Luis Villa
@kissane suggested yesterday(?) that we should Bring Back Book Talk #OnHere and I heartily agree.
Which I’m taking as the nudge I needed to start a new version of an old thread (prompted by @josh) on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) from perspectives that are (sadly) mostly new to SFF.
Note that for most of my life I’ve been a scifi reader; it’s in part the new breadth of storytelling that has brought me into fantasy.
Recommendations welcome! List is in no particular order.
Luis Villa
🧵 @ArkadyMartine ’s Teixcalaan books are Very Serious Hard Scifi but also smart about colonialism, gender, and a host of other topics, and in a style that really works for me.
(I say “but” here because, well, lots of Very Serious Scifi traditionally has been completely awful on all of those fronts. But if you’ve read this far in the thread you probably knew that already.)
I also thoroughly enjoyed her “Rose/House”.
Luis Villa
🧵 @Catvalente gets two shoutouts, for vastly different books. If you want *light*, and/or are into Eurovision, Space Opera is… hilarious.
Her “Radiance”, on the other hand, is more… deeply weird. In a way that I found deeply amazing but, especially if you’re newer to scifi, may not be for everyone. https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief/111942707909189921
Luis Villa
🧵I really enjoy everything Becky Chambers writes, but I particularly have been enjoying her #solarpunk novellas, starting with Psalm for the Wild Built. They’re good for the heart.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-becky-chambers/15125608
Luis Villa
🧵 NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth shouldn’t require a recommendation from me because anyone who is into science fiction or fantasy at all should already have read it; it is one of the towering achievements of the genre.
Luis Villa
🧵 In the “BDSM space lesbians” category, special sub-category “space necromancers”, Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb is absolutely as good as everyone says it is, though not a light read—second book in particular I found structurally challenging (in a good way!)
Luis Villa
🧵 Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a bit hit-or-miss for me (eg, Mexican Gothic wasn’t bad but didn’t quite hit the spot for me) but Gods of Jade and Shadow was *terrific*:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/gods-of-jade-and-shadow-silvia-moreno-garcia/12105572
Luis Villa
🧵 Nghi Vo’s novella Empress of Salt and Fortune melted me; strikingly original. (Also reminded me, in terms of form, of the underrated classic The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach.) The rest of her Singing Hills cycle of novellas have also been fun, though I admit none struck me quite as directly as the first.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-empress-of-salt-and-fortune-nghi-vo/16390013
Luis Villa
Surfacing this rec from @brainwane from the older thread’s responses. The best scifi is a lens through which we can look at ourselves; @zencho ‘s Sorcerer’s To The Crown was part of how I learned that fantasy can have the same impact: https://social.coop/@brainwane/112195892365448957
Luis Villa
Tade Thompson’s Rosewater / Wormwood trilogy is one of the few members of the *extremely* rare genre of “science fiction that acknowledges that the Hausa language exists”, a language with 50-80M speakers, and meaningful to me personally because my wife speaks it after her stint in Niger in the Peace Corps. These are hard to summarize; suffice to say “alien invasion via West Africa”, with a structure that is sometimes jarring and always engaging.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/tade-thompsons-rosewater-an-alien-invasion-that-grows-on-you/
Luis Villa
Picking up this old #bookstodon thread on science fiction and fantasy from different perspectives, because it is summer and friends have been asking for recs.
Cortez on Jupiter, Ernest Hogan: what if 1990s cyberpunk, but starring a Chicano muralist from LA? A gloriously weird book I wish I’d found when I lived in Miami rather than 30 years later: https://ernesthogan.blogspot.com/2014/11/ernest-hogan-on-cortez-on-jupiter.html
Luis Villa
edited to add: ugh, milkshake duck warning: https://zencho.org/articles/being-an-itemised-list-of-disagreements/
Probably not to everyone’s taste (less Big Ideas; more Just Plain Fun, And Also Sex (author’s description: “BSDM-inflected cyberpunk lesbian”), but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the Machine Mandate novellas: https://beekian.wordpress.com/
Luis Villa
I didn’t like the second and third books of the trilogy very much, but Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem deserves every bit of the very wide praise that it got. I strongly recommend reading it *after* the essays in Ken Liu’s translated short-story volume, as helpful context.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765382030/thethreebodyproblem
Luis Villa
Lots of this list will still be American, but there’s an increasing amount of sci-fi in translation these days. This collection of Chinese shorts is consistently good; not just the stories but also the introductory and closing essays, which push back healthily on attempts to generalize about China through its scifi.
Luis Villa
This list will be mostly *new* SFF but FWIW there’s a vigorous tradition of writing—and critiquing—diversity in SFF.
Samuel Delany’s 1977 review of the first Star Wars is a landmark here: in it he says, of SFF films, “the variety of human types should be as fascinating and luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer’s paint box. Not to make use of that variety… seems an imaginative failure.”
I hope my list is in that spirit. #bookstodon
https://samueldelany.tumblr.com/post/82806452407/samuel-delany-reviews-the-first-star-wars-movie
Philip Weiss (Phil in SF)
@luis_in_brief His Molly Southbourne series of science fiction/horror novellas are excellent.
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