People Twitter

Thanks mate!

Or as I've recently come to calling it, GNU + Terry Pratchett

I'm in the middle of the Dispossessed and I love The Left Hand of Darkness. I swear if these books were less sexual I'd want teenagers to have to read them. Left Hand to teach about cultural and gendered biases and the Dispossessed to teach that your ideology won't create a utopia, but that doesn't mean it won't make things better. It's an absolute shame that LeGuinn kinda requires nerdiness to be introduced to.

City of Illusions still haunts me as well and I keep bringing it up to my wife as we watch Three Body Problem. Its prequels Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile were good as the sci fi sword and sorcery followed by sci fi pocahontas (problematicness included) that they were. But City was a book about a Taoist against lies and liars and it hit hard for that.

Personally I found Omelas highly overrated though. It's a visceral depiction of a common thought experiment but a common thought experiment it was

The problem with DCC is the next book isn’t written yet :(

So you get that prolonged feeling with each new book. Same with he who fights monsters- another decent LitRPG series.

Sanderson's big fantasy series right now, the stormlight archive. Oh my god, each book is just made to make you get drawn deeper, and deeper until you hit the end. The gap between the first and second book was so freaking long to wait. I think we're up to book five now, so you don't have to have that feeling for a while.

Alternatively, if you like blue fantasy (talking animals and wise spirit guides that help sometimes hapless humans), mercedes lackey did great things with her heralds of valdemar series. I'd actually recommend jumping into it at a later point because her writing greatly improved from the first trilogy. You could start with magic's pawn/promise/price, which has one of the earliest depictions of lgbt protagonists I ever read.

If you like more 'earthy' fantasy, the wit'chfire series (actual series name, banned and the banished) by james clemens (who I just found out is a pseudonym for a sci-fi author who didn't want to be 'smeared' as a fantasy author and has some other good books when i googled for the name) is really good. Don't start his other series, because even though it was fantastic, it's never going to be finished. I think we're at like 30 years now and never gotten the third book.

And then there's the big one, the bold one, the 'start you off so small and build you into a great, grand sweeping epic' jim butcher series: the codex alera. The first book was riveting from start to finish. I actually think it was the best one, because the worldbuilding was just so sublime. I loved the characters more and more with each added book, but the magic of the beginning was just amazing.

I read a stupid amount of SF and fantasy (up to 60 books so far this year), and I keep notes, so if there's a particular kind of thing you enjoy I might be able to make a more focused recommendation.

I believe I've read everything recommended in reply to you, and most are excellent. Some books I've read recently that really pulled me in, and that I didn't see mentioned elsewhere, are:

• Sleeping Giants, Neuvel
• Ammonite, Griffith
• Spin, Wilson
• The Space Between Worlds, Johnson
• Service Model, Tchaikovsky
• The Tainted Cup, Bennett

Lots of others of I go further back. I hope you find something you love.

Definitely The Expanse series if you haven't read it yet. I loved so many of the charcters, a bit sad to not be reading about them anymore.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

I have this a lot, but the most it has happend was about 10 years ago with the webserial worm ( https://parahumans.wordpress.com/ ), I read it so much. I read it before work, I read it during lunch, I read it when I got home, I went to sleep late etc. etc.

When it was done I had forgotten what to do with my time, I wound up re-reading it again but slower at a few chapters a day rather than turning myself into a gremlin for maximal reading efficiency.

If you want a summary, it's a superhero story, which usually really isn't for me, but something about the tone of the writing and the way the world worked in this one made it work.

Powers are incredibly varied, but the strongest characters are the ones who know how to use their powers well, the protagonist exemplifies this, where she doesn't get a cool flashy power but she figures out how to use it so well and adapt to each situation that she becomes terrifying.

I also liked the charactersation of the heroes and the villains, where the heroes are somewhat vain and egotistical which means they do good things when the cameras are rolling rather than being "morally good". the villains are mostly just people on the edges of society for a mix of reasons which means they do what they want, but I think since then "The Boys" has also done something similar so the effect may be lessened.

Curious if anyone else on Lemmy has wound up reading it.