Stats for nerds
12recommend
15mentions
14people
2009–2024years
87% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Thank you. When I think of completely different takes, I think of “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”.
Also, these are not to be missed:
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway
- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
- I read and enjoyed these quite a bit, so let me add a few more to the list.
- “The Fall Revolution” tetralogy by Ken MacLeod: “The Star Fraction”, “The Stone Canal”, “The Cassini Division”, and “The Sky Road”
- “Void Star” by Zachary Mason
- “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross
- “The Freeze-Frame Revolution” by Peter Watts
- “Perfekcyjna niedoskonałość” by Jacek Dukaj
- “A Fire Upon the Deep” and “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge
- “The Golden Oecumene” trilogy by John C. Wright: “The Golden Age”, “The Phoenix Exultant”, and “The Golden Transcendence”
- “Gnomon” by Nick Harkaway
- the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks
- 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.
- Ok, for an Ian M Banks fan specifically.
Alistair Reynolds has a number of good books which can capture some of the same darkness you'd find in part's of Banks's work. The Revelation Space books are great in their gothic way, and House of Suns has a lot of the galactic wonder aspects of the Culture books.
Ken MacLeod as a friend of Bank's and a good writer. His Fall Revolution books are probably the best known and explore various radical leftish ideas for organizing society across the nearish future.
And this last is a bit of an oddball but Leonard Richardson's Constellation Games was a book I really enjoyed that starts with aliens coming to Earth looking to help out and our protagonist, a video game reviewer, asking for alien games to review but ends up in a place that resonated with The Culture very strongly.
- If you liked Accelerando (and I sure did!), you may also like Stross's Palimpsest and Glasshouse [1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)
The rougher The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams is also worth trying:
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/
Also A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. The latter can be read out of order; I read The Cassini Division before any of the others. Excession by Iain M. Banks is also one of my favorites, though it has a significant learning curve if you haven't read any of his Culture books before. All of these have things to say about runaway technological change and superintelligence. They all have a high "sensawunda" index, for those who recognize this old SF fan term.
[1] I have read and enjoyed most of Stross's output, but it has a lot of thematic variations and someone who loved Accelerando may not care for e.g. Rule 34.
- > SF is rarely character-led and it may be optimistic to expect depth or nuance from it
I don't agree with this assessment at all.
The best SF I've read has believable characters with real motivations.
Off the top of my head:
* Paul McAuley's Quiet War series
* Ken McLeod's Fall Revolution series, "The Execution Channel"
* Bester's "The Stars My Destination" - a recent read, and the character arc is cribbed from The Count of Monte Cristo, but the SF parafernalia is a backdrop for the character.
