Recommendations, Of a Modern Sort

Yes, I realize that LT has its own suggestion feature, but I'm looking for info that comes from real people and not statistics and such.

I read sci-fi and fantasy in almost equal measures, but lately I've noticed that I'm reading more and more fantasy. Part of it is that a lot of newer books recommended by friends are fantasy.

But when it comes to sci-fi, the titles I'm told I "have to read" are years--decades, even--old. I have no idea who or what I should be reading as regards contemporary sci-fi.

So I'm putting this before you: What are some recent sci-fi books/authors worth checking out?

I'm in the middle of Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds (2000), and it's pretty good so far.

i'm pretty new to sci-fi as a genre, but i've gotten hooked on kim stanley robinson. some of his writing is older, yes, but he's still prolific. i recently got his forty signs of rain, which is a couple of years old, and fifty degrees below only came out last year.

EDIT: i'm revising my post only to second redthing's rec. alastair reynolds is also another great one (although i might recommend to you both that you skip the third book in that trilogy, it's not nearly as good as the first two).

EDIT: ok. i thought i was editing my first post. *slaps forehead*

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton. I started it a while back (still haven't finished it yet, it's a big book over 900 pages) and it is pretty good. Space opera sci-fi, interstellar civilization on dozens of worlds. If you like that type of sci-fi you may like this book. This is part of a 2 book series. The second book, Judas Unchained came out in paperback last week.

The Lost Fleet: Dauntless by Jack Campbell. Series by a new author. The second book The Lost Fleet: Fearless is out as well. Each book is pretty short. This is military sci-fi, has some space battles. I have read the first book and it wasn't bad. I have yet to read the 2nd in the series.

I also really like David Weber books. He writes a popular military sci-fi series (centered around a character named Honor Harrington).

Charles Stross
Ken MacLeod

for a couple

I'll second both of bluetyson's recommended authors. They're both writing first-rate stuff.

One problem with recommending state-of-the-art SF is that the field has evolved - the genre is now building on (literally) generations of story conventions.

There's sometimes an unwarranted assumption that any given reader will be comfortable just picking it up and plunging back in. It can be difficult for readers who haven't kept up with the field to find a way to jump back on to what amounts to a moving ride.

So some of the cutting-edge SF can be a bit ...shall we say... inaccessible. Accelerando or The Cassini Division are a fun rides, but they might actually be over-dense with ideas for somebody who hasn't kept up.

Scalzi's Old Man's War doesn't assume that the reader has kept up with all of the SF published in the last twenty years.

As far as more accessible goes, and if you are a fantasy fan, Charles Stross has a series - The Family Trade etc., which is a bit of an Amber type riff. However, I am guessing he is going to SF it a bit it at some stage, with how he writes. So one you can check out if you want to avoid the 'mind melter' posthuman infotech sort of thing.

I'd reccommend the Arabesque cycle (Pashazade, Effendi,Felaheen), 2001-2003 + Stamping Butterflies, 2004, by Jon Courtenay Grimwood - if you like those he has written a few others worth reading. His oldest books are from the mid 90's, and he's still active.

None of these are traditional "hard sf", but I checked your profile and saw we share some books that may indicate these could be valid suggestions.

*touchstones! argh!*

All of Alistair Reynold's work.

Finished 1 decade ago, though it was started quite a while before that maybe Stephen Donaldson's The Real Story and Gap series.

Jeff Noon for some off the wall stuff. I've only read Pixel Juice but it was great.

I will of course highligh C. J. Cherryh as a very clever author. Her Foreigner series is still going strong, (defender is the latest) and whilst you are waiting for new books, she has written a lot of excellant old material to catch up on too.

Greg bear and David brin are still writing new and fascinating works. Some hits and some misses but worth checking out.

China Mieville is another new author of note. I didn't much care for perdido Street Station but I appreciated the talent he has.

Sean Williams might be hard to find, but I enjoyed his The Dark Imbalance series. Of course Neal Stephenson is still writing but I don't feel his new stuff is any match for his older works.

4>

Trilogy? The series has four books. Of which I found Chasm City the best. However I would probably recommend Century Rain as a starting point as it is self-contained and seems to me less dense.

For a good Ken Macleod I would go for Learning The World.

Neal Asher is another in the ranks of new British space opera and worth reading. Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon is hardboiled noir with a twist.

Robert Charles Wilson's Spin (and some of his other work) are great. Joe Haldeman has returned to something like his best form with Camouflage and Old Twentieth

10>

I would hesitate to include China Mieville in this list. Yep he is a great writer but I wouldn't call him science fiction. His books tend more to the fantasy end of the spectrum although he would call them weird fiction.

