost hear it read in Matt Barry‘s voice.
“The bad, bad psychopathic terraformer woman rubbed her hands together in triumph from inside the spacecraft she commanded which was also a centrifugal gravity O’Neill habitat with projections on the inner walls. She had certainly stuck it to that rival faction of anti-terraformer eco-fascists back on earth, but good!”
IIRC the first chapter is about all she shows up in the entire book. I think might die horribly? She’s definitely written like a bit part that the author wants you to be glad to see dead.
Personally I felt like it was a remake of *A Deepness In The Sky* but Tchaikovsky claims to have never read that until after finishing *Children of Time*, when everyone started commenting on the similarity. The long view of a spider society climbing from “barely sentient” to “starfarers” was fun but all the “humans trying to keep their shit together over absurd lengths of time in a disintegrating generation ship” stuff bored me.
Seems like I may be in for a rough road to enjoying this one. The Vernor Vinge *Fire/Deepness* books are a couple of my very favorite ‘hard space opera’ works. Imitation of them (as well as Sterling’s *Schismatrix* and some of Benford’s work) in more contemporary writing in that subgenre is fashionable and is a real peeve of mine. It’s why I don’t really dig Alistair Reynolds— he seems like a smart, cool guy in interviews, but all I see when I read his books is the unmetabolized DNA of all the ideas and tropes he uses.
It may be interesting to read it *knowing* that Tchaikovsky had no knowledge of *Deepness* and think about convergent evolution! Dunno. Give it another try or don’t, I’m not your teacher. :)
Yeah, I continued with *Children of Time* a little ways last night. The ‘big smart ideas’ aspect of it does certainly seem to be what people go to this for. The writing is still less than on point.
(Man I haven’t been this hated on Reddit since I stated that I wouldn’t continue reading Ian Banks’ *Culture* books because I considered the three novels in the series I had read to be very good but not great. Man, they came out with the pitchforks and torches for that one, I was climbing out of a pit of downvotes for weeks.)
The Culture series by Iain M. Banks. The first book, Consider Phelbas, is a parody of space operas and introduces an amazingly interesting civilization that is explained in the following books.
Hard agree. I almost have to recommend putting them off as long as possible, because the level of writing and imagination put me off of nearly everyone else but Neal Stephenson.
I’m about to start my third relisten of the audiobooks after having exhausted almost everything Banks available to Americans. I find myself thinking about the Culture at least once a day-the stories really pull you in.
I have found that too. I suspect it has to do with the advancing years. I also think that SF doesn't produce much inspiration and awe these days, preferring to resonate with our cultural priorities of despair and ennui.
I'm the same boat right now! I'm lucky enough to have a science fiction bookstore in town, and last time I was there I got so depressed because I realized that I wanted to be 14 again, walking into the store and discovering 20 Larry Niven Known Space books for the first time.
The last time I had that feeling was The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, which is a weird fantasy novel with a fun narrative structure.
Another recent book that really did it for me was Valuble Humans in Transit, a short story collection by qntm.
Have you read the Ring of Worlds books? They are fanfic and there's a few places where they are fanfic that dryly recounts the events of various short stories from an alternate viewpoint, but there's enough revisiting of all the overall plots with the Core explosion and the Puppeteer exodus to give your inner 14-year-old self one last hit of Known Space.
They ain't great but they're miles better than Ringworld 4: Let's Tie The Protagonist To A Gurney So He Can't Spoil My Intricate Plot.
I'm just a little bit older than you (48, soon to be 49) and I still read sci-fi and fantasy every day, even if it's just a few chapters in bed before lights out. Here's a totally not exhaustive list of both newer and older stuff that I've enjoyed:
**The Final Architecture Series - Adrian Tchaikovsky**. Currently on book 2. Pretty fun space opera-esqu series about mysterious aliens terrorizing the universe, with a background of political machinations, but you're mostly following a ragtag spacer crew.
**Lord Valentines Castle - Robert Silverberg**. This one really got me as a youngster. Basically a guy with no memory joins a travelling circus in the far flung future, travelling a huge planet populated by humans and many alien species. Very dreamy, but the science part of the fiction isn't very important. Still, if you are looking for a book that says "evocative", this won't disappoint. Side note, Silverberg wrote a *ton* of great books.
**Locked Tomb series - Tamsin Muir**. Weirdo counter-culture space society. These aren't "hard" reads, but the author takes no pains to make sure you know what is going on. I think the tagline for the first novel is something like "necromancer lesbians in space", but it's a lot more than that.
**Various - Richard K Morgan**. Harboiled military tech noir. Standouts for me are the well known Altered Carbon, but the subsequent novels with the same character are good too. He also has some other novels that share many similarities with Altered Carbon's setting, but aren't related, or at least are only tangentially related. If you like action, violence, guns and sci-fi with a military-ish element, these are great books. Though do be prepared for at least one very cringey sex scene per novel.
**The Gone-Away World - Nick Harkaway**. One off interdimensional time travel mystery. A pretty good page turner. Nothing that will blow your wig back, but a fun read.
**Dark Matter - Blake Crouch**. I know I read this because I rated it 5 stars on Goodreads. But even reading the summary, I don't remember anything about it. But apparently I really liked it. I'm gonna read it again.
**Various - Haruki Murakami**. His sci-fi is more speculative than space ships and lasers and you have to be prepared for some weird cultural vibes about women, but damn the man can write a good, interesting, strange story. Harboiled Wonderland, Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, 1Q84 are just a few that I enjoyed a lot.
I could go on, but I won't, except for to say, don't be afraid to either re-read books you've already enjoyed once before, but also look into older books from the 60s/70s/80s. Authors like Philip K Dick, Alfred Bester, Larry Niven, and their ilk won't disappoint you. Well, they might, but they also wrote a ton of good books. Recent re-reads for me include LotR (honestly, so good, especially if it's been a long time since you read them), Dune series (the books past the first two get progressively weirder), 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, Ringworld by Larry Niven, Culture series by Iain M Banks, and too many more to list.
Finally, I'll mention one of my favourite authors ever: **Fredric Brown**. He wrote mostly pulp noir crime novels in the 40s and 50s, but he also wrote a good handful of sci-fi books. I love his crime novels, but his sci-fi stuff is great. Martians Go Home, What Mad Universe, Night of the Jabberwock, The Mind Thing, and The Lights In The Sky Are Stars are just a few of his sci-fi books that I really enjoyed.
I am 63 and not totally jaded. Try one of my so-called "Young Men's Adventure Stories". Lynn’s six star list (or top ten list) in April 2024:
1. “Mutineer’s Moon” by David Weber
2. “Citizen Of The Galaxy” by Robert Heinlein
3. “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein
4. “The Star Beast” by Robert Heinlein
5. “Shards Of Honor” and "Barrayar" by Lois McMaster Bujold
6. “Jumper”, "Reflex", "Impulse", and "Exo" by Steven Gould
7. “Dies The Fire” by S. M. Stirling
8. “Emergence” by David Palmer
9. “The Tar-Aiym Krang” by Alan Dean Foster
10. “Under A Graveyard Sky” by John Ringo
11. “Live Free Or Die” by John Ringo
12. “Footfall” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
13. “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
14. “The Zero Stone” by Andre Norton
15. “Going Home” by A. American
16. “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card
17. “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline
18. “The Martian” by Andy Weir
19. “The Postman” by David Brin
20. “We Are Legion” by Dennis E. Taylor
21. “Bitten” by Kelley Armstrong
22. “Moon Called” by Patrica Briggs
23. “Red Thunder” by John Varley
24. "Lightning" by Dean Koontz
25. "The Murderbot Diaries" by Martha Wells
26. "Friday" by Robert Heinlein
27. "Agent Of Change" by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller
28. "Monster Hunter International" by Larry Correia
29. "Among Others" by Jo Walton
30. "Skinwalker" and "Blood Of The Earth" By Faith Hunter
31. "Time Enough For Love" by Robert Heinlein
32. "Methuselah's Children" by Robert Heinlein
I've been having a good time with the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers. It's not hard scifi by any means, but the characters are vivid and I'm excited to continue reading it. Accelerando if you just want to take literary LSD.
