New sci-fi and fantasy books to check out this August
transfer-orbit.ghost.io
transfer-orbit.ghost.io
If you're not sure about reading it, check out his prequel short story, “A Dead Djinn in Cairo” on Tor<dot>com. [2]
[1] https://pdjeliclark.com/a-master-djinn/
[2] https://www.tor.com/2020/06/08/read-p-djeli-clarks-a-dead-dj...
I wouldn't recommend either if you haven't read Dune, book 1, though. Read it.
Why is that? I read Dune when I was a kid but don't remember the particulars -- do I need them for some reason?
1. Denis Villeneuve's Dune comes out this fall, and from the trailers looks to be amazingly well done.
2. Dune is a touchstone book in science fiction. Many of the works in later generations contain passing references to it, and it has remained important and relevant since its release.
I read it again for the first time in years last month and enjoyed it all over again. I red the children of dune sequel as well.
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is also a good read. Fast paced and interesting ideas.
Sometimes when I want some thoughts to linger on while falling asleep, I reconstruct one of the places and imagine what would it be like to stay in that world.
Blake Crouch has really good imagination from my opinion and his books stay in your mind quite long. If you do not mind the week scientific background they are good rides.I liked very much the the wayward pines trilogy.
Dark Matter is a great lightweight hammock sci-fi book.
but fiction can be worth it when its laying out ideas that are so new and so fresh that it is intrinsically valuable. but these grand visions dont involve people or relationships at their core, so making a book out of it can be difficult.
i think the next great sci-fi novel will be about mars. i feel like there are a lot of aspects of mars colonization that have not been picked up by the hive-mind yet. practical aspects of living there and moving things there. and generally applying the rules of today to that world. the arbitrage is in the fact that people usually paint the future with a utopian, optimistic brush but the same rules of economics and politics will apply on mars just as much as they do here. maybe that sounds like red mars but it would be different.
I didn't find the people or relationship issues to detract from the Mars trilogy because the personalities interweaves with the politics, and the inescapability of personalities and relationships being factors in the close proximities necessary in almost all stages of colonising a planet.
Greg Egan, recommended on HN in any sci-fi related thread, seems idea-heavy from the little I've read so far.
(edit: reading down further I see I've been beaten to this recommendation)
The novel I want to write is a thoroughly depressing the-future-is-the-just-present-for-those-born-during-it exposition about the inescapability of human nature and how this means that any and all revolution is doomed to just change the people and not the structure and that whilst your fellow revolutionaries are your closest friends and allies now, in the unlikely chance that the revolution is successful, when it comes time to actually make decisions affecting reality, you'll find yourself in the company of strangers with familiar faces. Highlighting that in any future-state technological context this remains true.
Honestly, if I pick up a glossy new F/SF book the odds are very good that it will be poorly written tripe, or at best, kind of a tolerable way to pass a little time.
If your taste runs more towards better written material, a absolutely necessary step is to open the book at a random page or two and read some of the text. If the text looks like a blogpost or the offerings of a barely literate teenager, you dodge a bullet, put it back (unless you like that sort of thing, in which case, rock on).
This test has spared me a number of terrible reads - quite a number of books with perfectly nice looking covers, good blurbs and an intriguing "back of the book" premise are written by people whose writing is rudimentary (which is not to say that I need an exotic prose style; I like the 'plain' form too).
Battlefield Earth (the book, definitely not the movie)
The Land: Founding - Aleron Kong
Steel World - B.V. Larson
Ready Player One / Ready Player Two - Ernest Cline
Twinborn Chronicles - J.S. Morin
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
These are great in audiobook format... the internal monologue stuff really adds to the story/character