One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.
Seconded. One of those books that gives you a crisp metaphor for something powerful you might not have noticed we all do, thereby letting you observe yourself do it and describe it to others. Best read tabula rasa.
It's remarkable that they decided to adopt it for TV, because it's one of those novels that's very hard to imagine to put onto a screen. The whole book felt, to me, like I'm in a dream.
Wow, must try to watch it. I remember reading The City & the City and thinking about how visually it would be... different clothes, overlapping murals?
If you're in the UK you can watch d/load from the BBC hone site via iPlayer when they rotate available again (currently not on iPlayer): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p061bd5l
Weirdly, The City & the City reminds me of Martin Cruz Smith's books like Gorky Park set in the Soviet Union (or more recently post-Soviet countries) in that it is a police procedural set in a culture the reader presumably doesn't understand and so the reader is interested in learning how this society functions as much as they are interested in seeing the mystery solved. The difference of course is the societies in The City & the City are of course fictional.
Mostly just the explanations of how the two cities could function as separate entities while physically occupying the same land through the use of legally mandated "useeing". The author goes into detail how this works -- obviously at one level people see the people, vehicles, etc. from the other city or they'd run into them, but on a conscious level they act as if they don't exist.
I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way.
Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.
As someone who hated The City and The City to the point of never reading Mieville again, I appreciate the warning for Embassytown. I sometimes consider reading his stuff again but I was genuinely offended by the trick in City. Like... I paid money for this? No. It felt like contempt for his audience.
I hated it because it felt like a smug trick. Like, I know you ordered steak and paid for steak, but I'm serving you a salad because it's healthier for you, and if you complain it's just your lack of taste.
My thing about Miéville is that all the books of his I've read (Embassytown, Perdido street Station, and the one about trains that I didn't realize was pretty YA) felt like the endings dissol into B grade action (IMO Stephenson has the same problem). Everything starts off surreal and philosophical and beautiful and then just fizzles into stuff blowing up
True. But the action seemed to drive forward a big picture message, the action was the means to deliver a message, until the end. Then it was just shooting and explosions without putting a bow on whatever philosophy had been introduced. That's the way I remember these books (and diamond age, snow crash, et al)
I enjoyed the book, but I'm still not sure how it's been classified as science fiction, despite clearly having been pigeonholed into the category. The book has very little to do with real or speculative science. It was also one of the most awarded "science fiction" books of the last couple decades, so isn't really obscure in any sense either.
In some sense I think it does have quite a bit to do with (speculative) social science, especially once you see (spoilers) that there really is nothing supernatural going on at all.
C.J. Cherryh's 1981 novel Wave Without a Shore has something vaguely similar, where the human inhabitants of a planet refuse to notice the non-human natives sharing their cities.
Greg Egan's Permutation City is #1 for me. It's not only a good read, it may be the most important work of late 20th century philosophy. (Among other things, it completely anticipated Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, and totally obviates Bostrom's latest work.)
I think Egan is much better known than most (if not all) of the authors in the list. I've heard of Andy Weir and Hugh Howey, but not the particular books listed by them. Conversely I've heard about Permutation City quite often.
Many 'you should read these lists' are just that lists. Usually by the author of the list and things they have read and think you should too. That they missed something is not surprising. Lists like this have an air of authority when they usually boil down to 'things I have seen/read and like/hate'. I use them as interesting things to go thru to see if there is anything I missed.
Reading Egan's works elevated my standard for what constitutes a truly great novel: "If you don't change as a person after having it read it, it wasn't that great."
Permutation City especially made me see the universe and my part in it in a different light, or perhaps casting a shadow onto it. I'll never be the same person as I was before I had read it.
Wow, I also thought of the work as deeply philosophical. I also read a bunch of other philosophy, and found that Egan's hypothesis overlaps significantly with both Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist concept of soul (pali: puggala). Did anybody else think the same?
That's a great pick! Permutation City is definitely a thought-provoking read. Egan's exploration of consciousness and reality challenges so many assumptions we take for granted.
What's the Bostrom work it obviates? I'd be kind of surprised if he never read the Egan -- it was part of the background to extropian culture back then.
A book about what to do with life in the face of boundless possibilities, and when just about everything important has been figured out. I recall that this was a significant plot point in Permutation City -- and Egan answered the question more elegantly than Bostrom did.
Roadside picnic is a favourite of mine. I’m currently learning Russian to reread it in the original Russian. But the translation is very good and done by the authors themselves.
I didn't know they've translated the book themselves! I often feel like translations done by other people are missing something fundamental of the spirit of the original. I'm wondering if there is a list of books "translated into language X by the author" somewhere.
The problem is that translation isn't just about "capturing the spirit of the original" but realizing where to keep idioms and like from the original and where things need to be changed to make the translation less clunky. This isn't something just anyone can do. That's why people like Umberto Eco, who was more or less fluent in English, still preferred professional translators like William Weaver to translate his Italian books into English.
If you're learning to read it, I recommend listening as well. A quick Kagi search turned up a fantastic production read by Левашёв В. (1).
I can't go without mentioning my favorite reader in Russian. Listening to Peter Markin read is unforgettable; his performance of Stanislav's "The Invincible" brought the massive machinery and energies to life before my eyes (2); Markin also read Hyperion by Dan Simmons and Frank Herbert's Dune (3).
3: I've nearly memorized Dune in Russian because I love his narration so much. He also read The Lord of the Rings - as close as we'll get to a Russian Rob Englis, I expect.
