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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'm trying to find a legal copy of the original Russian book, but still could not find. Where did you get yours? That and the original Russian copies of the Metro series..
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.
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…
>Vita Nostra, Marina & Sergey Dyachenko That's far from their best novel, but unfortunately most aren't translated into English - there're Polish and sometimes Deutsch translations only :(
It's so good, if their others are better it's insane that they haven't been translated yet.
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…
I read Permutation City with great anticipation and really disliked it. My favorite parts were when big ideas met the tedium of execution (like the avatars having to deal with the cost of spot instances, and running in lower-res slower-than-realtime environments.) I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals. I greatly enjoyed Ze…
I want to do book recommendations from the other direction. I need to know which books to avoid based on the books people like. For example, if I hated The Three Body Problem and you loved it, then I'm probably going to hate the other books you love.
Just because someone liked a book you hate, doesn't mean you will hate the other books they like. I hated "Sea of Tranquility". I can't stand stupid characters. "Furtuna" was so bad I made a note to avoid any other books by Kristyn Merbeth. The main character is stupid, selfish, and short sighted to the detriment of everyone around her.
So much this, and it's why recommendation engines mostly don't work well, they really have no way to quantify why you liked or disliked something.
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.
I don't know how that can possibly make sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am curious, is the audio book abridged and the book far too long? Or what else could it be?
Without getting into spoilers, the very high quality narration makes the story better.
It's one of the handful of books that genuinely changed my mind about serious questions -- in my case, relating to gender, politics, & religion. But it's definitely not coming from anywhere you'd expect.
I compare it loosely to Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Dispossessed". The author paints a picture of a utopia, and gradually we see deep human flaws tear it apart. It starts off with investigation of a puzzling criminal tresspass, which slowly spirals upward into greater and greater consequences -- and it intensely rewards careful reading, or a second reading, as major reveals are subtly foreshadowed early and often.
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.
>the audio book is good but the book is not 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.
If you liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary, two books I cannot recommend enough are Daniel Suarez' Delta-V and Critical Mass. Highly technical focused hard-sci-fi about asteroid mining and human dynamics in high-risk envrionments. I can't vouch for the absolute factual correctness, but it has an appendix listing the papers the author indirectly references for the book. https://daniel-suarez.com/index.html