Enjoyable and recent sceince fiction reading and the state of the science fiction literaray genre.

Agent23

Agent23

Ни шагу назад!
So, let us discuss the last good science fiction novel(s) that you have read recently here here, as well as the overall state of Sicence Fiction literature.
I would prefer to focus on stuff that came out in the last 10-20 years, but older books are fine.
(Read, Agent23 is fishing for book recs and whining about science fiction authors,editors and publishers sucking.)
I must emphasize, that was not the last science fiction, I somehow got suckered into reading some more Alastair Reynolds and Neal Asher, but they, aside from being overtly political to some degree, really couldn't capture my attention or give me something that is even remotely comparable to the great Hard SF novels of yore written by such luminaries as Larry Niven, Arthur C. Clarke, or Vernor Vinge or Greg Bear or even Gregory Benford and David Brin back in their heyday.
Let us face it, the Science Fiction genre has been on a massive decline ever since the 00s.
Granted, the 90s and early 00s were described as a new golden age for the genre by some anthology editors, but the fusion of bleak cyberpunk and hard SF lifted off of older works, think Reynolds's Pushing Ice and Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, but at present the field is an SJW-infested pond of toxic waste.

Personally, the last decent thing science fiction I read were the first 3 of the bobverse books.

They were short, not overly-pompous, with a mostly plausible/hard SF feel to them, a sympathetic everyman main character and a decent amount of humor.
Ultimately, the series was a lot more satisfying than Prador Moon and Redemption Ark.

Next!


Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor
 
Gotta admit, I haven't read much recent sci-fi - exactly for the reasons you've listed - but if you're willing to go back a ways you've got Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Hell, even Douglas Adams if you don't mind a more satirical take.
 
JasonSanjo said:
Gotta admit, I haven't read much recent sci-fi - exactly for the reasons you've listed - but if you're willing to go back a ways you've got Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Hell, even Douglas Adams if you don't mind a more satirical take.
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And Clarke, and Niven, and David Webber before he went all in on the spreadsheet as novel approach.
A lot of Baen writers were pretty good.
Another book series I really enjoyed was the Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell.
Sadly it, too became something of a slog.

On a related note, IMHO the quality of Science Fiction editors plummeted at some point in the 00s, part of it was just natural attrition through retirement, death, or increasing senility and part was pandering to and infiltration by SJWs.

Self-publidhing might help some people, but IMO perversely it can disincrntivise those people from looking for decent editors, and the average length of your Science Fiction novel and novel series has only gone up and up, probably because writers get advances on the basis of wordcount and pandering to bad editors and publishers.
 
Been reading the Murderbot diaries lately and they seem halfway decent.

The basic story is about a security robot that has a broken governor module, allowing it to go rogue and disobey orders. It decides not to do so however, and instead names itself Murderbot and uses its newfound freedom to download massive amounts of TV shows to watch during boring security stints as it obeys orders anyway. Sometime in the past, Murderbot did go rogue even with a working governor system and killed most of its team (it named itself after this incident) and figuring out what happened there is a big mystery resolved over several books.

It has a nice dry sense of humor, the whole story is narrated first-person by Murderbot and Murderbot really doesn't understand humans very well and tries to gauge interactions via comparing them to TV shows so its actions are always off. Murderbot also regards itself as some kind of barely-functional loose cannon (it's comparing itself with actual TV superheroes), while from a reader's perspective it's apparent Murderbot losing its governor module made it more ethical and more functional than normal security units. Murderbot's just tooling around taking jobs and investigating its own past, while meantime there's a growing legend in the greater universe about this one security consultant who's basically straight out of the A-Team: he works for almost nothing if it's a good cause, never datamines the customer or steals their work, brings everybody back alive even if he has to go one-man-army to retrieve them, appears to know every trick in the book, can casually hack the most advanced systems, seems to be utterly immune to bribes or seduction, and can outfight any five normal people.

There's quite a few shoutouts to Heinlein in the books, Muderbot's first customers have a Line Marriage from of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, f'rex.
 
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That premise actually sounds somewhat interesting, and the name reminds me of Bender/Futurama for some reason.

I might pick that book up if it is short enough and I have the time.

Bear Ribs said:
There's quite a few shoutouts to Heinlein in the books, Muderbot's first customers have a Line Marriage from of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, f'rex.
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That is often a good sign unless the Author's name is Joe Scalzi.

That tool will kiss any ass and join any cause as long as he can get in some self-promotion, and he has a bunch of paid e-goons or sockpuppets a lot himself.

