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His blog post mentions people influenced (and misguided) by reading only American Sci-Fi. What are some examples of good "worldly" Sci-Fi? Or, good non-US Sci-Fi authors? Should I just check the Hugo and Nebula awards? I would like to expand my Sci-Fi palate.

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The modern answer to that are probably books like "the three body problems". Also old French science fiction can be excellent, e.g: anything Barjavel. Not to mention there are always UK outliers, like Douglas Adams.

But personally, I'd say Bande dessinée, the European cousin of comic books, is where you will find the most untapped underrated wonders.

Anything Moebius or Jodoroski, like "L'Incal" or "La caste des Meta-barons" is truly special. The aesthetics have a lot of personality, the writing is messed up, and the world building is all kind of twisted and provoking.

The main problem is that they sometimes take you for a whole run then end up nowhere. But the ride is awesome, and some of it has left scars inside me, I'm not kidding. And it has been translated to English.

Even without aiming for extremes, you'll find all kind of fun stuff.

Like "Aldébaran" that really sells this sense of discovery of new exotic places with a rag tag expedition, like African jungles in the past, but on new planets. It's a big saga too.

"Sillage" that packs your read with a futuristic black window amidst a galactic political turmoil.

Bilal's immortal trilogy giving the Egyptian alien concept some wind.

Or "Le gipsy" for a no brain adventure with a truck driver coasting on a road that wraps around the entire world.

It's crazy to me that given the lack of creativity of Hollywood they scrap everything they can from books and even mangas or video games, but they rarely attack this treasure.

Plus those SF master pieces have equally good fantasy sisters.

About old French science fiction, let's not forget Jules Verne.

I thought about it, but it's not that entertaining nowadays.

We have been spoiled by decades of mind blowing SF.

We know all the twists, all the tropes. And the style hasn't aged well.

Foundational stuff deserve respect because we built on them, but sometimes you can feel the age.

I’ve listened to From the Earth to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, and between the lists of things that mean nothing to me[0] and the humans being unrealistic[1], I have to assume something was lost in the translation, because they… are just not any good.

[0] 10 kinds of seaweed? I think?

[1] I spent my life betting against you and losing! / I challenge you to a duel! — followed by both parties getting distracted before the duel and be found chasing butterflies. Was this a secret code for them pretending to hate each other so they could have a gay affair back when such things were forbidden? Because that would make a lot more sense than the actual words in the audiobook.

Indeed. Even as a Frenchman a lot of it doesn't click for me.

Both the language and the day-to-day life has aged and not in a good way. (Shockingly, The Three Musketeers' language and concerns hasn't! It's still great fun. But not scifi.)

I agree. For me, the biggest surprise in The Three Musketeers is how few muskets are involved, but the story itself is excellent.

A problem with Barjavel - as I remember it - is the stylization of the stories: there is little detail, little background, little world ambiance in these books. Just a one big story. And that makes them paraboles or something - exercises about ONE idea. And not worlds.

In something like L'Incal on the contrary, the world around the story is very rich. In the way the Neuromancer world is rich. There is not JUST the story going on. It goes on in front and in the middle of a richness of OTHER ideas. Which is to me more thought-provoking because less artificial.

You should definitely check Stanisław Lem [1][2]. Some details might got lost in translations, but it's still worth to get to know works of this Polish writer.

[1] https://english.lem.pl/ (site's English version seems unfinished)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem (Polish variant has much more information)

Seconded.

An investment of only 10 minutes in reading the following short story will grant you knowledge of whether you will enjoy Lem:

https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-cyberiad/146-how-the...

And this particular story is remarkable in how it managed to survive translation.

With the note that its explicitly parodying scifi, the Hitchhikers Guide (Douglas Adams is British) is a fun read no matter the medium you can find it in (except for the movie and possibly the adventure game).

One of the most ageless stories I've ever read. I revisit the radio series every year and it holds up to a remarkable degree.

Douglas Adams predicted, to a remarkable level of precision, the process of enshittification.

The Three Body Problem trilogy is fantastic, and originating from China has quite a different feel to western sci-fi. Adrian Tchaikovsky is from the UK and has done some super interesting stuff as well, start with Children of Time.

Also everything by Ken Liu (China) and Nick Harkaway (UK), and the Iain M Banks "Culture" novels.

Ken Liu is Chinese-American, fyi

It is a great way to understand how totalitarianism and Chinese nationalism influences world view. Highly recommended reading.

Neal Asher as well - The Culture but not as optimistic (under selling it there but close enough).

I would recommend Stanislaw Lem. He is Polish and Jewish. Solaris is great start. There has been two movie adaptions of his book, Soviet and Hollywood, and both fail to express the main point of the book that is possible incomprehensible strangeness of alien intelligence. I would compare his book to Peter Watts Blindsight in this regard.

I'd start with The Invincible. Then Pilot Pirx. Solaris is too steep for a start imo.

Ken Macleod is a Scottish sci-fi author I've enjoyed. Stanisław Lem and Ken Liu are two other well regarded authors; Poland and China respectively.

Lem’s “Cyberiad” is brilliant and hilarious. I highly recommend it.

Macleod’s Star Fraction is still unsurpassed for me in political scifi. It’s the kind of novel that can only be written by someone born in Europe, with the lived experience of wars being reflections of reflections of reflections of old conflicts, warped and folded and turned inside out. It’s a wild read.

