Don’t really know how to explain this. I like sci fi and would love to dig deeper into it. Am avid reader and enjoyed Project Hail Mary (though set in space, this book is just amazing), Dune, short stories by Ray Bradbury and TV shows like Raised by the Wolves, Westworld, From (love From!). But e.g. Foundation I really disliked. Wheel of time is massive and I lost interest. Even the guide through galaxy I appreciated but was not really into it. Somehow, all those lots of traveling, lots of worlds, lots of many novel/invented names and terms render reading laborious for me.
Can you help me pin what is that I like and perhaps offer me a suggestion where to start? Thanks!
EDIT: thanks everyone for your excellent suggestions! So happy to be a part of lemmy community. I might make a follow up thread in couple of months so we can discuss some of the works. And lastly, if you been reading this far: have a good weekend.
How about The Expanse or The Martian? They’re both relatively hard sci-fi that focuses mostly on our own solar system.
The Martian tells the tale of a man stuck on Mars and his ability to survive on his own whilst those back on Earth figure out a way to get him back. Both the book and the film are great so you can’t go wrong with either.
The Expanse covers more of the local system. Earth and Mars are on the brink of war, whilst others live out near the asteroid belt, Jupiter and beyond. It goes a little sci-fi later on but it’s an inherently human story that has some great characters living in a time when space travel is still dangerous but achievable by humanity. It starts a little slow but ramps up brilliantly and has a nice conclusion that wraps everything up pretty neatly. You’ve got 9+ books, a 6 season TV series on Amazon Prime, and a newly released TellTale video game, all of which are well produced and worth investing time in.
The Martian I am saving as one of those cannot go wrong books, in case i ever run into reading blockage. But Expanse i didn’t check out. Will do now. Thanks
My immediate thought was Expanse too. A fairly manageable scale to everything, for the most part, with space travel within relatively strict bounds.
Dune is an example of massive world-building with a tons of jargon, but you still liked it? It seems that this post is saying you don’t like books like Dune, so how did you manage to enjoy it?
It sounds to me like while OP can absolutely enjoy longer, more complex works, they can prove daunting and time consuming, so they’re looking for shorter and more straightforward stories.
Maybe I’m casting my own experiences onto this, but I know that’s a feeling I get too, especially with some video games. Some of my favorites are 200+ hours of meticulous exploration and grinding, but I rarely find myself with the energy to engage with journeys of this magnitude, so I usually gravitate more towards shorter stuff.
Exactly this. Thank you. :)
You do know nothing is black and white in life, right?
Anyways, I wouldn’t put Dune as my 5* read, but I did enjoy it. I only read the main part of the main Dune book, not the whole series, prequels etc. Also, it is mainly set on one planet.
I don’t blame you for not reading the rest of the Dune series, it wasn’t my cup of tea, either, but why don’t you watch a movie or something if you don’t want to actually read a book?
Have you tried Asimov’s short stories? ‘I, Robot’ is mostly logic problems presented in a dramatic way. Good read.
I haven’t. I thought I wasn’t really into short stories… Till I discovered Ray Bradbury. Now I am very much into short stories. So will give Asimov a try for sure.
Philip K Dick, too. You’ll be amazed at how many movies his short stories and novellas have been adapted into.
Try the short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster.
VERY different genre, but if you’re digging short stories, i really dig earnest hemmingway’s stuff.
Check out Ted Chiang as well – his two short story collections (Story of Your Life and Others; Exhalation) are some of the best I’ve ever read. He wrote the story upon which the film Arrival was based. Lots of things about time, consciousness, free will, humanity, all beautifully done.
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I believe it was advertised as a trilogy before the third book got published. And frankly, third book is written as the final book of a trilogy. The newer books should’ve been a separate saga, and there’s a chance that they were initially planned as such.
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I started on the fourth book, it just doesn’t hit quite as well as the first three. I feel perfectly content stopping the series after the third book, it finishes Darrow’s story really well.
I’ll throw in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Both classics that are great page turners. Take place against the backdrop of an intergalactic society but remain focused on singular planets and their societies (well if you include their anarchic moons). Great characters with meaningful relationships. Left Hand has more of an interpersonal focus, Dispossessed more societal, but both amazing in their own way.
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A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is such a good recommendation really, I have to elaborate why: I love The Stand (rebuilding the society), Heart is a Lonely hunter (american southwest) and 1000 years of solitude (story that spans across number of generations). So thanks!
