Fantasy, SF, and Horror books you'd recommend

[AwkwardMD]

See, I think "Lesbian Necromancers explore a Gothic Cathedral in Space" does Gideon a disservice. It sets it up for expectations that absolutely will not be paid off. It gets pretty close on the vibe, but it's hard to sell people on vibes when they're expecting literal accuracy.

Gideon The Ninth is one of my favorite books of all time. Full stop.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

For Fantasy... Discworld. Just any of the Discworld novels, really. Yes, I'm preaching to the choir here since some of you have recommended it. Small Gods is one of the coolest when it comes about religions, and Hogfather is my go-to for the Holidays, which now is a bit of a late recommendation. And I mention Discworld specifically because after Discworld everything in Fantasy it just goes downhill from there.

Sci-Fi, I'm going to go out of the books with words and go into the books with pictures instead. No, I'm not cheating. Actually, I like to believe that Ghost in the Shell is the last story that understood what SF is about. It really has that Kindred Dick energy that turns it into Existencial Crisis: The Manga with its way of depicting a blank slate woman searching for purpose.

Horror, just one short story: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. If you're really worried about AI development, don't read this. It just going to add to the paranoia fuel.

 

[redgarters]

See, I think "Lesbian Necromancers explore a Gothic Cathedral in Space" does Gideon a disservice. It sets it up for expectations that absolutely will not be paid off. It gets pretty close on the vibe, but it's hard to sell people on vibes when they're expecting literal accuracy.

Gideon The Ninth is one of my favorite books of all time. Full stop.

Very true, it barely scratches the surface. But it hooked me in, and then I discovered all the amazing hidden within.

If you're looking for something light, but still with a queer bite, Victories Greater than Death (Unstoppable Trilogy) by Charlie Jane Anders is that blend of space fun and serious undertone. It's YA but a great read.

Deadly Education (The Scholomance trilogy) by Naomi Novik is a great twist on the "Some kids go to a school of magic where they could get killed" trope.

Some good singles:

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. This is a gem about a runaway queer transgender violinist. The blurb tells it like it is: "Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts." Beautiful book.

A Master of Djinn by Djélí Clark is one of the books that surprised me most last year. A detective story with a great magic twist.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is another one like that, only Sci fi. Starts off like a military sci fi trope, but becomes something more.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Anything by Becky Chambers, really - if you find it, read it, but this one is good to start with.

 

[THBGato]

Speaking of Aaronovitch, his Rivers of London series is some fabulous modern urban fantasy I don't hear people bring up enough. It's what you can read if you want a Gaiman-esque tale without all the baggage Gaiman's name brings with it these days.

Yes!

Klara and the Sun by Ishiguro Kazuo
It’s quiet sci-fi. bittersweet, wholesome, and stomach churning all at once. It’s one of those book that I put down and think, ok that’s it. That’s the one. how could I ever read another book?

Complete yes (also Never let me go)

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
Cozy fantasy. Read it with a nice cup of coffee, under a blanket on a rainy day.

Mistborn and Skyward by Sanderson are firm favourites as well

Total yes.


Just getting into Murderbot (read the first two), really enjoying it.

Has anyone mentioned Atwood? Can we get some love for Orynx & Crake and The Year of the Flood?

 

[Kelliezgirl]

For Fantasy... Discworld. Just any of the Discworld novels, really. Yes, I'm preaching to the choir here since some of you have recommended it. Small Gods is one of the coolest when it comes about religions, and Hogfather is my go-to for the Holidays, which now is a bit of a late recommendation. And I mention Discworld specifically because after Discworld everything in Fantasy it just goes downhill from there.

Sci-Fi, I'm going to go out of the books with words and go into the books with pictures instead. No, I'm not cheating. Actually, I like to believe that Ghost in the Shell is the last story that understood what SF is about. It really has that Kindred Dick energy that turns it into Existencial Crisis: The Manga with its way of depicting a blank slate woman searching for purpose.

Horror, just one short story: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. If you're really worried about AI development, don't read this. It just going to add to the paranoia fuel.

The Hogfather movie is excellent as well.

 

[puppett]

The Expanse. Sci Fi that tries to be based on real universe physics and realpolitik. It's a grand space opera that covers several genres within the series (detective noir, political thriller, disaster story) but is ultimately held together by brilliant characters (Amos, Bobby, Peaches, Naomi especially).

the show on amazon is also great

 

[AwkwardMD]

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. This is a gem about a runaway queer transgender violinist. The blurb tells it like it is: "Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts." Beautiful book.

This one really got to me. I loved it

 

[Comshaw]

Scifi:
The Lefthand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. The lady can spin a tale that will have you on an emotional roller coaster.

Several From Joe Haldeman:
The Forever War and The Forever Peace. Both won SciFi awards.

