I’ll go first. BrandoSando’s Mistborn: “I Have to Swallow What!? Living in a World Where The Dark Lord Already Won”
Fourteen years ago, during my first year of college, I sat in a creative writing class and listened as my teacher, an elderly man, told another student not to use black characters in his stories unless those characters’ blackness was somehow essential to the plots. The presence of blacks, my teacher felt, changed the focus of a story, drew attention from the intended subject.
These are the first words of Octavia butlers powerful essay, “The Lost Races of Science Fiction”. These words written in 1980 would make me think Ms. Butler could predict the future. Her words hit home today even greater when conversations of diversity are more readily had, but came from a a time when people rarely talked about diversity and representation to this extent. The biggest reason for me making this post is because people haven’t read her or this wonderfully crafted essay. It was 1980 and it didn’t make a splash in the lit world. Partly because it was in a magazine that was …
Mine was when I was 3 pages in and someone said the mc’s name which turned out to be the same as my ex’s name to the letter…dropped it like hot coal
It was a fr a pretty unfortunate streak too because it was a book from one of those blind-date-with-a-book promotion my local bookstore does, and this was an American YA fantasy (I’m from a different continent) so I had no reason to assume I’ll ever be unlucky enough…to see his stupid ass again for a ‘blind date’
Tor.com offers the following 3 books in a downloadable bundle:
A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers
Unlocked by John Scalzi
An Unnatural Life by Erin K. Wagner
Go here for more information and to download the bundle. As a note, signing up for tor.com’s book club is required to download the bundle. For me, this is a bonus, though, as it means getting a free bundle of 3 SFF books every few months (the last bundle was in February).
​
Edit: Thank you for the award!
Edit 2: Thanks for the awards! You guys are awesome!
I remember when I read both american psycho and lolita years back, the level of detail in american psycho didn’t make me go like ‘what the fuck’ but it surprised and disgusted me, but in lolita, boy that was something else, it made me go like ‘what the fuck’ when humbert made it seem like delores/lolita had seduced him, like a fucking 13 year old?? what the actual fuck.
I’ve been audiobooking lesser known (or lesser known to me anyway) stuff by authors whom I’ve read their most famous works, a lot of them stuff I had to read in school. I’d never read any of her other shorts stories other than “The Lottery” in highschool English class.
I already loved gothic like Flannery O’Connor, and I can’t believe I’ve totally snoozed on Jackson for so long!
If you haven’t read it (you should- it’s hella short- and again mild spoilers, though it’s not like there’s really anything to spoil, it’s basically just a scene there’s no real climax/resolution) it’s about a white kid who brings his black friend home for lunch.
The white mom asks the black kid a series of questions where she clearly thinks she’s being supportive, is in tune with what she thinks are universal realities of blackness, and the kid is confused at every turn why she’s asking such stupid questions. Like- “your dad must have to be big and strong to work at a factory” “not really, he’s the …
If you haven’t read it yet, Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic survival book. Half the book takes place 20 years after a pandemic destroys civilization, and it almost feels like a zombie survival story without the zombies - the survivors search through abandoned buildings for supplies, they all carry weapons and know how to use them, and meeting a stranger is at best stressful, at worst potentially deadly. It almost feels like it’s partway between The Walking Dead and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
When the book came out in 2014 it was initially categorized as sci-fi. It did quite well, got a lot of readers / buyers, and won the Arthur C. Clarke award. However the author, Emily St. John Mandel, was quite public about the fact that she didn’t want it to be in the sci-fi section - she thinks of her books as literary fiction rather than speculative fiction. That attitude unfortunately seems all too common among high-brow readers who look down on sci-fi and fantasy.
I …
Currently rereading SoE to prepare, but I’m pumped! I adored the first book and can’t wait to see more.
edit: I am now realizing how lame it is to post this without some sort of idea about the first book for people, without having them resort to reading the comments.
Shards of Earth is a space opera with a dash of fantasy elements (hard sci-fi fans look elsewhere) that deal with a species called the Architects coming back after years of absence. These beings turned Earth, and many other worlds, into art projects, killing billions in the process. It combines Adrian’s penchant for efficient worldbuilding with the fun of following a rag-tag crew composed of the usual Tchaikovsky weirdness. Add in some Lovecraftian set-up for the future, innovative space battles, refreshingly mortal characters, and Adrian’s great dialogue and baby you’ve got a stew going.
I’m looking for straight, unabashedly “philosophical” science fiction, and when I mean philosophical, I’m not looking for works that are circlejerked in the “That’s so deep, bro!” stoner way, like Blindsight or Diaspora. (I actually like the both of them, and I consider both Peter Watts and Greg Egan some of my most favourite SF writers. But that’s not what I’m looking for here, even if some of their work does come close.)
What I want are works that approach academic-ish work in philosophy, like say metaphysics and ontology. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is like that, drawing upon the work of Husserl, and his Baroque Cycle that mentions Leibniz, and Adam Roberts mentions Kant in The Thing Itself. Calculating God by Robert Sawyer is good, too. John Crowley’s work, whole being fantasy, does apparently take inspiration from neo-Platonic and Hermetic thought. Lem too would fit under my criteria.
Thanks for recommendations. …
I’m looking for recent hard sci-fi, anything published in the last 5 years. What do you all like? That’s it, but since automod removed my last post for being too short, I guess I’ll emphasize that the science should be of the fictiony variety, and also hard, and it should of course have also been published in the last five years, as I mentioned.