Anything by Stanislaw Lem. I really liked Fiasco.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Cyberiad is brilliant and funny.
I popped in to say this exact thing. The English translation I read was great.
I read it in Spanish. Same experience. I still laugh thinking about the classification of probability dragons.
Lots of people recommending Stanislaw Lem. I'll add him to the list. Thanks for the rec!
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Inspired the STALKER video games.
At some point in the 20th century, aliens esentially fired some rockets filled with garbage at the earth. The fallout of these rockets created several “exclusion zones” around earth. The book chiefly follows speculators who risk crossing military cordons in order to recover and sell salvaged tech.
Read the other books in the three body problem series! The story is wild.
Iain M. Banks.
Ordered the next book. I'll check out Banks as well. Thanks!
Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo.
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky.
Like others, I'm hyping the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic, and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.
With the caveat that I don't really like his books, The Sands of Sarasvati by Risto Isomäki.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne is absolutely worth the read. Just bear through the long lists of fish.
Thanks! What don't you like about Risto Isomäki? This is the first I've heard of them.
Oh, well, it's been a while, but... While Risto's ideas tend to be interesting enough, as a writer and a storyteller I think he lacks finesse. Especially his characters and their interactions come off as flat and formulaic. Romance feels tacked on and clumsy and he'd be better off focusing on other areas. Still, I can't say it's all bad. I don't want to drive anyone away from giving his work a chance.
If you’re interested in in humorous sci-fi, then check out The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Check out Roadside Picnic, inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series.
This looks very cool! I've heard of S.T.A.L.K.E.R but never realized there was a book. Thanks for the recommendation :D
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
Another person already said Stanislaw Lem, so I'm going to take a side route and suggest one of my favorite series...
BUUUT... It's not sci fi. It's still genre fiction, but rather modern dark fantasy.
The Night Watch books by Sergei Lukyanenko
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel)
Premise is that magicians, wizards, vampires, witches, werewolves, sorceresses, they're all real. The forces of light and dark were at war for centuries before they came to an agreement. The forces of dark would limit their activities to licensed behaviors, policed by the Night Watch, and similarly the forces of light would restrict themselves, policed by the Day Watch.
Now, here's the problem... Lukyanenko is a Russian nationalist of Ukranian heritage. He fully supports the war in Ukraine.
The books have nothing to do with it and were largely written even before the Crimea invasion, but since then Lukyanenko has made a large number of unfortunate comments.
So how much you enjoy the works is going to depend on how much you can separate them from the author. ☹️
Unfortunate about Lukyanenko's comments nowadays but I might still check out the books because they sound interesting! Maybe I'll avoid buying copies of those though. Thanks for the rec!
They really are very good books, and the first film, Night Watch, is good too. Based on about the first 3rd of the first book.
Then they did Day Watch and screwed it all up. :(
Anything by the Strugatsky brothers.
I really enjoyed Lord of all Things by Andreas Eschbach, a German author. Available in English
One of the most complex soviet scifi author is Ivan Efremov, i can recommend The bull's hour
The Best of World SF is undeniably an excellent sampler of voices from around the world, both of authors and of translators.
The editor comes off as maybe a bit self-centred? But I can't deny they have excellent taste and connections.
I recommend Ken Liu's translated Chinese scifi short story anthologies, which include some stori3s by Liu Cixin. The books are called "Invisible Planets" and "Broken Stars".