this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
16 points (100.0% liked)
Ask Lemmy
30811 readers
2357 users here now
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I've read Terry Pratchett's Night Watch three times, currently reading The Color of Magic for the first time and then I'm going to re-read Mort
I've read Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game three times, but that was for school. Pretty good children's mystery book, though
Neuromancer moves faster than some movies. Absolutely worth rereading
Lockstep by Karl Schroeder Hard sci-fi about how a intergalactic empire being run without developing any faster than light technology.
The Martian. I’ve read it twice, and would love to read it again. It’s so good.
I have all discworld books, I would definitely reread most of them. I just reread The Hail Mary Project.
Third run through Discworld in the past 2 years. My god, been trying to think how to explain to my best friend. I lack the words.
I’m going through the Discworld series for the first time right now. I’m going in chronological order but when I finish I’ll probably go through them again eventually but I think I’ll do series instead in bunches. I’m already looking forward to rereading the Watch series back to back.
I've just read the first one and the one about the printing press. There's a lot!
Yeah there are like 40 of them but you can split them up in to series. If you liked The Truth you’ll probably like the Watch series starting with Guards! Guards! and following Sam Vines and the other Watchmen.
On my third pass right now. Skipped a couple of the first novels, but I love the original order. Got feels for all the series, but I like the perfect way he kept them mixed up.
"Oh shit! Another witches book!"
"Back to the Watch! NICE!"
"Rincewind? Hell with it, those are all funny as hell."
I'm on my 13th or so read of Blindsight. Think I've unpacked it all, finally. I feel like a fruitcake having read it and *Echopraxia" so many times, but damn they're deep.
Not a fan of all of Watt's novels, but those two feel like he packed something to think about into nearly every single sentence. Easy read if you want to go fast, or, take your time and dig in. Never read a novel(s) that could go both ways.
Fuck me. Just talking about it is getting me hype for another run.
Blindsight:
"I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition— the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe—and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.
To this day, I still don't know what went wrong.”
Echopraxia:
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
The bone comic book omnibus from Jeff smith Bone omnibus amazon link
The book is basically Tolkien+Disney, it is aimed at a kid audience but it tackles some heavy topics that adults will enjoy, its great because it tackles metaphysics a lot in ways that are interesting for all ages.
The Malazan Book of the Fallen saga is so long that I tend to forget most of the plot of the earlier books by the time I finish.
A few I've read at least twice and will definitely read again at some point:
- Catch 22
- Infinite Jest
- The Windup Bird Chronicle
- The Handmaid's Tale
- Full 5 part Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy
- His Dark Materials Trilogy (plus the Book of Dust series, if we ever get that last one!!)
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Brave New World
- Slaughterhouse Five
Hitchhikers guide part 1 is worth it for the forward alone not to mention the book itself
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert M. Pirsig
Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
The Murderbot diaries.
This is also an awesome thread. I see a lot of books I love and a lot that I'm interested in.
Several that others have already mentioned, and:
- The Golden Age Oecumene, by John C Wright
- The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox, by Barry Hughart
- Any and all of The Culture novels
- The Hobbit, and TLotR trilogy. Used to read them every summer, for about twenty years.
- Armor, by John Steakley. Sadly, the only sci-fi novel he ever wrote, and one of only two books he ever authored, IIRC.
- The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi, which is on my list to read again this year.
- A Wizard of Earthsea trilogy, which I'm about to read again as soon as my wife finished them.
- The Chronicles of Narnia, which I used to read frequently when younger. I'm almost afraid to pick them up again now, for fear that they won't be as good (for an adult) as I remember.
John Steakley was a full time ghost writer so he wrote a lot of other books but not under his name.
He was working on a draft of Armor 2 when he died. I think I still have a copy of his first draft of chapter 1 somewhere. It's to bad it will probably never be finished or published.
I've heard that, about that first chapter. He, and Iain Banks, are two writers I'm particularly sorry about having had their times cut short.
Love the culture series! Communism..... In space!!! Though I'd say to anyone who hasn't read them yet to skip the first and come back to it. It's a great novel, but it smells like the 80's. Was my first read in the series and it turned me off to the rest of them until years later when I have the series another chance
IMHO, post-scarcity is really the only way communism works. And it's not true communism in the Culture; people still own things - artifacts, art, themselves. And it's also not communism in the Marxist sense, where the workers own the means of production, because there isn't a working class and production is largely automated. It's some sort of post-Communism thing we don't have a name for. Or, maybe we do, and I just don't know it?
I think your issue is that the Culture's economy is so often depicted from the perspective of humans. I have two guinea pigs, and from their perspective they are living in a post-scarcity world. Same for the humans of the culture. Their economy isnt really visible from a human scale.
Either way, Ian M Banks isn't really interested in the economics of his setting and spends much more effort detailing the politics of how such a setting works socially, which i should point out doesn't need a post-scarcity economy to create. I'm not sure if you noticed this, but the culture punishes criminals primarily through shunning. (Sure, there's also the slap drones, but I'm fairly certain that slap drones are a humane alternative to shunning.) The theory is that their laws are lax enough that the only real crimes left require actual malice to commit, and shunning serves two purposes:
- Social isolation is the most painful punishment for nearly all humans, which makes it a strong deterrent.
- You cant commit violence or theft if you aren't allowed near others, so those who don't care about having friends or family also get prevented from committing more crimes.
- It looks completely bloodless, since the subject doesn't physically suffer, and if it turns out they didn't do it you can just stop shunning them.
so often depicted from the perspective of humans.
