r/printSF

I'm looking for SF that makes space frightening just by treating it seriously.

Not because there's something hiding outside the airlock, but because you're surrounded by distances so huge they almost stop meaning anything, help might be months or years away, and one tiny mechanical failure can turn an ordinary situation into something completely hopeless.

I love when a book makes a functioning ship feel less like a safe little home travelling through space and more like an absurdly fragile bubble that has no business keeping humans alive out there.

The stuff that gets to me most is when nobody is even doing anything wrong. No evil corporation sabotaging the mission, no alien predator, no mysterious signal.

Maybe someone gets sick halfway between planets. Maybe a burn is slightly wrong and there's simply not enough fuel to correct it. Maybe two people can technically communicate but the delay is so long that having a conversation stops feeling like talking to another person.

That kind of thing scares me more than most actual horror because there's nothing to defeat. Physics isn't angry at you, it just doesn't care.

What books gave you that feeling?

Bonus points if they're not primarily marketed as horror. I'm less interested in "space contains a scary thing" and more in "space itself is an absolutely awful place for a human being to exist."

the more science fiction i read, the more i realize that some ideas eventually stop feeling strange. ai, virtual reality, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, generation ships, even some forms of space travel all start to feel almost familiar after enough books.

but there are still concepts that completely break my brain

for me, it’s stories where consciousness or identity can be copied, transferred or split between multiple versions of the same person. i understand the basic idea, but the philosophical consequences get weird very quickly

what sci-fi concept still feels genuinely difficult for you to wrap your head around?

Writers aren't expected to be good-looking like actors are, so I thought it'd be a worthwhile question. I think Catherynne M. Valente's pretty cute.

Hi everyone,

I recently discovered Roger Williams' "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" and the premise looks absolutely amazing.

Since my English isn't quite strong enough to comfortably read a whole novel, I was wondering: Is there a German translation available anywhere?

I know there is no official commercial German release. However, since the book was published under a free license online, I'm hoping that someone in the community might have created a fan translation (like a PDF, EPUB, or Google Doc) or knows where to find one.

If anyone has a link or can point me in the right direction, I would really appreciate it!

Thanks in advance!

looking for recs that are scifi books which incorporate real computer science or programming, and/or economics chicanery. examples: wjw dagmar shaw series, scalzi lock-in, neal's snow crash and diamond age.

Just finished this book tonight and I'm still reeling a bit. I was just wondering-- did Andrew Hilton (after Marie shoots him and 3125 takes over) become Red?

Were the giant antimemetic animals in the epilogue eating little pieces of 3125 after Idea!Marie obliterated it?

What happened to Hix after he turned on his machine to defeat 3125?

What was up with the aliens that replaced all the humans during Adam's concert? I get that 3125 took over but why did everyone turn into aliens??

Is Marie still sentient? She ascends and turns into an idea strong enough to defeat 3125, but can she still think and feel, etc? And if she can, how lonely would it be to exile herself forever away from humanity...

What was the significance of the "god" that ate people's knowledge of riding a bicycle??

I keep coming back to books where somebody follows a rule long after everyone who understood it is dead. Canticle for Leibowitz is the one everybody names, monks copying a circuit diagram as scripture. Asimov does a colder version in Foundation, where technicians run reactors as a priesthood and the ritual is the operating manual with the reasoning filed off.

Both of those are about knowledge being lost. The case I have trouble finding is the one where the procedure still works. Nobody on the page can say why, it reads as superstition from the outside, and it is the only thing keeping the lights on.

Anything come to mind? I would especially take books where you watch the reason come apart across the timeline instead of being told it already did.

Hi folks, I’m teaching an upper-level humanities course, Humans and Technology, and would love to bring some sci fi into the fray. I’m looking for recommendations of works that gel with the content and themes of the course.

I’ll share a simple rundown of the course below, but the tl;dr is this: the course seeks to complicate students’ understanding of technology’s impact on how we conceptualize our world and ourselves. As a part of this I’m requiring students to independently read a relevant novel throughout the semester and make connections to the courses content. Any works that spring to mind as productive for stimulating this sort of thinking, please share!

More info if it helps to narrow:
Students develop and creatively articulate a nuanced understanding of tech adoption in the enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Information Age, and in the dawning era of AI proliferation. Students explore:

- theories and ideas of society/tech co-constitution (i.e., human society and technology evolve together; we make our tools and our tools make us)

- historical perspectives on contemporary technologies as discerned by reading primary sources (Kant, Marx, Kuhn)

- the phenomenology of tech use — what’s it like to use technologies as part of daily being

- the future of tech and posthumanism

It is this last part (what the future holds) that’s a weak place in my syllabus specifically. Some kickass works of sci-fi could do well to help generate speculation and meaningful conversation about the possibilities and trajectories of our world.

Seems to me most sci fi (could be big literary names or more niche genre stuff) answers the mail here… but if anyone has specific recommendations that should be included, please let me know!

An English professor at my university recommended Klara and the Sun after we spoke about how the first semester went, so that’s on there. No need to help identify texts to “compliment” this one… just want to have a solid list of possible recommendations (students can always propose their own novel too).