We’ve already got several of his longer works,[1] but none of his shorter pieces, so I’ve started work on producing a public domain compilation. Hopefully will be up in a couple of weeks; all in it comes in at under 70k words.
> the alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother
You put that as critique, and I understand that. But for me, this was actually the strength of the story. By making the differences smaller, they are more focused, stronger, and give opportunity to explore them in depth.
Same thing I like about many of the Black Mirror stories: often they tweak, or magnify, just one parameter of our realistic, current (western) lives and then explore the differences that would bring.
In a story like "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" sure, the purpose of the aliens (Martians in that case) is purely to tell us about us.
But you don't really need aliens for that, there are several Black Mirror stories which do roughly the same perspective trick, particularly "Men Against Fire". Aliens offer an opportunity to explore something quite different and it's always disappointing to see them used as something less interesting.
It's like FTL. FTL is actually exactly equivalent to time travel, and so it's disappointing, though commonplace to see SF which decides to do FTL but no time travel (or indeed vice versa though that's less common)..
I like Culture novels just fine, I like Greg Egan's Amalgam setting (with aliens who are basically just us again, although a bit less obviously so than a Star Trek alien) just fine, but, in both cases I'm a little disappointed. If your aliens aren't even as weird as the Octopus is (and we have no idea what the fuck is going on with an Octopus) then you're not really trying are you?
They're a better depiction of Vampires than most, with Watts doing everything he could to make them biologically plausible (that can only go so far).
That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines and sedate them when not in use!
Spoilers:
It seems weird to me that a society with other posthumans and intelligent AGI would be bowled over quite so easily by the vampires, but oh well.
They still killed the book for me. The underlying idea (no spoilers) is absolutely great sci-fi. All this useless blast-from-the-past did was make the story look silly to me. Such a shame. He could have written a great sci-fi book without superstition, alas, he apparently didn't want to be talken serious....
disagree, the vampires are mostly abstracted away with hand wavy "we couldn't possibly understand how they think", interesting concept, the aliens are more interesting though, and echopraxia was a bit of a dud.
That was so good it convinced me that one correct way to make a good sci fi novel is to construct a world and then add one insane thing and make it fit.
FWIW, for calibrating recommendations, I tend to prefer literary sci fi and end up hating a whole lot of highly-praised-online sci fi novels. I really like that novel, and Watts’ short story that retells The Thing. That’s all I’ve read of his.
[edit] For further calibration, I'd say the book's strengths are efficiency (above-average editing and/or author's taste of what to write and what not to); action writing that is very much to my taste, being quick and terse and requiring close attention to follow it (almost like action-poetry) but not actually being unclear; and an excellent core sci-fi concept, which I usually don't rate so important an aspect as (I think) a lot of sci-fi readers, but in this case it's so good that it overcomes my usual "well that's nice, but has almost nothing to do with whether it's good" attitude toward that element. It's weak on characters, but is so busy with other things that it's hard to tell whether that's a general weakness of the author, or whether that simply didn't make it to the page in this case. World-building is sufficient, but also kind of not the focus of the story—there's plenty there to support the story, but no more.
I read both of those. Peter Watts is a bit of an acquired taste. Not for everyone. I actually enjoyed it but it's a weird one. Genetically modified people that are effectively vampires, a main protagonist with severe brain damage, etc. There's a sequel to this too if you enjoy this.
The Hail Mary project was actually enjoyable. Andy Weir peaked with the Martian his debut novel and this is kind of in the same style. Maybe not as good but enjoyable.
The middle third of The Gods Themselves is so weird and different I thought it was a book printing error at first and I had to re-read some of it about six times to make it stick.
The Tines in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep are pretty good example. (The aliens in A Deepness in the Sky are physically alien, but psychologically pretty close to humans.)
I've read the latest Weir book (Project Hail Mary) and the two prominent Watts books (Blindsight and Echopraxia) recently and they were all memorable but frustrating.
Weir writes like a blogger who also writes script treatments but doesn't actually read novels. He throws plot at you every page ("ok so this happened so I need to do this next") which makes his books readable, but he has zero character development. His characters appear, react to external stimuli and solve problems, but don't change over time.
Watts's books, on the other hand, could use some of Weir's plot juice. Very cool ideas and interesting scenes, but the plots were hard to discern. I had no idea what needed to happen to resolve conflict most of the time. Echopraxia was particularly confusing. Watts did a Reddit AMA shortly after Echopraxia came out where he was put on the spot to explain fundamental plot elements.
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is the most alien alien i have ever read. I read the old translation, but there is a new one now (2011 by Bill Johnston ) direct from polish rather than via french first
Golem XIV also gets at the fact that an artificial intelligence needn't be anything like us either. The titular Golem is capable of communicating with us but finds the experience very frustrating because we're so very stupid, while the perhaps even more intelligent Honest Annie doesn't communicate with humans and is postulated to treat them the same way we treat flies, a nuisance deserving no great thought.
The depiction of the alien is something I really liked about that book - the concept of having to cooperate with an alien species rather than with being subjugated or subjugating, was refreshingly new (for me).
The problem with Project Hail Mary is that the audio book is good but the book is not. First read the book and then listen to the audio book and you know what I mean.
That's interesting. I found Project Hail Mary to be once of the most disappointing second novels ever written and am surprised at its reception. Is the audiobook meaningfully different?
