Greg Egan. Agree with others in this thread that Permutation City is the most important. But Diaspora is not to be missed either. Egan's unique value prop is: crazy-thought-experiment sci fi (2D world with 2 time dimensions is his latest and is typical) but hard, harder than you can believe. Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?
Gene Wolfe. Book of the new Sun. Wolfe's unique value prop is, create an interesting sci fi or fantastical setting, and tell it through special narrators (unreliable, liar, child, amnesiac, etc) with wonderful skill, producing a puzzle with a lovely solution (that you will only partially solve).
I read Permutation City with great anticipation and really disliked it. My favorite parts were when big ideas met the tedium of execution (like the avatars having to deal with the cost of spot instances, and running in lower-res slower-than-realtime environments.)
I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals.
I greatly enjoyed Zelazny's Amber series and have tried to get into some of his sci-fi, but failed. Perhaps it's time to give Lord of Light a third try.
Lord of Light is worth it if you can manage. I remember I bounced off a few times too.
It's rather hard to believe it's the same author as Amber sometimes, those books took me like 12 seconds to get hooked on, LoL is great it's just _quite_ different in feel.
> Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?
Egan must be one of the most intelligent people alive… or if not, is at least the highest level I am personally capable of recognizing. I am genuinely curious which is the case. Anyways, I haven’t read Diaspora yet so will do so, thanks!
Something being logically consistent doesn't mean it's correct. It's possible someone could make a fully logically consistent version of string theory including future gravitational predictions.
They say "doesn't describe this universe", but that really just means it's wrong.
Edit: replying to pavel_lishin:
Yes, I'm sure Egan knows that, I'm partially replying to the statement "Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?"
Egan is quite active on Mastodon. Toots about science and maths among other things and I gotta say, some of the math stuff he works on seems quite impressive (to me at least).
Seconding the Book of the New Sun - It's great as a standalone, and the series is rewarding if you keep reading. It's an excellent 'puzzle' of a story as OP stated.
If you liked The Martian and Project Hail Mary, two books I cannot recommend enough are Daniel Suarez' Delta-V and Critical Mass. Highly technical focused hard-sci-fi about asteroid mining and human dynamics in high-risk envrionments. I can't vouch for the absolute factual correctness, but it has an appendix listing the papers the author indirectly references for the book.
Delta-V is also described as a "Technothriller" - i.e. in the grey area between action thriller and sci-fi, where the tech is current and cutting-edge, or possibly an inch beyond. I liked the first book, will try the second some time soon.
I really enjoyed his Daemon novel, and I think it would appeal to the HN crowd. Interesting intersection of code and the real world, and it is set more-or-less in the current time.
Daemon is the first of a trilogy. The remaining two books are good, but not quite as good IMO.
It's strange to start a list of "books that you may never have heard of" with a novel which is a nominee to the 2020 Hugo Awards. I suppose that most of the regular readers of sci-fi haver heard of it.
A nitpick about the third recommandation with "robots modeled on Karel Čapek’s designs". I suppose that they have not read Čapek’s novels. His robots were not pure machines, they were made from a biological substrate. In a way, they were closer to golems than to what we're now calling robots.
If you want to read really different and lesser known novels, Karel Čapek’s are a good choice. I did not enjoy "R.O.R." much except for his surprising concept of robots, but I highly recommend "War with the newts".
Yeah, Project Hail Mary was the only one of the three I'd ever heard of. Still, it was a great book (especially since I read it right on the heels of reading Artemis, which was only "okay").
I just finished Hail Mary this past week. Not as big a fan of it as most seem to be. I found the narrative style to get tedious about half way through the book. A few issues too with events late in the story. 7.5-8/10 by me, above average but not elite.
The Bobiverse series is one of my favorites, sense of humor meets Bob the von Neumann probe. Well written and plenty of theory explanations of technology. They even pull in Expeditionary Force's AI Skippy as a faction group, which is another good series if you like technical theory in detail explained mostly by the asshole AI.
