43 KiB
Obscure Recommendation Thread
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Author: u/xamueljones My arch-enemy is entropy*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3kqbc2/obscure_recommendation_thread/
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Score: 15
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Created: 2015-09-13T01:02:12
Post:
I've been working my way through the backlog of books on my list of books to read, and I noticed a significant portion of books were either recently published, written by a well-known author, or very popular in it's own right.
Therefore I'm curious, are there obscure books that people in this subreddit can recommend?
Note that it doesn't have to be rational. Just a book you think people here would like to read and is likely to not be very well-known.
EDIT: I'm particularly interested in books by non-American authors or foreign books with an English translation.
Comments:
u/Escapement [+6] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (13 hours later)
Steven Brust is surprisingly poorly known. He writes really excellent fantasy novels. Read them in order of publication. The Taltos books are unreservedly awesome - they're different episodic adventures within the life of Vlad Taltos, a human within an empire of Elfs. The Phoenix Guards books have a very unusual style that some people cannot abide while others, such as myself, enjoy greatly - try the first before buying the rest. The Phoenix Guards and it's 4 sequels are very consciously modelled on Dumas' Three Musketeers.
Kage Baker wrote some really weird stuff. One of them, The Anvil of The World, stands alone and is unreservedly extremely good. The House of The Stag is not quite as good and set in the same world, and the Bird of the River is not nearly as good. The Anvil of The World is about a man who travels through a fantasy world who has the power to be superhumanly competent at killing things, trying to get by in a world of vendetta. Baker's "The Company" books are mostly exceptionally strange time-travelling romance novels which are unlike anything else but are pretty good overall - the setting concept is a Company has been established to loot the past of things that they won't notice being missed (items lost in shipwrecks or fires, etc), and to serve as historians.
K J Parker has written a lot of novels that don't get talked about much. They're almost all really good, especially the Fencer trilogy and the Engineer trilogy. The Engineer Trilogy is about a foreman who is forced to leave a rigid city and his efforts to get back to his wife and child at any cost to the world.
John Varley writes amazing transhumanist sci-fi. Start with Steel Beach, the story of a news reporter living on Luna in the far future. Read all his other books in that overarching storyline, especially The Golden Globe. Don't neglect the short stories, those are really good too.
Dan Simmons is mentioned very little on here. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are amazing stories about a disparate group of pilgrims come to a frontier colony world in times of war, in hopes of fulfilling various desires even at the cost of their own lives, who have their backstories explained along the way. Endymion and The Fall of Endymion, two sequels, are more standard adventure stories that in the series following Hyperion, but they aren't really necessary and I'd only bother if you absolutely loved Hyperion. His other works are largely forgettable.
We discuss the works of Roger Zelazny shockingly little. His Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness are both amazing. Lord of Light is about futuristic humans masquerading as Gods and reincarnating people by copying their memories into new bodies, with a strong focus on Hindu and Buddhist myth. His Amber books have a strong start but get too complicated, and the sequel series (books 6-10) are actually not good.
Gene Wolfe writes amazingly deep and complicated fantasy / sci-fi novels. Go read the four parts of the Book of the New Sun (about a torturer expelled from his guild wandering a far-future Earth). Sometimes it is collected in a pair of duologies (Shadow and Claw, Sword and Citadel).
u/chaosmosis [+1] and with strange aeons, even death may die (22 hours later)
I would characterize Endymion as anti-rational or discordian. I didn't read the fourth book, I got bored of all the nonsense superpowers.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
Dan Simmons is mentioned very little on here. Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are amazing stories about a disparate group of pilgrims come to a frontier colony world in times of war, in hopes of fulfilling various desires even at the cost of their own lives, who have their backstories explained along the way. Endymion and The Fall of Endymion, two sequels, are more standard adventure stories that in the series following Hyperion, but they aren't really necessary and I'd only bother if you absolutely loved Hyperion. His other works are largely forgettable.
Hyperion, if you bother to trudge through all of it stuck me as a new atheist still angry at Christianity, or just horribly dystopian. I hesitate to call it Luddite fare but the impulse is definitely there.