How could I forget about Neal Asher?! Skip The voyage of the Sable Keech, though. I'd recommend The Skinner, plus Gridlinked and Cowl.

reading_fox and I are known to disagree on Neal Stephenson - while Snow Crash is excellent I think the quadruple of Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, Confusion and The System of the World is great reads. But I deliberately left them out in my former post as books +900 pages each is, well... if you don't like them it's a lot of paper ;-)
And I know there are a lot of disagreement on if his books are good or not.

*touchstones!*

Same way I forgot Richard Morgan I guess, but I was thinking mind melting, not super agents or the Altered Carbon stuff I guess. :)

>11 andyl: & to clarify - i wasn't considering chasm city as part of the trilogy, since it's intended to be self-contained. the part of the ?trilogy/four-parter? that i don't recommend is absolution gap.

>1 iamrazorwing: if we knew a little about what you already enjoy, we'd be able to be a bit more specific in our recommendations. As you know, SF has many subgenres and not everyone enjoys, for example, military sf or cyberpunk. Please, tell us about some of your favorites...

>10 reading_fox: I agree with andyl, China Miéville is a fabulous read, but he is a mix of dark fantasy, horror and steampunk.

David Weber is excellent military/space opera SF - the most recent ones are heavy on the politics, though. I like them, some people are turned off.

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (I'm not sure whether they're listed separately - they have a few independent works but mostly write together) are great. Their Liaden Universe books are...um, culture clash, politics, romance, space opera, psionics...and probably anything else you can think of in SF.

EDIT: While there is a Steve Miller page, a) I think there's at least a couple different authors there and b) none of them seem to be the Steve Miller I was talking about. Sharon has the Liaden books.

Elizabeth Moon's current SF series, which starts with Trading in Danger, is also excellent.

Hmmm, I'm beginning to sense a trend here. I hadn't realized just how much my current SF reading is military SF....

OK, not quite as recent but magnificent books - Janet Kagan, particularly Hellspark, and Dorothy J. Heydt's A Point of Honor. The first is culture clash and first contact; the second is VR integrated into a near-future world.

Jack McDevitt has several great books. I like the Prescilla Hutchins ("Hutch") novels. Most of these books are relatively recent. The Hercules Text by McDevitt is also very good.

if we knew a little about what you already enjoy, we'd be able to be a bit more specific in our recommendations. As you know, SF has many subgenres and not everyone enjoys, for example, military sf or cyberpunk. Please, tell us about some of your favorites...

Well, that's really hard to say. I loved I, Robot. I really enjoyed Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, so I guess that makes me a social SF fan? Left Hand of Darkness--as much as I enjoy Le Guin--was only decent. I've read Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and they both left me feeling cold, simply because I didn't get either of them. Dune's a great piece of work for its world-building, but I found it hugely dull otherwise.

I guess I like stories that are accessible, ones that don't throw a whole lot of technical jargon or abstractions my way. I've read plenty of great SF in the short story form (James Patrick Kelly, The Hugo Winners Vol. 1), but I'd really like to find some novels that I can lose myself in.

Maybe I should read more of the classics waiting on my shelf before I go venturing off into contemporary territory.

I'd also reccommend Jules Verne. I borrowed two of his books from my cousin: Twenty Thousand Leages Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. They were both excellent.

I also noticed Ender's Game in your catalog. I heard that series was pretty good!

Hmm...If you liked I, Robot, then i'd suggest reading Robot Dreams and Robot Visions as well, if you're wanting to read some more short stories some time in the future.

It might be worth looking at a few anthologies to get a feel for what is out there. Maybe a couple of Dozois Best SF anthologies and Hartwell Year's Best SF. That way you can say "urgh don't like " or rather "wow - has written any novels".

For social SF, then Stan Robinson's 40/50/60 series of near future eco-thriller's are good (which philosojerk recommended). His multicoloured Mars series (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, and The Martians) is also good - but they are big reads.

I also like Bruce Sterling - Holy fire : a novel and Distraction fit into the social SF area.

Geoff Ryman's Air, Or, Have Not Have is one of the truly great novels IMNSHO.

Elizabeth Moon's Speed Of Dark is well worthy of its Nebula

Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and Darwin's Children are worth reading as is his Blood Music if you haven't already read that.

>19 iamrazorwing: It sounds like you like the kind of SF that encourages one to think about issues of various kinds.

Here I am following andyl again:-) Dukedom and I second andyl's choice of Kim Stanley Robinson whose novels are always thought-provoking.

And I would second also the Elizabeth Moon which examines the idea of what it means to be normal. It sold both in genre and out.

I would also recommend Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (dystopian future), Player of Games by Ian M. Banks (political intrigue in highly advanced societies), Salt by Adam Roberts (contrast of two societies with different political philosophies) and, if you haven't read it, Burn by James Patrick Kelly.

I would recommend Illium by Dan Simmons. It starts out sounding more fantasy than scifi, but he puts the hard tech in as he goes.

I also enjoyed The Plot to Save Socrates by Paul Levinson, a time-travel-ish novel.

