r/printSF

I haven’t read any Scalzi yet but I’m looking at this bundle. Any thoughts? Is the highest tier worth it? My backlog is already massive but I have heard good things.

I came across this book very randomly and decided to give it a read. It seems right in the cyberpunk vein and I wonder why it isn't considered required reading for that genre? I don't want to give spoilers, but by chance anyone else has read it, what do you think? I enjoyed it immensely.

I would like to know about the most cynical sci-fi writers about political progress.

To quote, Larry Niven, "Niven's Law: No cause is so noble that it won't attract fuggheads."

There are a handful of writers in SF that I think qualify as 'cult writers'...writers who were considered geniuses among their peers but never quite managed to gain significant sales or critical attention. Cordwainer Smith is probably the epitome of this, at least to me.

But there's one author I think doesn't get nearly the accolades he deserves, even though his prose and his imagination are some of the most brilliant I've ever encountered. In many ways, he's also pretty similar to Cordwainer Smith in his storytelling, and like Smith he's also criminally underrated.

I'm talking about Edgar Pangborn, and specifically I'm talking about the cycle of fiction that takes place in his 'Darkening World'. This particular series is made up in print of three novels (Davy, The Judgement of Eve, and The Company of Glory) and a story collection (Still I persist In Wondering). All of them take place in a post-apocalyptic America several generations after a nuclear war and a plague have wiped out the old civilization and much of humanity. In many ways, this cycle is surprisingly similar to the perrenial classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, but from the other direction; in the later, the church is actively attempting to gather and safeguard knowledge of the old world with barbarian hordes trying to destroy it. In the Darkening World, the new theocratic religion that has risen up is actively attempting to suppress and destroy knowledge of the old world, while some others are attempting to reclaim it and escape the reach of the church.

Much like Smith, we get hints of a greater universe that we only are allowed to see bits and pieces of. There is a definitive timeline here, but it can only be gleaned from context clues: We know that their was a nuclear war, we know that some generations after that war there arose a messianic figure named Abraham who became the figurehead for the new 'Holy Murkan Church', we know that various kingdoms and principalities have arisen in the now pastoral and pseudo-medieval world. We know that there are several terrifying animals that inhabit the wilderness which may or may not be the offspring of animals that were kept in zoos...and we also know that there is an enormous number of 'mutants' who live on the fringes of society due to their 'corrupted blood' (i.e. the effects of radiation on their genes).

Of all of these, probably Davy is the one that is most well-known (it was even nominated for a Hugo). It's essentially a bildungsroman about the eponymous character. It's presented as a manuscript of his memoirs, annotated by friends and people who knew him. Davy himself is an anarchic character who, while presented as being free-thinking and progressive in a lot of ways, is also still very much a man of his time (especially when it comes to women).

If you ever get a chance, give this man's work a read.

Love the author's other books so I picked up this one. Really liking it but I had to stop about half way through because I recently lost my dog and it felt like the book was moving towards some tragic ending where rex dies. So umm.. without spoiling too much else, does Rex survive? Am I going to be traumatized if I keep reading?

I'm in the mood for science fiction where the main character isn't the chosen one, the captain, the genius who invents everything, or the person who accidentally becomes the most important human in history.

I'd love stories where the protagonist is an engineer, maintenance tech, mechanic, cargo handler, station operator, repair specialist, or someone in a similar role who's just trying to do their actual job. The stakes can still be huge, but I'd like to see them from the perspective of someone who normally wouldn't be the focus of the story.

Bonus points if the technical work actually matters and isn't just background flavour. I really enjoy competent characters solving practical problems without suddenly turning into action heroes.

I've already read Project Hail Mary, The Martian, and most of Becky Chambers' work.

Any recommendations?

https://preview.redd.it/8zry8fsuj9bh1.jpg?width=4080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8342141a3093fe31b987ab52b919c90f83038ac5

Excited to read. My first time

Reading the Semiosis trilogy got me interested in stories focused on plants. Sentient or not. Fantasy or sci-fi. As long as the writing is actually good; please don't recommend anything that you haven't read and actually enjoyed! If I just want a list of stories with no humans to recommend them, I can ask an AI.