That said your recommendation of Brust earned my upvote, I don't thinkl there is anything he's written I don't own other except cowboy feng. . .
u/Escapement [+1] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (a day later)
Regarding Cowboy Feng: You aren't missing much. Minor plot spoilers:
It's far worse than The Gypsy or The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars (the other books I don't really like by Brust).
u/Timewinders [+11] (2 hours later)
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (famous author but I think this is one of his is pretty obscure) is about a devil in Hell sending letters to his nephew about how to be better at tempting people. I'm not Christian but I still enjoyed it a lot. Excellent humor.
Penpal is an excellent horror story written by someone on /r/nosleep that is quite good. It's not rational but I loved the way the author used foreshadowing. It's also really interesting how scary it is even without anything supernatural going on. Probably obscure outside of reddit.
I also read a lot of YA novels years ago that are probably still very enjoyable for older readers:
Anything by Neal Shusterman, whose stories tend to explore the psychological and social effects of interesting scifi concepts. I especially recommend Unwind, which takes place in a dystopian America where parents can choose to give up their teen children so that every organ in their body can be harvested (they're legally considered to still be alive since every part of them is still alive, just in a divided state). Lots of interesting political commentary, but I wouldn't read the sequels since the first book is the best and stands very well on its own. Also by him and excellent: Everlost (does some really cool worldbuilding with ghosts and even some munchkinry by some of the more intelligent characters), Bruiser, Full Tilt, and The Dark Side of Nowhere.
The Sea of Trolls series by Nancy Farmer. This story is a real treat if you know anything about Norse mythology. And even if you don't, the use of both Norse and British Isles cultures, religion, and history makes the worldbuilding very interesting. It's about an apprentice bard in the British Isles named Jack who gets kidnapped by Vikings during a raid and ends up on a series of adventures to free himself and his sister, including an expedition to Jotunheim. There's also a lot of interesting historical stuff going on in the background like the diminishing presence of the pagan religions and the rise of Christianity.
I'm not sure whether this is actually obscure, but the Bartimaeus Trilogy is excellent. It's about a young magician named Nathaniel in a magical version of our world where magicians get most of their magic by summoning and forcing demons to do their will. Nathaniel summons a demon named Bartimaeus to get revenge on someone who humiliated him once and unknowingly gets involved in a conspiracy. The humor is some of the best I've seen, especially in Bartimaeus's pov, and uses footnotes. Also lots of interesting stuff about how about how a society built on slavery affects the magicians of their world, who control the government. Now that I look back on it, it might have actually been a commentary on British Imperialism, though I was too young to see that back then.
Deltora Quest is a children's book series by an Australian author set in a medieval fantasy nation similar to Australia but somehow filled with even more deadly and unusual wildlife. The main character and his friends try to free their kingdom from the rule of the Shadow Lord by finding all the gems of the magical belt of Deltora. The setup is a pretty standard adventure story but there's a ridiculous amount of puzzle solving that I think should be pretty entertaining to a rationalist. I actually considered writing a rational version of this story once because the setting seems to practically run on puzzle solving with each of the main characters bringing different strengths to the solving of each puzzle. The setting is also very unique for a medieval fantasy with many unusual and dangerous magical creatures introduced in each book. The plot is very entertaining and has a ridiculous number of twists. The twists are often also based on puzzles with things like word play being vital clues to future plot developments. Both the main characters and villains are very intelligent. A common saying in their world about the villain is "The Shadow Lord has many plans" being immortal and using that to his advantage such as by waiting for a weak king to take the throne to put his plans in motion and having backup plans for his backup plans.
The Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones (and anything else by her really). A man from our Earth ends up controlling a medieval fantasy world via an extremely powerful demon he managed to contract. He forces them to act like people straight from a D&D game (complete with a fake dark lord and fake battles) to make money off of tourists from Earth as a side venture along with exploiting the mineral resources of their world. Very funny and plays on a lot of the tropes of medieval fantasy novels. You might have tangentially heard of one of the author's other books, Howl's Moving Castle, by way of the Ghibli anime adaptation. Both versions are different, excellent, and should be watched/read. Also by her and good: The Merlin Conspiracy and its prequel, the Chrestomanci series, etc.
