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

[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.

[oyceter]

bald purple lesbian vegetarian eco-pacifist

Okay, this alone makes me want to read it! Awesome!

[sunnyskywalker]

It is! And there's so many good little moments. Like when Spinel, the boy from Valedon, first arrives on Shora and gets to the raft, he isn't so much concerned with vast intercultural issues; like what probably most of us would do, when he realizes how very different the food is from what he knows, he's all OH GOD WHY DON'T YOU HAVE SANDWICHES I CAN'T EAT LIKE THIS.

[oracne]

Oops, I missed this comment and recced her again downstream!

[sunnyskywalker]

Can't be recommended enough, in my opinion!