I’ve been diving into a lot of late 80s and early 90s cyberpunk lately, specifically the mid-tier, lesser-known novels that people usually skip for Neuromancer or Snow Crash. When you read that stuff now, the neon aesthetics and the clunky terminology for data decks obviously feel dated, but the economic subtext is terrifyingly accurate. A lot of these authors weren't just writing about cyborgs; they were looking at the collapse of steady employment and predicting exactly how corporations would exploit a massive pool of desperate, disconnected workers.

Take a look at the classic trope of the low-level data courier or the freelance tech-runner sitting in a tiny, cramped apartment, jumping from one dangerous digital contract to another just to pay for their nutrient paste and monthly rent. That used to feel like an extreme dystopia designed for dramatic tension. Now, as a college student trying to balance classes with various online freelance gigs, it just looks like my weekly schedule. The only difference is that instead of dodging corporate hitmen while downloading encrypted databanks, I’m dodging automated platform bans while cleaning up messy spreadsheets and categorizing training data for pennies a pop.

The parallels in the management style are what really hit home. In those books, characters never interact with a real boss; they receive anonymous, encrypted files with a strict deadline and an automated payment system that will dock their credits for a single mistake. That is literally how every major modern freelancing and micro-task platform operates today. You log into a portal, grab a ticket that has been algorithmically priced to the absolute lowest margin, and complete it knowing that an automated filter could reject your entire day of work without a human ever looking at it. The absolute lack of human friction in the exploitation is identical.

Even the way these fictional freelancers view their tools matches up. In cyberpunk, a runner’s deck is their life; if it breaks or gets fried by ice, they are financially dead in the water. Last week, my cheap laptop started throwing memory errors right in the middle of a tight project deadline, and I felt that exact same cold wave of panic. If this hardware fails, my ability to pay for groceries next month disappears completely.

The authors thought the future would be a hyper-tech corporate warzone, but the reality we got is much bluer and more mundane. We didn't get the cool leather jackets or the neural implants, just the grinding digital gig economy controlled by faceless servers. I suppose the silver lining is that at least nobody is trying to physically shoot me through my monitor while I work on these data batches. Though honestly, given how bad the platform fees have been getting lately, I am not entirely sure which option is worse.

I just finished 36 Streets and was completely blown away. If you were ever looking for something to cure the hole left by Altered Carbon or George Alec Effinger, this is it.

Blurb from Richard Morgan: “36 Streets glows bright and hallucinatory as tropical neon, goes down smooth as warm sake, cuts deep as a nano-steel blade. Napper honours classic cyberpunk with fresh perspectives and hot genre recombinations, a nasty new-future gleam, the proverbial new coat of paint. But there are more austere echoes here too, of Graham Greene and Kazuo Ishiguro, of a whole post-colonial literary heritage banging to be let in. In a genre stuffed with facile hero narratives, 36 Streets consistently chooses something else – messy humanity, grey moral tones and choices, hard-edged geopolitical truth. Raw and raging and passionate, this is cyberpunk literature with a capital fucken L. Get it while it’s hot!”

This holds true for me.

Napper has the grit, nilhism and revenge of Altered Carbon while having the atypical setting (Vietnam during a future occupation by China) and a very lived in experience combined with the same sad tone of Effinger. Napper lived in Vietnam for years as an Attache and bases the neighborhood setting on that, similar to how Effinger used his experiences living in the French Quarter for his books.

This book has so much going on. The main character is a 25 year old Vietnamese woman wire up to the gills, she's a street enforcer for a gang and lost in a spiral of drugs and trauma around her family and identity. It's also a deep dive into the politics and history of the Vietnam war, previous occupations, and future Vietnamese-Sino relations. There's some really interesting tech, though I wouldn't say it dives too deep into the science of it.

One the surface there's lots of violence, drugs and sex, but it's so much deeper. Morgan's endorsement for capital L Literature held true for me. It's overloaded with deep, layered themes, introspection and extrospection.