For books that weren't originally in English, consider reading the following.
- The Mahabharata. It's a classic and I still enjoy it a lot even though I'm an atheist now. I'm still impressed by how complex its presentation of characters and morality were for its time. An abridged version might be more consumable though.
- The Dream Merchant by Isabel Hoving. A YA book about kids employed by a company that uses them to travel through the dreams of mankind, like Inception but on a much wider scale. I don't remember much about this one but it was very good.
- Mimus by Lilli Thal. Another YA book about a crown prince of a medieval kingdom who gets captured by the enemy country and forced into working as an apprentice jester. He struggles to cope with defeat and along the way the previously pampered prince becomes a more mature person. Complex characters and a surprisingly realistic and detailed look into how life in a medieval castle might have been. It was also nice to see a jester, a character often in the background of a medieval story, be the main character.
If you want more recommendations let me know, I left a bunch of obscure YA books I loved off of this list because there's just so many (I read literally hundreds or maybe thousands of books as a teenager and kept track of them).
u/None [+3] (2 hours later)
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u/None [+1] (2 hours later)
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u/Escapement [+1] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (15 hours later)
I tried the Bartimaeus trilogy a while ago, got about 1/3rd of the way into the first book before putting it down and never going back to it. It was a fair bit back and I don't recall why I didn't like it, but I can add myself as a data point into the overarching phenomenon of older readers not getting into it.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 hours later)
Oh wow! I completely forgot about reading Deltora and Sea of Trolls when I was younger. That brings back great memories and I'm buying my own copies right now so I can reread them. By the way, Deltora was $#!@&ing creepy to me as a child and I had some minor nightmares about it. Especially about the monster from the fifth book which stalks you in a pitch black, flooded, underground maze. Yet I absolutely loved the series. I think I had creepy tendencies as a kid....
Too bad that I can only get the first Deltora series on Kindle. The other two series, Shadowlands and Dragons, can only be gotten in print. :(
I'd have to recommend The Neverending Story, because while it's not similar to the YA stories on the list, it's a fantastic coming of age journey (sorta) like how the characters mature in your recommendations.
I also remembered reading the Septimus Heap series which I was so happy to have some decent length on the books I was reading. I hated how all of the teens and YA books were only 100 to 200 pages long instead of a more comfortable 600 page monsters the Heap series was.
I would also love to go through any book lists you have, since I tend to spend a fair amount of time every so often just going through my book list and seeing what I've read recently I'd like to add to it. Seriously, the excel spreadsheet is at half a thousand lines with a dozen columns for several different categories.
u/Frommerman [+1] (2 days later)
Nice to see some Bartimaeus love.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (2 hours later)
Let me make a trip down to the downstairs library and see what I can dig up that I haven't recommended before ...
- Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Brois Strugatsky. Not actually that obscure, but it's fairly old (1972) and translated from the original Russian. It says on the front cover that it was the basis for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games, but I have no idea how true that is; they both clearly take a lot of inspiration from Chernobyl.
- Newton's Cannon by Gregory Keyes. The protagonist is a young Benjamin Franklin, who is meddling with magic. It's got a lot of cool ideas in it. Unfortunately, later books in the series don't live up to the first one.
- Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a weird book that takes the frame of Marco Polo speaking to Kubla Khan about a variety of cities that he's seen during his travels. It's sort of surreal and directionless, the sort of book that it's better to read a chapter at a time instead of bingeing.
I think everything else doesn't fit the criteria of obscurity well enough. My recommendations not calibrated for obscurity can be found here.
u/mncke [+4] (3 hours later)
I second Strugatsky brothers. As a hardcore fan of Soviet/Russian scifi I may be a little biased, but I think their work is pretty good. Most of their books are about things rationalists may find interesting.
Monday Begins on Saturday is about a programmer in a world of magic.