Murderbot has become a must listen at bedtime, the self deprecating, funny and lovey dovey killing machine. He loves his solitude and media, and has an emotion from time to time.
I read murderbot a few years ago and fell in love with it. It's funny, short, has good characters and they develop overtime. The world building is interesting enough but not drowning out the narrative<3
One of "you may never heard of" sci-fi books I can recommend is The City & the City by China Miéville. Perhaps not traditional science fiction, but so original and strange, it's beautiful.
I dislike both this and Miéville's Embassytown since in my opinion both set out to mislead me and then do a reveal which amounts "I misled you about what's really going on" and while that works for a stand up comic beat (e.g. Taylor Tomlinson "he cheated on me ... in my head") I don't want to read a whole novel this way.
Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.
As someone who hated The City and The City to the point of never reading Mieville again, I appreciate the warning for Embassytown. I sometimes consider reading his stuff again but I was genuinely offended by the trick in City. Like... I paid money for this? No. It felt like contempt for his audience.
Weirdly, The City & the City reminds me of Martin Cruz Smith's books like Gorky Park set in the Soviet Union (or more recently post-Soviet countries) in that it is a police procedural set in a culture the reader presumably doesn't understand and so the reader is interested in learning how this society functions as much as they are interested in seeing the mystery solved. The difference of course is the societies in The City & the City are of course fictional.
Seconded. One of those books that gives you a crisp metaphor for something powerful you might not have noticed we all do, thereby letting you observe yourself do it and describe it to others. Best read tabula rasa.
My thing about Miéville is that all the books of his I've read (Embassytown, Perdido street Station, and the one about trains that I didn't realize was pretty YA) felt like the endings dissol into B grade action (IMO Stephenson has the same problem). Everything starts off surreal and philosophical and beautiful and then just fizzles into stuff blowing up
I hated it because it felt like a smug trick. Like, I know you ordered steak and paid for steak, but I'm serving you a salad because it's healthier for you, and if you complain it's just your lack of taste.
I enjoyed the book, but I'm still not sure how it's been classified as science fiction, despite clearly having been pigeonholed into the category. The book has very little to do with real or speculative science. It was also one of the most awarded "science fiction" books of the last couple decades, so isn't really obscure in any sense either.
In some sense I think it does have quite a bit to do with (speculative) social science, especially once you see (spoilers) that there really is nothing supernatural going on at all.
C.J. Cherryh's 1981 novel Wave Without a Shore has something vaguely similar, where the human inhabitants of a planet refuse to notice the non-human natives sharing their cities.
No mention of Peter Watts' Blindsight? That book changed all sorts of notions of first contact and consciousness for me. I'm still thinking about it to this day. Absolute must read for anyone concerned with such things
It was a Hugo nominee and actively reprinted under Tor Essentials label; probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"...but to be fair, anything by Andy Weir or Hugh Howey probably shouldn't have made the list either.
>probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"
That's most of the ones being mentioned in this thread. I think maybe they are scifi books you haven't heard of...if you also don't normally read scifi.
I loved that about this book. For the first like 75% of the book you're thinking, "Okay, these vampires must just be a metaphor or a name they've given to something else." Nope, just actual vampires.
Greg Egan's Permutation City is #1 for me. It's not only a good read, it may be the most important work of late 20th century philosophy. (Among other things, it completely anticipated Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, and totally obviates Bostrom's latest work.)
Reading Egan's works elevated my standard for what constitutes a truly great novel: "If you don't change as a person after having it read it, it wasn't that great."
Permutation City especially made me see the universe and my part in it in a different light, or perhaps casting a shadow onto it. I'll never be the same person as I was before I had read it.
Many 'you should read these lists' are just that lists. Usually by the author of the list and things they have read and think you should too. That they missed something is not surprising. Lists like this have an air of authority when they usually boil down to 'things I have seen/read and like/hate'. I use them as interesting things to go thru to see if there is anything I missed.
