Rec me stuff!

[oyceter]

OMG people! I have my plot brain back! Not only that, but I am suddenly feeling the urge to read really dense SF with lots of worldbuilding and aliens. This is extremely strange, given my three-year-or-so romance novel spree and my general tendency toward the fantasy side of sf/f.

Rec me stuff! I have been contemplating attempting Cherryh again, as I just reread Gate of Ivrel and could actually figure out what was going on, but I am a little scared of where to start. I've mostly just read her fantasy, since plot-brain abandoned me years ago, but now I want to try more of her SF. I own Faded Sun, Foreigner, and Invader.

... while I'm at it, I should probably read some Ursula K. LeGuin SF too, since I haven't even read Dispossessed.

Mostly I want cool cultures and politicking and alien-ness, although anti-colonialism and feminism are huge pluses. I've already been slightly thrown out of a book or two thanks to the use of terms like "native" and "reservation" and not being sure if the author was aware enough to deconstruct or was just thoughtlessly using it. POC authors also a big plus. Have read Karin Lowachee's Cagebird and have some of her others out, recently went through a fair amount of Butler and mean to reread her Parable books, would like to know if Tobias Buckell's current books fit the amount of denseness I am in the mood for.

This feels so odd, but I figure while I am in the mood, I should read as much as possible, since this seriously hasn't happened for years and years.

Comments

[pandarus]

I &hearts the hell out of Iain (M) Banks, particularly the Culture novels - 'Use of Weapons' is a particular favourite.

People tend to rave about Lois McMasters-Bujold's Vorkosigan books too, but I've not read them.

DUNE! Have you read Dune? God, that's brilliant. You've probably read it, though.

Also Vonda N. McIntyre's 'Starfarers' books are fab, and they're downloadable now.

[oyceter]

I've bounced off of several of Bujold's books (Vorkosigan and her fantasy series), and my feeling was that it was her prose and characterization, not the plotting or the worldbuilding, so I may hold off on her. And have definitely read Dune at a very malleable age!

Haven't really read Banks or McIntyre outside of her Star Wars books, will check them out!

[rilina]

Have you read Vanishing Point by Roessner? It is post-apocalyptic SF set in south bay!

[oyceter]

Bwahaha, I am going to check that out just for that combination!

[sophia_helix]

I've never seen anyone else mention that book before! I found a hardcover copy at my local Goodwill in the early '00s and have loaned it out a few times, but it didn't seem well-known at all.

[littlebutfierce]

No recs, just wanted to say that it's great to see you posting again!!

[oyceter]

Awww, thank you! I am hoping this keeps up; I took a break for a while but am trying to dip my toes in again.

[estara]

Well if you have Foreigner you have another 11 books to read, and from what she says on her website the series is still selling so well, that she has plans and ideas for another couple of books at least - at the moment she's busy writing the next one, which will come out next year - they seem to be one a year by now. Personally I find the series going really strong still. Jo Walton did a spoiler-filled review series on Tor.com

I also find Juli Czerneda writes really out-there SF with mostly female protagonists and lots of alien - more space operaish action, too and some hints of romance: Esen, the ultimate shapeshifer and Sira of the TradePact Universe and for a change a human who gets drawn into an intergalactic problem, because of her knowledge of marine biology (Czerneda was a marine biologist by profession as far as I know)- Dr. Mackenzie (Mac) Connor.

I might remember more, but these are books I really enjoyed and authors I continue to buy from.

[oyceter]

Haha, that is a good thing! I have been feeling up to big fat series right now.

And ooo, marine biology book sounds awesome!

[jain]

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany is an awesome book containing most of the things you're looking for. It ends on something of a cliffhanger (there's a planned sequel that may or may not ever be completed at this point), but I don't hesitate to recommend the book despite that.

[starlady]

I saw him at a talk about 1.5 years ago, he said that since the relationship the book was created out of ended he doesn't know if he could go back to finish it, and that he's kind of moved on from sf. :/

[oyceter]

Ooo I should look that up, thank you!