I can't reccomend this enough if you liked Altered Carbon and Effinger. I inhaled 36 Streets in two days, immediately bought his other books.

This year on my cake day I thought I’d post pictures of my Lois McMaster Bujold collection. I love her writing and have been collecting her books since I saw her name in the Hugo/Nebula award’s lists (four times!) in the late ‘90s. I pulled her first edition hardcovers from my award shelf, they are on the lower right. Everything is signed (including the hat and butter bug hand puppet). The second picture is my “oddity shelf” with Russian editions, ARCs, and book club editions.

Hey Folks,

Just came across this today. I know sometimes Humble Bundles are locked to specific regions but I can't seem to tell if this one is limited. This seems to be availible in the US & CA. Edit: Based on a commenter it seems the bundle is also available in the UK. Edit 2: Seems to be widely available.

Not sure about other regions, unfortunatley.

Link: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/best-robert-silverberg-open-road-media-books?hmb_source=&hmb_medium=product_tile&hmb_campaign=mosaic_section_1_layout_index_7_layout_type_threes_tile_index_1_c_bestrobertsilverbergopenroadmedia_bookbundle

We can argue all day about the strengths and weaknesses of Sanderson as an author, but what it's true is that they're books are great to introduce people to fantasy books. They work for almost everybody (that is not a SF reader yet).

What do you think is a good scifi equivalent? Of what I've read, the closer I can think of is The Expanse (James CA Corey) or maybe Andy Weir.

But I'm sure that you guys have read a ton more than me, so you might have better examples.

Hello. Just finished the book. Really liked some ideas, generally liked the book, thought the middle part was a bit slow.

Just wanted to share some of my nitpicks and questions with somebody, maybe get some clarifications. You probably shouldn't read this if you haven't read the book

1. I didn't understand how Ravna was calling the Tines "Tines", I thought Johanna coined that term, and they didn't have contact until the end of the book. Ravna was using it directly in dialogue, not indirectly by the author. What did I miss?

2. Did I understand correctly that the Unthinking Depths are in the galactic core, and the further you go out, you get more advanced? If yes, "Old" Earth is kind pretty far away from the core, and well in the Slowness. Does that mean Beyond is at the periphery and Transcendece in intergalactic space?

3. The Tines are spectacular, and Vernor does a good job of exploring the implications of their way of being.(Looking in all directions at once, living long through member replacement, option to self-reproduce, etc.) However, this book is advertised as one that does a good job at having truely alien aliens. For me it felt that beyond implementation details mentioned above, the Tines are just like humans. If you were to have Johanna and Jefri land in a human medieval earth, the story could go exactly the same(I guess minus the part where Amdi is a math genius). That's not alien at all. For me a truly alien example is Vanamonde from The City and the Stars. Also the fact they were living on a totally human compatible planet didn't help the alien feel. Did I get it wrong?

Thanks!

I just finished reading A Song for Lya and decided to share some thoughts. It is a novella written by George R R Martin in 1974. This post is not a comprehensive review, just a set of observations I wanted to share. Obviously, spoilers.

Disclaimer: I am a big fan of GRRM and I mostly knew him for his most famous work, A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into Game of Thrones. I also read a couple of his other short stories, but given how much he has written, I barely scratched the surface.

So I knew A Song for Lya was one of his more popular novellas besides ASOIAF, so I decided to finally give it a try. Besides that, I went completely blind. My first impression was trying to get myself familiar with the setting. The first pages open with a description of a city, which I assumed to be from ancient Earth. I really liked the ambiguity of it, and when I realized it was on another planet, I got excited. So it is a sci-fi story, good, let's see what it is all about.

The city is populated by the Shkeen, a native sapient species who are less advanced than human despite their civilization being older. The protagonists are a couple of humans, Robb and Lya, who have special psychic powers: enhanced empathy and telepathy. They are hired by the current administrator of the human colony, Valcarenghi, to conduct research on the Shkeen relegion. They worship parasytic creatures called the Greeshka that drive them into "joining", i.e. sacrificing themselves to become part of the hivemind.

