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Children of Time is sorta hard sci Fi that almost reads like a very exciting Wikipedia article at times. It obeys it's own internal logic pretty well, and you can go "well, sure." for most of it. Fun read imo. Project Hail Mary was the perfect vacation read for me last year.
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Apr 26, 2022 18:00
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You might like Hal Clement's stuff, everything of his I've read has dealt with the problems of intelligent creatures from wildly different planets interacting with each other. Like Ice World, which is about aliens trying to figure out how to send probes to the surface of a planet so cold that even elements like lead and phosphorus are frozen solid. There's a great part where the crew are trying to figure out why the probes they send to the blue parts of the planet instantly break when they reach the surface. In another one of his books creatures all from different planets explore an uninhabited world. The inciting incident for a big action rescue setpiece is that the first creature out of the airlock is a very small alien from a planet with very little atmosphere, and he instantly gets in trouble because none of the creatures from planets with thick atmospheres thought to warn him about wind and he gets blown away
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Apr 26, 2022 18:07
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Senjuro posted:Any hard sci-fi books that heavily focus on the technical details as much as The Martian and Project Hail Mary? Preferably from this century. Closest I've read are Aurora and Blindsight. Seveneves was pretty good until the focus started to shift towards politics past the half way mark. Yeah, if you haven’t already, check out: Dragon’s Egg Spin Diaspora Semiosis Anathem (controversial but it’s probably my favourite Stevenson) Luna: New Moon Red Moon The Mars Trilogy and 2312 Tao Zero Pushing Ice The Corporation Wars trilogy I don’t know if you’re into hard sf that isn’t space-focused but: Wool Intrusion (Ken MacLeod) The City & The City Oryx and Crake Almost hard SF: Embassytown The Light Brigade The Area X series
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Apr 26, 2022 18:11
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tuyop posted:Yeah, if you haven’t already, check out: Out of that list I only read Spin, it wasn't what I was looking for though. It was a character focused drama with some sci-fi in the background. I want just pure science and engineering porn like The Martian and Project Hail Mary. Yes, those have some additional elements to them but they're secondary and that's fine.
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Apr 26, 2022 18:27
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Senjuro posted:Out of that list I only read Spin, it wasn't what I was looking for though. It was a character focused drama with some sci-fi in the background. I want just pure science and engineering porn like The Martian and Project Hail Mary. Yes, those have some additional elements to them but they're secondary and that's fine. Oh that’s a bit harder to pin down, thanks for clarifying
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Apr 26, 2022 18:49
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Senjuro posted:Out of that list I only read Spin, it wasn't what I was looking for though. It was a character focused drama with some sci-fi in the background. I want just pure science and engineering porn like The Martian and Project Hail Mary. Yes, those have some additional elements to them but they're secondary and that's fine. Nix Accelerando from my recs, Three Body Problem might be what you’re looking for.
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Apr 26, 2022 19:02
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Senjuro posted:Any hard sci-fi books that heavily focus on the technical details as much as The Martian and Project Hail Mary? Preferably from this century. Closest I've read are Aurora and Blindsight. Seveneves was pretty good until the focus started to shift towards politics past the half way mark. I haven't read either but Buzz Aldrin cowrote one called Encounter with Tiber and Chris Hadfield wrote The Apollo Murders. Both came out recently and have been compared to Weir's stuff
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Apr 26, 2022 19:06
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Somewhat related, I was thinking about Embassytown the other day and how well Mieville is able to create a portrait of a future that's truly removed from ours, to the point that it was unsettling and made me nauseous in a kind of temporal-vertigo way. I really liked that but I'm not sure where to look for similar sci fi stuff. Maybe Niven? I loved Ringworld and World Out of Time (the first part, at least) as a kid specifically because of those queasy far-flung elements. Some of Ted Chiang's stuff is also really good about forcing the reader to occupy an alien mindset (the one where angels and hell are real comes to mind). Would love any recommendations.
