@kissane suggested yesterday(?) that we should Bring Back Book Talk #OnHere and I heartily agree.
Which I’m taking as the nudge I needed to start a new version of an old 🐦 thread (prompted by @josh) on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) from perspectives that are (sadly) mostly new to SFF.
Note that for most of my life I’ve been a scifi reader; it’s in part the new breadth of storytelling that has brought me into fantasy.
Recommendations welcome! List is in no particular order.
This list will be mostly *new* SFF but FWIW there’s a small but vigorous tradition of writing—and critiquing—diversity in SFF.
Samuel Delany’s 1977 review of the first Star Wars is a landmark here: in it he says, of SFF films, “the variety of human types should be as fascinating and luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer’s paint box. Not to make use of that variety… seems an imaginative failure.”
I hope my list is in that spirit. #bookstodon
https://samueldelany.tumblr.com/post/82806452407/samuel-delany-reviews-the-first-star-wars-movie
Lots of this list will still be American, but there’s an increasing amount of sci-fi in translation these days. This collection of Chinese shorts is consistently good; not just the stories but also the introductory and closing essays, which push back healthily on attempts to generalize about China through its scifi.
I didn’t like the second and third books of the trilogy very much, but Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem deserves every bit of the very wide praise that it got. I strongly recommend reading it *after* the essays in Ken Liu’s translated short-story volume, as helpful context.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765382030/thethreebodyproblem
edited to add: ugh, milkshake duck warning: https://zencho.org/articles/being-an-itemised-list-of-disagreements/
Probably not to everyone’s taste (less Big Ideas; more Just Plain Fun, And Also Sex (author’s description: “BSDM-inflected cyberpunk lesbian”), but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the Machine Mandate novellas: https://beekian.wordpress.com/
Picking up this old #bookstodon thread on science fiction and fantasy from different perspectives, because it is summer and friends have been asking for recs.
“Cortez on Jupiter”, Ernest Hogan: what if 1990s cyberpunk, but starring a Chicano muralist from LA? A gloriously weird book I wish I’d found when I lived in Miami rather than 30 years later: https://ernesthogan.blogspot.com/2014/11/ernest-hogan-on-cortez-on-jupiter.html
Tade Thompson’s Rosewater / Wormwood trilogy is are hard to summarize; suffice to say “alien invasion via West Africa”, with a structure that is sometimes jarring and always engaging.
It is also one of the few members of the *extremely* rare genre of “science fiction that acknowledges that the Hausa language exists”, a language with 50-80M speakers, and meaningful to me personally because my wife speaks it after her stint in Niger in the Peace Corps.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tade-thompsons-rosewater-an-alien-invasion-that-grows-on-you/
Surfacing this rec from @brainwane from the older thread’s responses. The best scifi is a lens through which we can look at ourselves; @zencho ‘s Sorcerer’s To The Crown was part of how I learned that fantasy can have the same impact: https://social.coop/@brainwane/112195892365448957
@luis_in_brief Recommend: Zen Cho's "Black Water Sister" https://zencho.org/books/black-water-sister/ Suspenseful, funny, observant. I appreciated how this book got at the experience of coming to one's heritage country as an adult, after (previously) only experiencing it as a child, and starting to grasp how politics, real estate development, old familial dynamics, & chance decisions have shaped the people/places that one took for granted. More on themes in @[email protected]'s work: https://www.harihareswara.net/posts/2021/willis-and-cho/ #BooksSeriously
🧵 Nghi Vo’s novella Empress of Salt and Fortune melted me; strikingly original. (Also reminded me, in terms of form, of the underrated classic The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach.) The rest of her Singing Hills cycle of novellas have also been fun, though I admit none struck me quite as directly as the first.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-empress-of-salt-and-fortune-nghi-vo/16390013
🧵 Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a bit hit-or-miss for me (eg, Mexican Gothic wasn’t bad but didn’t quite hit the spot for me) but Gods of Jade and Shadow was *terrific*:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/gods-of-jade-and-shadow-silvia-moreno-garcia/12105572
🧵 In the “BDSM space lesbians” category, special sub-category “space necromancers”, Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb is absolutely as good as everyone says it is, though not a light read—second book in particular I found structurally challenging (in a good way!)