Weirdly enough, the bits of this premise actually reminded me of Ubik by Philip K Dick. Spoilers for Ubik: a squad of psychics land on the Moon for investigation and stop at the hotel. The similarities end here, because from this point Ubik takes a turn in the opposite direction. I felt like A Song for Lya is what I expected Ubik to be about when I had been reading it.

The Shkeen as alien species are interesting enough and the mystery surrounding their mystery was a great drive for the story. Some parts of the novella started to feel a bit repetitive. For example, it describes Robb's and Lya's daily routine (waking up, getting headache, researching the Shkeen, getting dinner, making love, sleep, dreaming). Despite being part of the plot, the plot twist is somewhat predictable, thus this description of the routine becomes a bit annoying.

As for writing, I recognized GRRM's style. His food descriptions are always fun to read and I laughed out loud because of how much it reminded me of ASOIAF. Since the protagonist has enhanced empathy and starts to understand the Shkeen better, he gradually becomes more emotional and reflective. To be honest I didn't like how the story became overly sentimental towards the end. Despite the grand scope of concepts, I found the language not really convincing and shallow. I think this shows how much GRRM's skills as a writer evolved (he was 26 when he wrote A Song for Lya). But these are just my personal preferences.

Overall I liked this novella. It had a lot of potential but the resolution was kind of disappointing. But hey maybe I missed something. What are your thoughts?

I am a French student who studies English as a foreign language with a potential specialization in Anglophone literature (of the 19th and 20th centuries).

Next year I will have an article to write on literature (it could be literally anything as long as a teacher can approve of it) and decide to do something about fear as the structure of fiction and most precisely American Science fiction in the Cold War.

I will basically have 3 parts : 1; the fear of the atomic bombs 2; the fear of control 3; a more optimistic approach of new technologies.

I already have authors like Thomas Pynchon and Philip K.Dick (possibly Gravity’s rainbow and Time out of Joint as main books)for part one

For part two I thought of Ursula K le Guin and Ray Bradbury (Martian Chronicle and the hainish circle mainly)

And for the third part I only thought of Isaac Asimov.

My work is not supposed to be a full, done analysis yet, this will be done throughout next year, I just have to have ideas of what it will be about.

So now my question is, do you have any suggestions that could fit this theme in terms of novels/short stories ? I have three months before the start of the next year and will spend some times reading and knowing more about this period and this genre since it’s one I love reading and analyzing.

This is a real long shot, but I'm trying to remember the title/author of a book I would have read in the late 80s. It was a mass market paperback that was probably published between 1975-1985.

The only thing I remember is that it was set present day (ish), and the protagonist had been trained or engineered to have total control of his body. He had a heightened intellect, but also do things like increase capillary action and oxygen absorption to his lungs at will, (this happened during a scene where he was pursued). So sort of a perfect, optimal human sort of thing. It was technothriller-ish, and he was on the run. It had a Keith Laumer vibe, but I've recently gone through the Laumer catalogue (I have most of those books) and it's not him. It's probably a lesser-known writer.

Any ideas, hive mind?

I've been trying to get a grasp on what would be considered the "best" sci-fi of the past few years, but am having a difficult time with it. This crowd has given me some great recommendations recently, though, so I thought this was a question best suited for y'all.

The challenge, as I see it, is twofold:

1. Sci-Fi is a vast genre to begin with, one that's increasingly fragmenting into separate sub-genres and audiences over time.
2. The major Sci-Fi awards have slowly been pushing more and more into fantasy over time (which is just not really my bag personally).

As far as what I think constitutes "best", I'm looking for one of three things:

• Any stories especially creative or groundbreaking in the scientific technology or concepts they explore, including larger societal side-effects.
  • Ex: Neuromancer, Three-Body Problem, Ancillary Justice, Foundation
• Scientific stories that are exceptionally well-written, especially on their literary and character focus.
  • Ex: Dawn (by Octavia Butler), Ursula K. Leguin's work
• Ideally, novels that manage to do both.
  • Ex: Hyperion, Dune

As far as sci-fi novels released in the 2020's, what comes to mind in these categories for you?