Love Gibsons writing here. Definitely how it feels to be living in a time of the ultra wealthy.

As she walked from the Louvre, she seemed to sense some articulated structure shifting to accommodate her course through the city. The waiter would be merely a part of the thing, one limb, a delicate probe or palp. The whole would be larger, much larger. How could she have imagined that it would be possible to live, to move, in the unnatural field of Virek's wealth without suffering distortion? Virek had taken her up, in all her misery, and had rotated her through the monstrous, invisible stresses of his money, and she had been changed. Of course, she thought, of course: It moves around me constantly, watchful and invisible, the vast and subtle mechanism of Herr Virek's surveillance.

Just finished reading Yume Kitasei's Saltcrop and it left me craving for some more quality cli-fi.

Some books that fall more or less under that umbrella I've read and enjoyed:

Ray Nayler - The Mountain in the Sea

Paolo Bacigalupi - The Windup Girl, The Water Knife, The Ship Breaker trilogy

Charlotte McConaghy - Migrations

Jeff VanderMeer - Borne

Still working my way through Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, I'm sure I'll finish it eventually. Read Forty Signs of Rain partway through some years ago, might give that series another try some day. Based on what I've read by her I think Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is likely too bleak for me. I read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood some years ago and remember liking it, might continue with the series at some point.

The sequel to Tchaikovksy’s science-fantasy blend Elder Race is finally with us after many long years in the form of Engines of Reason, and the war between magic and technology continues!

After reviewing many… many books written by prolific author Adrian Tchaikovsky (this would be the third… this year!) I can safely say that I am among the ranks of Tchaikovsky fanatics. His sheer range of imagination and ability to craft entire worlds from intriguing themes should be taken apart and studied. In the Elder Race series, the author springs off Clarke’s Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic!” and creates a charming duology of novellas from that simple premise.

Elder Race introduced readers to the world of Sophos IV, a planet at the far reaches of Earth’s colonized world. The only survivor of Earth’s advanced scientists, Nyrgoth has watched a new generation of humans emerge and flourish on this far-flung planet. This post-colonial society has evolved into its own version of medieval feudalism mirroring fantasy worlds we have come to know and love. To the people of Sophos IV, Nyr, in his lonely tower, among his advanced Earth technology, is nothing short of a wizard wielding magic! The last survivor of the Elder Race.

In the sequel, Engines of Reason, Nyr’s technology-masked-as-magic dominance is threatened when a new force emerges, also mysteriously able to access Nyr’s ancient-Earth tech and positions themselves as an antagonist to Sophos IV’s new monarch. Returning to help Nyr fend off this threat is Lys Fourth Daughter, the rebellious sister of the new monarch and savior of the planet in the events of Elder Race.

Engines of Reason is a quick novella that proceeds at a nifty clip, deepening the lore of Sophos IV, the precarious political balance between the tenuous new queen and her subjects, while also fleshing out Nyr and Lys’ relationship giving the novella a depth that belies its format. While the plot itself is reasonably straightforward and predictable, it is at the fringes of the worldbuilding that Tchaikovsky weaves his true magic of narrative storytelling. He explores reactive governance and monarchical over-reach in a balanced way without devolving into dark fantasy tyranny, and puts more focus on the commoners, caught between the powers of might, magic, and technology.

I enjoyed Engines of Reason as a continuation of the ideas laid out in Elder Race and am glad that the author decided to revisit this world, which had and still has many more stories to tell!

At the end of the day, we all worship at the Altars of science, hope for the Wonders of Magic, but are ultimately driven by the Engines of Reason.

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Read this review and more on my Medium Page: Distorted Visions

The Arikei in Embassytown by China Mieville follow linguistic determinism. For them, words are physical states and not symbolic abstraction like it is for humans. Their words are directly linked to their reality. As human language is perceived to be disconnected from their immediate physical reality, they can’t comprehend humans directly. 

The octopuses from Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky have mini-brains across their bodies. They communicate through a shifting array of pigments and textures on their skin. 

The ocean from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem touches at the dangers of trying to understand “god-like” consciousness. The entire project of trying to decipher any pattern or meaning behind the actions of the ocean falls flat as it is simply too beyond our understanding. 

Stevland from Semiosis by Sue Burke experiences reality through root networks, nutrients, and evolutionary strategies. All animals and humans to him are a passing phenomenon that he humours and tends to.

I finally read Red Rising. And I was a bit underwhelmed. It was an interesting world, but it never really made me want to keep reading longer than planned. Is it universally loved and I'm just crazy?

I finished reading Gibson's Neuromancer last night. I thoroughly enjoyed every second I spent with this book. The world was dense even with sparse prose, and the struggles and wants of each character unfolded beautifully right through to the end. I think Wintermute might be a top 3 AI for me, and once the purpose of the plot clicked into place (an AI heist on itself to break out of the limitations set on it), I was enraptured til the end and only put it down because I had to do other things.