Mindbridge. Armored warriors being instantly transported for a limited time to other parts of the universe, aliens that they encounter and the mental toll it takes on them

All My Sins Remembered. Recalling an intergalactic assassin's memories and how they come back to haunt him.

Beowulf's Children byLarry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes. Three top-notch scifi authors writing one book can't go wrong and they didn't.

ANY of Issac Asimov's scifi novels. If you've seen the movie "I Robot" you need to read the novel. The movie diverges greatly from the original. Azimov was the one who came up with the Three Laws of Robotics.

The Caves of Steel by Issac Asimov, is one of three closely interwoven stories that deal with a robot detective, R Danial Oliva. He also makes an appearance at the end of the Foundation series.

The Dragon Riders of Pern by Anne McCaffery. You might surmise from the title that the series is fantasy rather than scifi, but she manages to keep it plausible.

The Ship Who Sang series, which deals with a woman who is born with incapacitating physical disabilities and because of that her mind is linked to a starship.

Neuromancer by William Gibson, A mind-bending trip through an imagined near future. I remember one of the scenes vividly. The main character is mentally linked to a cyber-enhanced female assassin. She teases him constantly. One of the things she does is slip her hand into her shirt and run her finger around her nipple knowing he will feel it too.

And lastly, one everyone should read. It was on my high school reading list for my Lit class. It's not only a great scifi novel, but a commentary on authoritarian politics.

Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury. 451 is the Fahrenheit temperature at which paper combusts.

Comshaw

 

[onehitwanda]

Just finished the first book! Highly recommend!

Oh babe, get the kleenex. Your heart is going to break so many times.

 

[onehitwanda]

There's an easy answer to most of life 's questions: What Would Sam Vimes Do?

I think the true beauty of Sam Vimes is that most situations he's in, he never, ever takes the easy choice - even when nobody but him would know.

 

[StillStunned]

Joe Abercrombie's first seven books (the First Law trilogy - The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged and The Last Argument of Kings - plus Best Served Cold, The Heroes, Red Country and Sharp Ends) are perfect character studies.

If you want to learn how to write characters who feel like real people, you could do far worse than study Inquisitor Glokta, Logen Ninefingers, the Dogman, Shy South, Caul Shivers, Corporal Tunny, Monza Murcatto, Temple, Shevedieh and dozens more. Nobody's black and white: the best might be the worst, and the worst might be the best. It's a shit world, and everyone's up to their knees in it.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. This is a gem about a runaway queer transgender violinist. The blurb tells it like it is: "Good Omens meets The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet in Ryka Aoki's Light From Uncommon Stars, a defiantly joyful adventure set in California's San Gabriel Valley, with cursed violins, Faustian bargains, and queer alien courtship over fresh-made donuts." Beautiful book.

I loved this one. On first reading, the end felt wrong to me - "you can't do that, it doesn't work that way" - but after sitting with my reaction, I realised that maybe that rule-breaking was the point, that not everything we take for granted about How The World Works is actually inevitable.

 

[YmaOHyd]

I think the true beauty of Sam Vimes is that most situations he's in, he never, ever takes the easy choice - even when nobody but him would know.

There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said "Laugh this one off!" He might have said "Fetch!"

But he didn't, because if he had said any of those things, then he'd know that what he had just done was murder.

He turned away, tossed the empty mortar over his shoulder and muttered: "The hell with it."

At times like this, teetotalism bit down hard.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Have we really gone two and a half pages without anybody mentioning Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galazy series? Consider it mentioned. Absurdist space comedy with a good deal of thought-provoking nonsense.

Cat Valente's Space Opera and the sequel, Space Oddity: this story is what happens when HHGTTG gets very drunk and has unprotected sex with the Eurovision Song Contest. Interstellar civilisations discover Earth and seek to answer the eternal question: "are you people or are you meat?"

 

[lovecraft68]

First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

Both are trilogies and I found the second to be far better than the first, but that was good as well.

Stephen R Donaldson also came out with a third series and it was a case of going to the well too many times. That was I think was four books, I quit after two.

 

[TheLobster]

Have we really gone two and a half pages without anybody mentioning Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galazy series? Consider it mentioned. Absurdist space comedy with a good deal of thought-provoking nonsense.

Ringworld also wasn't mentioned, by Larry Niven, if we're talking about classics. Maybe not so much the latter installments but the first book is really good.

In terms of horror, I can recommend The Phenomenon. I don't know if it has been published as an actual novel, but you can read the whole thing here. (It has nothing to do with the 2020 movie).

 

[Duleigh]

I would appreciate it if you elaborated a bit on the books you're recommending.