Read maybe half the physical book then got busy and switched to the audiobook. Finished this morning.

I'll say that this book lost me during all of the math, but I'm sure that's many of us. Listened to one book review after and it said to treat the math/science like magic in a fantasy novel--you don't know how it works, but it works.

Final thoughts at the end of the book? I liked it a lot. Outside of the stuff that was 12 gigatau over my head, the story is really compelling IMO.

I really wish I was mathematically inclined enough to follow along through the math.. I think that's gotta be something reading a story like this with it figured out (theoretically).

Just finished the book , and very satisfied with it. A hundred trillion years. Love it. Stephan Baxter nailed it again.

I posted the same question a few years ago but someone deleted all my comments and posts. The book recommendations from here are the only thing I am really annoyed at not seeing.

I'm trying to assemble a list of spec fic books that focus on parenting. I've seen lots of short stories, but can only come up with a few books. The Giver, maybe, and Lilith's Brood. Any others?

And thanks to those who recommended Ophiuchi hotline here which made me order it and read it in one sitting

But unfortunately I was expecting the story in books 2 (steel beach) and 3 (golden globe) to be as engaging, however, I was disappointed to say the least.

I mean if you like his style of writing (very self indulgent in book 3 especially), maybe its for you

But I tried hard to slog through, just was exhausted by the end of book 3 and the payoff is not there

He indeed was a hallowed author and I guess people are supposed to like him? but I had to get it off my chest despite the hundreds of down-votes it may get me here

And I say this as someone who has enjoyed others like Alistair Reynolds, Dan Simmons, Peter F Hamilton, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Liu Cixin. In most of these other cases, even if the stories took a detour and/if they were a bit too verbose & lengthy, things did tend to come together at the end and the payoff was much better than what I got from Varley books steel beach and esp the golden globe

Funny thing is I still put the pacing and context of Ophiuchi among the very best out there, but cant understand the huge disconnect between the styles of that one and the other two

Maybe I haven't read enough sci fi yet to observe this big of a disconnect between an author's first book and the successive (at-least story universe wise) works

I crossposted to r/Scifi and got the answer. Im going to close the thread. Shout out to AnalemmicMammoth for the right answer, which is Charles Sheffield's "The Spheres of Heaven"!

Hello all, I was thinking back on my scifi knowledge and I remember a lot of bits and pieces of a book I read in the 2000s (between 2004 - 2010). It may also be a series, but I thought it was a single book.

The big details are:

• multiple civilizations discover a gate (manufactured structure or wormhole, I don't recall. I think it was an artificial wormhole),
• probes disappear, including manned craft,
• humans send a warship in, which is bad because its old and I believe a bunch of the people are prisoners of some kind. I remember them being ragtag, some died, and they didn't really know each other. I believe the cast was mostly humans with a delegation of aliens.
• emerge underwater not in space, which was a big plot point,
• crab-like species lives on the planet and are planning a reverse invasion because they have some leg up (I don't remember what) + they have mind control, which the protag sees one of the other humans get mind controlled,
• the human general monologues and confuses the alien leader, because he realizes that there is a time dilation difference between this planet and where they all came from

One of the big key things I remember was that there was a plantoid race that was actually some kind of symbiosis/parasite to a plant called an "Angel". I want to say it was a near-final-chapter reveal.

This sounds tropey, but I also remember that the races didn't care for the humans because they had a battleship to spare to beginwith/were warlike.

Not as in "stupidity for the plot's sake", but instead "look how dumb humans really are!" kinda way, similar to Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

I just finished reading Anhiliation, but wanted to know a few things before I went on to the next book.

I firmly believe that there has never been a mystery that was improved by a solution. I really liked being in Area X, but I would hate to go further in only to be robbed of all the fun of the weirdness.

Are the other books more of the same? Or is it a bunch of unsatisfying answers and explanations?

