Book recommendation

[trajanus101]

Hi!

Having exhausted my collection of books, I was looking for something new to read and decided to come hear for recommendations. I like science fiction and dystopian literature, and have previously enjoyed books such as "Brave New World", "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", to name a few. Preferrably, the literature should be rather scientifically accurate (I think "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" is lacking in this regard, but I thought the book was a good read anyway). Also, I would like the language to be rather sophisticated, as I am trying to expand my vocabulary.

I have previously also read some existentialist literature, such as "The Stranger" by Camus, and would also be open to try some other books in this category.

Thanks in advance!

[Vota]

You might give the book "Contact" a try, by Carl Sagan.

[TheFifthElement]

J G Ballard might be a good choice. The Drowned World is quite prescient in its prediction of climate change before such things existed. Alternatively The Mote in God's Eye is a really good sci-fi read as are Asimov's robot stories.

[mal4mac]

J G Ballard was amazingly prolific in this genre. The most recent dystopia I read by him was SuperCannes, which is also well worth reading. Some of his novels are difficult to place, the superb "Concrete Island" is dystopic in tendencies, but isn't really science fiction. There seems to be a consensus growing amongst writers and critics, led by Will Self, that Ballard is the most important British writer of the latter half of the 20th century.

[trajanus101]

Thanks a lot for your suggestions! I have already read (and enjoyed) "Contact", but I'll check out J G Ballard.

[WICKES]

There seems to be a consensus growing amongst writers and critics, led by Will Self, that Ballard is the most important British writer of the latter half of the 20th century.

Yes, I'd agree with that.

Maybe you could try another British writer, Aldous Huxley. Huxley knew his science (his grandfather was Darwin's close friend and supporter and his brother was a leading British evolutionary biologist) and his works make frequent references to science. But he was also a master of the English language with a first in language and Literature from Oxford.

An individual book I'd recommend is Ian McEwan's 'Child in Time'.

[sandy14]

J G Ballard is a good recommendation, as Supercannes is probably as good a place as any to start. His short stories are also worth looking at.


Larry Niven's Ringworld was a rather enjoyable science fiction book as was Joe Haldane's Forever War and Frederik Pohl's Gateway. Neville Shute's "On the Beach" and Wyndham Lewis's Day of the Triffids are well worth a read. If you want to try older SF tales - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is also a good read too - and fits within science fiction too.

[Calidore]

Iain M. Banks' Culture novels managed the rare trifecta of being intelligent, entertaining, and original. Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games would be good starts.

Regarding sandy14's suggestions, I can also second The Forever War and especially Day of the Triffids, but you'll have better luck finding them if you look for Joe Haldeman and John Wyndham, respectively. :) Wyndham was a very reliably good old-school author, and you won't go wrong with any of his stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wyndham

[mal4mac]

John Gray and Will Self on JG Ballard:

http://www.watershed.co.uk/dshed/john-gray-and-will-self-jg-ballard

Another interesting dystopia:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

I'm really into this guy, I just read, "An Artist of the Floating World", which includes a depiction of a Japanese city of culture, and the destruction of its "floating world" through aerial bombing and Western, brutalist rebuilding. Very Ballardesque...

[Vota]

I'd give The Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton a look. It's a +3000 page epic space opera. I thought it was phenomenal.

A couple of other sci-fi books that stand out in my memory: The Mote In God's Eye, Old Man's War, Altered Carbon, Ilium + Olympos.

I have to agree on The Culture series recommendations. I read The Algebraist, Consider Phlebas, and The Player of Games and felt they were all top-notch sci-fi.

[Calidore]

I'd give The Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton a look. It's a +3000 page epic space opera. I thought it was phenomenal.


For my part, I'll second this one. It's a huge story with lots of characters and subplots, but also plenty of action and surprises. It's never boring in the least. You do have to pay attention, though. For example, it opens with a technobabble-heavy space battle that lost me me when I read it at normal speed, but when I went back and reread it slower, I could follow it perfectly. It's not that Hamilton was trying to be obtuse or difficult; he's just thought out his universe in great detail. It's a very impressive achievement.

[Anymodal]

trajanus101 I love those books too. I have good memories of Clifford D. Simak, and especially of Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451). But look them up because I read them more than ten years ago.

In the existentialism‎ category I recommend: 'The bold singer' by Eugene Ionesco (short play), Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' (easy to read play), Jean Paul Sarte's 'Nausea', 'The Wall' (the book AND the short story), 'The Devil and the Good Lords' (play), Kafka's short stories AS WELL AS his classic novels, Dino Buzzati's short stories (any good collection of them) (I recommend ESPECIALLY The seven messengers and The Walls of Anagoor stories), and of course his novel The Desert of the Tartars.

Also give Borges' short stories a shot. I have the intuition that you will like them (the inmortal, the library of babel, etc)

[chrisvia]

See next post.

[chrisvia]

Here are some suggestions based on your post, but not necessarily reflecting the intersection of all your desired attributes (existentialism, dystopian, complexity of language, scientific) with each suggestion:

Consilience by Edward O. Wilson
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq
Walden Two by B. F. Skinner
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre

[kev67]

I'd give The Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton a look. It's a +3000 page epic space opera. I thought it was phenomenal.

A couple of other sci-fi books that stand out in my memory: The Mote In God's Eye, Old Man's War, Altered Carbon, Ilium + Olympos.

I have to agree on The Culture series recommendations. I read The Algebraist, Consider Phlebas, and The Player of Games and felt they were all top-notch sci-fi.

I read that over twenty years ago. I thought it was superb, the best sci-fi book that I have read.

[kev67]

I read Neuromancer by William Gibson a couple of years ago. It is a sort of dystopia, written in the 80s. It is definitely science fiction (well, cyberpunk), which predicts the ways things are going in cyberspace. It's a cross between Tron, Bladerunner and The Matrix. However, I cannot recommend it because I could not follow it (and I was a computer programmer with a technology degree).

[Prince Smiles]

If you enjoyed 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' you might want to try 'The Man in the High Castle' by Philip K Dick.

+2 regarding J.G Ballard. He was a genius, and once becoming accustomed to Ballardian sentences one realizes that his was a very unique voice.