Hard to Be a God about the application of the concept of greater good and being a benevolent god.
Noon: 22nd Century is a series about a technocratic socialist utopia.
Also
It says on the front cover that it was the basis for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games, but I have no idea how true that is;
It was not a basis per se, more like an inspirational starting point.
u/Rhamni [+2] Aspiring author (14 hours later)
Oh man, I had no idea you frequented these parts too, button zombie king! It's always nice to recognize people in random places.
u/mncke [+3] (16 hours later)
Oh hai
By the way, having finished reading Worm recently, it just occured to me Worm spoiler
u/Rhamni [+1] Aspiring author (16 hours later)
Khepri was the bomb. An excellent final escalation.
u/Transfuturist [+3] Carthago delenda est. (17 hours later)
Please explain. :?
u/Rhamni [+3] Aspiring author (18 hours later)
Back in April-June reddit did the whole /r/thebutton thing. mncke did some work on a bot that used a large number of donated accounts to press the button every time the countdown came close to zero, thus delaying the end of the button. I was active in one of the pro death factions, so I tagged a bunch of people from all the factions, and it's always fun to see them in different places all over reddit.
u/jesyspa [+2] (9 hours later)
It says on the front cover that it was the basis for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games, but I have no idea how true that is; they both clearly take a lot of inspiration from Chernobyl.
Roadside Picnic inspired the movie Stalker by Tarkovski, which the video game is (very roughly) based on. I suspect that they had initially wanted it to be more reminiscent of the film, but ended up simplifying it due to development taking too long already.
By the way, neither Roadside Picnic nor the film Stalker take any inspiration from Chernobyl.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (12 hours later)
By the way, neither Roadside Picnic nor the film Stalker take any inspiration from Chernobyl.
I suppose I should have realized that just from the publication date. The parallels were really clear when I read it, but apparently entirely coincidental (or owing to aspects of language/culture). It was probably the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone / Visitation Zone thing that got me thinking that they were related.
u/Chaigidel [+5] (5 hours later)
Stanislaw Lem is generally a good bet. Solaris is probably best known because of the movie adaptations. Also notable are His Master's Voice, which has pretty much grounded in the real world top scientists as the protagonists and The Cyberiad, which is basically a book of fairytales written by a post-human civilization. (The internet says you should make sure to get Michael Kandel's translation of The Cyberiad if you're reading it in English, there are bad Lem translations around and the book has some tricky wordplay bits.)
Thomas Ligotti is a sort of spiritual heir to H.P. Lovecraft, who goes for the raw cosmic horror angle instead of getting fixated on a cthulhu critter menagerie, and mixes in some Kafka-esque nihilism about humanity and society. Mostly writes short stories, basically pick any book you find and start reading.
Don't know how well known Bruce Sterling is these days, his Schismatrix was pretty much my favorite SF book in the 90s. Holy Fire is also good. Then I found Zeitgeist really weird and haven't read his later books.
Ian Watson writes somewhat surreal high-concept SF. I liked the cognitive-sciency The Embedding and the short stories in Salvage Rites.
Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Just go read it.
u/Escapement [+2] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (15 hours later)
My favorite Stanislaw Lem is probably Memoirs Found In A Bathtub. It's ludicrous and crazy and lovely. Anti-rationalist fiction, if such a thing can be said to exist.
u/Anderkent [+1] (3 days later)
Tales of Pirx The Pilot would be my personal favourites. In particular Ananke, The Hunt, and The Conditioned Reflex.
u/FeepingCreature [+2] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (3 days later)
The Invincible was the Blindsight of its time.
u/jalapeno_dude [+4] (5 hours later)
Not sure how obscure this is, but my favorite Big Epic Fantasy Novels lately have been by [Daniel Abraham](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Abraham_(author)). My favorite series of his is probably the (completed) Long Price Quartet, which has some genuinely original ideas contained therein. His in-progress Dagger and the Coin series (4/5 books complete right now) is more conventional but still pretty good--and it has the bonus that the good guys are bankers, unsurprising for the author of The Cambist and Lord Iron, an excellent rationalist story that has been linked on this sub before.