Yeah I also didn't like the book at all, it read like a cash grab. However, just listen to a sample of the audio book, it's just hilarious how much effort Ray put into making the characters become alive. Certain significantly improving the lack of writing, of course it can't fix the writing.
Please be kind; being an author is an incredibly hard career, and people do it for the love of creating and sharing a story. It is not a cash grab, and if you don't like his writing style, just don't read his books. Books are deeply personal and no reason to make a personal attack because it isn't a match for your desired book style.
The great thing about opinions, as youve pointed out with books, is that you can disregard them. Personally, I agree that PHM was not particularly good compared with The Martian, but to each their own.
I thought PHM was a fairly well crafted nerdy action book, like a classic B-movie catered to a more educated audience. It's good at tuning itself to its target audience and maintaining interest with pacing and interesting, fun ideas.
What's frustrating is the number of people that list it as the best sci-fi of the last decade and try to elevate it as doing something truly groundbreaking. I don't really understand where that's coming from.
For pedantry's sake, "Project Hail Mary" is not Weir's second novel. I think "Artemis" followed after The Martian. It's a story set on the Moon with a strong female character, but I can't remember much else about it. :D
In my opinion Andy Weir is not a very good writer anyways, he is ok. When the story is interesting enough that is typically fine, like in The Martian. Hail Mary is too long certainly, characters a little flat, however, Ray can fix the flat characters in the audio book a little with his good voice acting.
I can understand people preferring to have things narrated to them, but I fail to see how narration can make a book from something you don't like at all into something you like. Ultimately no matter how good the narration is, either you like the story or you don't.
I also found the film of The Martian way better than the book. I got so sick of reading about concentrations of gases and stuff in painful detail. So yeah, good story, but not so good writing. If Project Hail Mary is anything like that then I'll give it a miss.
If you didn't like the 'painful detail' in The Martian, you will positively hate Project Hail Mary. Much more of the 'painful detail' as you call it with much less interesting characters. If you loved The Martian (like I did) and enjoy lots of random science-ish tangents and pseudo-engineering problem solving, you'll find stuff to like in this book. But it is a too long, worse written version of The Martian, with a less interesting protagonist.
Weir tries to make the story more interesting by adding an extra mystery to solve (the main character wakes up with amnesia and has to piece together where he is and what he has to do), but to me it really didn't work.
Weir doesn’t write characters, or dialog to speak of, but he writes decent prose and well thought out engineering puzzles. I enjoy his books for the imaginative exercise.
It's difficult to explain without spoilers... one of the characters feels significantly more fleshed out and real because of some artistic choices in the voice acting.
I am not sure I'd go as far as GP and say that the book is not good, but this is one of the cases where the audiobook feels more like a "production" and not just a book in a different medium.
I found the audiobook to be a superior experience to reading the book as well. It think PHM is an excellent primer on that type of SF for someone who hasn’t read something like it before. My daughter, who never reads hard SF, loved the audiobook.
I once commented on Twitter that the Anansi Boys audiobook read by Lenny Henry was better than the book. Neil Gaiman responded, “I agree”.
Can't really take the recommendation for Beacon 23 seriously after seeing the 1/2 half of the first tv episode. That was utter crap and nonsensical. :(
I didn't know there was a tv series for this one. I read the book ages ago; pretty OK. I wouldn't judge it by any failed attempt to put it out on TV.
The same author also wrote the silo series. He tends to push his books out in small portions but it's effectively a trilogy. The series on Apple TV for that is actually pretty good. I reread the books after completing season 1 a few months ago.
Nearly all of the ones featuring Reid Malenfant are a bummer; in many of the Xeelee sequence stories, the future of humanity is only marginally better than living in the Warhammer40k universe, and the "happy ending" ones are ones in which humanity is merely mostly extinct.
Ya TV adaptations can fail for so many reasons that a book succeeds at. I've read so many books that when translated to a visual medium fail because of the people involved, see Wheel of Time as that one was so bad...
More modern / post cyberpunk maybe but would add Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan. I really liked the premise and the organic feel vs a lot of other science fiction.
While not Sci-Fi, I found that The Screwtape Letters could actually be enjoyed even from a fairly agnostic perspective, as an allegorical dive into human cognitive foibles.
Though I suspect Lewis would be unhappy to hear that, especially since he wrote a fourth-wall-adjacent bit about devils preferring that humans don't believe in them.
Lewis was clearly intelligent and well educated in the humanities, but I don't think he ever cared much about science. IMO, the Space Trilogy is good writing but bad sci-fi.
In "Of Other Worlds", in a conversation with Brian Aldiss and Kinsley Amis (or Martin Amis? Don't remember), he says that he had a rocket take Ransom to Mars, but he knew better by the time he wrote the second book, and had angels take Ransom to Venus. That is, he wasn't trying to write hard science fiction; he was trying to write stuff where you were confronted with "the unknown". Fantasy and science fiction were both aimed at that, but fantasy was better, because you didn't have to worry about the rules of actual science.
He also said (quoting from memory): "If I were briefed to attack my own books, I would say that though the scientist has to be a physicist for the plot, his concern seems to be almost exclusively biological. I would also ask whether it was credible that such a gas-bag could invent a mousetrap, let alone a spaceship. But then, I wanted comedy as well as adventure."
Of the three, I always loved That Hideous Strength the most. The first two, which I think are good, were too much like travelogs, but the third had a pretty decent story.
Let me throw my hat in the ring. I'd recommend Grass by Sheri S Tepper.