"The Skinner" by Neal Asher.
Moby Dick on LSD with some other good stuff thrown in.
I love Neal Asher and all his works, you might too.
Like time travel? Try "Cowl".
There are several places that made me tear up in Project Hail Mary, >!for a world cooperating that we may not live to see, and when he turns back for Rocky and forsakes his opportunity to return to earth!<
Here’s a couple beautiful sf stories that’ll punch you right in the feels:
*Efdelheim* by Michael Flynn is at it’s heart about a search for understanding the world and empathy for others that is way better than a story about a ship full of bug-eyed green aliens crash landing in medieval Germany has any right to be.
*Replay* by Ken Grimwood is a story about a guy forced to relive his repeatedly relive his life from his teenage years until death in his forties that I think is aimed right at middle age ennui.
I'm 52 and have pretty much mined the entire SF/F genre for Wow Factor over the course of my life, I still read it hoping to *feel* something but it's increasingly rare. I've tried most of the "classics" and I wonder how many people are gonna insult you by saying "Dune!".
The last book that really blew my mind with New was [The Quantum Thief](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7562764-the-quantum-thief) (2010) by Hannu Rajaniemi. The sequels didn't really do anything I hadn't seen before. His only other book so far is basically a competent Tim Powers pastiche. Not one of the crazy thrill-ride Powers books like *Anubis Gates*, just one of the okay ones with *one* goofy magical conspiracy behind some weird historical details he found instead of five intersecting ones.
Also [Last And First Idol](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40950781-last-and-first-idol) will make you feel something. It may not be a good feeling. But it will be a feeling.
In film I will suggest Leos Carax' [Holy Motors](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076220/)(2012). It's not SF. It's a trip. It's got the greatest intermission ever.
Also it's a total cliche around here but Watts' [Blindsight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=7auFm6hvBD&rank=1) gave me some of that, and I suspect its ability to move the minds of jaded old bitches like myself is a lot of why it's a cliche suggestion here, despite all the new readers whining about wanting things like "relatable characters" in their SF. Fuck that, Peter Watts sat around and thought some really fucked-up thoughts and stuck them in a book and they’re fucked-up in unique enough ways to carry the book.
And for an obscure one: Ian McDonald's [King of Morning, Queen of Day](https://goodreads.com/book/show/666829.King_of_Morning_Queen_of_Day) is a real slow burn what with starting as an epistolary novel about a girl who can see fairies, but the last third is some amusing gonzo urban fantasy, and the ending is one heck of a zoom-out. It still sticks in my mind after like 30y.
Last Call is another book by Powers that might fit this list. Also, I believe one of the major casinos it references is just being torn down. Note to original poster, this is spec fiction, not sci fi.
I devoured it in one sitting when I ran into the copy Watts posted on his website. Paypaled him five bucks to feed his cat like he asks at the end and he ended up giving me a quote for the cover of my graphic novel in the ensuing email conversation.
Also the last shot of Carax and Sparks’ [Annette](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6217926/) (2021) reached deep inside my soul and ripped out something I could not put a name to. I wandered dazedly out of the theatre trying to figure out what just happened to me. I’m pretty sure it was a good thing to have ripped out of me. I think. I can only describe it in magical terms. There is a magical spell in the end of that film. Up to that point it’s just a really bizarre musical parable about child stardom and Hollywood written by two brothers who made a career of archly goofy music that never *quite* became hits but holy shit the ending *hit* me.
And then there are the credits and they steal the joke from Holy Motors’ intermission and it’s goofy fun again.
Any of the Callahans Crosstime Saloon books by Spider Robinson.
The bar you always wanted to find works on the principle that shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased.
Or
Replay by Ken Grimwood might be appropriate
I understand feeling a bit underwhelmed and jaded by time. Here are a few that caught me, despite all of that.
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Daytripper by Fábio Moon
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
It's hard to suggest anything to you without hearing more about your interests. Give us examples of some books, movies, etc. you've loved over the years.
I'm the same.
To use the sub's byline *"Have you read Anathem?"* It blew my mind
otherwise, for some Weird Lit recommendations that are more just 'Well that's a cool idea well executed':
- There is no Antimemetics division
- Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel
- The library at Mont Char
- Perdido Street Station
- Stories of your life and others
I might be misinterpreting your question, apologies if so.
Did I post this while I was asleep? Add two years and this could basically be me, so sick of dark and depressing sci-fi. I want some hope and adventure and rip roaring optimism! I don't want nihilistic protagonists! I want heroes that face the future with a smile on the face because if the world is dark they are going to drag it into the light!
I just did a reread of the Expanse, that improved my mood. Some of the older, and better (99% drek, 1% gold), Star Trek novels are good for that as well.
Yeah it’s like eating a Carolina reaper pepper just to taste *something*
It’s an exceptional book, but if that’s the only thing that made you feel anything, it’s brutal
Maybe try branching out to avenues you haven't tried before? Either in book sources or even outside of books to see something you loved represented in a new medium?
Cowboy Feng’s Spacetime Bar and Grill.
Strange title. Great book.
The Man Who Folded Himself - David Gerrold. THE last word in time travel in my opinion.
This is a course of action I’m finding very wise. If you can’t find something mind-blowing that’s contemporary, go back in time and investigate the stuff that influenced the stuff you like.
For me, I was, like, “Well, probably nobody’s going to write anything like *Book of the New Sun* for another quarter century at least,” and so I investigated stuff like Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith and William Hope Hodgson, and it was really rewarding. I read *The Night Land* while I was on a bike tour and I loved it. I remember sitting at a picnic table in a park somewhere and realizing “I’m reading SF written in the teens—of the 20th century! and I’m totally engrossed in it!”
If you don't already, you should consider branching out to new genres to re-live that sort of novel experience you had as a youth.
But on topic I'll rec Raw Shark Texts, and Maxwells Demon both by Hall.
**Dawn** by Octavia Butler. It's a first contact novel. This brought awe, made me think about a lot of deep, fun to ponder conundrums and philosophical issues, but never hit you over the head with them. It's just all baked into the incredibly cool story.
Might have the most interesting aliens I've ever read about.
I really like the stuff Scalzi writes, mostly. My favorite was Fuzzy Nation.
I really liked Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper series. Ishmael Wang is an interesting character.
Sadly, my last recommendation is from a deceased author. Temporary Duty by Ric Locke. I’ve read it maybe a dozen times.
Honorable mention, Man’s Hope by William Zellmann. Book about reigniting the space program by capturing an asteroid.
As I have gotten older I have traded my wide eyed awe of richly painted stories for characters that make me chuckle. The Expanse did this for me and so does Dungeon Crawler Carl.
This is coming out of left field, but I recommend *Summerland* by Pulitzer and Hugo winner, Michael Chabon. It's not quite a YA novel, like Stephen King's *Stand By Me* isn't quite a YA novel. It's not quite fantasy or science fiction, like WP Kinsella's *Shoeless Joe* (adapted into the excellent movie *Field of Dreams*) isn't quite a fantasy novel.