For more sci-fi/fantasy book recommendations, I tend to agree with the reviews of Andrew Plotkin (semi-famous as an author of IF games), which you can find here.
u/DataPacRat [+5] Amateur Immortalist (6 hours later)
"Kid Radd", a completed webcomic, which starts as a simple 1980's video game parody, and ends up as a rather impressive full-fledged story with various philosophical musings. One version can be read at https://www.bgreco.net/kidradd.htm , and you may want to check the summary at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Webcomic/KidRadd to double-check if you're interested.
Fox's "Peter Pan and the Pirates", a non-Disney-based interpretation of the classic tale, much to be preferred to most other cartoon versions, from the opening sequence on to exploring what happens if Peter decides to grow up. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/PeterPanAndThePirates , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_and_the_Pirates .
"The Odyssey", a 1992 TV series which starts by having the protagonist fall into a coma, and stay there for two seasons, as he travels through what may be his subconscious and may be a parallel world. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Series/TheOdyssey , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Odyssey_%28TV_series%29 , and depending on your local jurisdiction, you may be able to find the episodes here.
"Spellbinder", another 1990's kids-oriented show involving parallel worlds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellbinder_%28TV_series%29 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spellbinder:_Land_of_the_Dragon_Lord . Or, from just 5 years ago, "Stormworld", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormworld . (I'm just now realizing how many Commonwealth-produced parallel-reality kids shows I've enjoyed...)
The "Lensmen" books by Doc Smith, which pioneered many of the now-standard tropes for space opera.
The "Station General" med-SF stories and novels by James White.
u/Charlie___ [+1] (a day later)
Oh man, Kid Radd! That takes me back. You ever read Basil Flint, P.I.?
u/DataPacRat [+1] Amateur Immortalist (a day later)
Basil Flint, P.I.
I'm afraid the name doesn't ring a bell, and my Googling doesn't seem to turn up any sites with archives. Do you know where I could read any of it?
u/Charlie___ [+1] (a day later)
I think it might be taken offline now. Very fitting for a thread about obscure things. It was hardly high art, but I think it was a fun webcomic from an author who actually knew how to end stories.
Looks like you can still find bits of it in the internet archive under basilflint.com.
u/FeepingCreature [+1] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (3 days later)
"Spellbinder", another 1990's kids-oriented show involving parallel worlds.
This was my childhood. So many happy memories.
u/None [+9] (2 hours later)
The Young Wizards series isn't obscure on this sub, but it's obscure overall?
u/PeridexisErrant [+3] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (7 hours later)
And everyone should read it, of course.
u/Rhamni [+2] Aspiring author (14 hours later)
I read the first one, and it wasn't quite up my alley. Does it get better, or is it just a taste thing?
u/Escapement [+2] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (15 hours later)
Honestly, the first ~3 books are probably the best the series gets, after that I feel like it went downhill pretty fast. If you didn't like the first one, I think the odds are very bad about you liking the other two, and totally dismal about liking the remainder of the series. Some of the third book has a bunch of thematic /r/rational probably really likes, spoilers but honestly if you didn't like the first one I wouldn't force yourself through the second to get to the third, there are many books.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (17 hours later)
Not sure the first two books are really vital for understanding High Wizardry.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (a day later)
Probably a fair bit of taste, but I'd suggest trying out the fourth book onwards.
- There was something like a 25 year gap, and she's a noticably more fluent author form there on
- I did this (library...) and it seemed to work - you don't miss any big arcs
u/TimTravel [+2] (14 hours later)
That's the "So you want to be a wizard" series, right? I remember liking them.
u/ToaKraka [+3] https://i.imgur.com/OQGHleQ.png (17 minutes later)
I recommended the educational Sherlock Holmes books The Einstein Paradox and Conned Again, Watson! quite a few months ago here.
Sailor Nothing, which I recommended here three months ago, might also count as somewhat obscure, as it was written fifteen years ago, even if the author is still known nowadays for other works (City of Angles, Floating Point).