Amazon B&N BAM! Bookshop iBooks Amazon B&N BAM! Bookshop iBooks Amazon B&N BAM! Bookshop iBooks THE TOMB WILL OPEN IN… Praise for The Locked Tomb Series: “One of the best sci-fi series of all time.” –Cosmopolitan “Deft, tense and atmospheric, compellingly immersive and wildly original.” –The New York Times “Brilliantly original, messy and weird straight…
🧵 NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth shouldn’t require a recommendation from me because anyone who is into science fiction or fantasy at all should already have read it; it is one of the towering achievements of the genre.
🧵I really enjoy everything Becky Chambers writes, but I particularly have been enjoying her #solarpunk novellas, starting with Psalm for the Wild Built. They’re good for the heart.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-becky-chambers/15125608
🧵 @Catvalente gets two shoutouts, for vastly different books. If you want *light*, and/or are into Eurovision, Space Opera is… hilarious.
Her “Radiance”, on the other hand, is more… deeply weird. In a way that I found deeply amazing but, especially if you’re newer to scifi, may not be for everyone. https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/111942707909189921
Stumbled into @[email protected]'s Radiance and it is 🤯 Stick into a blender and pulse: Dick and Delany's technicolor delirium; Stanley-Robinson's narrational multi-modality; Maltese Falcon's noir; Orson Welles' everything (Citizen Kane and drunk wine ads alike); Voyage Dans Le Lune (every version you can think of, including colorized and with Air's soundtrack). Not for everyone but I am loving it.
🧵 @ArkadyMartine ’s Teixcalaan books are Very Serious Hard Scifi but also smart about colonialism, gender, and a host of other topics, and in a style that really works for me.
(I say “but” here because, well, lots of Very Serious Scifi traditionally has been completely awful on all of those fronts. But if you’ve read this far in the thread you probably knew that already.)
I also thoroughly enjoyed her “Rose/House”.
🧵 Kai Ashante Wilson’s Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and The Devil in America are both terrific stuff; pretty pure fantasy but outside of the normal bounds of that genre. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765385246/thesorcererofthewildeeps
🧵 @maryrobinette ‘s Lady Astronauts series gets my highest possible praise, which is that I want to share it with my son as part of his early-teen intro-to-scifi reading—it’s smart, fun, and engaging, and also for a developing kid, so much better and more thoughtful about gender and race than any scifi I read at that age. And it’ll be getting a fourth book soon, apparently!
🧵 @djolder ‘s Book of Lost Saints is modern-day-ish magico-realist-fantasy that spoke personally to me as a Miami Cuban kid. I can’t possibly be objective about it and no way of knowing if it’ll work for others here, but I hope it works for somebody.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/daniel-jose-older/the-book-of-lost-saints/
🧵 I first discovered Saad Hossain’s work through his utterly bizarre Escape from Baghdad, which is hard to explain and not for everyone: Catch-22 meets Hunter S. Thompson via Iraq? His more recent The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, and Kundo Wakes Up, are (briefly) djinn/AI crossover events, in a near-future subcontinent—more accessible and more fun, but still pointed.
https://locusmag.com/2022/04/gary-k-wolfe-reviews-kundo-wakes-up-by-saad-z-hossain/
🧵 This is How You Lose The Time War is as good as Bigolas Dickolas said it was. https://slate.com/culture/2023/05/amal-el-mohtar-bigolas-dickolas-tweet-interview.html
🧵 @nnedi ‘s work is great—I particularly loved her (underrated) Book of Phoenix, and quite liked her recently-republished Desert Magician’s duology (again, techno-magic in the deserts of West Africa. And Hausa!). Her best-known work is probably her Binti trilogy, which didn’t work quite as well for me but are widely loved.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/books/ya-fantasy-diverse-akata-warrior.html
🧵 These 25 post-dystopias are good (post-! recovery! optimism!) but they are about *beginnings* of recovery. Which also means a lot of grim detail about the recent or still-ongoing dystopia. Powerful in many places but also lots of triggering.