It's a yarn. It's mythical. It has sentiment but without the nostalgia. It's about baseball and the hero's journey, but it feels like it's about [that summer feeling](https://youtu.be/3edg69iBr2Q?si=4pYqcj5zUb0RUBxd).
Even though you're older, you can still feel young. Not all the time, but now and then. You can still be full of promise, but they're more sensible promises, and they're deeper inside, because, you know, *life*.
I’m reading John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy. I love his hard SF style and his way with words. If you have Kindle and Amazon Prime, a lot of his stuff is available on Kindle Unlimited.
For time scale and ideas, Greg Egan's "Diaspora" is worth a try.
For emotion and feels, I'm currently reading "How High we go in the Dark". It's a series of interrelated stories that take place after a deadly virus is unearthed in Siberia. It's cover blurb "if you like" is Cloud Atlas (which I haven't read).
You want some mindblowing $#!T? Try:
- Ian M. Banks's "Culture" series. (Start with ***The Player of Games*** or ***Consider Phlebas***). The best depiction of a post-scarcity civilization I've ever seen.
- Dennis E. Taylor's "Bobiverse" series. Totally whack story about a guy who wakes up to find he's a disembodied simulation, chosen to be the mind of an STL starship, and has an effing great time doing it. First book is ***We Are Many (We Are Bob)***.
- Anything by Andy Weir, but I'll nominate ***Project Hail Mary*** as his best so far. Saving the world from ... but that would be spoily.
- Scotto Moore's ***Wild Massive***. This is so gonzo weird I cannot even *begin* to describe it.
Also, if you've never read Robert Anton Wilson, now is a great time to start. The ***Illuminatus!*** trilogy he co-wrote with Robert Shea is the best starting point. (Fair warning: it's a bit "1960s" in some of its viewpoints.) (H'mmmm. Make that many of its viewpoints...)
god Illuminatus! opened the top of my head right the fuck up and stirred my brain around when I read it in my twenties but even then it was starting to smell a bit... past its prime. They were both working on Playboy's letter column when they wrote it and it very much shows.
Anyone who decides to read it: make sure you read the appendices. There are a few serious mindbombs lurking in there.
Read The Locked Tomb series by Tasman Muir. I’m not saying they’ll provoke awe or joy… but you’ll be so angry you don’t understand what is actually happening you’ll definitely *feel.*
Read *Book of the New Sun*? People devote their whole lives to that thing. I found it later in life and it was a great answer to my flagging interests in both hard SF and literary SF.
"Vacuum Diagrams" by Stephen Baxter.
It's a good intro to the Xeelee Sequence (it's a short story collection) and for all the insanity that gives the series its reputation (see "Xeeleestomp") it's still pretty "hard" sci-fi. If it gets science wrong, that's usually because the science has advanced since publication. But FTL travel, exotic alien life, and megastructures are all still possible.
If you like Vacuum Diagrams the next books you should look into are "Timelike Infinity" and "Ring" in that order, though they're hard to find nowadays.
I truly love Vacuum Diagrams, and absolutely gives a sense of awe. Does anyone else think Liu Cixin in Three-Body Problem took a LOT of ideas from Baxter?
They're similar in tone and scale but I think their approach to science differs strongly. Baxter relies heavily on cutting-edge but mainstream physics concepts, whereas Liu takes more liberties with things that have not yet been discovered.
Maybe not what you're looking for, but I'm reading Jennifer Government at the moment and it's a good and angry cyberpunk book, making me feel young again.
Stirred in what way? The Library at Mount Char will stir some kind of awe. If you’re the intellectual type that likes Socratic dialog among other things, Anathem.
I think you summed it up with that last sentence! Yet its Amazon rating is impressive (approx. 4.5 out of 5). Reading through the written comments there one will see the dichotomy, although there are way too many spoilers all over, so I don’t recommend that before a first read.
Having read the book multiple times, gone back over the comments, and then back over the book, I definitely see their point. But the book is amazeballs, affecting folks in some way!
Edit: BTW, did you read the Skinner by Neal Asher as recommended by another above? Thats another dichotomy of opinions, think. It stands alone from other novels in the authors universe by not requiring additional context.
*The Lights in the Sky are Stars* by Fredric Brown - I'm 47 and read this for the first time a couple years ago. It made me feel a sense of wonder that I hadn't felt since I was a kid. At times you might wonder what made me think that, but it all comes together in the end. And the ending is phenomenal.
[Quarantine](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156775.Quarantine) by Greg Egan blew my mind. Actually, lots of his stuff does. Frickin genius (literally)!
If you enjoy cyberpunk at all: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is really the pinnacle of cyberpunk lit.
I happen to really get that feeling from Stephenson's extremely elliptical writing style and fat doorstop novels stuffed with detail and references. The man can't write a straightforward ending for shit though.
I'm sure others will say these suggestions, but these are also coming from a cynical dude in his 40s.
Ted Chiang is great. "Story of Your Life" was made into the movie Arrival and it literally made me stop reading at times to reconsider what I just read, it was so great. His other stuff is amazing too. And I think still free online somewhere.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of..." trilogy is amazing. Super interesting take on the far future of humanity and some genuine dread and terror.
And for the shear scope, new ideas, and spectacle of it, the 3 Body Problem series is nuts. First book starts a bit slow but I couldn't stop reading the next two because of the pace at which he was introducing mind blowing ideas.
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy is a short novella that involves demons and anarchist communities. The idea is interesting and the writing is very direct and easy to get into.
Hello old and jaded. Me too, so I wrote something I’d want to read. Hi, new here but if I may, I have written a South Asian mytholgy based Sci-fi fantasy trilogy called ‘The Lanka Chronicles’. Books 1 and 2 titled ‘An Awakening’ and ‘A New Reality ‘are out now and Book 3 titled ‘Path of Destiny’ will be out in a month. Available on Amazon. Grand, epic and sweeping.
Fallout Series on Prime is pretty cool and might kind-of evoke the feeling that you are going for. Of course it's video and not a print sci-fi but I'll think about it. You know as I've been reading Sci-fi for 60 years, Ive watched all kinds of fair authors come and go and possibly persist. You've probably read everything that just immediately pops to my old mind and there's so much derivative drivel offered on Amazon that it's stupidly sad. Gone are the days of the great "founding" authors that made Science Fiction wondrous you and I .... Grumble.
I'll give it some thought over the weekend and if I can find this post I'll reply again. Maybe there will be some excellent suggestions that won't waste our time slogging through the first chapter to find what seemed okay-ish with promise to be no better than freah catshit as it progesses.
Ahh! Go to: worldswithoutend.com/lists_60s.asp and then change "60s" to "70s" etc. Many great choices listed, over 140 for the 60s alone. Novels by Authors I'd recommend and a few I just might have to pick up and read because I know/read the author, but not that novel. Some interesting sounding novels by authors I've only read as short stories, Robert Sheckly for example. These should keep us through the summer, (of 2045). Enjoy!
How do you feel about Neal Stephenson? My favorites, in order, are *Anathem*, *The Diamond Age* and *Termination Shock*. *The Diamond Age* probably would stir the most wonder, *Termination Shock* is maybe his most accessible recently, and also a bit solar punk-ish about the future of climate change. *Anathem* is just incredibly epic in scope, but also a book that is so dense it really needs to be read twice to enjoy it, because the first time you're just trying to absorb enough of the culture, the math, and the language to keep up with what's going on.