Reading Macleod's Fall Revolution books as a teen 20-ish years ago blew my fucking mind. I had barely half a clue about the historical and political references he was building on (and making what I assume were very clever wry jokes about) but it took me somewhere else--somewhere else entirely. Somewhere very different from the chrome-plated Jonathan Swift kind of stuff I'd got my hands on before then (modulo some outliers like Monica Hughes, who tended to be more "abandon technology, return to monke").

The first Ken Macleod book I bought circa 1998 was The Cassini Division, solely because it had a shiny embossed cover of a robot shooting lasers, which of course had no relation to the book's contents.

Ken Liu is American, though he has many translations of Chinese authors that are worth checking out. His own writing is good and has some obvious Chinese influences, but I wouldn't properly characterize it as Chinese.

You may be mixing him up with Liu Cixin whose work he has translated.

Stanisław Lem is an example I suppose?

Hugo and Nebula awards are american centrics. Your best bet is to go to the pages of the national SF awards (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_science_fiction#Awa...) then look for an english translation of the books

While he's focusing on (slightly older) US sci-fi, I think he's talking about all sci-fi (he himself is a modern British sci-fi writer, and he seems to be including himself in the list of people that weird billionaires shouldn't be taking influence from). In terms of good non-US sci-fi, a few I like:

- Iain M Banks (his non-scifi stuff, as Iain Banks, was also good)

- Alastair Reynolds

- Ken MacLeod

- Peter Hamilton (mixed feelings about this recommendation; there are aspects of his work I find extremely irritating, but he is _very_ good at _properly_ alien aliens)

- Charlie Stross (the author of the article)

There are plenty of good American sci-fi writers as well, of course. I think it would be fair to say that British sci-fi writers tend to be more cynical/less utopian than Americans, though this isn't as pronounced as it used to be (American sci-fi is no longer as "wow! spaceships!" as it used to be).

The Wormwood Trilogy by Tade Thompson[1] blew my mind. Most of the story takes place in Nigeria. The author was born in the UK but grew up in Nigeria.

Tamsyn Muir[2] is from New Zealand. Her Locked Tomb series is sci-fi/fantasy/horror but ... funny? The books get more out there as the series progresses.

I know Muir was nominated for / won a few Hugos so yeah I bet your idea of checking those awards is a good one.

[1] https://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=wormwood+tril...

[2] https://www.librarything.com/author/muirtamsyn

Seconding The Wormwood Trilogy. Their other books are great as well.

qntm (Sam Hughes) is a British writer I feel HN would be all over. He runs Things of Interest.

His works --freely available[0]-- are amazing. This is coming from someone who's read most of the other fine recommendations in this tree.

If you want a suggestion then get started with There Is No Antimemetics Division.

0: https://qntm.org/fiction

Becky Chambers - A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Becky Chambers is amazing. If you haven't read her books and you like sci-fi, drop everything and read them now.

Her books are like a mug of hot chocolate after a long day out in the cold. And I need a lot of hot chocolate these days.

The problem with Hugo and Nebula is that they’re still pretty American or American adjacent. But I would suggest more anthologies than novels, like “Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction” which is all African sci-fi and fantasy, and “New Voices in Chinese Science Fiction” which is what it says it is.

There is a collection of shorts by Chinese (mostly woman) authors called Sinopticon that I enjoyed. It's nice to read things that don't follow any of the tropes that I'm used to or at least uses them in very different ways.

Iain M. Banks. Start with Player of Games and then read the rest of the culture series.

There is a very different (but less popular) direction in American sci-fi that is most prominently represented by Kurt Vonnegut, although he tends to depict a much closer future than the likes of Heinlein.

Check out the scifi subgenres like Afrofuturism. I remember The Ear The Eye and The Arm by Nancy Farmer being a great intro to the genre that was on my middle school summer reading list.

Simon Stalenhag, Tales from the loop and following. Sweden. High tech, AI, robotics, goo, etc spill into and leave debris all over the "real world". The real world both works on these projects and randomly "encounters" the spillouts.

Check out Ursula K. Legion. One of her stories, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, was recently adapted into an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

Huh, I assumed that had been inspired by Doctor Who’s “The Beast Below", but now I realise the latter was itself inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Leguin.

Interestingly, I've read a couple dozen of her works but haven't heard of that story.

He mentions Ian M Banks, who was not from the US

When you're done with the Lem bibliography, you could start Jerzy Żuławski, Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg and Strugatskys. :)

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. If you start with their earliest work, like "The Land of Crimson Clouds", you can get vibe, how communist Sci-Fi looked. If you read later stuff, like "Tale of the Troika", then you get story humorously criticizing soviet bureaucracy. Then there is pretty serious stuff, like "The Doomed City" or "Ugly Swans". You probably know "Roadside Picnic" - this interpretations in films and gaming are known as "Stalker".

john brunner is british, and has written some very prescient dystopic novels

> His blog post mentions people influenced (and misguided) by reading only American Sci-Fi. What are some examples of good "worldly" Sci-Fi?

I think you're missing the point. The article is about reading any sci-fi the wrong way ("Because we invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale and they took it at face value and decided to implement it for real."). He tilts a lot at American sci-fi of a certain era, because that's what influenced the current crop of tech billionaires who are making that mistake to great effect.

I've read a couple of Stanisław Lem and Ian Banks novels (mentioned as "good 'worldly' Sci-Fi" in sibling comments), and I can recall a couple ideas just of the top of my head that I wouldn't want some idiot techie taking "at face value and decided to implement it."

The key is read whatever, but keep in mind sci-fi is fantasy written only for entertainment value. Don't take it too seriously, don't make your dreams out of it, and read other stuff.

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