https://www.npr.org/2019/02/09/692484737/new-collection-asks-what-might-the-peoples-future-look-like
🧵 Cuban sci-fi? Cuban sci-fi! I can’t say I loved either the works of Yoss (“Super Extra Grande) or de Rojas (The Year 200, A Legend of the Future)—I’d probably only recommend to people looking to go pretty far afield—but interesting and different.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/galaxy-90-miles-away-view-cuban-science-fiction/
🧵 tangentially, if you’re in SF, I owe several of the books in this thread to the small but mighty (and mightily weird) scifi/fantasy shelf at Medicine for Nightmares on 24th Street. It is not where I would recommend anyone *start* with sci-fi/fiction, but it is great, including a lot of stuff that I never saw at the now-canceled scifi/fantasy place that was on Valencia and is now in the Haight.
🧵 When I posted this thread on The Other Place in 2021, someone recommended Mary Soon Lee’s Sign of the Dragon, an epic fantasy poem(!). It’s terrific not just because the form is such a breath of fresh air, but for her seriousness and tenderness towards characters who aren’t her protagonists.
If you’re looking for a summer read that is fantasy but very different, I can’t recommend this enough.
https://www.amazon.com/Sign-Dragon-Mary-Soon-Lee-ebook/dp/B087HVB242
🧵 Indigenous Americans are very under-represented in this list. Only thing I’ve knowingly read in that category is Rebecca Roanhorse's Between Earth and Sky, and it is amaaaazing fantasy, reminiscent of Tolkien or RR Martin. Incredibly rich worldbuilding, compelling characters. Final book in the trilogy just came out, but it is complex enough that I want to re-read the first two before I jump in.
https://rebeccaroanhorse.com/2024/06/09/mirrored-heavens-is-here/
🧵 Cairo and New Orleans magico-steampunk? Cairo and New Orleans magico-steampunk! Really like everything I’ve ready by @pdjeliclark. His “The Black God’s Drums” is particularly sharp and idea-driven; his Dead Djinn series is more fun, though still incisive on being an outsider (in keeping with the best detective noir).
🧵 From Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts is a grim but well-done take on the traditional science fiction sub-genre of the generation ship.
The Deep is… hard to explain, but powerful and recommended, especially if you’re an experienced reader of fantasy wanting to push your boundaries.
🧵 @AnnLeckie ‘s Ancillary/Imperial Radch series is a great ripping read, and extremely sharp on gender and class. Can’t recommend enough for any fan of “hard” science fiction.
🧵 Nisi Shawl’s Everfair was great if you’re into alternate histories of power and colonization; I need to read the (recent) second book in the series ASAP.
https://www.npr.org/2016/09/07/490101943/everfair-looks-into-steampunks-dark-heart
🧵 Ending on the same note I started the thread, now several years ago: short stories in translation. The thread started with Chinese; these are from Spanish. Unlike the other short story collections I’ve tended to recommend, this one takes a longer view (including some very old pieces), and is a bit academic, so it is a bit more uneven to the modern ear. But still some good stuff in it.
🧵 I lied; not done. The most mind-bending, “think about it all the time”, scifi of the past 5-10 years for me: @adapalmer ‘s Terra Ignota.
It wasn’t in the original 🧵 on 🐦 because it is not an easy set of books for a newcomer to scifi. Reading scifi is a bit of a skill—you have to figure out the puzzle pieces. And Terra Ignota pushes has a lot of pieces, but they are so rewarding.
@[email protected] also, @[email protected]’s amazing Terra Ignota series is sort of post-hopepunk: what if hope won, and everything was great, and we’d solved war and sexism and nationalism! (But then they come back from the dead…)
Read Wole Talabi’s “Convergence”, a story collection. Great stories, period. Much recommended.
Mostly in Nigeria or with Nigerian characters.
You can get it (and others) from the new Bookshop.org ebook feature!
Which of the Ian M Banks #TheCulture novels would you recommend? :D
Luis Villa
Billy Smith
Andrew Scott