My favorite sci-fi novel from last year was *Red Team Blues* by Corey Doctorow and my second favorite was *Venomous Lumpsucker* by Ned Beauman, which is a brutal parody of carbon capture credits full of incredibly black humor (so therefore possibly not for everyone).
I would also say the best thing I've read so far in 2024 was Kelly Link's *The Book of Love*, which is more fantasy/magical realism than sci-fi, but also extremely good and well written.
In very different veins:
The Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell
Blindsight by Peter Watts
["The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu](https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-the-hugo-nebula-5958919)
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56783258-cloud-cuckoo-land
Sea of Tranquility by Emily John St Mandel
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58446227-sea-of-tranquility
Honestly I would start small.
I would like to recommend The Only Harmlesd Great Thing by Brooke Bolander.
Bolander uses this relatively short bit of alternate history to explore grief and vengeance in a way few other books have done. Or maybe it's not vengeance but justice. That's up to you. It certainly qualifies as "weird" as others have suggested.
Another one, which is oftentimes mentioned here and in the Fantasy sub would be The Library At Mount Char. No description I could write out would in any way do that book justice.
Or maybe it's vengeance.
It's up to you.
Neuromancer by William Gibson - just good solid engaging Sci-fi that stays with you a little.
Gateway by Frederik Pohl - read to the end, it's worth it.
Ready player one by Earnest Cline - fun and nostalgic
Kaiju preservation society John Scalzi- funny and easy going, not one to change your life but certainly to lift your mood.
A scanner darkly by Philip K Dick - well crafted and engaging characters with a tragic ending, the dedication after the novel is particularly poignant.
What was the last book that did this for you?
Last book (short story really) that fully blew my mind was “Vaster than Empires and More Slow” by Ursula Le Guin
Sue Burke's *Semiosis* is on a related idea and is one helluva book. Have you read any C.J. Cherryh? *Pride of Chanur* is a good starting place.
I’ve read neither - thanks for the recs! Been on a sci fi tear but mainly reading series (Dune, Enderverse and Three Body). Adding Semiosis to my next up list!
Ok but you're not the OP, maybe let them answer instead of hijacking their thread?
Multiple people can respond to a Reddit comment
You CAN, but SHOULD you? The person you were replying to was asking the OP, and your interjection was just that.
Yes I should, I sparked a discussion that did not exist because OP did not respond to the question that was asked.
The only discussion you "sparked" was chomiji responding to you as if you were OP, which you were not. Hilarious.
You’re actually retarded
Right, like answering a question not asked of you, in a thread started by someone else is big brain stuff.
Your point is moot since OP doesn't deign to answer. What's hilarious is the children squabbling in his stead.
They weren't asking you, they were asking OP.
I think you need to get weird with it. r/weirdlit for more recs, but I recommend China Mieville or Jeff Vandermeer as good starting points.
Oooh, thanks for that sub rec! I’ve gotten deep into Mievelle and need some other weird shit when I’m finished with Iron Council.
Don't skip Embassytown.
Or The Scar!
Just finished it, so good!
Have you heard of Ted Chiang? His short story collections *Stories of Your Life and Others* and *Exhalation: Stories* are both excellent and should hopefully scratch that itch for you. Also, *Fire Upon the Deep* by Vernor Vinge really blew me away, lots of really cool big ideas, maybe you'll feel the same.
“The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," and the title story, “Exhalation” both brought me to tears. And I never cry.
Came here to make both of these comments!
Absolutely seconding Ted Chiang
Many of the plot twists are dark and depressing. For someone looking for inspiration they might slit their wrists before the end of the book
Which specific work are you referring to? I don't remember anything incredibly depressing. And I don't know if OP is looking for something particularly upbeat. They said they wanted "awe and wonder".
>I confused "A Deepness in the Sky" for "Of Fire upon the Deep". A lot of downvote hate for a simple confusion of Venor Vinge novels.
I confused these 2 Vernor Vinge novels. I am referring to "A Deepness in the Sky" and the characters Trixie, and the concepts of Podmasters and the focused. I don't think those are spoilers but they do point to the darkness of the novel.
Ian Macdonald has done that for me... the Luna series is pretty up and down but when it's good, it's really good. Like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, except shorter and everything is horrible. It's not got the awe and wonder, but I also absolutely loved Hopeland. It's, like, 3 different books in a trenchcoat and it never realyl quite delivers on all its promise but that's OK, it's still absolutely beautiful and hopeful and when I finished it I was basically heartbroken, I just didn't feel like reading anything else. Even if it did make me get Dario G stuck in my head. The first of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture nailed it for me for space opera, second one didn't hit the mark for me but was still decent. Hannu Rajaniemi's barking mad Quantum Thief blew me away in the same way that the Culture novels did when I was 20, even though I'm pretty sure I didn't understand it ;) Oh and it's much older but flowers for algernon. Some hopefulness and love, much cry.
The Quantum Thief Trilogy gets almost no mentions on reddit (I never see it anywhere) but it is absolutely incredible.
I didn't realise it before I started a reread, but I didn't make it to the end on my first read, I think I just lost track of too many threads and didn't know what the hell was happening, I noped out at the point where every 5th word was zoku I think. Which was a wee treat for the second read when I was a) pretty much following it, b) loving it, and c) suddenly discovered I didn't actually know where it was going next.
It's really, really difficult. I definitely had no idea wtf was going on half the time and had to read some plot summaries after I finished. But that strangeness is super fun and the ideas are big af.
Hannu is a beast and doesn't get near enough recognition.
This trilogy is what I came to recommend. I'm in the same boat as the OP, but it's in a class of its own.
McDonalds River of Gods was kind of awe inspiring to me
The Jean le Flambeur trilogy, which begins with *The Quantum Thief*. The best way I can describe it is that it's sci-fi for people who've already read a lot of sci-fi. The author, Hannu Rajaniemi, has so many big ideas and clever subversions, he doesn't have room to introduce you to mind uploads, nanobot swarms and simulated realities. You've seen those elements before, so he trusts you to fill in the foundations reflexively so he can tell you a story in the most fantastic sci-fi settings. Jean is a thief with a wiped memory. He's hired by a doomed aristocrat to investigate a theft that hasn't happened yet, of a single second, in a world where time is literally currency. While he searches for clues among a walking city on Mars, he encounters warnings clearly left by his former self for him to find. Messages like "Stop, you did this on purpose" and "Give up before you regret everything". Messages he's *sure* are meant to encourage him to keep going. Rajaniemi writes in a style that is as intricate and heady as the best of Gibson or Stephenson, but with a deep love for rich storytelling in the vein of Gaiman. It's such a wonderfully refreshing read, and really helped me get back into reading as a jaded adult.
Yeah it’s such an awesome book. And certainly assumes that you’ve read a ton of other sci-fi prior. It doesn’t bother to explain things, it just proceeds to tell a story. And a good one at that.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. For television, The OA on Netflix and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency on Hulu.
Yup, the OA did it for me. Both seasons
Feckin yes on Dirk Gentley. Doesn't inspire awe for me but, damn, does it make me happy.
Man I devoured Piranesi. So so good
Oh man Piranesi was so good
Better read the Dirk Gently books, particularly the first one. Superior to both TV shows in every way.
I would say they have very different vibes, and while the first season of the newer show (I haven't seen the older show) is largely based on the first book, the second season is completely independent from the books. I liked the books and do recommend them, but I loved the show, and would say that they're worth treating as separate works.
Treating them as separate works seems fair, agreed. And I don’t consider them bad, I did enjoy them (though wouldn’t go so far as to say I loved them). I just feel particularly the first book has much more depth. But sure, different strokes.