I like the unique worldbuilding in Semiosis even though the biology is not very alien compared to Earth. I really enjoy the idea of plants evolving to control their surroundings or other organisms. They also work on slow time, with fights and cooperation happening much slower, kind of like the rocks in the German short Das Rad.

Does anyone have any recommendations for plant focused stories? Or slow time stories that happen parallel to life at other speeds, ideally about plants?

edit: Holy Toledo, that's a lot of suggestions. I've got not idea how to choose. Again, if you read something you absolutely loved then please mention it.

I have a somewhat unusual question about the current SF landscape. I'm a writer working outside of SF, and I have an idea sketched out that sits squarely within soft science fiction and overlaps into horror. My influences come mainly from the classics, and I'm wondering if SF has moved on substantially from them. Before writing it, I'm trying to assess the project's publications odds and whether any of these elements would create significant barriers. Any thoughts would be helpful.

Simply, I love 19th and early 20th century authors, and they form the bulk of my reading and influences, along with some post-1950s authors working in those traditions. This includes early SF: HG Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lovecraft, and other horror writers. I don't imitate the classics, nor write pastiches, and I'm keenly aware of some of their shortcomings. The influence appears in my work mostly in the tendency for longer, winding sentences, an aspiration for reasonably lush description where appropriate, and a certain attention to structure.

I also adore Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, though they're not really SF. I enjoy Ray Bradbury's stories, some Philip K Dick, and Edogawa Ranpo. I have tried to read Asimov, Heinlein, and Frank Herbert and struggled to finish them; I just never went further into "newer" SF.

For privacy's sake, I'd rather not go into great detail on my idea, though it will sound rather bland and generic as a result. It concerns a sprawling, hyper advanced AI system and a high-level engineer at the company that designed it. In addition to being soft science fiction, the first half looks like a mystery, but this gradually transforms into horror by its end. The second half has some of these features but is more straightforward soft science fiction.

Structure is important to the idea, and it shares a lot with the noted influence of early SF, especially in how science fiction, mystery, and horror can overlap structurally and otherwise. The novel is basically two seamless novellas and will meet contemporary publishing's expectations on manuscript length, though on the shorter end (around 75,000 words). Wells and Stevenson are the biggest influences. While not hard science fiction, the story does play with some of the basic ideas behind AI, which I've worked with professionally. Aspects of philosophy and mysticism also appear, and I studied both in graduate school.

Does contemporary SF have room for this sort of novel? I don't mean to suggest the idea is anachronistic or disqualified solely by having more of a link to these older influences than recent works. Rather, I'm more wondering if SF has moved so far beyond writing with this sort of kinship to the classics that agents and editors would pass on it.

Also, I'm in no way trying to dodge the work of finding comparable recent books; I only want to ask those more knowledgeable in case this idea differs too wildly to have a shot at publication.

Sorry if this doesn't fit the sub.

Alright, I just came off a run of really good, but dense and/or heavy books. (There is no Antimemetics Divison, Embassytown, Klara and the Sun plus some heavy non-SF books like The Stranger and Remains of the Day). Some of these were taxing reads while others were easy but just emotionally heavy. I loved them all, honestly, but I need something lighter.

Now I’d like to read something quick, fun, SF. I don’t need it to be devoid of depth, but I’d like it to not be too much of a downer.

Here are some books I’ve read in the past that kinda fit the bill, and that I really enjoyed:

Robot and Monk books by Becky Chambers

A couple Vorkosigan book by Bujold

Ender’s Game by Card (I get that this one has some real depth, but it also reads quick and I loved it.) I’ve read them all. But none of the prequels co-authored by Aaron Johnson. I own a few though.

Children of Time by Tchaikovsky

Wool by Hugh Howey

Ubik by PKD

What do y’all think? Any fun, fast, gripping palate cleansers out there?

