I’ve been reading sci fi recently. Some good ones:
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell. In the near-ish future an inhabited alien planet is discovered and while the rest of the world is debating what to do the Society of Jesus just send their own mission in secret. Forty years later (only a few for him, due to relativity), the only surviving member of the mission is returned home and hidden away by his fellow Jesuits as they try to get out of him what happened.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers. In the spacefuture a young woman from Mars spends what money she has from her family fortune to change her identity and get away to join the crew of ship that bores the hyperspace tunnels that are used to travel faster than light. The crew is a bunch of different species and backgrounds and Rosemary has to learn a lot to fit in with them as the owner of the ship takes on a risky job.
Hard to Be a God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. An extremely Soviet sci fi novel where the speculative technology being examined is historial materialism. The main character is a historian, not in that he studies the past but that he studies historical processes on alien planets that have not yet developed into a communist utopia. He is stationed in a medieval society and starts to see what he sees as a growing fascist movement. His superiors dismiss this as that’s impossible. Fascism arises as a reaction to capitalism; it cannot happen in a feudal society. But it is happening.
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin. A human from Earth is sent to a planet to invite them to join the space UN. The people on Gethen are not sexually dimorphic (bisexual is the term the novel uses, it was written in the sixties) and neither male nor female most of the time. They instead have a monthly cycle where they, for a few days, develop either male or female sexual characteristics, different every month with no particular pattern. He has to navigate the politics of Gethen while finding it difficult to understand its people.
The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin. A physicist was born on an anarchist lunar commune and struggles to pursue his research there due to politicking and his communal obligations that prevent him from working on it. His research attracts attention back on the main planet, a capitalist society, and he travels there to be able to pursue it unhindered, but soon finds himself even more disgusted with that society.
And some fantasy:
The Discworld series as a whole - Terry Pratchett. Just wonderful books. I would say Guards! Guards! is a good starting point.
Other Words for Smoke - Sarah Maria Griffin. A teenage brother and sister are dumped on their aunt for summer, who lives in a big old house. Their aunt, it turns out, is a witch with a talking cat, and the girl (a few years older than the kids) who lives in the other wing of the house is feeding meat to something that lives in the walls called Sweet James in exchange for visits to a hidden world. Sweet James starts asking for bits of the kids.
The Earthsea books - Ursula Le Guin again. Each book follows a different plot but the series pivots around the journeys of a wizard named Ged. Or Duny. Or Sparrowhawk. Or Hawk. Names are important in this series and most characters have several. Ged is only really the protagonist of the first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea that goes from his childhood to going to a school for wizards, where he fucks up massively and has to spend the rest of the novel dealing with the consequences of. I particularly love the second and fourth novels, The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, which focus on Tenar, a girl who was raised to be the high priestess of a death cult, and who was very certain of her place in the world and of who and what she was as that priestess until Ged shows up.
voxpoplar wrote (edited )
I’ve been reading sci fi recently. Some good ones:
The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell. In the near-ish future an inhabited alien planet is discovered and while the rest of the world is debating what to do the Society of Jesus just send their own mission in secret. Forty years later (only a few for him, due to relativity), the only surviving member of the mission is returned home and hidden away by his fellow Jesuits as they try to get out of him what happened.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers. In the spacefuture a young woman from Mars spends what money she has from her family fortune to change her identity and get away to join the crew of ship that bores the hyperspace tunnels that are used to travel faster than light. The crew is a bunch of different species and backgrounds and Rosemary has to learn a lot to fit in with them as the owner of the ship takes on a risky job.
Hard to Be a God - Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. An extremely Soviet sci fi novel where the speculative technology being examined is historial materialism. The main character is a historian, not in that he studies the past but that he studies historical processes on alien planets that have not yet developed into a communist utopia. He is stationed in a medieval society and starts to see what he sees as a growing fascist movement. His superiors dismiss this as that’s impossible. Fascism arises as a reaction to capitalism; it cannot happen in a feudal society. But it is happening.
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula Le Guin. A human from Earth is sent to a planet to invite them to join the space UN. The people on Gethen are not sexually dimorphic (bisexual is the term the novel uses, it was written in the sixties) and neither male nor female most of the time. They instead have a monthly cycle where they, for a few days, develop either male or female sexual characteristics, different every month with no particular pattern. He has to navigate the politics of Gethen while finding it difficult to understand its people.
The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin. A physicist was born on an anarchist lunar commune and struggles to pursue his research there due to politicking and his communal obligations that prevent him from working on it. His research attracts attention back on the main planet, a capitalist society, and he travels there to be able to pursue it unhindered, but soon finds himself even more disgusted with that society.
And some fantasy:
The Discworld series as a whole - Terry Pratchett. Just wonderful books. I would say Guards! Guards! is a good starting point.
Other Words for Smoke - Sarah Maria Griffin. A teenage brother and sister are dumped on their aunt for summer, who lives in a big old house. Their aunt, it turns out, is a witch with a talking cat, and the girl (a few years older than the kids) who lives in the other wing of the house is feeding meat to something that lives in the walls called Sweet James in exchange for visits to a hidden world. Sweet James starts asking for bits of the kids.
The Earthsea books - Ursula Le Guin again. Each book follows a different plot but the series pivots around the journeys of a wizard named Ged. Or Duny. Or Sparrowhawk. Or Hawk. Names are important in this series and most characters have several. Ged is only really the protagonist of the first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea that goes from his childhood to going to a school for wizards, where he fucks up massively and has to spend the rest of the novel dealing with the consequences of. I particularly love the second and fourth novels, The Tombs of Atuan and Tehanu, which focus on Tenar, a girl who was raised to be the high priestess of a death cult, and who was very certain of her place in the world and of who and what she was as that priestess until Ged shows up.