It felt fresh and original in a way few science fiction books are, the characters are really well done and it just stays with you. Despite being the first book of a trilogy, it works well on its own.
I love this genre, and there is such a plethora of interesting reads. I think one of the most interesting, in terms of presenting technology's role in varied societies, is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Great read if you are bored of the classic space opera.
And the prequel A Deepness in the Sky is even better with very alien aliens (and a neat way of hiding that alien-ness from readers) and some very nasty antagonists with truly terrifying technology in the form of "focus".
Mind you, Vinge's Rainbows End is also really good and set in the near future with what may be an emerging AGI as a key character.
I really like the shepherd.com way of curating the recommendation. Browsing trough books and picking something to read has become much easier this way.
One scifi book that was very impactful to me is the black cloud by Fred Hoyle. It's such a well thought out story and has held up remarkably well for a 50 year old novel.
Thanks so much, that is super motivating for me :)
I am working to really improve genre and topic accuracy this winter. Right now it is a mess. The data we pull in from publishers is so messy. They don't know how to use the BISAC classification system and they often mislabel sci-fi (among others). I have a big upgrade coming to improve both our systems (we use NLP/ML on the topic side).
Was about to say so many of these "you've never heard of" lists are books within the past decade but there are just so many older ones. Asimov alone wrote many book outside of the robot and foundation series.
One that only the older set may know is Cities in Flight by James Blish (technically a trilogy but primarily sold as the single combined novel).
I am going to work a ton this winter to improve topic/genre accuracy, as I think we have more on Mesopotamia but the system is struggling to tag it correctly. We are using an older NLP/ML system that isn't working as well as newer ones. Update coming soon.
Great to hear. Also, a very interesting topic for me since this is close to my masters degree and current job. For a niche topic like ancient mesopotamia I was surprised. Is there a blog post or something about how the site works behind the scenes?
But I am not a developer, so it only goes into things lightly, like our topic system with NLP/ML and other topics. (hoping to be a dev in a few years enough to work on it as well)
Currently, I'm working as a Data Scientist on document retrieval/text matching, and I have a masters degree in a topic close to computer science and linguistics.
> Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane?
Thanks, I'll have a look. It's quite interesting, even if it's not very technical, since recently I started thinking about building a book trade or selling network for close friends and their friends (invitation based).
> It is python / Django on the backend, nothing crazy I think.
A solid choice, I think.
Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?
That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website.
> Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?
When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them. We created every book recommended in our system manually, as we needed to find high-quality cover images, and it was an easy way to start.
Eventually, we licensed data from the Nielsen API. It has not been a great experience, but it works "ok." I also looked at Ingram and Bokwer. Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.
I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features. I am going to look at Open Library again then, as it might work better for that limited functionality. I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)
> That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website.
Sounds like a nice way to generate some funding, especially as you already have a number of users on your site to start with. I have no idea how much bureaucracy it takes to be able to take 5% of each transaction or so, so I'll probably leave mine completely free - if I ever get the time to implement it, that is.
> When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them.
> Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.
Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad data.
> I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features.
Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?
> I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)
Maybe, maybe not. It takes huge effort to go back and improve a system relying on bad data, especially if it's already a certain size. I know from experience, as my company just did that with a large internal catalogue. Not fun.
I chatted with someone who had a platform like this in the past, and they said it worked really well. They ended up shutting it down when a server lost data or something weird. They also made a fair amount of money from links to buy the book new if there were no used copies available to "order."
>Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest >into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad > data.
Legally, you can probably use the Google Books API for a project like this (whereas I couldn't due to their rules). Or, you could also use Open Library since you don't need great data quality, only the title and author to get this running. For me it was some of the other quality issues that made it not worth my time back then.
>Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?
I promise I will update it this weekend. I am trying to find a better embed than this text list (behind the scenes, we have a much better system).
Basically, it is:
Roll out a better ad system for our Founding Author Members (as they are heavily funding the website).
Roll out book series pages (and test a notification system for users there)
Ship a massive update to our bookshelf collections of genres, age groups, and topics. This will visually navigate and break down the most loved books of all time, trending, new, and some other cool stuff.
Improve the accuracy of our genre / topic system (as of right now, it is not doing well). And I am working to add themes and tropes into he mix.
Big improvement to book section UX.
Building a DB of all books to power features needing that going forward (going to try to see if I can use Open Library).
Add a monthly "fav read of month" program for readers.
It is a rough list; still testing and thinking on a lot of these.
As I am trying to really do something cool with email and waiting to make sure engagement looks good with 1,000 subscribers before I start evolving and improving it.
> Legally, you can probably use the Google Books API for a project like this (whereas I couldn't due to their rules). Or, you could also use Open Library since you don't need great data quality, only the title and author to get this running. For me it was some of the other quality issues that made it not worth my time back then.
I think, UX wise I'd be in a similar position to you, since 1.) I'd need a short description of the book as well, and 2.) definitely in german, too. So, I'd probably have to create a lot of data myself.
This is one of my all-time favorite series. I laugh so much reading them, and the later books go heavy into really interesting alien species. Authors love them as well: https://shepherd.com/search/book/38814
Have you read any Peter Hamilton? He is another fav of mine.
I've found the Mandel Trilogy to be entertaining, too. Could be thought of as some world-building for the much later ND? But not as epic. Just three normal paperbacks.
I listened to this series as an audiobook and I enjoyed it a lot. I prefer reading to listening but this one worked really well and has a great narrator. It's a good series too, simple fun with decent jokes and a well paced plot.