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Apr 26, 2022 19:36
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Somewhat related, I was thinking about Embassytown the other day and how well Mieville is able to create a portrait of a future that's truly removed from ours, to the point that it was unsettling and made me nauseous in a kind of temporal-vertigo way. I really liked that but I'm not sure where to look for similar sci fi stuff. Maybe Niven? I loved Ringworld and World Out of Time (the first part, at least) as a kid specifically because of those queasy far-flung elements. Some of Ted Chiang's stuff is also really good about forcing the reader to occupy an alien mindset (the one where angels and hell are real comes to mind). Would love any recommendations. Dune, kinda. It's supposed to be our future but it's sometime in the 10000s
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Apr 26, 2022 20:21
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Opopanax posted:I haven't read either but Buzz Aldrin cowrote one called Encounter with Tiber and Chris Hadfield wrote The Apollo Murders. Both came out recently and have been compared to Weir's stuff I'm surprised how difficult it has been to find other books similar to Weir's work. Surely he didn't invent the "explaining in detail how a smart person continuously sciences their way out of problems" genre?
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Apr 26, 2022 20:21
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Senjuro posted:Found some review complaining about too many technical details in The Apollo Murders so it sounds perfect actually. Thanks! If you want some dry science inexplicably showing up in the middle of the action you can't go wrong with Crichton
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Apr 26, 2022 20:29
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I remember reading in an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson (wish I could find it) in which he says that speculative sci fi novels are typically either set in the near future (extrapolation of present conditions) or the far future (make up a completely new world, because so much has changed over the millenia that the future is unrecognizable from the present). Much rarer are stories set in the mid-future, in which the DNA of the contemporary world is still present, but there have also been vast changes through centuries of future history. What are some examples of this, other than some of KSR's own work? Star Trek is another one I can think of. Though I'm less interested in space opera here. I'd love to read a novel set perhaps 500 years in the future, on a richly detailed future earth.
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Apr 26, 2022 20:49
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:I remember reading in an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson (wish I could find it) in which he says that speculative sci fi novels are typically either set in the near future (extrapolation of present conditions) or the far future (make up a completely new world, because so much has changed over the millenia that the future is unrecognizable from the present). Much rarer are stories set in the mid-future, in which the DNA of the contemporary world is still present, but there have also been vast changes through centuries of future history. What are some examples of this, other than some of KSR's own work? Star Trek is another one I can think of. Though I'm less interested in space opera here. I'd love to read a novel set perhaps 500 years in the future, on a richly detailed future earth. I just recommended it to the other guy but maybe check out Accelerando by Charles Stross. It starts maybe 15 years into our future and ramps up over three generations of a family and gets progressively more scientific and advanced, what with exponential growth and whatnot.
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Apr 26, 2022 20:53
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Sandwolf posted:I just recommended it to the other guy but maybe check out Accelerando by Charles Stross. It starts maybe 15 years into our future and ramps up over three generations of a family and gets progressively more scientific and advanced, what with exponential growth and whatnot. Oh, I need to read this, thank you. edit: also all of this thank you 👀 Magic Hate Ball fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Apr 26, 2022 |
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Apr 26, 2022 21:30
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Somewhat related, I was thinking about Embassytown the other day and how well Mieville is able to create a portrait of a future that's truly removed from ours, to the point that it was unsettling and made me nauseous in a kind of temporal-vertigo way. I really liked that but I'm not sure where to look for similar sci fi stuff. Maybe Niven? I loved Ringworld and World Out of Time (the first part, at least) as a kid specifically because of those queasy far-flung elements. Some of Ted Chiang's stuff is also really good about forcing the reader to occupy an alien mindset (the one where angels and hell are real comes to mind). Would love any recommendations. Mieville is a Big Deal in the Western weird fiction world. I think that's closer to what he's going for than strict sci fi. My personal theory is that Mieville's politics align well with broad utopian and speculative imagining. I think this is partly why so much magical realism from the global south (for instance, Marquez, Isabel Allende, and Ben Okri) is kind of similar - and absolutely important to read and internalize. These are stories of/adjacent to struggle