#1 - anything by Terry Pratchett. Once you see past the silliness and humor of his work, you'll start to see the artistry behind his keyboard. He uses the English language like an artist's pallet to paint an image in your mind and attach real emotion to it. The man was a master at wordcraft, and when you finish reading any of his last 4 novels your first thought will be - "That was a damn good story." The next thought HAS to be - "How did he do that with early onset Alzheimer's?" He wrote until the day he died of Alzheimers

#2 - The Dragon Riders of Pern by Anne MacCaffery - this was the first successful attempt I've ever seen to combine fantasy, swords and sorcery type of fantasy, with hard Sci Fi and it was successful in a way that has not been equaled. Great stories, great imagery, and it was written in a time when the thought of women writing sci fi was poo-pooed.

#3 - "The Men and the Mirror" by Ross Rocklynne. The Men and the Mirror is both an anthology book and a short story in the anthology book. It's my favorite "Problem Story" a genre of Sci Fi that has seemed to have disappeared. (Introduce a problem and come up with a scientific way to solve it) Two spacemen land on a planet whose entire top has been scooped out and polished into a mirror, hundreds of miles across, and somehow fall into it. They are on an almost frictionless concave surface - how do they get out? I loved stories like that. (Rocklynne's solution is scientific but it's doubtful either spaceman would have lived) It can be found in Isaac Asimov's amazing anthology "Before the Golden Age"

#4 - "Before the Golden Age" an anthology by Isaac Asimov - science fiction stories from the 1930s - before spaceflight was thought possible. The stories are amazing when you consider the time they were written and this is a genre I try to capture in my Alan Scarlett series and my Captain Scarlett series.

 

[onehitwanda]

There were a lot of things he could say. "Son of a bitch!" would have been a good one. Or he could say "Welcome to civilization!" He could have said "Laugh this one off!" He might have said "Fetch!"

But he didn't, because if he had said any of those things, then he'd know that what he had just done was murder.

He turned away, tossed the empty mortar over his shoulder and muttered: "The hell with it."

At times like this, teetotalism bit down hard.

This is the exact scene I was thinking of, @YmaOHyd

 

[Britva415]

I warmly recommend this book series, even if it has its flaws as well.

obligatory "down with first person present!" torches and pitchforks

No, just kidding. I read it anyway

and liked it!

 

[PennyThompson]

Two of the loveliest little books I've read in the last few years are A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.

They're both slim little novellas, about a Tea Monk -- their vocation is to travel between towns and villages in a post-industrial solar-punk world, brewing tea for residents and listening to their problems, a sort of traveling spiritual therapist -- who is feeling burned out with life and decides to explore the re-wilded forest in their little bicycle-powered mobile wagon home. Along the way they meet a robot, which hasn't happened since robots divorced themselves from humanity a couple hundred years ago to commune with nature. The whole story is sweet and cozy and breezy, but deeply joyful and meditative. Both books made me cry a couple of times, and have stuck with me ever since.

Becky Chambers also has a really wonderful space opera series called Wayfarers, which starts with A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and I highly recommend them as well!

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

Red Sister by Mark Lawrence, is the first in a fantasy trilogy with badass warrior nuns. All three books are pretty fabulous. And speaking of warrior nuns, Warrior Nun, the Netfix series is pretty good, too.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

Two of the loveliest little books I've read in the last few years are A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers.

They're both slim little novellas, about a Tea Monk...

Speaking of tea, The Tea Dragon Society by Kay O'Neill is fantasy graphic novel that will put a smile on your face.

 

[Statius]

Clytemnestra https://share.google/kHBqOtIrsMQubnL85

Best novel I've ever read reinterpreting Greek Myth.

 

[Writer61]

Apart from the last, I think these have all been mentioned already, but I will second/third them:

Lord Of The Rings

Anything by Asimov, but especially
- the Robot series; amazing the way that he takes three simple, apparently hole-proof, precepts and drives right through them, and
- Foundation

Dune

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series

Most of Arthur C Clarke's books (met him once on a bus at Heathrow)

Iain Banks Culture novels

and, the best ever sci-fi series:

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (actually a radio series before it was a book, or a TV series, or a film)

 

[KittyOfSteele]

Neuromancer by William Gibson, A mind-bending trip through an imagined near future. I remember one of the scenes vividly. The main character is mentally linked to a cyber-enhanced female assassin. She teases him constantly. One of the things she does is slip her hand into her shirt and run her finger around her nipple knowing he will feel it too.

As a fan of William Gibson I'd suggest people to read the short story "Johnny Mnemonic" first before reading Neuromancer. Johnny Mnemonic is a much better introduction to William Gibson because his prose has the saturation levels, the brightness, and the contrast way too high, like beyond the limit of 100 most screens have. If you manage to survive Johnny Mnemonic, you are ready to read Neuromancer.