[sanguinity]

Andrea Hairston's Mindscape. (Which I'm only half through because I somehow managed to misplace it coming back from Colorado, boo!) Dense plotting and worldbuilding (and I had to restart it halfway through because I was only hanging on to my understanding of the book by my fingernails, but once I did, wow). Post-colonial and post-apocolyptic SF, with the most stable high-standard-of-living nation being West African, and the least stable of which is the southwestern U.S., which has become a failed state controlled by private, warring Hollywood militias. There's more stuff about the worldbuilding that I absolutely adore, but it's better for you to read it than for me to tell you all the things.

I also really liked Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber</i as anti-colonial SF, and one which is not heteronormative, to boot.

[oyceter]

Oooo those sound good! And they've both been sitting on my shelf for a year or so while my brain couldn't handle anything plotty.

[lnhammer]

Second the rec for Banks -- he's one of the few plot-heavy SF authors I still keep up with. The Culture novels start with Consider Phlebas, but the second one, Player of Games, is generally considered the best entrypoint.

Charles Stross is hit-or-miss for me, but I did enjoy Singularity Sky. Haven't gotten to the sequel yet.

---L.

[lnhammer]

Oh, and the two SF books over the past year I most enjoyed are Declare by Tim Powers (it's SF cleverly disguised as a historical spy thriller) and Anathem by Neal Stephenson.

---L.

[thistleingrey]

+1-ing Vanishing Point, Banks (skip Consider Phlebas), and Midnight Robber if you haven't read it already. Banks's Culture books peter out after a while, for me, but there's a good few before they do.

I wasn't overwhelmed by Buckell's Crystal Rain, but I found it interesting enough to make a note to find the sequels at a library sometime. Haven't done that yet. :P

hmm *makes note of Mindscape*

[oyceter]

Thanks! Just borrowed Crystal Rain from the library, so hopefully it'll be up my alley...

[heresluck]

I have no recommendations for you (though I am happily noting down everyone else's!) -- just wanted to say wooooooooo plot brain! I'm a little envious -- mine is still missing -- although it's probably just as well since staying up to 3am reading would not be a good life choice for me right now. Hee.

[oyceter]

Mine has been missing for three years! At least! Probably more, since I've been scarfing down romances and YA for a LONG time! (Not to say romances and YA don't have plot too, but I've not been reading the very plotty ones, or just glossing over plot for character stuff.)

[glass_icarus]

LEGUIN! :D &hearts I've been reading a bunch of her stuff recently and I enjoyed all of it that I've read so far, but my current favorites are The Left Hand of Darkness (though you have probably read it already?) and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories.

[oyceter]

I have not actually read those! I've only read Le Guin's fantasy and a story or two from Four Ways to Forgiveness, and I feel I should catch up on her SF.

[vito_excalibur]

I'm reccing Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books to everyone, because I am in LUUUUUUUUURVE.

[cofax7]

Aren't they *awesome*? So fabulous. If only she could write FASTER. ::sigh::

[laurashapiro]

I can't recommend The Dispossessed highly enough. There's so much good there.

I haven't been reading much SF, but if you're in the mood for epic Indian pre- and post-colonial historical fantasy, I loved Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra.

[oyceter]

Oooo! The Chandra sounds awesome, and I definitely have Le Guin on my list to read more.

[ellarien]

As someone else has mentioned, there are lots more books in Cherryh's Foreigner series. (Bear in mind that the first few dozen pages of Foreigner are a prologue almost completely disconnected from everything else.) The later sequels don't have quite the same edge as the first few, but those of us who are hooked don't mind too much. If you're in a plotty mood you might also try Downbelow Station.

Also, Kristine Smith's series (starting with Code of Conduct) has lots of plot and politicking, and what I thought was an interesting take on the developing relationship between humanity and a humanoid alien race. I'm not sure how that would read from an anticolonialist perspective, but the aliens are not being subjugated or exploited, but meeting humanity on more or less equal terms as far as I remember.

Karen Traviss, City of Pearl and sequels; something of an environmentalist polemic, but complex and engaging, with lots of interesting aliens.

Recently, I've enjoyed Karl Schroeder's Virga series (Sun of Suns and sequels), but that's more of a loose string of adventures across a gorgeous (slightly steam-punky) science-fictional setting, not so much with the intricate plotting. Tobias Buckell's Crystal Rain is good too, and has a couple of sequels.

Ken MacLeod (not so much the recent near-future stuff, which is very gritty and downbeat, but maybe Cosmonaut Keep and sequels.)