that also embody struggle in their prose and world-building. They are weird and dissociative and vaguely traumatic because they speak to weird, inescapable, dissociative and traumatic experiences. In Mieville's case each of his books could be read as an exploration of a particular facet of society just with some of the rules altered to make the point. Like, I think that the guilt and disgust that he personally feels around British history is most evident in the New Crobuzon books, which are like, explicitly Victorian and viscerally repulsive, for example. Policing and the epistemic crisis is similarly treated in The City & The City. Linguistics and colonialism in Embassytown, etc. I would really recommend checking out the Vandermeers' (Ann nee Leckie, of course) huge, comprehensive collection of Weird short fiction (The Weird). I read it over about ten months last year and I found it really did a lot to clarify my tastes. Based on your enjoyment of Embassytown (the unsettling novelty of the setting and the... weird kinematics of the world there) , I think you might enjoy: The Dark by Karen Joy Fowler The Country Doctor by Steven Utley Last Rites and Resurrections by Martin Simpson The Specialist's Hat by Kelly Link The Beautiful Galreesh by Jeffrey Ford (I first read this in junior high and oh boy is a rereading as an adult a trip) And the classics, for their genre importance rather than their relation to Mieville and like, recent weird fiction: The Willows by Algernon Blackwood The Night Wire by HF Arnold The Crowd by Ray Bradbury The Long Sheet by William Sansom (one of my favourite short stories in general) The Summer People by Shirley Jackson Axolotl by Julio Cortazar And from Nisi Shawl's New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, because I think about it constantly: Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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Apr 26, 2022 21:33
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:I remember reading in an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson (wish I could find it) in which he says that speculative sci fi novels are typically either set in the near future (extrapolation of present conditions) or the far future (make up a completely new world, because so much has changed over the millenia that the future is unrecognizable from the present). Much rarer are stories set in the mid-future, in which the DNA of the contemporary world is still present, but there have also been vast changes through centuries of future history. What are some examples of this, other than some of KSR's own work? Star Trek is another one I can think of. Though I'm less interested in space opera here. I'd love to read a novel set perhaps 500 years in the future, on a richly detailed future earth. Short story, but Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg. And in a similar vein, but much tougher to find, Dio by Damon Knight. It's of my favorite micro-genres -- regular-degular humans, but we have discovered how to prevent / eliminate aging. What does society look like a couple hundred years later?
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Apr 26, 2022 22:59
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Senjuro posted:Any hard sci-fi books that heavily focus on the technical details as much as The Martian and Project Hail Mary? Preferably from this century. Closest I've read are Aurora and Blindsight. Seveneves was pretty good until the focus started to shift towards politics past the half way mark. You're not really going to find this at novel length works (unsurprisingly it's hard to maintain at length!). Check out Greg Egan's work both long and short (which is often called impenetrably technical). The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories series might work for you. Timescape by Gregory Benford is very technical. Ted Chiang's stories often focus on achieving engineering feats particularly "Tower of Babylon" and "Exhalation". The MicroCosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon is the original engineering porn story but it's all essentially fantastical. It's not science fiction per se but Radiance by Carter Scholz is about the inner workings of weapons R&D in the American military industrial complex. The book's really good. It's up in its entirety with footnotes here: https://www.gwern.net/docs/radiance/2002-scholz-radiance Also, shut up about this century, you're closing off a vast realm of good and great poo poo for recency bias and most of the stuff I've mentioned comes from the 20th. fez_machine fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 00:30
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Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is probably my favorite hard scifi. Colony ship accidentally overaccelerates it's target planet, shooting them off into space into the unknown, dooming them to potentially an eternity of deep space thanks to the reality of newton. Lot's of questions of survival, and recreating society in this type of disaster. Voyager seemed to take a lot of inspiration from this book. e. noticed you said this century, which this is very much not. also...the politics are very sus. Famethrowa fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Apr 27, 2022 |
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Apr 27, 2022 05:32
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fez_machine posted:Also, shut up about this century, you're closing off a vast realm of good and great poo poo for recency bias and most of the stuff I've mentioned comes from the 20th. Famethrowa posted:e. noticed you said this century, which this is very much not. also...the politics are very sus.