So of course I came to this sub and searched for other people's thoughts on it. For the most part discussion falls along the lines of

1. The prose is sparse and challenging to some readers, but rewarding and rich once you become immersed in it.
2. The techno-jargon was novel for the early 80s, but maybe feels a bit 'dated' now. However it still works within the fictional world of the Sprawl
3. There's still some debate as to how much of Neuromancer is predictive of our current technological path vs how much we've diverged or simply tried to bring his fictional ideas into existence.

I think point 3 is something really interesting to explore, because how 'accurate' the book is to our current trajectory through information technology seems to vary considerably depending on when you read the book. In the late 80s it looked to be on track, then by the late 90s/very early 2000s it was way off seeing as the internet was highly fragmented and mobile phones were becoming a thing. The 2010s, then, was the beginning of a split-divergence: Some aspects of the book have become truly 'history' (the lack of mobile phones and the way 'cyberspace' is envisioned), whereas others are becoming increasingly relevant. The Tesser-Ashpol family's attempts at biological immortality, in tandem with the development of an AI, is chillingly close to what we're seeing with the rise of cryptofascists vying for control of government behind the curtain and doing everything they can to achieve AGI.

In this way, Neuromancer has swung back around to being a really good prediction of where things might be headed. It would have been very difficult for someone in 2013 to see how things have turned out now, so they would've taken Gibson's ideas as just some alternative history that would never happen - something I call the 'flying car future', which is distinct from the future that actually has the potential to happen.

So this means that Neuromancer is both important and interesting to read as a prediction of things that may yet happen, and as a setting which makes us reason with our place within that world. The world of the Sprawl is full of indivudals - humans - who are lost and 'secondary' to the technology that has evolved around them. Biology and psychology playing catchup with the onslaught of silicon and plastic. It makes me wonder just how bad things could get. By no means is everything wrong with Gibson's future world, but it's clearly meant to feel alien and disconnected from any kind of grounding human experience so as to warn us that all of the data in the world means nothing without legitimate connection.

That's hammered home brilliantly with the design of Straylight, which comes across as spot-on description of the LLMs we're surrounded with now. An endless maze of reality warped and re-assembled with basically no understanding or attention paid to why things existed in the first place, why their context was important, and why displacing them removes their value entirely. Like an AI-generated Mona Lisa pulling a duckface to take a selfie with a wonky iPhone.

There's also some discussion I've seen that after reading Neuromancer, many people working in computer tech actually wanted to make his fiction into reality. This is very 'Torment Nexus' territory, and it worries me that the wrong lessons will be taken from his world.

Looking for something like Rememberance of Earths Past, Blindsight without the vampires, the Southern Reach series, Sevenesses- looking for a serious tone and dialogue, so please *no fantasy at all and nothing like Project Hail Mary or Dungeon Crawler Carl or The Expanse*

Original aliens is a must! Please no necromancers, vampires, or aliens that are AI/based on animals from earth/hive-mind/Crabs etc. The aliens from The Sparrow is not what im looking for. The octopuses from Mountain in the Sea is not what im looking for. Something totally unique and un-human like the Trisolarians or the Southern Reach.

I really want to be immersed in a believable world with rational actors who communicate like regular people and aliens that surprise me. Thank you so much!

So, a while back I read The Call of Cthulhu...but when I cracked open The Shadow Out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft I was instantly absorbed (the only reason it was on my shelf that long was the cover, awful cover). It has no particular end, explanation, and leaves you with...what if it actually is real? And what can you do when we are talking about eons of time and space? Made me shiver! So exciting. If you have read it, tell me what you thought. If you haven't I RECOMMEND IT x100!

Read the book it’s really awesome. Very accessible to read and great story

Hey everyone, I'm curious to hear from people who've read most-if-not-all of Gibson's work. I've just finished reading Neuromancer for the second time (which I love), and as I'm starting Count Zero, I'm curious to know more about his other work just because I rarely hear much about it.

How are his other trilogies? How has he matured as a writer, if at all? Do his other works surpass the Sprawl in terms of prose or ideas, or are they too different to really compare? Are there other ones you would highly recommend?

For the record, I do really like him so far. I'm not expecting his other work to be as groundbreaking or impressive as Neuromancer, but I'm also not against reading it in time. I guess I'm more trying to figure out how best to potentially prioritize getting to them among all the other books I have in my backlog.

We're really at the point, perhaps because of my advanced age, where it's easier to find what I have read than what I haven't. At least when it comes to online recommendations or Google searches.

When I have a bunch of books in my queue, I come across series that I haven't read and flag to save but I never do and then I finish my list and I have nothing to read. I'm kicking myself because there are some relatively recent and even completed fantasy and sci fi series that are highly rated and under my radar.

Not only have I read most of the big names and commonly suggested books, I find my taste is also to the more contemporary authors lately.

If you're willing to, would you please share your top 5 with the qualifier that it has been written in the last 10 years or so? Huge bonus points if it's a complete trilogy or series.

throw a guy a lifeline, my last two bedtimes have been sub par. Ive been rereading noble house to doze off.