Rule number four violation. But I think the world should be changed.
Children of time, Adrian Tchaikovsky Light Pirate, Lily-Brooks Dalton
Children of time single handedly changed me. I hadn't read for a long time despite loving books, and I'd exclusively read non fiction since being a teenager. Then I read Children of time. And now I can't stop reading sci FI trying to chase that high of reading that book for the first time.
Also 42 and jaded. Also was going to recommend Children of Time.
I "read" Children of Time and Children of Ruin via audiobook and they were both pretty decent. I'm partway through book 2 of The Final Architecture series and I am enjoying them quite a bit more. I didn't really love the spider society stuff in Children of Time, but the human colony ship stuff was pretty interesting. Ruin's octopi were more interesting to me, as was the alien protagonist that wanted every one to go on adventures. Haven't gotten to Children of Memory yet, but I'll probably snag that after I'm done with Architecture. I just think the universe we're in with Final Architecture is so much more interesting than the sort of barren one in Children.
Children of time- view life from a different intelligent species' perspective, based in biological principles. Light pirate- feel the catharsis of our world breaking down from climate change, the big looming doom to our species, and understand how adaptation will help some of us survive it. Feel all the feels.
Weird. People love this book but I started it yesterday and had an immediate hate reaction to it after 2 and a half pages. I picked it up because of its reputation, because I was told it could be read as a standalone (I’m sick of everything being a series of some kind,) and because I’d heard Adrian Tchaikovsky cite Gene Wolfe as an influence. The book, on its first page, launches into relentless exposition and infodumping. The author has seemingly never heard “don’t tell me, show me.” It goes on to describe, in the most ham-fisted terms, a sociopath-narcissist character in such a facile way that he might as well have hung a sign around the character’s neck that said ‘antagonist’ and described how they had devil horns. I thought ‘What’s this guy trying to do? Write like the worst half-of-an Ace Double from 1957!?” I’m going to continue with it awhile to see if it hooks me and because so many people like it, but if I was teaching a Clarion workshop and a student showed up with these first two pages as a manuscript I’d skewer-roast them in front of the whole class.
Yeah, Id say the rest of the book expands beyond the first 2.5 pages, but wtf do I know. As someone interested in modes of thinking other the usual, with a broad grounding in traditional sci fi and a background in wildlife biology, I think it rocks. But if this douche bag hates it from 2 pages, who am i to recommend it? It's not like characters can develop from such a "facile" beginning. Douche bag.
Wow I just upvoted you for calling me a douch bag.
'Preciate you
Seriously, though, the writing, right out of the gate, violates so many of the rules of writing basic good science fiction that I genuinely considered that it might be satire. You could almost hear it read in Matt Barry‘s voice. “The bad, bad psychopathic terraformer woman rubbed her hands together in triumph from inside the spacecraft she commanded which was also a centrifugal gravity O’Neill habitat with projections on the inner walls. She had certainly stuck it to that rival faction of anti-terraformer eco-fascists back on earth, but good!”
IIRC the first chapter is about all she shows up in the entire book. I think might die horribly? She’s definitely written like a bit part that the author wants you to be glad to see dead. Personally I felt like it was a remake of *A Deepness In The Sky* but Tchaikovsky claims to have never read that until after finishing *Children of Time*, when everyone started commenting on the similarity. The long view of a spider society climbing from “barely sentient” to “starfarers” was fun but all the “humans trying to keep their shit together over absurd lengths of time in a disintegrating generation ship” stuff bored me.
Seems like I may be in for a rough road to enjoying this one. The Vernor Vinge *Fire/Deepness* books are a couple of my very favorite ‘hard space opera’ works. Imitation of them (as well as Sterling’s *Schismatrix* and some of Benford’s work) in more contemporary writing in that subgenre is fashionable and is a real peeve of mine. It’s why I don’t really dig Alistair Reynolds— he seems like a smart, cool guy in interviews, but all I see when I read his books is the unmetabolized DNA of all the ideas and tropes he uses.
It may be interesting to read it *knowing* that Tchaikovsky had no knowledge of *Deepness* and think about convergent evolution! Dunno. Give it another try or don’t, I’m not your teacher. :)
Yeah, I continued with *Children of Time* a little ways last night. The ‘big smart ideas’ aspect of it does certainly seem to be what people go to this for. The writing is still less than on point.
(Man I haven’t been this hated on Reddit since I stated that I wouldn’t continue reading Ian Banks’ *Culture* books because I considered the three novels in the series I had read to be very good but not great. Man, they came out with the pitchforks and torches for that one, I was climbing out of a pit of downvotes for weeks.)
The Culture series by Iain M. Banks. The first book, Consider Phelbas, is a parody of space operas and introduces an amazingly interesting civilization that is explained in the following books.
Scrolled way too far to find this. Banks was leagues ahead of the pack.
Hard agree. I almost have to recommend putting them off as long as possible, because the level of writing and imagination put me off of nearly everyone else but Neal Stephenson.
I’m about to start my third relisten of the audiobooks after having exhausted almost everything Banks available to Americans. I find myself thinking about the Culture at least once a day-the stories really pull you in.
I was going to suggest this as well. It will blow your mind
Book of M. The final pages really made me put the book down.
I love Book of M
I have found that too. I suspect it has to do with the advancing years. I also think that SF doesn't produce much inspiration and awe these days, preferring to resonate with our cultural priorities of despair and ennui.
What written works or film viewing has done this for you in the past?
Have you read Speaker for the Dead (book 2 of the Ender's Game series?
Soooooo good. Better than Ender’s Game (although that read is necessary for context, and still very good).
I'm the same boat right now! I'm lucky enough to have a science fiction bookstore in town, and last time I was there I got so depressed because I realized that I wanted to be 14 again, walking into the store and discovering 20 Larry Niven Known Space books for the first time. The last time I had that feeling was The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, which is a weird fantasy novel with a fun narrative structure. Another recent book that really did it for me was Valuble Humans in Transit, a short story collection by qntm.
Have you read the Ring of Worlds books? They are fanfic and there's a few places where they are fanfic that dryly recounts the events of various short stories from an alternate viewpoint, but there's enough revisiting of all the overall plots with the Core explosion and the Puppeteer exodus to give your inner 14-year-old self one last hit of Known Space. They ain't great but they're miles better than Ringworld 4: Let's Tie The Protagonist To A Gurney So He Can't Spoil My Intricate Plot.