I wonder how much "well written" is a matter of taste (I thought it wasn't that much). I found "We Are Legion" very poorly written although I loved the premise and really wanted to read it but couldn't go any further then maybe a quarter of it. It also happened to me with Murakami's Kafka On The Shore but I blame that on the translation or some cultural impedance mismatch.
I started with Fractal Noise, which was fairly short, it imparted a hunger to know more about that universe. Also, the audiobook, given the subject matter, was presented in an awesome manner IMO.
It's strange to start a list of "books that you may never have heard of" with a novel which is a nominee to the 2020 Hugo Awards. I suppose that most of the regular readers of sci-fi haver heard of it.
A nitpick about the third recommandation with "robots modeled on Karel Čapek’s designs". I suppose that they have not read Čapek’s novels. His robots were not pure machines, they were made from a biological substrate. In a way, they were closer to golems than to what we're now calling robots.
If you want to read really different and lesser known novels, Karel Čapek’s are a good choice. I did not enjoy "R.O.R." much except for his surprising concept of robots, but I highly recommend "War with the newts".
Yeah, Project Hail Mary was the only one of the three I'd ever heard of. Still, it was a great book (especially since I read it right on the heels of reading Artemis, which was only "okay").
I loved The Martian, actively disliked Artemis, and thought Project Hail Mary was all right. I liked it overall, but it never really clicked for me like The Martian did. Definitely worth a read, though! Most seem to have liked it more than I did.
I just finished Hail Mary this past week. Not as big a fan of it as most seem to be. I found the narrative style to get tedious about half way through the book. A few issues too with events late in the story. 7.5-8/10 by me, above average but not elite.
Credit for not assuming to know the reader by saying something like "Sci-fi books that you've never heard of!". I now routinely block youtube channels that do such things.
It uses a google spreadsheet as a database so you just need to update the spreadsheet and it adds a book to the website.
I have a life goal to read every thing written by Phillip k dick as well as every book on David Pringle’s 100 best sci-fi list. Some of the books are hard to find though. Like I’ve been searching for years for the peoples republic of Antarctica.
I would suggest the following novels if you haven’t read them yet
Gene wolfe shadow of the torturer series aka book of the new sun
A scanner darkly by pkd, this, imo, is his best book even though all his books are compelling. But I think also, yes we can build him, its amazing because it really shows off pkd ability to come up with a wild premise but that’s simply the universe the characters live in and they don’t really care about that premise they have other problems.
Herovits world by malzburg, this book is hilarious and about how you must be a terrible narcissist to believe someone should read your fiction especially science fiction
The Brian Daley series about Han Solo, these are super interesting because they were written in 1979 so before empire strikes back came out. So Daley basically only had Star Wars to go on to create a whole trilogy of novels starring Han Solo. I think these are probably my favourite Star Wars novels because they have such little constraints.
One of my hopes for the website is I could help books that are lesser known get noticed and "pop." Working on getting more to help in that capacity as there are so many good books that don't get enough notice. Aiming to come out with some features this Winter to help around that.
Though I wouldn’t say A Scanner Darkly is my favorite PKD novel, I’d have a harder time arguing it isn’t his best. I can see it; it was just too heavy for me to actually enjoy all that much.
Ubik is probably my favorite, or (to be cliche) Androids.
PKD says more in single paragraphs than many authors manage to say in entire books.
After I finished the two Frank Kittridge novels from S.J. Morden I was surprised I haven't heard of him until now.
They start as a "The Martian" cribbed story, but the development arc takes in better places. It was less geek/efficiency porn and more character development and required less strain on my suspension of disbelief overall.
> Ever since reading Heir to the Empire (Timothy Zahn), I’ve been fascinated by science fiction stories with amazing characters and intriguing concepts.
Did an LLM write this? "Amazing characters" and "intriguing concepts"? This sentence says nothing.
It's a stealth ad for the author's book. If you think the advertising copy was written by an llm, I'm pretty sure that says you won't like his book :-)
It's a way for new or unknown authors to authentically connect with readers by sharing five books they love on a topic, theme, or mood they are passionate about or experts in. Readers get fantastic personalized picks by super readers, and authors get to bump into some readers who might be more interested in them and their books.
Authors face an immense battle to get noticed, and unless something is done, we will only have big brand-name authors who can afford to write full-time. The internet has really consolidated books into a winner-takes-all market, and I want to do what I can to help widen that so new authors have a chance.
I work with authors daily and know how hard they work to create a story for us. Most will never earn back the time they put into creating that book. Some books and writing are not a match for what we personally like. I just hope we can say, "It wasn't a match for what I like," rather than accusing an author of using an LLM. I loose my cool sometimes as well, and trying to remind myself to stick to this code (as I know I create plenty of bad writing that I inflict on readers of my blogs).
Gosh, no, we have a strict anti-AI policy, and every author we work with agrees to an honor statement that they will always write everything themselves.
I've caught a few dishonest authors, and they get banned from the website forever.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadhttps://thetvdb.com/series/345091-show
Best bet looks like: https://ext.to/the-city-and-the-city-season-1-complete-720p-...
If you're in the UK you can watch d/load from the BBC hone site via iPlayer when they rotate available again (currently not on iPlayer): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p061bd5l
Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.
You can see how they connected to him there too.
Permutation City especially made me see the universe and my part in it in a different light, or perhaps casting a shadow onto it. I'll never be the same person as I was before I had read it.