Yes, or for something I enjoyed much more, Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
A great book, but it certainly includes a lot of invented vocabulary to deal with, and the reader is expected to just roll with it and sort the vocabulary out on their own.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Ursula K. Le Guin is an example of a writer that does deep but focused worldbuilding. Her sci-fi books tend to be about a single planet, sometimes two like in The Dispossesed. You could try that one or even better start with The Left Hand of Darkness. I like how she sets up various unusual alien factors (geopolitics, biology, society, natural environments) and lets them interplay but also without forgetting a plot.
She keeps popping up so I think I really have to check her out. :)
Red rising
Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead are both classics with little world building.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned The Culture series by Iain M. banks. Much like Dune there is a ton of world building that occurs in the novels but it’s not the focus of any one novel. You can read them independently and still enjoy them. The concepts he tackles in the novels were way ahead of their time and his prose and s second to none. The novel Consider Phlebas is typically where most people start, but I started The Player of Games.
Against a Dark Background from Banks is good too, much less space travel, a very adventurous plot and worldbuilding which is dense but doesn’t overtake the book.
Seconding The Player of Games as the place to start in the Culture novels, although there is notably a lot of space travel in the Culture series overall which might be why people are avoiding them for this request. But 100% worth giving TPoG a read, for sure - and it in particular has no space travel past the opening, iirc.
Most of the rest of Asimov is a lot more self contained than foundation. I like the rest of his stuff but Foundation is too abstract for me.
Yeah the Robot series was great if you like whodunits - the focus is very much on the plot, and all the world building we get directly impacts the plot
Oh there’s just so many. A favorite of mine is Replay by Ken Grimwood. It’s a kind of a time travel book, but different from most, and a lot of fun - written in 1986, so not new. Broad plot is that the main character, a middle aged man, dies on the first page and wakes up back in college, back in the 50s, I believe. It gets more interesting from there.
You might enjoy the Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells, which is a series that starts with All Systems Red. The first couple are novellas, and the first one was published in 2017, so much more recent. They won a lot of awards. It takes place in an unspecified time in the future, told from the perspective of a cyborg of sorts who is a security bot who has hacked his control unit and doesn’t have to do what he’s told, but he doesn’t want people to know that so he can watch soap operas when he can. He’s guarding a small group on an alien planet when things get weird.
I’ll recommend one other, very different: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. I believe that was 2007. It’s told from the perspective of a guy in near earth future who had late stage Alzheimer’s but was given a cure, so is slowly getting back his mental function. Wearable computers are ubiquitous at the time. Also a big award winner.
I hope you find something you like.
Murderbot is good
Agreed!
Omg this comment is so beautiful. Thank you so much! I think I am going to start with your first option, just got it on kindle (I am a total sucker for time/dimension travels, from 11/22/63 (one of my all time favorites) to Time Traveler’s wife to Blake Crouch).
Please, please write back and let me/us know what you think!
Hey I just finished the Replay and came to thank you again for mentioning it. Such an amazing book, absolutely one of my best reads so far. Cannot believe it is not more popular. Not only the plot got me, but also the way it was written, so… Human and intelligent. Also there is often quite some interesting info and emotional maturity in the dialogs, and yet they never felt forced, as those well-thought-through-exchanges sometimes tend to be. Just excellent. But gotta say: for once, for freaking once, the main character of time travel invests in stocks. I mean, come on, finally!
Anyways, you literally nailed it with recommending me this one. Will also look up now the other two from the list. Thanks again!
Oh, great! I’m so glad you liked it. I really appreciate your coming back to let me know. Like you, I’m not sure why it isn’t more widely known - it’s such a fun read.
I have a friend who was a reviewer for a major science fiction magazine back in the day. When I was going through a bad time and needed some escapism, he’d take me to the bookstore and pick things he thought I’d like; Replay was one of those. I’m so glad to be able to point someone else to it.
So I’ll make this recommendation a little more hesitantly. There’s another time travel book I really like - one that is is more well known - The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. It’s really great and really well written, but it’s also… very, very strange. It’s the kind of time travel where, if you go back a little, then there are two of you at that point. The character does some odd things. One to consider.
Let me know what you think of the others!
I recently finished The Psychology of Time Travel, not sure if you’ve read it, but it was really good and interesting! And totally unique
The Three Body Problem trilogy, especially the first two books.
Trying to avoid too many spoilers, the first book is about a Chinese scientist investigating a mysterious threat. It’s not too heavy on world building, and it’s set on present day earth.
Second book, The Dark Forest, is about how this impossible threat is dealt with, and I think it’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve read.
I think the third book, Death’s End, went overboard quite a bit, but it’s still a good one.
An oldy, but The day of the triffids by John Wyndham
I have a massive soft spot for his stuff. I’m still hoping that someone will adapt The Kraken Wakes for film or TV one of these days.