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Apr 27, 2022 10:25
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I'd still maintain that it is a fantastic novel in the mold of what you are looking for, and the politics are best understood as an expression of a viewpoint which you can disagree with but understand "why" some people would find it compelling given the circunstances. It was exciting in a way that few hard scifi novels manage, keeping the crunchy bits of real science intact while having insane stakes and compelling desperate survival plans.
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Apr 27, 2022 14:46
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I have a bit of weird one, sorry if its been talked about, but I recently finished reading Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons and found I really enjoy reading about the rise and fall of a business or corporation and all the weirdness that goes on. Helps that I'm a big D&D nerd as well. I've also read The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company so I enjoy a more political based history as well. Any thoughts on interesting focused histories like that?
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Apr 29, 2022 09:00
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Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar Disney War by James Stewart
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Apr 29, 2022 13:24
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I liked Janet Gleeson's Millionaire, which is a biography of John Law, particularly his role in creating the Mississippi Bubble in the 18th century. John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, about Theranos, is a good read too.
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Apr 29, 2022 19:41
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I just finished all of David Joy's novels and I need more of that rust-belt-Appalachia-drug-noir-Justified-True Detective S1-meth-and-pickup-truck-grittiness
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Apr 29, 2022 20:06
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Zkoto posted:I have a bit of weird one, sorry if its been talked about, but I recently finished reading Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons and found I really enjoy reading about the rise and fall of a business or corporation and all the weirdness that goes on. Helps that I'm a big D&D nerd as well. One of my favorites is Expedition to Disaster: The Athenian Mission to Sicily 415 BC by Philip Matyszak. Its a nice breezy accounting of the very obscure, very stupid war that ended up setting up ancient Athens for its eventual downfall.
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Apr 29, 2022 20:26
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Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson's Lost Pacific Empire: A Story of Wealth, Ambition, and Survival It's terrifying
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Apr 29, 2022 20:37
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Thanks so much all, some nice stuff to dig into.
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Apr 30, 2022 10:35
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Zkoto posted:I have a bit of weird one, sorry if its been talked about, but I recently finished reading Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons and found I really enjoy reading about the rise and fall of a business or corporation and all the weirdness that goes on. Helps that I'm a big D&D nerd as well. Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records by Ronin Ro is pretty good if the subject matter appeals to you.
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Apr 30, 2022 18:27
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Zkoto posted:I have a bit of weird one, sorry if its been talked about, but I recently finished reading Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons and found I really enjoy reading about the rise and fall of a business or corporation and all the weirdness that goes on. Helps that I'm a big D&D nerd as well. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is a history of the Congo War with the sources being almost entirely interviews Collective Courage is partially a polemic, partially a guide, but its focus is on African American co-ops and it's pretty good Life and Society in the Hittite World is pretty broad so I hesitated but the Hittites are generally a pretty obscure group to a lot of people and so focusing on the specific social world of an entire civilization most people haven't heard of is I suppose focused. ...and forgive them their debts is a history of loan forgiveness largely focused on the bronze age by a finance analyst turned Assyrologist, it is up there in my favorite books of all time. Warning: a lawyer friend of mine described it as "too dry." Reform in Sung China is a fascinatingly deep exploration of one of the most important moments in all of Chinese history: The New Policies. It's really difficult to overstate the impact of the New Policies, but even explaining why the New Policies qualified as changes is a task and a half. Like just part of them is "instituting a wage system, including all of the financial structures that would make a wage system practical." Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276 is a very fun, readable book that is kind of a snapshot of a very particular time and place in history. The parts about how the exam system worked have stuck with me for years. The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control is short and is...perhaps one of the most detailed, focused histories I can think of? It's really more of a chronicle of basically everything that happened in Russia/USSR in 1917-1921 so long as it pertained to socialism in the workplace specifically. It's also freely available: https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/index.htm
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Apr 30, 2022 19:03
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Zkoto posted:I have a bit of weird one, sorry if its been talked about, but I recently finished reading Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons and found I really enjoy reading about the rise and fall of a business or corporation and all the weirdness that goes on. Helps that I'm a big D&D nerd as well. I quite enjoyed Console Wars, about the rise and fall of Sega. Lots of information about the marketing, weird politics between Sega Japan and Sega US, very good insights into the video game market at the time, etc.
