zambonibot

Hi! I’m looking for scifi stories that feature a sentient world or landscape. The worlds don’t necessarily need to be alive, but at least have an agency or act as protagonists of sorts in the action.

A classical example is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, of course, but the way the Earth play a role in the plot of NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy is equally intriguing to me. Some VanderMeer novels also come to mind!

First time posting. Really appreciate your recs!

Any references?

"World Made by Hand" by James Howard Kunstler
https://www.amazon.com/World-Made-James-Howard-Kunstler/dp/0802144012/

Book number one of a four book apocalyptic fantasy series. I read the well printed and well bound trade paperback published by Grove Press in 2009 that I bought new on Amazon. I have ordered the second book in the series.

In this alternate reality, oil well fracking was not invented and the world started running out of crude oil in 2008. Then somebody popped off a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and somebody popped off a nuclear bomb in Washington DC. And the world slowed down and the USA moved back to the 1800s over the next several decades. We were back to times that the flu and encephalitis killed significant portions of the population. This book is set roughly in 2030 or 2040. The book is a page turner with short three to five page chapters.

The town of Union Grove, New York has decayed significantly over time. No cars, either buy a horse or walk where you are going. No electricity and the farms are worked by hand now. The population is maybe 20% of what it was at the turn of the century so there are houses standing empty all over town. All of the older people remember cars, airplanes, antibiotics, and air conditioning but the young people don't.

The author has an active website at
https://kunstler.com/
Warning, the author's website is fairly crude.

My rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars (1,098 reviews)

It's a common trope in sci-fi books that the Earth has a unified World Government, and the aliens are similarly unified.

It's not obvious that this would be the case though and in historical "First Contact" scenarios the fact that they weren't unified made a big difference (think of the other groups in Mexico helping Cortes against the Aztecs, the various alliances European powers had with different North American tribes etc.)

Are there any books that consider this? Like imagine if First Contact happened at the height of the Cold War...

I used to read a lot of SF short stories when I was younger but have really dropped off in my adult years. Can anyone recommend what they would consider the best stories / authors / collections from the past 20 years. They can be any kind of SF, I enjoy it all, even stories that are tangential.

Follow-up question: Are there any subscriptions for modern pulpy SF-type publications these days? That would be so cool.

I've recently found that I really enjoy military fiction, but certain personal political beliefs can make it difficult for me to just enjoy it straight, as it's intended to be taken, without a speculative or historical (WWII or earlier) element to it. I'm looking for something like this:

• Human or humanoid protagonists facing human or humanoid threats - nothing cosmic.

• Folowing a single relatively small military unit, either an ultra-mobile infantry unit, based on a starship or using magic for transport, or one that engages in insurgency, counter-insurgency, or guerilla warfare.

• The characters do the kinds of bad things such units are typically associated with, but are easy to like anyway.

• Our protagonists are subordinates, with officers present but secondary characters - perhaps the MC is an NCO with the ear of his commanding officer.

• Two-thirds downtime, one-third action.

• If sci-fi, spaceships look like planes and act like boats.

In terms of comparisons, the ideal book would be: (sorry that most of these are games - I'm new to print science fiction, and not much of my experience of print fantasy is at all what I'm looking for)

A Song of Ice and Fire but focusing more on enlisted soldiers, less on politics or officers.

The Black Company but with fewer horror or epic fantasy elements.

Warhammer 40,000 but less so.

Mass Effect but smaller in scope

Traveller

I very much appreciate any suggestions.

I love books that present plausible uses of emerging tech in the future. Have any favorites? Here are some of mine: Biotech: Upgrade by Blake Crouch; Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood; the Neutronium Alchemist by Peter Hamilton

AI: the Hierarchies by Ros Anderson; the Culture Series by Ian Banks

Nanotech: the Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson

Catch All: Accelerando by Charles Stross; Ready Player One by Ernest Kline

I’m especially looking for books about lethal autonomous weapons systems ( I see you Martha Wells) and AI.

Thanks!

I love when I'm reading a story that's so good I can't stop thinking about getting back to it while I go about my day.

Been a while since I found something that fits this description. What's the last book that did this for you?

I just finished The Dying of the Light and Fevre Dream by George RR Martin. I'd love to read another book that features a melancholy tone where hope seems distant fragile but still precious.

I'd appreciate any and all recommendations!

“Literary icon Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men, dies of natural causes at age 89 at his home in Sante Fe”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12191325/Literary-icon-Cormac-McCarthy-dies-natural-causes-age-89-home-Sante-Fe.html

I have read one of his books ("The Road") and seen two of his movies.
https://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0307386457/

Gnomon is a book that kept me turning the pages breathlessly late at nights and early in the mornings, and it’s been a very long time since any book has given me such excitement. It’s literally a layered novel, and somehow each layer was both individually satisfying to read and fit the mystique surrounding the larger narrative.

The story is set in London in a somewhat near-future, and at its centre is an inspector who is tasked with the investigation of an unexpected and mysterious custodial death. The futuristic setting involves an omnipresent, omniscient ‘System’ which is in charge of all administration and law keeping, and which seems to be working very well.

Within this ‘main’ story, there are subsumed four ‘sub’ narratives - stories-within-the-story - involving a middle-aged woman in medieval Rome, a genius banker from the late 2000s, an ‘old geezer’ from a contemporaneous period, and a super-mind from the far future.

Each of these tracks reads like a novella that works well in isolation, but the magic of Gnomon lies in how all the threads have commonalities that emerge in unexpected ways, and how they all come together beautifully at the end.

The overarching theme of Gnomon is that systems running our lives is no utopia; in fact, is something we should exercise enormous caution with, for any system is only as safe as the integrity of the human beings controlling it, and systemic abuse is inevitable sooner or later. The point is made rather emphatically towards the end, and as I mention the end, I’m reminded of the one disappointment I had in this otherwise enjoyable read.

I mentioned that everything comes together beautifully at the end of the book, but for some reason, the ending did not give me the kind of payoff that I had expected. For all the complexity that the novel wore from the very beginning, the ending felt a tad too.. simple, perhaps. And a little rushed too.

This is however, only a minor nitpick in a novel that is brimming with intrigue, interesting characters, and layers of mystery throughout its (large) span. The destination left me a little underwhelmed, but the journey was well worth my while.