I have to agree on the Neal Stephenson Cryptominicon et al foursome. Although long, reading Illium already demonstrates I like long novels.

I'll also suggest my own first novel, Dusk Before the Dawn, which has some nanotechnology plagues as it's sci fi base, plus martial arts and mayans (yes, I know, a strange combination).

I enjoyed Altered Carbon quite a bit, too.

On the other hand, I have a second opinion on Kim Stanley Robinson: I got through about 2/3 of Red Mars and I have to say I wasn't that impressed. The speculative science was interesting, but the temporality of the narrative is so spread out that it's easy to lose interest. Also his characters just aren't very three-dimensional or compelling.

Perhaps a good start to see if you like Peter Hamilton's style would be to read his short stories -A Second Chance at Eden. I would also agree with the recommendation of Alastair Reynold's Century Rain.

I'd honestly say to check out this year's hugo nominees for best novel. Glasshouse, Eifelheim, Rainbow's End, and especially Blindsight are well worth reading (I have not read the fifth nominee yet).

Richard Morgan is the best novelist of the lot of the new British wave, period.

Charles Stross is the new Bruce Stirling. For a start, look at his pastiches of Lovecraftian horror and intelligence procedural; "The Atrocity Archives" and "The Jennifer Morgue."

John Scalzi is very accessible and modern at the same time, particularly if you're looking for straight-up military SF.

If you haven't looked at Iain Banks you're missing the man most of the current wave of British writers stand in the shadow of. Start with "The Player of Games."

I also personally like Karen Traviss.

I second Iain M. Banks. You should know that he writes mainstream novels under the name "Iain Banks" and inserts his middle initial when he is writing science fiction. Most of his science fiction output are "Culture" novels and they are quite good. Consider Phlebas, Look to Windward, Player of Games, Excession, and even Inversions, although you have to look for it in the last one.

The Red/Blue/Green Mars series isn't about the characters. I can barely remember them now. What's so completely fascinating are the ideas he presents and the idea of what happens when humanity tries to start over on another planet.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written an interesting SF series which deals with the idea of humanity (and corporates) trading with alien cultures, and how some humans and their families have to become 'disappeared' (hide from govt and alien allies because they've transgressed against an alien rule which doesn't match a human rule...& the punishment is usually fatal).
The first in this Retrieval Artist series is The disappeared: A Retrieval Artist novel

Mix that with lunar and Mars habitats, police and bounty hunters etc, ... and it's quite interesting.
It's the people as well as the ideas that I like in this series.
Mind you I like murder mysteries/police procedural as well as Science Fiction and there's some genre blurring in this series. It's not hard science fiction.

29>

In a way I disagree. The biggest character in the books was the planet itself. It may have been so big it swamped the others. Anyway I have strong memories of a number of the characters in the Mars books and I haven't read them since the first edition hardbacks came out. If anything I would say that his characters were believable if not very dynamic at times.

I'm with andyl there. The major players in the First 100 are definitely still memorable. There was deliberate mythologising of them, in fact.

Some of the Culture books are good, some aren't. Wouldn't argue with Morgan.

I have to agree with those who have said Richard Morgan; Altered Carbon and Broken Angels are both great. I'd also add L.E. Modesitt Jr. to the list. While sometimes a bit formulaic, some of his work like The Parafaith War and Adiamante are very worthwhile reads.

Talking of Richard Morgan I have his latest book Black Man which will be published next month in the US as Thirteen. Guess which title is winning out as the primary title :-( Personally I prefer the British title. It is a bit more in your face - which considering the main character of the book seems appropriate.

A strange thing I have noticed is that the reviews (*) all state both titles. I have never noticed this before where titles have differed between the US and UK.

(*) So far this has been Strange Horizons and sffworld, no others have reviewed it yet.

>34 andyl: did you mean that you have not noticed a difference generally in US and UK titles of the same book or are you talking about this book specifically? A difference in titles happens a fair amount. Take Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close, for example, which here in the US was titled Fleshmarket Alley. That was just one example off the top of my head. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone/Sorcerer's Stone is, of course, a notable one.

It does irritate me; which is why I started buying the UK editions...one wonders what else they are "translating" for me.

No, I am aware that a number of books have differing titles between the US and the UK. What I noticed about this particular one is that the online reviews have stated both titles and showing both covers. For example This one at Strange Horizons.

Add another vote for spin by RC Wilson! My brother had me read an oldie called childhood's end by AC Clarke (very dated) and I happened to spot Spin soon after. Really liked it. Went on to read a few other books by Wilson which I also enjoyed including Blind Lake.

Alastair Reynolds has some great books. The Revelation Space trilogy was superb science-fiction.

I would also suggest Scott Westerfeld's Succession series (The Risen Empire and the Killing of Worlds.)

>36 andyl: I guess I misunderstood your original post. Yes, I agree, that's interesting.