I found Perseverance Island: The Robinson Crusoe of the Eighteenth Century to be pretty cool. It has been pointed out here, however, that the book isn't particularly rational.
Unicorn Jelly is a rather ancient webcomic by a person who is nowadays somewhat (in)famous in the MLP: FIM community. It's been several years since I tried reading it (I got bored of it after a while, though I loved the art style), but I do vaguely remember that it was somewhat interesting and included some cosmology stuff.
For books translated into English, there are always the little-loved sequels (1 2 3 4 5) to The Three Musketeers. Project Gutenberg's translations of them aren't the best, but I found them fairly entertaining.
u/None [+3] (2 hours later)
Unicorn Jelly[8] is a rather ancient webcomic by a person[9] who is nowadays somewhat (in)famous in the MLP: FIM community. It's been several years since I tried reading it (I got bored of it after a while, though I loved the art style), but I do vaguely remember that it was somewhat interesting and included some cosmology stuff.
Personally I enjoyed Friendship is Dragons for employing one of my favorite deconstruction premises: look at any series you like, and deconstruct it by assuming it's actually all a table-top role-playing session underneath.
u/Transfuturist [+2] Carthago delenda est. (18 hours later)
I prefer Darths and Droids for its length. Oh my god, I hope they'll do something for the new movies... ^^
u/Empiricist_or_not [+2] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
Unicorn Jelly is a rather ancient webcomic by a person who is nowadays somewhat (in)famous in the MLP: FIM community. It's been several years since I tried reading it (I got bored of it after a while, though I loved the art style), but I do vaguely remember that it was somewhat interesting and included some cosmology stuff.>
The webcomic that started my 23+ tab morning relax, I have the hardcover and re-read it periodically.
u/GaBeRockKing [+1] Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 (4 hours later)
Unicorn Jelly is a rather ancient webcomic by a person who is nowadays somewhat (in)famous in the MLP: FIM community.
Looks like the link's broken. If it's anywhere as misanthropic and anvilicious as her MLP fanfiction tended to be, however, that might not be entirely bad. Chatoyance is effectively the Ayn Rand of MLP: FiM.
u/None [+0] (18 hours later)
Oh God it's the same person!?
u/Transfuturist [-1] Carthago delenda est. (18 hours later)
Chatoyance has several webcomics, and they're all fairly awful. Fortunately she seems to be quarantined in the Conversion Bureau setting, though she escapes occasionally to grace the Optimalverse with her blatant CelestAI proponence. It's about an alien intelligence converting humanity into small technicolor horses, so it makes sense.
u/None [+3] (an hour later)
Lately I've been really enjoying the Faction Paradox series of books and audios. It's a spinoff of a Doctor Who book (so probably as close to utter obscurity as one can get), but it has nothing to do with Doctor Who so it can be enjoyed by anybody. The book Dead Romance is probably one of the best scifi stories I've read in the last several years. It's many shades of rational and engaging af. I have the Faction Paradox audios and a few ebooks (including Dead Romance), so if anyone wants, PM me.
u/None [+1] (2 hours later)
Are there ebooks for Faction Paradox that aren't just raw text files?
u/DataPacRat [+1] Amateur Immortalist (6 hours later)
There's at least one audiobook, and IIRC a few comic books.
u/None [+1] (18 hours later)
My collection is twelve mp3s, six pdfs, and one epub / mobi. If you know of any text files, I'd love to have them.
u/Charlie___ [+2] (an hour later)
Unfortunately, anything particularly obscure is too obscure to have been read by me. However, there are some good books that I have mentioned a few times to other people, but they never seem to have read them.
China Mountain Zhang, by Maureen McHugh. A coming of age novel in a future where China is the world superpower.
The Glass Bead Game, by Herman Hesse (mainly just the first half). A coming of age novel for a brilliant artist in a future where high society is tired of art.
Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, Ursula LeGuin (Yes, I know she's famous, and so was Hesse, but you probably haven't heard of this book, therefore it's obscure). A coming of age novel for two awkward teenagers who like music and conworlding.