Typical for an ex-propaganda pusher, oh, pardon that, I mean PR expert, or whatever corpo nonsense he used to do.

What I am in the mood for is some good old fashioned hard SF, or Heinleinesque, well, anything, or some Bujold and Webber-like space opera, aka Hornblower in space, or some decent, old school Cyberpunk.

Think Stephenson's Diamond Age/Snow Crash, or early GIbson, or maybe giving Rudy Rucker another shot.Although he went totally overboard in midway of the 2nd or 3rd *ware book.Hell, Friday by Heinlein was actually great cyberpunk-ish space adventure with typical Heinlein plot development, I'd love to read something like that.

I might even go as far as to see if Morgan has written more stuff in the Altered Carbon universe, but the guy's random bouts of leftoid political detritus pissed me off even when I was a kid.
They literally annoyed me more than the mind-transfer bestiality/snuff brothel in the first book.
And I can try and read the other 2 books in Sergei Lukyanenko's Labyrinth series.
The first was nice enough, but I could never get myself to read the rest.

I have been meaning to pick up the sequels to The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.

The first book was decent enough, and I enjoyed how alien the aliens were, and it does put an interesting spin on the Fermi paradox.

Overall I'd rank Liu Cixin above most current western hard SF writers.

As I get older it feels like I am looking more and more towards my childhood for entertainment, then I compare it to what is on the market now, then shake my head and listen to more youtube nonsense or read a random weeb LN halfway, or find another book on finances or some obscure programming language.

The 90s/00s were truly the best time to be a kid as well as the best time to start reading Science Fiction.
 
GoldRanger said:
A lot of fiction in general, not just scifi, sucks these days. I blame the proliferation of self-published works for lowering the bar.
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Hmm, well if we're discussing those I had the misfortune to listen to one yesterday so might as well share my pain. An unexpected rainstorm came through so mud wound up making my job take much longer than expected and my audiobook ran out. I didn't want to burn a ton of data downloading one on my phone so went through a bunch of old downloads and wound up listening Cyber Viking Book 1.



It's one of those self-indulgent harem books. Dude's a drug dealer with a cybernetic arm that wound up cashiered by Uncle Sam into fighting a war in Saudi Arabia, wound up a captain of his own company, then his group was abandoned when the government decided the war was too expensive and they pulled out without evac'ing any of the "Convict" groups. So his company fought their own way out, publishing a blog on the way that caught on with the public, and fights his way all the way across Saudi Arabia losing only two men in the process of slaughtering thousands of enemies. Yeah, that kind of story.

As with most indulgent trash stories the guy's got unbelievable luck. He winds up with two girls who want to share him by the end of the second chapter. Earth's facing a sudden alien invasion so the guy who built his cybernetic arm sends him 11 million dollars to prep with and a warning that the asteroid on TV is not really an asteroid. He has a vast number of army grunts who worship him and are willing to uproot their lives and cross the country on nothing more than a tweet about The Crew needing them, so he's able to get a huge group of skilled combatants within hours.

Oh, and one of the girlfriends' mom is the richest single person in America and owns a combination of Future!Google and Future!Apple wrapped up one in, and is so politically powerful she straight up shoots the US President for disagreeing with her in the early story, and then simply assumes power and the whole US government goes along with it rather than give her the side-eye while she diverts scads of resources to helping her Daughter's boytoy build his own kingdom (He literally starts calling himself Pirate King a few chapters in) in Colorado.

For all of that terrible writing, and insane starting bonuses the hero gets that honestly remove any tension from the apocalypse, the actual apocalypse is interesting and I'm contemplating fast-forwarding through the sex and self-indulgent cruft to see what the aliens are actually up to. They've dropped about 18,000 X-Gates on Earth at semi-random. Each gate has four portals facing in opposite directions that appear to connect at random, so over 70,000 worlds are connected, but you can see the other worlds through the gates and there's sometimes another X-gate on the alien world in easy view so it's apparently actually millions of worlds networked and anything can come through. Most of them seem to want to loot, some take slaves, and a rare few are interested in trade. Some aliens are only equipped with spears, some have energy weapons, some are closer to Earth level. One early group, the MC concludes, are refugees as they were more scared of whatever was behind them on the other side of their gate than whatever was ahead of them (They wound up eating Russian Artillery so that probably wasn't a good call). Nobody seems to bring any air support, artillery, or the like. The story goes that this is a new age of Vikings, they may raid or trade depending on how well equipped you are and how much it costs them to beat you, and you need to raid and trade them back to survive.