I think Egan is much better known than most (if not all) of the authors in the list. I've heard of Andy Weir and Hugh Howey, but not the particular books listed by them. Conversely I've heard about Permutation City quite often.
Wow, I also thought of the work as deeply philosophical. I also read a bunch of other philosophy, and found that Egan's hypothesis overlaps significantly with both Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist concept of soul (pali: puggala). Did anybody else think the same?
That's a great pick! Permutation City is definitely a thought-provoking read. Egan's exploration of consciousness and reality challenges so many assumptions we take for granted.
What's the Bostrom work it obviates? I'd be kind of surprised if he never read the Egan -- it was part of the background to extropian culture back then.
A book about what to do with life in the face of boundless possibilities, and when just about everything important has been figured out. I recall that this was a significant plot point in Permutation City -- and Egan answered the question more elegantly than Bostrom did.
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Gene Wolfe. Book of the new Sun. Wolfe's unique value prop is, create an interesting sci fi or fantastical setting, and tell it through special narrators (unreliable, liar, child, amnesiac, etc) with wonderful skill, producing a puzzle with a lovely solution (that you will only partially solve).
I liked Book of the New Sun in a pulpy way. I'm a huge sucker for dying earth settings, and it was great to read one of the originals.
I greatly enjoyed Zelazny's Amber series and have tried to get into some of his sci-fi, but failed. Perhaps it's time to give Lord of Light a third try.
It's rather hard to believe it's the same author as Amber sometimes, those books took me like 12 seconds to get hooked on, LoL is great it's just _quite_ different in feel.
Egan must be one of the most intelligent people alive… or if not, is at least the highest level I am personally capable of recognizing. I am genuinely curious which is the case. Anyways, I haven’t read Diaspora yet so will do so, thanks!
They say "doesn't describe this universe", but that really just means it's wrong.
Edit: replying to pavel_lishin:
Yes, I'm sure Egan knows that, I'm partially replying to the statement "Sci fi so hard, you don't find any cracks and are left thinking wait a minute ... This must be true then?"
https://daniel-suarez.com/index.html
Daemon is the first of a trilogy. The remaining two books are good, but not quite as good IMO.
A nitpick about the third recommandation with "robots modeled on Karel Čapek’s designs". I suppose that they have not read Čapek’s novels. His robots were not pure machines, they were made from a biological substrate. In a way, they were closer to golems than to what we're now calling robots.
If you want to read really different and lesser known novels, Karel Čapek’s are a good choice. I did not enjoy "R.O.R." much except for his surprising concept of robots, but I highly recommend "War with the newts".
Murderbot has become a must listen at bedtime, the self deprecating, funny and lovey dovey killing machine. He loves his solitude and media, and has an emotion from time to time.
His Project Hail Mary audiobook is unparalleled.
Perdido Street Station and Kraken I really enjoyed, but I almost threw the book across the room for Embassytown once I realised.
https://thetvdb.com/series/345091-show
https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
Likewise, this is one I'll never get out of my head. Fair warning to would-be readers: anticipate the rest of your day becoming unproductive.
It was a Hugo nominee and actively reprinted under Tor Essentials label; probably doesn't qualify as a book "you may never have heard of"...but to be fair, anything by Andy Weir or Hugh Howey probably shouldn't have made the list either.
That's most of the ones being mentioned in this thread. I think maybe they are scifi books you haven't heard of...if you also don't normally read scifi.
Permutation City especially made me see the universe and my part in it in a different light, or perhaps casting a shadow onto it. I'll never be the same person as I was before I had read it.
You can see how they connected to him there too.
A book about what to do with life in the face of boundless possibilities, and when just about everything important has been figured out. I recall that this was a significant plot point in Permutation City -- and Egan answered the question more elegantly than Bostrom did.
35 page short story and eerily reminiscent of today's world.
It was written in 1909.