Mother of Storms, by John Barnes (won an award, but a while ago - you may have heard of his other good [though very different] novel, One for the Morning Glory?). Not a coming of age novel. Instead, Charles Stross writes 'The Day After Tomorrow.'
u/None [+2] (a day later)
I'm particularly interested in books by non-American authors or foreign books with an English translation.
Dammit. Most foreign books I wanted to recommend aren't translated into English.
Still: Omega Minor. It's a very complex novel dealing with the Holocaust, but touching on a whole lot more. It's heavy on description and sometimes approaches poetry more than prose. It's complicated and beautiful. And as a bonus, the author did the English translation humself.
The Conqueror's Shadow, by Ari Marmell is also pretty good. It's about a retired villain/warlord who's retirement gets threatened by a new Big Bad Evil Guy. It's a fun little book with a lot of dark humor.
The City of Dreaming Books is a book about books. The city it takes place in has more bookshops than you could imagine. It's build upon the catacombs of old libraries where bookhunters seek for rare first editions to sell topside. The entire thing is fantasy about books. It's pretty nice and it has pictures. (I like books with pictures that are still interesting for adults.)
u/None [+2] (a day later)
My roommate started showing us Metropolis last night. You should watch it. The art is gorgeous.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (12 minutes later)
From my own recommendations, it would have to be:
Anything by Octavia Butler, especially Kindred, Fledgling, and Wild Seed.
Medicus by Ruth Downie.
Anything by Robin McKinley, especially The Hero and the Crown, Beauty, and Sunshine. She's an unusual author, because I can't really tell any commonality between the people who I've met who has read her books and it's a bit hit-and-miss for whether or not a fellow bibliophile has heard of her. Her works seem to belong to the genre of fantastical adventure, but with twists to the story narrative to make it more of a slice-of-life style.
u/Magodo [+0] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (3 hours later)
Can we talk about Octavia Butler? I tried reading her Xenogenesis trilogy and I just thought it was so bad. It's not good sci-fi, it feels like she's recycled common sci-fi tropes to get her point across. Like how 'hierarchical tendencies' is why humans are not as advanced as they could be. Wtf are heirarchical tendencies?
She also seems to eschew characters with white skin for whatever reason. A black-chinese baby is the protagonist of the trilogy. I'm sorry but I can't imagine that character without laughing aloud.
u/blazinghand [+9] Chaos Undivided (6 hours later)
I know a half black half Chinese guy, and a couple of half Chinese half Arab/Persian guys. I'm half Korean, half Persian. I do not find this surprising. There are lots of Chinese people and lots of black people on earth, or so I have been told.
Most people I know aren't white. Most people aren't white. I suspect exposure to people of different ethnicities has a lot more to do with physical location than anything else. Maybe you find non-white people surprising because you don't see a lot of them? In many places it's unusual to see people outside of your ethnicity so that would be a normal reaction. It's not the strangest thing for an author to use mostly non-white characters, especially since many authors use mostly white characters: authors often write what they know and what they've lived. Character ethnicities usually don't mean much to me.
I've read one story by Octavia Butler, Wild Seed, which was excellent. The two main characters were black, but for spoiler reasons their blackness wasn't relevant, and also it was literally set in Africa so I didn't find it surprising or off-putting in the slightest. I didn't even actively think about it or consider it might be unusual until you mentioned it now.
u/Magodo [+5] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (14 hours later)
Apologies for coming across as a vehement KKK member. I live in India. Between breakfast and lunch, I speak 4 languages. I don't know any white people at all.
It riles me up when a book it touted as sci-fi, contains no sci-fi elements and generally feels like a book written by a teenager.
u/blazinghand [+2] Chaos Undivided (a day later)
Ah, don't worry about it too much. Internet posts are a hard medium to communicate over and you can expect occasional misunderstandings even in the best of situations. Sorry if I seemed aggressive.
u/Kishoto [+5] (3 hours later)
I'd like you to clarify what you mean by eschewing characters with white skin, as you've only supplied one example. And that's not nearly large enough to validate your claim. Also, on a more personal note, can you seriously not imagine a black chinese person? How ethnocentric can you be? That's like a Chinese person saying they can't imagine a white african without laughing.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
Also, the protagonist of Snow Crash was half black, half Japanese, and that's considered one of the modern classics ... so yes, clarification.