Overall I'm actually interested in what the alien plan is. The ones that built the gates don't seem to be participating, they just drop tens of thousands of gates at random and let everybody onto everybody else's worlds suddenly en masse. The gates come with a button you can press that will shut down the other three, allowing only your own world to have access but only as long as you're holding down the button, and it will quit working for a bit under an hour if you hold it too long which is a pretty odd rule. My current theory is that it's actually an extremely bloody game show analog and they're filming all the various races encountering each other and shooting each other up for Alien!YouTube likes. This is vastly more interesting than another sex scene written by somebody who doesn't seem to know how human bodies work.
 
GoldRanger said:
A lot of fiction in general, not just scifi, sucks these days. I blame the proliferation of self-published works for lowering the bar.
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I don't think there really is a difference in quality between "published" and "self-published" works. A lot of stuff put out by oldpub is crap. Oldpub certainly didn't gatekeep quality. A mainstream publisher wants an 80,000 word manuscript. Some stories aren't 80,000 words long. Your tight story would have to be padded out. And then you also have an editor who is meddling and isn't necessarily making the book better, and the heart of the story becomes diluted after a dozen drafts and edits.

As for sci fi/space opera, my problem is that the genre is usually a very dry, boring slog to read. I don't want to read an imaginary tech manual that describes the mechanics of a railgun in detail or whatever. I just want a fun adventure.
 
GoldRanger said:
A lot of fiction in general, not just scifi, sucks these days. I blame the proliferation of self-published works for lowering the bar.
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That has a part to play, sure, but the quality of science fiction editors and the SJW infiltration into the genre also fucked it up.
I remember how the a large portion of short stories in "The Year's Best Science Fiction" for example became thinly-veiled whining about Bush and the GFC and the right in general.

Baen books has also declined in quality as compared to 10-15 years ago.

Val the Moofia Boss said:
I don't think there really is a difference in quality between "published" and "self-published" works. A lot of stuff put out by oldpub is crap. Oldpub certainly didn't gatekeep quality. A mainstream publisher wants an 80,000 word manuscript. Some stories aren't 80,000 words long. Your tight story would have to be padded out. And then you also have an editor who is meddling and isn't necessarily making the book better, and the heart of the story becomes diluted after a dozen drafts and edits.

As for sci fi/space opera, my problem is that the genre is usually a very dry, boring slog to read. I don't want to read an imaginary tech manual that describes the mechanics of a railgun in detail or whatever. I just want a fun adventure.
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Exactly, hard SF has turned into recycled slog, with precious little being added, its hayday was probably the 70s - 90s.
A short story by Ian McDonald written in 1998 is better than his more recent books, same goes for Alastair Reynolds and Steve Baxter, and Vernor Vinge.
And don't get me started on Weber and some other military SF/space opera writers I used to like.
I do not need 50 pages of a description of the setup for a naval exercise, thank you very much.
The only "improvement" we have seen in hard SF and MilSF/space opera has been the increase of page count.

Then there are writers who just don't have anything more to write and whose quality is declining with age.

Bujold is a good example, IMHO, her last few books were pretty much meh.

Cryoburn was dull and unengaging, CVA was somewhat fun, but it felt like an anime plot and not like a part of the Vorkosigan Saga, and I never read Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen as from what I understand the plot is some virtue signal and after 2 massively underwhelming books I see no reason why I should waste my time on a third.
 
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There's always the works of Chris Nuttall
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The most recent part of the Ark Royal arc includes a sentient virus, which he started before the Covid-19 thing, honest.
 
edgeworthy said:
There's always the works of Chris Nuttall
Home
The most recent part of the Ark Royal arc includes a sentient virus, which he started before the Covid-19 thing, honest.
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Oh, I have read some of his stuff, he could do with some more polish and editing IMO, but a few were entertaining.
 
Agent23 said:
Oh, I have read some of his stuff, he could do with some more polish and editing IMO, but a few were entertaining.
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I protest! I do have editing! <grin>

That said, the best way to find an error is to scan the text, then ask beta readers, then get a professional editor, then do all the edits, then publish ... and someone will point the error out the week afterwards <sigh>.

Chris
 
ChrisNuttall said:
I protest! I do have editing! <grin>

That said, the best way to find an error is to scan the text, then ask beta readers, then get a professional editor, then do all the edits, then publish ... and someone will point the error out the week afterwards <sigh>.

Chris
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No offense, but you aren't at the levels of Weber and Drake just yet. ;)

I like that your characters are more fallible and that anyone can die in your stuff, though.
 
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