You might also try older Gene Wolfe -- Book of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun, Book of the Short Sun (which are two quadrologies and a trilogy, but the first quadralogy is usually published two books at a time these days.)

[starlady]

I would second the Gene Wolfe rec. Brain-bending, in a good way.

[ailiathena.livejournal.com]

If you haven't already, go read Sherri Tepper's Grass ASAP.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/104342.Grass

[oyceter]

Thanks for the rec! I bounced off Tepper before in undergrad, but should give her another try...

[sunnyskywalker]

Have you read Joan Sloncziewski's A Door Into Ocean and the sorta-sequel Daughter of Elysium? The first has a society of bald purple women who live on giant living ocean rafts and practice advanced biotech and Quaker pacifism and consensus decisions (not that they're actually Quaker, since I think Earth is so long ago it's forgotten) getting invaded by their neighboring planet, and baffling the invaders with their non-violent yet highly successful resistance. Plus they've adopted a human boy from that planet, and there's a woman who's a noblewoman on that planet but was half-raised on the rafts by the Sharers because her dad was a trader, and they both have issues deciding where they really belong. Also, in the Sharers' language, verbs obey Newton's Third Law, so that you can't say "I hit you" without also meaning that you hit me. I liked that detail. The second book is set a few centuries later, after the rafts have been joined by some floating cities of very long-lived people in an uneasy coexistence. A family comes in from another planet to live in one of the floating cities, where the wife will be a translator for the politicians and the husband will do some longevity research. They're from a mildly matriarchal religious minority group where children are so central that it's weird to see an adult without at least one child in tow. The kids are some of the most convincing fictional kids I've ever read, and their mom kicks ass while pregnant, which you almost never see. All their banking shenanigans and interplanetary diplomacy and genetic engineering and sit-ins are going on while the reader is going HEY GUYS THERE IS A ROBOT REBELLION BREWING WATCH OUT, which is always fun. And the characters from the first book sorta reappear in a famous philosophical text - imagine a Socratic dialogue with a Socrates who's a bald purple lesbian vegetarian eco-pacifist. I'm not really doing the books justice, but there's so much in them to cover!

I liked Crystal Rain, which some people mentioned above, but I liked the sequels a lot more. I've described Sly Mongoose to people as "Jamaican cyborg dude helps the floating city of economically depressed Aztecs fight the zombies from space" - and how can you go wrong with that? - but it also has debates about techno-democracy (basically, everyone has a wifi chip in their heads and twitters their votes on everything that ever happens in the city) and economics (and really awful systems that rely on bulimic teenage boys to support the economy). They're probably not the densest, but enough to make really fun books much cooler. And he doesn't pander to the reader with giant infodumps explaining The State of the Galaxy Today; you have to work that out as you go.

[lnhammer]

There are further sequels to Daughters (namely, The Children Star and Brain Plague), but with each one the society has been so transformed by the events of the previous that it is almost unrecognizable. I quite liked the last as a story on its own, though -- one with (in a very transformed way) a story similar to Forward's Dragon's Egg.

---L.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Maybe I sent you my plot brain? I am much more in the fluff/comfort mode than usual. Definitely read Foreigner et seq. -- skip the prologue if it's annoying you, it's not representative.

[oyceter]

Haha, maybe! I feel like I have just come off of three years or so of fluff/comfort mode.

[chomiji]

Well, gosh, no one did much CJC recommending ... I think Pride of Chanur is probably one of her most straightforward, and it's the lead-in to one of my favorite series by her. You might also like Merchanter's Luck.

[oyceter]

Haha, so true! I figured I'd ILL Downbelow Station and some of the books more related to Cyteen (does that include Merchanter's Luck?), since I remember the buzz when Regenesis came out. And will see if my library has the Chanur series!

[oracne]

I don't think anybody mentioned Joan Slonczewski, who is Teh Awesome. A DOOR INTO OCEAN has all kinds of cool stuff about passive resistance, for example. And BRAIN PLAGUE has intelligent microbes, sort of...it's complicated but very cool.

Also, good to see you posting. I was going to email you this morning to check on you, then I saw you posted!

[oyceter]

Aw, thank you! I've been fine, just running around a lot in RL and felt like I needed a bit of an Internet vacation after feeling stressed about always being behind during the summer.