A book about what to do with life in the face of boundless possibilities, and when just about everything important has been figured out. I recall that this was a significant plot point in Permutation City -- and Egan answered the question more elegantly than Bostrom did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-translation
I can't go without mentioning my favorite reader in Russian. Listening to Peter Markin read is unforgettable; his performance of Stanislav's "The Invincible" brought the massive machinery and energies to life before my eyes (2); Markin also read Hyperion by Dan Simmons and Frank Herbert's Dune (3).
1: https://youtu.be/IAD-ANTvs9Y
2: https://youtu.be/Ad32oH6Cg4Q
3: I've nearly memorized Dune in Russian because I love his narration so much. He also read The Lord of the Rings - as close as we'll get to a Russian Rob Englis, I expect.
That and the original Russian copies of the Metro series..
35 page short story and eerily reminiscent of today's world.
It was written in 1909.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster
If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).
You put that as critique, and I understand that. But for me, this was actually the strength of the story. By making the differences smaller, they are more focused, stronger, and give opportunity to explore them in depth.
Same thing I like about many of the Black Mirror stories: often they tweak, or magnify, just one parameter of our realistic, current (western) lives and then explore the differences that would bring.
Aliens are hardly ever more than a tool to get a perspective. To look at humans, societies, structures etc. They are also stories _about us_.
But you don't really need aliens for that, there are several Black Mirror stories which do roughly the same perspective trick, particularly "Men Against Fire". Aliens offer an opportunity to explore something quite different and it's always disappointing to see them used as something less interesting.
It's like FTL. FTL is actually exactly equivalent to time travel, and so it's disappointing, though commonplace to see SF which decides to do FTL but no time travel (or indeed vice versa though that's less common)..
I like Culture novels just fine, I like Greg Egan's Amalgam setting (with aliens who are basically just us again, although a bit less obviously so than a Star Trek alien) just fine, but, in both cases I'm a little disappointed. If your aliens aren't even as weird as the Octopus is (and we have no idea what the fuck is going on with an Octopus) then you're not really trying are you?
That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines and sedate them when not in use!
Spoilers:
It seems weird to me that a society with other posthumans and intelligent AGI would be bowled over quite so easily by the vampires, but oh well.
FWIW, for calibrating recommendations, I tend to prefer literary sci fi and end up hating a whole lot of highly-praised-online sci fi novels. I really like that novel, and Watts’ short story that retells The Thing. That’s all I’ve read of his.
[edit] For further calibration, I'd say the book's strengths are efficiency (above-average editing and/or author's taste of what to write and what not to); action writing that is very much to my taste, being quick and terse and requiring close attention to follow it (almost like action-poetry) but not actually being unclear; and an excellent core sci-fi concept, which I usually don't rate so important an aspect as (I think) a lot of sci-fi readers, but in this case it's so good that it overcomes my usual "well that's nice, but has almost nothing to do with whether it's good" attitude toward that element. It's weak on characters, but is so busy with other things that it's hard to tell whether that's a general weakness of the author, or whether that simply didn't make it to the page in this case. World-building is sufficient, but also kind of not the focus of the story—there's plenty there to support the story, but no more.
The Hail Mary project was actually enjoyable. Andy Weir peaked with the Martian his debut novel and this is kind of in the same style. Maybe not as good but enjoyable.
Alien aliens are always rare in sci-fi books. Although I really struggled with the octopodes in Children of Ruin, so I'm not sure if I'm ready yet.
Can someone please suggest books with novel, really alien forms of life, social structures, etc.?
Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" series had a story towards the end that blew my tiny little teenaged mind back in the 90's.
Octavia Butler, of course. Xenogenesis.
Weir writes like a blogger who also writes script treatments but doesn't actually read novels. He throws plot at you every page ("ok so this happened so I need to do this next") which makes his books readable, but he has zero character development. His characters appear, react to external stimuli and solve problems, but don't change over time.
Watts's books, on the other hand, could use some of Weir's plot juice. Very cool ideas and interesting scenes, but the plots were hard to discern. I had no idea what needed to happen to resolve conflict most of the time. Echopraxia was particularly confusing. Watts did a Reddit AMA shortly after Echopraxia came out where he was put on the spot to explain fundamental plot elements.
Watts Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f...
Watts also gave a real-sounding lecture on vampirism, which is enjoyable if you liked that in his books: https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=6fTMtmf9yA8JT9at
Project Hail Mary is more... warm and fuzzy, but then one doesn't read Peter Watts for warm and fuzzy...
What's frustrating is the number of people that list it as the best sci-fi of the last decade and try to elevate it as doing something truly groundbreaking. I don't really understand where that's coming from.
Weir tries to make the story more interesting by adding an extra mystery to solve (the main character wakes up with amnesia and has to piece together where he is and what he has to do), but to me it really didn't work.
That is actually impressive if true. Watney was by far the worst thing about the book.
I don't know how that can possibly make sense.
I am not sure I'd go as far as GP and say that the book is not good, but this is one of the cases where the audiobook feels more like a "production" and not just a book in a different medium.
I once commented on Twitter that the Anansi Boys audiobook read by Lenny Henry was better than the book. Neil Gaiman responded, “I agree”.
I read PHM and didn’t love it; my friends who listened to it all loved it. Maybe I should give it a try.