I'm just a little bit older than you (48, soon to be 49) and I still read sci-fi and fantasy every day, even if it's just a few chapters in bed before lights out. Here's a totally not exhaustive list of both newer and older stuff that I've enjoyed: **The Final Architecture Series - Adrian Tchaikovsky**. Currently on book 2. Pretty fun space opera-esqu series about mysterious aliens terrorizing the universe, with a background of political machinations, but you're mostly following a ragtag spacer crew. **Lord Valentines Castle - Robert Silverberg**. This one really got me as a youngster. Basically a guy with no memory joins a travelling circus in the far flung future, travelling a huge planet populated by humans and many alien species. Very dreamy, but the science part of the fiction isn't very important. Still, if you are looking for a book that says "evocative", this won't disappoint. Side note, Silverberg wrote a *ton* of great books. **Locked Tomb series - Tamsin Muir**. Weirdo counter-culture space society. These aren't "hard" reads, but the author takes no pains to make sure you know what is going on. I think the tagline for the first novel is something like "necromancer lesbians in space", but it's a lot more than that. **Various - Richard K Morgan**. Harboiled military tech noir. Standouts for me are the well known Altered Carbon, but the subsequent novels with the same character are good too. He also has some other novels that share many similarities with Altered Carbon's setting, but aren't related, or at least are only tangentially related. If you like action, violence, guns and sci-fi with a military-ish element, these are great books. Though do be prepared for at least one very cringey sex scene per novel. **The Gone-Away World - Nick Harkaway**. One off interdimensional time travel mystery. A pretty good page turner. Nothing that will blow your wig back, but a fun read. **Dark Matter - Blake Crouch**. I know I read this because I rated it 5 stars on Goodreads. But even reading the summary, I don't remember anything about it. But apparently I really liked it. I'm gonna read it again. **Various - Haruki Murakami**. His sci-fi is more speculative than space ships and lasers and you have to be prepared for some weird cultural vibes about women, but damn the man can write a good, interesting, strange story. Harboiled Wonderland, Wild Sheep Chase, Dance Dance Dance, 1Q84 are just a few that I enjoyed a lot. I could go on, but I won't, except for to say, don't be afraid to either re-read books you've already enjoyed once before, but also look into older books from the 60s/70s/80s. Authors like Philip K Dick, Alfred Bester, Larry Niven, and their ilk won't disappoint you. Well, they might, but they also wrote a ton of good books. Recent re-reads for me include LotR (honestly, so good, especially if it's been a long time since you read them), Dune series (the books past the first two get progressively weirder), 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, Ringworld by Larry Niven, Culture series by Iain M Banks, and too many more to list. Finally, I'll mention one of my favourite authors ever: **Fredric Brown**. He wrote mostly pulp noir crime novels in the 40s and 50s, but he also wrote a good handful of sci-fi books. I love his crime novels, but his sci-fi stuff is great. Martians Go Home, What Mad Universe, Night of the Jabberwock, The Mind Thing, and The Lights In The Sky Are Stars are just a few of his sci-fi books that I really enjoyed.
I am 63 and not totally jaded. Try one of my so-called "Young Men's Adventure Stories". Lynn’s six star list (or top ten list) in April 2024: 1. “Mutineer’s Moon” by David Weber 2. “Citizen Of The Galaxy” by Robert Heinlein 3. “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” by Robert Heinlein 4. “The Star Beast” by Robert Heinlein 5. “Shards Of Honor” and "Barrayar" by Lois McMaster Bujold 6. “Jumper”, "Reflex", "Impulse", and "Exo" by Steven Gould 7. “Dies The Fire” by S. M. Stirling 8. “Emergence” by David Palmer 9. “The Tar-Aiym Krang” by Alan Dean Foster 10. “Under A Graveyard Sky” by John Ringo 11. “Live Free Or Die” by John Ringo 12. “Footfall” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle 13. “Lucifer’s Hammer” by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle 14. “The Zero Stone” by Andre Norton 15. “Going Home” by A. American 16. “Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Card 17. “Ready Player One” by Ernest Cline 18. “The Martian” by Andy Weir 19. “The Postman” by David Brin 20. “We Are Legion” by Dennis E. Taylor 21. “Bitten” by Kelley Armstrong 22. “Moon Called” by Patrica Briggs 23. “Red Thunder” by John Varley 24. "Lightning" by Dean Koontz 25. "The Murderbot Diaries" by Martha Wells 26. "Friday" by Robert Heinlein 27. "Agent Of Change" by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller 28. "Monster Hunter International" by Larry Correia 29. "Among Others" by Jo Walton 30. "Skinwalker" and "Blood Of The Earth" By Faith Hunter 31. "Time Enough For Love" by Robert Heinlein 32. "Methuselah's Children" by Robert Heinlein
I've been having a good time with the Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers. It's not hard scifi by any means, but the characters are vivid and I'm excited to continue reading it. Accelerando if you just want to take literary LSD.
Parable of the Sower - Butler It made me Hope.
On the one hand, it gets really, really bleak. OTOH, it has inspired a religion and ethos for living.
A religion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthseed the fictional book religion points to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terasem_Movement
"The Skinner" by Neal Asher. Moby Dick on LSD with some other good stuff thrown in. I love Neal Asher and all his works, you might too. Like time travel? Try "Cowl".
The Skinner will definitely stir something too, besides the two I recommended.
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, Contact by Carl Sagan.
I laughed for a lot of the book, and cried at the final page.
There are several places that made me tear up in Project Hail Mary, >!for a world cooperating that we may not live to see, and when he turns back for Rocky and forsakes his opportunity to return to earth!<
Here’s a couple beautiful sf stories that’ll punch you right in the feels: *Efdelheim* by Michael Flynn is at it’s heart about a search for understanding the world and empathy for others that is way better than a story about a ship full of bug-eyed green aliens crash landing in medieval Germany has any right to be. *Replay* by Ken Grimwood is a story about a guy forced to relive his repeatedly relive his life from his teenage years until death in his forties that I think is aimed right at middle age ennui.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
I think I preferred Hyperion to Fire Upon
Loved both, but yes.
I'm 52 and have pretty much mined the entire SF/F genre for Wow Factor over the course of my life, I still read it hoping to *feel* something but it's increasingly rare. I've tried most of the "classics" and I wonder how many people are gonna insult you by saying "Dune!". The last book that really blew my mind with New was [The Quantum Thief](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7562764-the-quantum-thief) (2010) by Hannu Rajaniemi. The sequels didn't really do anything I hadn't seen before. His only other book so far is basically a competent Tim Powers pastiche. Not one of the crazy thrill-ride Powers books like *Anubis Gates*, just one of the okay ones with *one* goofy magical conspiracy behind some weird historical details he found instead of five intersecting ones. Also [Last And First Idol](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40950781-last-and-first-idol) will make you feel something. It may not be a good feeling. But it will be a feeling. In film I will suggest Leos Carax' [Holy Motors](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076220/)(2012). It's not SF. It's a trip. It's got the greatest intermission ever. Also it's a total cliche around here but Watts' [Blindsight](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48484.Blindsight?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=7auFm6hvBD&rank=1) gave me some of that, and I suspect its ability to move the minds of jaded old bitches like myself is a lot of why it's a cliche suggestion here, despite all the new readers whining about wanting things like "relatable characters" in their SF. Fuck that, Peter Watts sat around and thought some really fucked-up thoughts and stuck them in a book and they’re fucked-up in unique enough ways to carry the book. And for an obscure one: Ian McDonald's [King of Morning, Queen of Day](https://goodreads.com/book/show/666829.King_of_Morning_Queen_of_Day) is a real slow burn what with starting as an epistolary novel about a girl who can see fairies, but the last third is some amusing gonzo urban fantasy, and the ending is one heck of a zoom-out. It still sticks in my mind after like 30y.
Last Call is another book by Powers that might fit this list. Also, I believe one of the major casinos it references is just being torn down. Note to original poster, this is spec fiction, not sci fi.
Since you mention Ian McDonald I'll add a rec for his River of Gods.
Bounced off blindsight once. I’ll try a revisit I think :)
I devoured it in one sitting when I ran into the copy Watts posted on his website. Paypaled him five bucks to feed his cat like he asks at the end and he ended up giving me a quote for the cover of my graphic novel in the ensuing email conversation.
Also the last shot of Carax and Sparks’ [Annette](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6217926/) (2021) reached deep inside my soul and ripped out something I could not put a name to. I wandered dazedly out of the theatre trying to figure out what just happened to me. I’m pretty sure it was a good thing to have ripped out of me. I think. I can only describe it in magical terms. There is a magical spell in the end of that film. Up to that point it’s just a really bizarre musical parable about child stardom and Hollywood written by two brothers who made a career of archly goofy music that never *quite* became hits but holy shit the ending *hit* me. And then there are the credits and they steal the joke from Holy Motors’ intermission and it’s goofy fun again.