Edit: Actually, he's half-Korean, not half-Japanese; he walks around with Japanese swords.
u/Kishoto [+2] (5 hours later)
Ah, so the author tends to favor minorities as protagonists? That's all well and good, I guess. Although I'm still a bit miffed at the ignorance displayed :\
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (6 hours later)
Ah, sorry; Neal Stephenson wrote Snow Crash. I was wondering whether it was the authorship that mattered (whether it was okay when Stephenson did it but not when Butler did it).
Octavia Butler writes a lot of science fiction with themes of race and gender. This makes sense, because she's a black woman who grew up in 1950s America, and there's a long history of scifi authors taking what they see in the world and translating it into science fictional analogs to better grapple with the subject.
u/Magodo [+2] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (7 hours later)
Yes, it's author specific. I would have no issues reading Snow Crash. (It's been on my to read list for too long)
The difference is Stephenson isn't trying to push a race agenda or for equality. IMO, you can't write a book while promoting your ideology. Ex: Atlas Shrugged.
There was a point in the book where the aforesaid baby says that plastic is the most evil thing created by man. What good sci-fi author would do this? She also seems to want to go back to an age without technology.
I'm not sure if I'm making a whole lot of sense here, it's probably better to read the books and judge for oneself.
u/None [+2] (18 hours later)
The difference is Stephenson isn't trying to push a race agenda or for equality.
Yeah, he's just trying to push anarcho-capitalism and tribalized neo-feudalism.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
IMO, you can't write a book while promoting your ideology. Ex: Atlas Shrugged.
Sure you can. I mean, this sub wouldn't have existed if it was for HPMOR, a work where the author has admitted to writing it in order to convince people of his ideas. Or take Cory Doctorow. Pirate Cinema is all about ideas he likes and finds interesting and it still manages to be an entertaining novel.
Why the hell wouldn't you be able/allowed to write a book from a perspective you are sympathetic to?
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (17 hours later)
He's half-Japanese from what I recall. His father...
For some reason I never questioned how I knew he was half-Japanese while his father was held in a Japanese POW camp.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (18 hours later)
Yeah, I thought he was half-Japanese as well, because his Korean heritage just never comes up and there's all this stuff about his father being a Japanese POW, and he has Japanese swords ... here's the quote, BTW.
His father was a sergeant major, his mother was a Korean woman whose people had been mine slaves in Nippon, and Hiro didn't know whether he was black or Asian or just plain Army, whether he was rich or poor, educated or ignorant, talented or lucky.
u/Transfuturist [+1] Carthago delenda est. (18 hours later)
Man. I need to reread it if I'm getting so much of it wrong. His dad was black. Dammit.
u/Magodo [+4] Ankh-Morpork City Watch (14 hours later)
Spoilers follow:
Any positive character that we're meant to empathize with is either black, Chinese or Latin-American. Usually I don't even notice this sort of stuff. But it got really annoying after a point when the protag gets kidnapped by 4 white dudes, taken to a town with all whites and sold to whites.
u/None [+3] (4 hours later)
I thought Wild Seed was boring. Tried, think I saw the appeal, but couldn't get into it.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (18 hours later)
I forgot to include this story, The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart. It does a great job of making the story enjoyable, despite (or is that because of?) the reader wishing the villainous protagonist brothers dead. It makes good use of strong black comedy.
u/Salaris [+1] Dominion Sorcerer (3 days later)
If you're looking for some hard fantasy, I'd strongly recommend Rokka no Yuusha. It starts out looking like a typical medieval fantasy and quickly turns into a (relatively rational) locked room mystery. I've been having tons of fun with it, and it meets your criteria for a foreign book in translation.
u/Ozimandius [+1] (5 days later)
Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. You won't regret it - excellent chinese author and fun read with some great sci-fi elements.