As the title suggests, been in a bit of a reading slump with the sci fi books but want to get back into it. Last sci fi books that I read and loved are Spin, Wool series (sort of sci fi), the mercy of gods, 2001. I did not like the popular bobiiverse series, don't enjoy the writing of Alastair Reynolds or Adrian Tchaikovsky as I know their books are highly recommended. Read some of the murderbot books and found them ok. Need something thats not too hard to get into and has some space travel

I'm not necessarily looking for "utopias," but for science fiction that really explores what happens when basic material scarcity is mostly solved. A lot of books say humanity has moved beyond money or resource shortages, but everyone still behaves almost exactly like people in a modern capitalist economy. Jobs, status, politics and daily life all end up feeling strangely familiar. I'm much more interested in stories that actually ask what changes when food, housing, manufacturing and energy stop being major constraints. What motivates people? How do relationships, ambition, education or even boredom change? What new conflicts replace the old ones? I'm open to any style, hard SF or softer/social SF, older classics or recent novels. Bonus points if the society feels believable rather than simply "everyone is nice now." What books do you think handled post-scarcity better than everyone else?

I've been on a bit of a reading kick lately focused on how speculative fiction handles memory, not just as a plot device like wiped minds or uploaded consciousness, but as something more fundamental to what makes a person who they are over time.

The books that have stuck with me most are the ones where memory loss or alteration isn't just a thriller hook but actually forces you to sit with uncomfortable questions about continuity of self. Recursion by Blake Crouch did this reasonably well for a pageturner, but I kept wanting something with more philosophical weight behind it.

I recently picked up Flowers for Algernon again after years and was struck by how much it holds up precisely because the memory and cognition changes feel emotionally grounded rather than just conceptually clever.

Curious what others here have found in this space. Are there works in translation or older SF that handle this better than the mainstream Englishlanguage stuff tends to? I feel like this is a theme where European or Japanese SF might approach it from angles I haven't encountered yet. Also open to short fiction recommendations since this seems like a theme that works especially well at novella length.

I realized recently that some sci-fi books are almost impossible to fully appreciate on a first read. You're busy figuring out the world, the terminology, the politics or the technology, and by the time everything clicks the book is basically over.

I reread A Deepness in the Sky a few months ago and enjoyed it way more than I did the first time. I caught so many little details and bits of foreshadowing that completely flew past me before. It almost felt like reading a different novel.

What book was like that for you? Not necessarily because it was confusing, but because knowing where the story was going made you appreciate the writing, worldbuilding or characters a lot more. I'm looking for books that genuinely reward a second read.

EDIT: thank you all!! Took me a while to read everything so far and add books to my list. Did not realize that there would be this much to parse through. Really appreciate it all.

Basically the title. The concept of a hive mind or collective consciousness is used periodically but it’s usually portrayed as either bad/evil or at best undesirable.

Are there any stories that try and flip this concept that convince the reader that the hive mind is good? Or the hive mind is the protaganist? Maybe invert the survival story and instead of someone trying to avoid being assimilated it’s a hive mind trying to avoid being dismantled by someone who thinks they’re doing good.

Really just curious to see how an author might try and take this concept.

3.25/5 Revelation Space continues to be a bit of an enigma for me where I really enjoy the moment to moment reading experience while simultaneously recognizing that as a larger series it has a lot of problems. This entry has some of the biggest issues so far where it's paradoxically doing too much and too little at the same time. I'd say I was sufficiently whelmed with the book and there were some moments that I thought were quite good and entertaining and other moments that were very clumsy and badly executed.

Structurally it needed more focus. The exploration of the extent of a "perfect" democracy via the Demarchists is compelling, it just wasn't fully explored in a satisfying way, felt like he dropped this prematurely and didn't follow through well enough. Also he goes back to the well of his tried and true exploration of consciousness and memory with the Voi brothers, in itself a really good idea, just not executed in a fully satisfying way and had a really clumsy climax and conclusion.

The throughline of the previous book felt pretty shoehorned in and awkward, felt included out of necessity of making this a real trilogy instead of disconnected from the first.

That being said I do fundamentally find Reynolds writing to be enjoyable to read, just think this needed more time to cook to make it more compelling and hit harder. I'm still interested in the final book of the trilogy but not dying to pick it up immediately.

What I remember:

• Set in the far flung future

• Famous actress wears a box on their leg recording their daily interactions but scripted.

• Lover from a past episode confronts her about being on TV by breaking the fourth wall of the show and she plays along as if it is was all scripted.

• Lover eventually kills themselve because she refuses lost track of what is the TV show and what is real.

Reality TV show might be the wrong word but get sthe idea across.