The same author also wrote the silo series. He tends to push his books out in small portions but it's effectively a trilogy. The series on Apple TV for that is actually pretty good. I reread the books after completing season 1 a few months ago.
If you don't like depressing novels, also stay away from Stephen Baxter; I love his novels, but most of them are wildly depressing.
Oh. I don't remember those being depressing though it's been years since I read any.
Which ones do you remember being that way?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C8XVRQBC
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374175412/infinitedetail
Out of the Silent Planet Perelandra That Hideous Strength
Note that like a lot of CS Lewis, there is a very heavy Christian view.
I love seeing something like this as it is awesome where their minds go for what other books they connect it with...
Though I suspect Lewis would be unhappy to hear that, especially since he wrote a fourth-wall-adjacent bit about devils preferring that humans don't believe in them.
He also said (quoting from memory): "If I were briefed to attack my own books, I would say that though the scientist has to be a physicist for the plot, his concern seems to be almost exclusively biological. I would also ask whether it was credible that such a gas-bag could invent a mousetrap, let alone a spaceship. But then, I wanted comedy as well as adventure."
The best start is Pilgrimage: The Book of the People, especially suitable for a moody teen girl...
(And I wish I could know the story of the Bells of Couvron!)
It's a great book, but everyone has heard of it already.
It's always someone's day to be one of 10,000.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Mind you, Vinge's Rainbows End is also really good and set in the near future with what may be an emerging AGI as a key character.
One scifi book that was very impactful to me is the black cloud by Fred Hoyle. It's such a well thought out story and has held up remarkably well for a 50 year old novel.
I am working to really improve genre and topic accuracy this winter. Right now it is a mess. The data we pull in from publishers is so messy. They don't know how to use the BISAC classification system and they often mislabel sci-fi (among others). I have a big upgrade coming to improve both our systems (we use NLP/ML on the topic side).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks
One that only the older set may know is Cities in Flight by James Blish (technically a trilogy but primarily sold as the single combined novel).
If you want to share your 3 fav reads of the year, you can do that here -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/my-3-fav-reads
You get a cool page like this -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024/f/bwb
Plus, it goes into our "best books of 2024" voting -> https://shepherd.com/bboy/2024
I am slowly getting more into place on this website, I have been working on it for 3.5 years now.
How do I get to my page? The profile section is very spartan. I'm not even sure whether my profile picture was submitted.
To submit your 3 favorites, and then we will email you once the page is ready.
Ya sorry, brand new and working on the profile to improve it and the image bit.
Hit me up at ben@shepherd.com if you need any help.
Ah, I completely missed this part. Long day.
> Ya sorry, brand new and working on the profile to improve it and the image bit.
Don't worry, so far I like the site quite a bit, especially since there is much more about ancient mesopotamia than I had thought!
I am going to work a ton this winter to improve topic/genre accuracy, as I think we have more on Mesopotamia but the system is struggling to tag it correctly. We are using an older NLP/ML system that isn't working as well as newer ones. Update coming soon.
I blog every 2 to 3 weeks here about building it: https://build.shepherd.com/
But I am not a developer, so it only goes into things lightly, like our topic system with NLP/ML and other topics. (hoping to be a dev in a few years enough to work on it as well)
Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane? https://build.shepherd.com/p/a-big-focus-for-2024-improving-... https://build.shepherd.com/p/building-shepherd-updated-topic... https://build.shepherd.com/p/building-shepherd-topic-pages-n... https://build.shepherd.com/p/sneak-peek-at-genre-and-age-gro...
It is python / Django on the backend, nothing crazy I think.
> Here are a few, are these interesting or too mundane?
Thanks, I'll have a look. It's quite interesting, even if it's not very technical, since recently I started thinking about building a book trade or selling network for close friends and their friends (invitation based).
> It is python / Django on the backend, nothing crazy I think.
A solid choice, I think.
Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?
That is a very cool idea! I've been thinking about something like that to help fund the website, which is a network of book trades, and you get credit for a new used book for every trade. Although I was going to charge $10 a year or $1 a book to go 80% toward authors and 20% toward the website.
> Do you use something like openlibrary.org as well?
When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them. We created every book recommended in our system manually, as we needed to find high-quality cover images, and it was an easy way to start.
Eventually, we licensed data from the Nielsen API. It has not been a great experience, but it works "ok." I also looked at Ingram and Bokwer. Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.
I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features. I am going to look at Open Library again then, as it might work better for that limited functionality. I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)
Sounds like a nice way to generate some funding, especially as you already have a number of users on your site to start with. I have no idea how much bureaucracy it takes to be able to take 5% of each transaction or so, so I'll probably leave mine completely free - if I ever get the time to implement it, that is.
> When I last looked in 2020, the data quality on open library was really bad, so I didn't use them.
> Now things are 90% automated, but we still have to source a high quality cover for each book as the book APIs have such small images.
Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad data.
> I am hoping to expand our book DB in 2025 to all books for a lot of the new features.
Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?
> I also could have been too pedantic back in 2020 when i looked at them :)
Maybe, maybe not. It takes huge effort to go back and improve a system relying on bad data, especially if it's already a certain size. I know from experience, as my company just did that with a large internal catalogue. Not fun.
>Not great, since that would have been a starting point for me. ;) Cool though, that you can invest >into a custom database, since you can tailor it to your task and aren't relying on potentially bad > data.
Legally, you can probably use the Google Books API for a project like this (whereas I couldn't due to their rules). Or, you could also use Open Library since you don't need great data quality, only the title and author to get this running. For me it was some of the other quality issues that made it not worth my time back then.