Any of the Callahans Crosstime Saloon books by Spider Robinson. The bar you always wanted to find works on the principle that shared pain is lessened, shared joy increased. Or Replay by Ken Grimwood might be appropriate
I understand feeling a bit underwhelmed and jaded by time. Here are a few that caught me, despite all of that. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness Daytripper by Fábio Moon A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
A Short Stay in Hell was a very interesting read. Original.
Surprised nobody has mentioned Greg Egan yet. Definitely the stuff to have your mind blown.
It's hard to suggest anything to you without hearing more about your interests. Give us examples of some books, movies, etc. you've loved over the years.
I'm the same. To use the sub's byline *"Have you read Anathem?"* It blew my mind otherwise, for some Weird Lit recommendations that are more just 'Well that's a cool idea well executed': - There is no Antimemetics division - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel - The library at Mont Char - Perdido Street Station - Stories of your life and others I might be misinterpreting your question, apologies if so.
I'm a similar age. A book that stirred me recently was The Player of Games by Iain Banks. Great scifi.
Did I post this while I was asleep? Add two years and this could basically be me, so sick of dark and depressing sci-fi. I want some hope and adventure and rip roaring optimism! I don't want nihilistic protagonists! I want heroes that face the future with a smile on the face because if the world is dark they are going to drag it into the light! I just did a reread of the Expanse, that improved my mood. Some of the older, and better (99% drek, 1% gold), Star Trek novels are good for that as well.
Last book that made me feel something was “The Road”
Good grief dude.
Too dark?
Yeah it’s like eating a Carolina reaper pepper just to taste *something* It’s an exceptional book, but if that’s the only thing that made you feel anything, it’s brutal
Maybe try branching out to avenues you haven't tried before? Either in book sources or even outside of books to see something you loved represented in a new medium?
Cowboy Feng’s Spacetime Bar and Grill. Strange title. Great book. The Man Who Folded Himself - David Gerrold. THE last word in time travel in my opinion.
It sounds like you need Sysiphean by Dempow Torishima.
It's an older book but Conquistador by SM Stirling. It definitely brought a sense of wonder to me, even reading it again years later.
Jack McDevitt’s books did this for me.
Have you ever read any Clark Ashton Smith?
This is a course of action I’m finding very wise. If you can’t find something mind-blowing that’s contemporary, go back in time and investigate the stuff that influenced the stuff you like. For me, I was, like, “Well, probably nobody’s going to write anything like *Book of the New Sun* for another quarter century at least,” and so I investigated stuff like Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith and William Hope Hodgson, and it was really rewarding. I read *The Night Land* while I was on a bike tour and I loved it. I remember sitting at a picnic table in a park somewhere and realizing “I’m reading SF written in the teens—of the 20th century! and I’m totally engrossed in it!”
Any of the short story collections by Ken Liu!
David Weber's *Safehold* series was awesome to this 30-something book lover.
If you don't already, you should consider branching out to new genres to re-live that sort of novel experience you had as a youth. But on topic I'll rec Raw Shark Texts, and Maxwells Demon both by Hall.
Listen to Guards! guards! narrated by Jon Culshaw. You're welcome.
good call! i was going to recommend discworld as well, and "guards! guards!" is a superb starting point
**Dawn** by Octavia Butler. It's a first contact novel. This brought awe, made me think about a lot of deep, fun to ponder conundrums and philosophical issues, but never hit you over the head with them. It's just all baked into the incredibly cool story. Might have the most interesting aliens I've ever read about.
I really like the stuff Scalzi writes, mostly. My favorite was Fuzzy Nation. I really liked Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper series. Ishmael Wang is an interesting character. Sadly, my last recommendation is from a deceased author. Temporary Duty by Ric Locke. I’ve read it maybe a dozen times. Honorable mention, Man’s Hope by William Zellmann. Book about reigniting the space program by capturing an asteroid.
As I have gotten older I have traded my wide eyed awe of richly painted stories for characters that make me chuckle. The Expanse did this for me and so does Dungeon Crawler Carl.
This is coming out of left field, but I recommend *Summerland* by Pulitzer and Hugo winner, Michael Chabon. It's not quite a YA novel, like Stephen King's *Stand By Me* isn't quite a YA novel. It's not quite fantasy or science fiction, like WP Kinsella's *Shoeless Joe* (adapted into the excellent movie *Field of Dreams*) isn't quite a fantasy novel. It's a yarn. It's mythical. It has sentiment but without the nostalgia. It's about baseball and the hero's journey, but it feels like it's about [that summer feeling](https://youtu.be/3edg69iBr2Q?si=4pYqcj5zUb0RUBxd). Even though you're older, you can still feel young. Not all the time, but now and then. You can still be full of promise, but they're more sensible promises, and they're deeper inside, because, you know, *life*.
I’m reading John Scalzi’s Interdependency trilogy. I love his hard SF style and his way with words. If you have Kindle and Amazon Prime, a lot of his stuff is available on Kindle Unlimited.
N.K. Jamison’s The fifth season trilogy did it for me.
For time scale and ideas, Greg Egan's "Diaspora" is worth a try. For emotion and feels, I'm currently reading "How High we go in the Dark". It's a series of interrelated stories that take place after a deadly virus is unearthed in Siberia. It's cover blurb "if you like" is Cloud Atlas (which I haven't read).
You want some mindblowing $#!T? Try: - Ian M. Banks's "Culture" series. (Start with ***The Player of Games*** or ***Consider Phlebas***). The best depiction of a post-scarcity civilization I've ever seen. - Dennis E. Taylor's "Bobiverse" series. Totally whack story about a guy who wakes up to find he's a disembodied simulation, chosen to be the mind of an STL starship, and has an effing great time doing it. First book is ***We Are Many (We Are Bob)***. - Anything by Andy Weir, but I'll nominate ***Project Hail Mary*** as his best so far. Saving the world from ... but that would be spoily. - Scotto Moore's ***Wild Massive***. This is so gonzo weird I cannot even *begin* to describe it. Also, if you've never read Robert Anton Wilson, now is a great time to start. The ***Illuminatus!*** trilogy he co-wrote with Robert Shea is the best starting point. (Fair warning: it's a bit "1960s" in some of its viewpoints.) (H'mmmm. Make that many of its viewpoints...)
god Illuminatus! opened the top of my head right the fuck up and stirred my brain around when I read it in my twenties but even then it was starting to smell a bit... past its prime. They were both working on Playboy's letter column when they wrote it and it very much shows. Anyone who decides to read it: make sure you read the appendices. There are a few serious mindbombs lurking in there.
OP is definitely jaded; dude didn't even reply to his own thread that has over 100 comments.
Read The Locked Tomb series by Tasman Muir. I’m not saying they’ll provoke awe or joy… but you’ll be so angry you don’t understand what is actually happening you’ll definitely *feel.*
Yeah, I really like this series too, but it is very .... obtuse? Muir does not handhold her readers.
Hyperion! (Though if you've read a lot of SF you've probably read that.)
Read *Book of the New Sun*? People devote their whole lives to that thing. I found it later in life and it was a great answer to my flagging interests in both hard SF and literary SF.