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May 2, 2022 07:33
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Opopanax posted:If you want some dry science inexplicably showing up in the middle of the action you can't go wrong with Crichton Zkoto posted:I have a bit of weird one, sorry if its been talked about, but I recently finished reading Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons and found I really enjoy reading about the rise and fall of a business or corporation and all the weirdness that goes on. Helps that I'm a big D&D nerd as well.
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May 10, 2022 18:02
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Looking for a birthday present for my dad. A non-fiction, funny, memoiresque type adventure, very much like A Walk in the Woods. Maybe even another Bill Bryson book, actually. Or, since my dad enjoys sailing, has anyone written a nautical-themed book similar to A Walk in the Woods?
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May 11, 2022 04:57
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Looking for a birthday present for my dad. A non-fiction, funny, memoiresque type adventure, very much like A Walk in the Woods. Maybe even another Bill Bryson book, actually. Or, since my dad enjoys sailing, has anyone written a nautical-themed book similar to A Walk in the Woods? Is your dad a Boomer? Then he'll probably like Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.
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May 11, 2022 14:14
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Can I please get some book recommendations? I mostly read sci-fi or sci-fi adjacent stuff lately. I'm waiting for my library's e-book copy of Children of Dune to come available in 8 weeks. What I'm after most at the moment is something like Douglas Adams, Tom Holt, Terry Pratchett, Christopher Moore (but his latest stuff is not great), Jasper Fforde. Amusing, quirky, clever, and somewhat mindless. Stuff I don't want right now: difficult to read, understand, deal with writing or subject matter (I save that stuff for winter); Philip K Dick, Margaret Atwood, Harry Harrison (although I love Bill the Galactic Hero and the West of Eden trilogy), or hard scifi. HenryJLittlefinger fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 11, 2022 |
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May 11, 2022 19:57
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:Can I please get some book recommendations? The Ciaphas Cain series. Don't let the fact that it's Warhammer put you off, it's a fun adventure series with a likable rogue lead, not grimdark at all.
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May 11, 2022 20:02
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:Can I please get some book recommendations? Funny, quirky, clever, books: Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan The Magic Christian by Terry Southern Norwood by Charles Portis Miami Blues by Charles Willeford something by Kurt Vonnegut. Mother Night or Cat's Cradle maybe. If you like horror, maybe try a Jeff Strand book. I still think Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary) is very funny.
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May 11, 2022 20:17
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HenryJLittlefinger posted:Can I please get some book recommendations? There's more comic fantasy than comic sf. Try Robert Asprin's Myth series (first five or so books only), Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. The Android's Dream by John Scalzi.
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May 11, 2022 20:20
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Interstellar Gunrunner series (disclaimer: I might be biased because the author is an old friend) is excellent and exactly up your alley. It's a space opera trilogy with some cool weird concepts and a lot of humor.
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May 11, 2022 20:38
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Brandon Sanderson's Skyward series is YA science fiction that super meets the "Amusing, quirky, clever, and somewhat mindless" requirement. The last book comes out either this fall or the next, I can't remember. They are fun romps imo.
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May 11, 2022 20:39
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:Looking for a birthday present for my dad. A non-fiction, funny, memoiresque type adventure, very much like A Walk in the Woods. Maybe even another Bill Bryson book, actually. Or, since my dad enjoys sailing, has anyone written a nautical-themed book similar to A Walk in the Woods? Redmon O'Hanlon has written a number of books that might fit. He's a rather bookish English academic who occasionally goes mad and tries to replicate the journey of an 18th century explorer, or find a semi-mythical animal of some sort. He usually takes a completely unsuitable companion and they have a dreadful time. I wouldn't choose "Congo Journey" as it's a bit too traumatic, but any of his other books would be great. Sailing books: You could try "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby - at 17 he sailed on one of the last sailing ships to carry grain from Australia to Europe before the war. Obviously if your dad hasn't read the "Master and Commander" books you should infect him with those.
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May 11, 2022 21:20
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