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Comment by Blackthorn | Hacker News Reader

If you like Murderbot, you owe yourself to check out her other series, The Cloud Roads. Absolutely fantastic.

Her newer novel "Witch King" is also pretty good! Nominated for (but didn't win) the 2024 Hugo. Just finished it last week.

When I tried to answer the question, “what did you do with your time while you were laid off?” Part of that answer was “read about forty books” of which about twenty were Wells’

5 Ile Rien, 7 Cloud Roads, 2 Emilie, Witch King, plus rereading Murderbot

Which were your favorites?

I’m curious if Witch King will be standalone or not. That might change my answer. The Ile Rien ones were good, the Emilie ones would make good YA fare. The Raksura books are told by a nonhuman culture, but things get very dark at some points. I’d say that one of the main characters in that series is a bit of a prototype for Murderbot, and another the prototype for Ship.

She's posted that the sequel is in the works, called Queen Demon

They announced a second book on goodreads called Queen Demon

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217388171-queen-demon

I found the Ile-Rien books more fun, esp. Death of the Necromancer, a nice Francophile steampunk vibe.

I like Murderbot ok, though it's beginning to feel a little like a shaggy dog joke at this point.

Another good one is Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Also, I feel like if I am recommending something I have to recommend Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is my current obsession. I've read all the books multiple times in multiple formats, but it's not much like Murderbot.

i am reading service model right now with our scifi book club. this book needs a trigger warning for programmers. reading it feels like work because i am constantly analyzing what coding faults lead to the choices the robots are making.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is also very good imo.

Honestly that’s the book I recommend to anyone who thinks Heinlein, Asimov and Niven are all there is to good sci-fi.

YMMV. I found it pretty tedious, especially the 2nd in the series (Children of Ruin). I liked Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series (Shards of Earth, etc) better.

I think Final Architecture was a better story, but the background and philosophy in the Children series is very very good indeed.

> I found it pretty tedious

100% this. I am not at all arachnophobic -- I like spiders, I find them cute and fascinating. They were the only interesting characters in the book. The humans were all vile and the human scenes dull dull dull.

I really stuggled to finish the book and do not plan to return to the sequels.

Children of Time needs to come with a huge content warning for those with arachnophobia. I got through it, but I didn't enjoy it, for that reason.

See also Ann Leckie’s Ancillary books (5)

Glad to see DCC mentioned, one of my favorite things to do is describe the initial concept to someone and then see them experience the first few chapters and get hooked

I found the Il-Rien books more engaging than the Cloud Roads. Especially the Fall of Il-Rien trilogy. I'm currently reading the two-in-one book they released earlier this year in the Il-Rien universe.

Thanks for the recommendation!

absolutely! better than murderbot imo, especially the first two books.

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