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It's set in an Art-Deco "future" of our fully habitable Solar system (jungles and oceans on Venus, flowering fields on Pluto, etc), that started to be colonized in the 1860s. Of course, it is a play on early science fiction tropes, but somehow, it all fits together.
"Constellation Games" by Leonard Richardson (also known for the Beautiful Soup Python library!) https://constellation.crummy.com/
"Happy Snak" by Nicole Kimberling https://www.nicolekimberling.com/happy-snak
Here are some which, though perhaps not the best, haunt my memory through unique nostalgia. Glory Season , David Brin. Ok, this is one of the best. A heartrending saga of epic scale. Carve the Sky , Alexander Jablokov. Scifi feudalism. All of an Instant , Richard Garfinkle. Vita Nostra , Marina & Sergey Dyachenko. Though very different, it somehow reminds me of Roadside Picnic . Spin , Robert Charles Wilson. Schismat…
That's far from their best novel, but unfortunately most aren't translated into English - there're Polish and sometimes Deutsch translations only :(
Greg Egan. Agree with others in this thread that Permutation City is the most important. But Diaspora is not to be missed either. Egan's unique value prop is: crazy-thought-experiment sci fi (2D world with 2 time dimensions is his latest and is typical) but hard, harder than you can believe. Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then? Gene Wolfe. Book of t…
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I love the Wandering Inn but calling it “a bit longish” is quite an understatement.
Ok it's a bit longer, only a little bit. See for yourself https://www.reddit.com/r/WanderingInn/comments/wil9pi/word_c...
I'm also a very mildly annoyed that they included several era-spanning series on the list, but limited Dragonlance to the chronicles trillogy, despite that including followups by the original authors (Legends, Second generations).
The Wandering Inn [1], Stories of an alternate world somehow connected to a certain innkeeper of the said inn. Features extensive world building, character building, Lots of fleshed out characters, contains humour as well as serious stuff, has dragons, fae, aliens, time travel, hiveminds, automatons, cute pets, cosmic horrors, history lessons, magic, alchemy and steampunk engineering. It's a bit longish and not finis…
I suppose there could be a "It's all a VR game" or "It's alien mind control" twist that I haven't gotten to yet.
HN thread is full of books I've heard of and that get recommended literally anytime books are mentioned.
No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight? That book changed all sorts of notions of first contact and consciousness for me. I'm still thinking about it to this day. Absolute must read for anyone concerned with such things
> No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight? It was a Hugo nominee and actively reprinted under Tor Essentials label; probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"...but to be fair, anything by Andy Weir or Hugh Howey probably shouldn't have made the list either.
That's most of the ones being mentioned in this thread. I think maybe they are scifi books you haven't heard of...if you also don't normally read scifi.
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Yeah it's implausible. I mean, I don't think his genetics is right. So it's probably physically possible in some sense, but I don't it makes sense that it's that stable of a trait.
I think his explanation was that right angles don't appear in nature so the trait didn't get selected out.
Which is weird, because they do.