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Comment by Eddy_Viscosity2 | Hacker News Reader

I read it based on a reddit search for 'good sci fi books' and that's it. Going in with no hype or expectations and I thought it was great.

PS. HNers, any good sci-fi book recommendations?

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“Service Model” is a recent one and I had an absolute blast with it. If you don’t have much of a humanities background, you’d benefit from skimming the Wikipedia article. There’s a lot of references to old novels you might miss if you don’t have the context.

You might be interested in this prequel to "Service Model": "Human Resources" [1]

[1] https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/

He needs to do more in this universe and maybe connect it to one of his others. He really specializes in all the variants of collapse and I love every page of it.

A write up review of books I've read and there are a couple scifi books (and a bunch of other recommendations) here: https://alexpotato.com/books/

Nicely done, thanks!

If you liked it and want something in a similar style (conceptually) but with a bit more personal/human element I would recommend The Raw Shark Texts.

As for best sci fi books I’ve read in a while: The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch (think sci fi meets True Detective) - some awesome concepts here and really strong pacing. The other one was Version Control by Dexter Palmer which is a bit slower and more subtle sci fi (big concepts presented in a personal drama style of book)

Just read Lexicon by Max Barry (2013) - great sci-fi thriller that actually has a strong anti-memetic component. I wonder if it was an influence on qntm's book.

I loved Jennifer Government (Max Barry) wayyyy back.

Lexicon was very good. I'd also recommend Bad Monkeys, by Matt Ruff, for a vaguely similar feel (although the subject matter is completely different.)

I feel like I have to mention "The Sky So Big and Black" by John Barnes. IMO, rather underrated. Hadn't really read any good Mars-based science fiction before.

I'm a pretty big fan of Roadside Picnic!

Of you enjoyed this, you might like "Gnomon" by Nick Harkaway.

The Diamond Age is feeling more and more prescient to me as time goes on

A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge

Player Piano by Vonnegut

Dune

I just came across Hardwired from 1986, it's a cyberpunk dystopian future with lots of action. I loved it, some of it is very prescient, but with lots of 80s influence to an imagined future.

Interesting chain of descent: Walter Jon Williams wrote Hardwired, and R Talsorian Games based their tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk 2020, on it. That's the source material used for the computer RPG, Cyberpunk 2073.

Meanwhile, WJW followed up with Voice of the Whirlwind, which seems to be set about a century later, and drops enough references in Aristoi to place it as the third book in the same universe, quite possibly a thousand years later.

I recommend all three (and almost everything that WJW has written).

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