>Is there a public roadmap somewhere for the features?
Not a good one: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/roadmap
I promise I will update it this weekend. I am trying to find a better embed than this text list (behind the scenes, we have a much better system).
Basically, it is:
Roll out a better ad system for our Founding Author Members (as they are heavily funding the website).
Roll out book series pages (and test a notification system for users there)
Ship a massive update to our bookshelf collections of genres, age groups, and topics. This will visually navigate and break down the most loved books of all time, trending, new, and some other cool stuff.
Improve the accuracy of our genre / topic system (as of right now, it is not doing well). And I am working to add themes and tropes into he mix.
Big improvement to book section UX.
Building a DB of all books to power features needing that going forward (going to try to see if I can use Open Library).
Add a monthly "fav read of month" program for readers.
It is a rough list; still testing and thinking on a lot of these.
And waiting for a lot of data to come back on our personalized email list -> https://shepherd.com/my-book-dna
As I am trying to really do something cool with email and waiting to make sure engagement looks good with 1,000 subscribers before I start evolving and improving it.
> Legally, you can probably use the Google Books API for a project like this (whereas I couldn't due to their rules). Or, you could also use Open Library since you don't need great data quality, only the title and author to get this running. For me it was some of the other quality issues that made it not worth my time back then.
I think, UX wise I'd be in a similar position to you, since 1.) I'd need a short description of the book as well, and 2.) definitely in german, too. So, I'd probably have to create a lot of data myself.
> Not a good one: https://forauthors.shepherd.com/roadmap
> Improve the accuracy of our genre / topic system (as of right now, it is not doing well). And I am working to add themes and tropes into he mix.
I think, that's a good focus. Good quality structured data is quite good to have.
> Add a monthly "fav read of month" program for readers.
I'd definitely use this. Are you planning on adding a lot more interactivity/"blogging" features on the reader side?
It'll be interesting to see the development in the next year, big plans! I'll definitely keep an eye on the site.
>I'd definitely use this. Are you planning on adding a lot more >interactivity/"blogging" features on the reader side?
Yep working that way in 2025 :)
These books aren't anything that will change your life, but they're well written and a lot of fun.
Have you read any Peter Hamilton? He is another fav of mine.
I thought Fractal Noise was meh by comparison
A nitpick about the third recommandation with "robots modeled on Karel Čapek’s designs". I suppose that they have not read Čapek’s novels. His robots were not pure machines, they were made from a biological substrate. In a way, they were closer to golems than to what we're now calling robots.
If you want to read really different and lesser known novels, Karel Čapek’s are a good choice. I did not enjoy "R.O.R." much except for his surprising concept of robots, but I highly recommend "War with the newts".
To add something to the conversation I am reading the expanse right now and I really like it. It's the mix of goofy and dark that gets me.
https://mnky9800n.github.io/booklist/
It uses a google spreadsheet as a database so you just need to update the spreadsheet and it adds a book to the website.
I have a life goal to read every thing written by Phillip k dick as well as every book on David Pringle’s 100 best sci-fi list. Some of the books are hard to find though. Like I’ve been searching for years for the peoples republic of Antarctica.
I would suggest the following novels if you haven’t read them yet
Gene wolfe shadow of the torturer series aka book of the new sun
A scanner darkly by pkd, this, imo, is his best book even though all his books are compelling. But I think also, yes we can build him, its amazing because it really shows off pkd ability to come up with a wild premise but that’s simply the universe the characters live in and they don’t really care about that premise they have other problems.
Herovits world by malzburg, this book is hilarious and about how you must be a terrible narcissist to believe someone should read your fiction especially science fiction
The Brian Daley series about Han Solo, these are super interesting because they were written in 1979 so before empire strikes back came out. So Daley basically only had Star Wars to go on to create a whole trilogy of novels starring Han Solo. I think these are probably my favourite Star Wars novels because they have such little constraints.
Added the Brian Daley series about Solo to my list, I'd never heard of those!
My email is ben@shepherd.com and I'd love to chat!
Ubik is probably my favorite, or (to be cliche) Androids.
PKD says more in single paragraphs than many authors manage to say in entire books.
They start as a "The Martian" cribbed story, but the development arc takes in better places. It was less geek/efficiency porn and more character development and required less strain on my suspension of disbelief overall.
Did an LLM write this? "Amazing characters" and "intriguing concepts"? This sentence says nothing.
Authors face an immense battle to get noticed, and unless something is done, we will only have big brand-name authors who can afford to write full-time. The internet has really consolidated books into a winner-takes-all market, and I want to do what I can to help widen that so new authors have a chance.
If you are curious, here are my goals for readers: https://build.shepherd.com/p/what-is-shepherds-mission-for-r...
Here are my goals for authors: https://support.shepherd.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406508361617...
And here is why I am building Shepherd for myself and others: https://build.shepherd.com/p/why-am-i-building-shepherd-ie-w...
Hope that helps; happy to answer questions :)
I work with authors daily and know how hard they work to create a story for us. Most will never earn back the time they put into creating that book. Some books and writing are not a match for what we personally like. I just hope we can say, "It wasn't a match for what I like," rather than accusing an author of using an LLM. I loose my cool sometimes as well, and trying to remind myself to stick to this code (as I know I create plenty of bad writing that I inflict on readers of my blogs).
I've caught a few dishonest authors, and they get banned from the website forever.