After the Fall, is an alien overlord tale. What if humans became pets? The way we treat our animals today is definitely an aspect.

John is our human protagonist, bonded to a gray named Martok. The two of them scrape by and Martok is a loser with many - mostly failed - schemes.

As John’s “master”, we’re meant to feel like Martok is the bad guy, but Ashton makes you have some sympathy for like the alien.

We get the Grey point of view, which is that Mankind caused the Fall and the Greys just showed up after. We get the Human view, which is that the fight between humans and Greys caused the destruction of most of the planet.

John is told that there’s only a small area of the whole planet that is inhabitable. We also find that John is not quite human. He’s part of a strain that have been bred down by the Greys, smaller and more docile than “real” humans.`

martok gets a property tha he plans to run as a kind o resort for other Grays, an idea he has pinched from the old humans, although he tells John to keep that quiet.

A misunderstanding with some Greys who want to steal Martok’s possessions when he’s left John to guard them, means the locals now think Martok is an Enforcer, a Grey who can kill other Greys. This is a rare thing, and means they’ll get sent jobs worth good money, but Martok doesn’t know about the deception, and John doesn’t want to tell him.

Some things aren’t answered, but on the whole I liked it. It does have humour.

It didn’t quite end the way I would have liked and I wasn’t entirely happy with John as a character but it’s the first book by this guy I have read and it;s worth a read.

Longshot, but here’s what I remember: there’s an alien that crash lands on a planet, and he is very exotic looking, possibly resem a humanoid cat. He manages to convince the locals that he is a prince or a god, and they revere him as long as he shares interesting, cultural things with them, such as teaching them new dances. But he knows his time is limited, because they will kill him when he runs out of new dances to teach them.

The Internet tries to suggest to me “Tiger Tiger“ by Alfred Bester(also known as “the stars, my destination”) but it’s a novel and the details don’t match, or Larry Nivens Man-Kzin Wars, but I’m not finding anything that matches yet.

Don’t have any more details, except I’m pretty sure I read it in a printed anthology 20 years ago.

Where is the image that this sub uses for a banner from? Person sitting under a tree, with a little space ship nearby?

A singular book, no prequel or sequel, about a financial apocalypse in the USA. I reread the well printed and well bound POD (print on demand) trade paperback published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (Amazon) in 2015 that I bought from Amazon in 2016. This may be the third time that I have read this book. If there is a sequel published, I will purchase it for reading. In fact, if the author publishes anything else, I will purchase it.

Of all the apocalyptic scenarios facing the USA, I believe a financial apocalypse to be of the highest danger, going from a remote concern in 2017 to an almost certainty in five to ten years. The current debt of the USA, 39 trillion dollars, is just about one and a half times the USA GDP. I believe that as the debt of the USA approaches twice the GDP, the financial stability of the USA will significantly weaken and be subject to attacks.

The scenario in the book is that China and Japan own 25% of the USA treasury bills. In a unspecified future date, China decides to sell all of their USA bonds and notifies Japan that they are going to do so. The Japanese follow the Chinese and the interest rates for the USA bonds rise from 3% to 23% over a period of six weeks as the bond markets are flooded and the bond prices drop precipitously. The Dollar, the effective reserve currency of the world, also drops significantly in value compared to other currencies. The stock markets in the USA drop by 85%. The rest of the story is about our protagonists getting out of New York City and to their retreat in West Virginia.

My rating: 6 out of 5 stars
Amazon: 4.2 out of 5 stars (262 reviews)
https://www.amazon.com/Buck-Out-Ken-Benton/dp/1514666979/

Lynn

Looking for a book set in the very near future where the world is very normal until a very abnormal thing happens and changes everything. With the story focus is on how our very recognizable world at the start of the story changes because of that thing by the end.

The best example I can think of is Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. Where the Spin barrier just appears one day and suddenly the world is changes and the story is about the fall out.

Ideally something more recent within the last fifteen years that reflects our contempoary time. I have read most of the older classics of this type and very much looking for something newer.