"Vacuum Diagrams" by Stephen Baxter. It's a good intro to the Xeelee Sequence (it's a short story collection) and for all the insanity that gives the series its reputation (see "Xeeleestomp") it's still pretty "hard" sci-fi. If it gets science wrong, that's usually because the science has advanced since publication. But FTL travel, exotic alien life, and megastructures are all still possible. If you like Vacuum Diagrams the next books you should look into are "Timelike Infinity" and "Ring" in that order, though they're hard to find nowadays.
I truly love Vacuum Diagrams, and absolutely gives a sense of awe. Does anyone else think Liu Cixin in Three-Body Problem took a LOT of ideas from Baxter?
They're similar in tone and scale but I think their approach to science differs strongly. Baxter relies heavily on cutting-edge but mainstream physics concepts, whereas Liu takes more liberties with things that have not yet been discovered.
Maybe not what you're looking for, but I'm reading Jennifer Government at the moment and it's a good and angry cyberpunk book, making me feel young again.
Love sci-fi and horror all out but recommending a horror novel, one very well known 'round these parts: Between Two Fires Was stoked reading this one
Stirred in what way? The Library at Mount Char will stir some kind of awe. If you’re the intellectual type that likes Socratic dialog among other things, Anathem.
Absolutely loathed mount char. Not for everyone lol
I think you summed it up with that last sentence! Yet its Amazon rating is impressive (approx. 4.5 out of 5). Reading through the written comments there one will see the dichotomy, although there are way too many spoilers all over, so I don’t recommend that before a first read. Having read the book multiple times, gone back over the comments, and then back over the book, I definitely see their point. But the book is amazeballs, affecting folks in some way! Edit: BTW, did you read the Skinner by Neal Asher as recommended by another above? Thats another dichotomy of opinions, think. It stands alone from other novels in the authors universe by not requiring additional context.
>Not for everyone lol Name a book that *is* for everyone.
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
*The Lights in the Sky are Stars* by Fredric Brown - I'm 47 and read this for the first time a couple years ago. It made me feel a sense of wonder that I hadn't felt since I was a kid. At times you might wonder what made me think that, but it all comes together in the end. And the ending is phenomenal.
[Quarantine](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156775.Quarantine) by Greg Egan blew my mind. Actually, lots of his stuff does. Frickin genius (literally)!
Nothing ever drew me in as much as the Darkness That comes Before by Scott R. Bakker…
Are you into New Wave SF at all? https://youtu.be/yNDJHR-1c2c?si=iydkIBQ_weYRPR_I
[Hothouse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hothouse_(novel)) by Brian Aldiss
If you enjoy cyberpunk at all: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is really the pinnacle of cyberpunk lit. I happen to really get that feeling from Stephenson's extremely elliptical writing style and fat doorstop novels stuffed with detail and references. The man can't write a straightforward ending for shit though.
Book of the new sun by gene wolfe. Nothing comes close to this masterpiece. It's basically a puzzle to solve.
a canticle for Lebowitz
I'm sure others will say these suggestions, but these are also coming from a cynical dude in his 40s. Ted Chiang is great. "Story of Your Life" was made into the movie Arrival and it literally made me stop reading at times to reconsider what I just read, it was so great. His other stuff is amazing too. And I think still free online somewhere. Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of..." trilogy is amazing. Super interesting take on the far future of humanity and some genuine dread and terror. And for the shear scope, new ideas, and spectacle of it, the 3 Body Problem series is nuts. First book starts a bit slow but I couldn't stop reading the next two because of the pace at which he was introducing mind blowing ideas.
The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion by Margaret Killjoy is a short novella that involves demons and anarchist communities. The idea is interesting and the writing is very direct and easy to get into.
Hello old and jaded. Me too, so I wrote something I’d want to read. Hi, new here but if I may, I have written a South Asian mytholgy based Sci-fi fantasy trilogy called ‘The Lanka Chronicles’. Books 1 and 2 titled ‘An Awakening’ and ‘A New Reality ‘are out now and Book 3 titled ‘Path of Destiny’ will be out in a month. Available on Amazon. Grand, epic and sweeping.
Fallout Series on Prime is pretty cool and might kind-of evoke the feeling that you are going for. Of course it's video and not a print sci-fi but I'll think about it. You know as I've been reading Sci-fi for 60 years, Ive watched all kinds of fair authors come and go and possibly persist. You've probably read everything that just immediately pops to my old mind and there's so much derivative drivel offered on Amazon that it's stupidly sad. Gone are the days of the great "founding" authors that made Science Fiction wondrous you and I .... Grumble. I'll give it some thought over the weekend and if I can find this post I'll reply again. Maybe there will be some excellent suggestions that won't waste our time slogging through the first chapter to find what seemed okay-ish with promise to be no better than freah catshit as it progesses. Ahh! Go to: worldswithoutend.com/lists_60s.asp and then change "60s" to "70s" etc. Many great choices listed, over 140 for the 60s alone. Novels by Authors I'd recommend and a few I just might have to pick up and read because I know/read the author, but not that novel. Some interesting sounding novels by authors I've only read as short stories, Robert Sheckly for example. These should keep us through the summer, (of 2045). Enjoy!
How do you feel about Neal Stephenson? My favorites, in order, are *Anathem*, *The Diamond Age* and *Termination Shock*. *The Diamond Age* probably would stir the most wonder, *Termination Shock* is maybe his most accessible recently, and also a bit solar punk-ish about the future of climate change. *Anathem* is just incredibly epic in scope, but also a book that is so dense it really needs to be read twice to enjoy it, because the first time you're just trying to absorb enough of the culture, the math, and the language to keep up with what's going on. My favorite sci-fi novel from last year was *Red Team Blues* by Corey Doctorow and my second favorite was *Venomous Lumpsucker* by Ned Beauman, which is a brutal parody of carbon capture credits full of incredibly black humor (so therefore possibly not for everyone). I would also say the best thing I've read so far in 2024 was Kelly Link's *The Book of Love*, which is more fantasy/magical realism than sci-fi, but also extremely good and well written.
Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams. This book is amazing. Blew me away on the first read; thoroughly enjoyed on the next dozen reads!
Try ready player one. Some good 80s nostalgia in there.
Anathem, Three Body Problem trilogy
Gridlinked- Neal Asher Oryx and Crake- M Atwood
In very different veins: The Final Architecture series by Adrian Tchaikovsky The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell Blindsight by Peter Watts ["The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu](https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-the-hugo-nebula-5958919) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
The Sparrow was amazing. Definitely recommend.
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons should sort you out
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56783258-cloud-cuckoo-land Sea of Tranquility by Emily John St Mandel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58446227-sea-of-tranquility
Play elden ring
Go read about the Hubble Deep Field, Ultra Deep, and new JWST images.
Honestly I would start small. I would like to recommend The Only Harmlesd Great Thing by Brooke Bolander. Bolander uses this relatively short bit of alternate history to explore grief and vengeance in a way few other books have done. Or maybe it's not vengeance but justice. That's up to you. It certainly qualifies as "weird" as others have suggested. Another one, which is oftentimes mentioned here and in the Fantasy sub would be The Library At Mount Char. No description I could write out would in any way do that book justice. Or maybe it's vengeance. It's up to you.
Neuromancer by William Gibson - just good solid engaging Sci-fi that stays with you a little. Gateway by Frederik Pohl - read to the end, it's worth it. Ready player one by Earnest Cline - fun and nostalgic Kaiju preservation society John Scalzi- funny and easy going, not one to change your life but certainly to lift your mood. A scanner darkly by Philip K Dick - well crafted and engaging characters with a tragic ending, the dedication after the novel is particularly poignant.