You're right; AFAICR, the economy is only ever depicted from a human perspective. Either in contrast to external cultures, or just describing daily life. Your Guinea Pig example is quite apt: humans in The Culture really are just pampered pets; or, maybe more like working dogs, although ship remotes could probably do all the stuff Contact agents do.
Have you ever read The Golden Oecumene trilogy, by Wright? The last chapter, in particular, is what I'm thinking of.
I've only read one post-scarcity novel and that's Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. I think it's his first novel.
I've heard of it, and I like Doctorow, but haven't read it. I'll put it in the list.
Project Hail Mary was amazing. Can't wait for the movie too.
I’m glad you enjoyed it. I think I must be one if the few people on the planet who didn’t care for it.
Same here, didn't vibe with the main character's constant complaining and whining
Most of The Culture series
There are so many, but here are a few from the top of my head:
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein.
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein.
Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes.
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri.
Dune, Frank Herbert.
Paradise Lost, John Milton.
Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke.
The Riftwar Saga, Raymond E. Feist.
Most of those hold up.
Time enough for love did not imho.
Need to look at rift war.
Yeah, "Time Enough For Love" ended up on that list mostly because it's so different. That made an impression on me when I read it in high school, in the way of "Huh, I guess it's actually possible to write a book like this". It had a lot of interesting ideas but the narrative sprawls around pretty wildly.
Riftwar Saga basically takes Tolkien's Middle-earth setting and mixes it with our own world's Middle age cultures, plus magical stargates and an invasion from an another world. It's not a ripoff in any way, it carries it own story proudly but the similarities with names from Tolkien's works was a bit distracting at first. These were the first books I was able to read entirely in original English in my early teens.
Will have to give it a shot.
Redoing storm light now, didn't love it the first time, but it was OK and I forgot most of the details when the 4th book dropped. It's not bad but I don't get why others are so crazy about it.
Books. Multiple.
The Practice Effect by David Brin. It's an isekai (it's not anime, but it's an isekai) where things get MORE useful when you use them, reversing entropy.
Sentenced to Prism. MC is sent on a mission to a world inhabited by silicate based life forms. Shenanigans ensue. Mildly autistic coded MC.
Resurrection Inc. The dead are resurrected as mindless zombie robots. Sometimes it goes wrong and the dead regain their memories. The MC does. Hijinks ensue.
edit - more
Mistborn Chronicles - an orphan gets super powers in a very messed up world. A group recruits her for a heist.
Loved Sentenced to Prism! I loved the plot of the Mistborn Chronicles, but I struggled a bit with the audiobook narrator. Maybe I should actually read them…
I read them and flew through them, despite being a slow reader. The second arc though (Wax and Wane) is one of my favorite series ever. It’s set in the same universe, just centuries in the future and is basically a western. They’re great fun to read. Would recommend.
World War Z has hit differently after major life stages: College, marriage, kids, global pandemic, etc.
It’s too bad the zombie tv universe is flooded at this point. I’m hoping in ten or twenty years we get a premium streaming channel anthology show based on the stories in this book. The movie they made from it had so little to do with the novel.
Speaker for the Dead
Eisenhorn
Count of Monte Cristo
The Emperor of All Maladies
Moby Dick
Lords of Silence
All Honorable Men: History of the war in Lebanon
Adams and Victor's Principles of Neurology
The Biology of Cancer (Weinberg)
Japan to 1600
History of Medieval Russia (Martin)
The Baltic: A History
On War (Clausewitz)
The Back Channel
Timbuktu (Villiers)
Sorry if this is too many, just looked at my book app for ones I keep reading.
Edit: Fuck it, I'm having fun. Here are a few more I remembered while roasting a bowl.
Dune
Amulet of Samarkand
Venice (Madden)
The Golden Compass
First and Only (Abnett) - read the first omnibus
Harrisons Manual of Medicine 18th ed
Gomorrah (Saviano)
The Gunpowder Age (Tonio)
The Money Illusion (Sumner)
Speaker for the Dead
Interesting! I enjoyed it much less than Ender's Game, but they were such different books it doesn't surprise me that someone else would prefer it.
Moby Dick
Right‽ Such an amazing read. It does take a bit to get into the cadence, I find, but so worth it.
I loved Enders Game, Enders Shadow and Speaker for the Dead. It had a great emotional importance to me. Especially Enders Shadow, it was one of the first books I read that properly described starvation. I went through a lot as a child, and Beans story of a starving, smart, small kid really resonated with me in the period after my own tribulation. I don't think Shadow has the same impact on people without some of my experiences, so I chose to use the main arc and I've always felt that Ender would rather be remembered as The Speaker more than anything else. Probably silly, but I'm fine with that. In short, I agree, Enders Game is the better book. Speaker is just the pay off.
Moby Dick has always infuriated and enthralled me. I read 5 pages, hate myself. Start reading again in 15 minutes because I can't get it out of my head.
I liked Ender's Shadow much more than Speaker for the Dead, which felt preachy to me. I just didn't click with it.
Both Game and Shadow are great books, and excellent choices.
It's been a really long time since I read Speaker, but I really liked it.
First, middle school me loved how different it was from Enders Game. It was a challenge, and it felt like the author was purposefully shedding the fans of the first novel with something less approachable.
Second, it hooked me in immediately with the mystery, and then really wrestled with what would anthropology with non-human cultures look like, and how could they go wrong? And how could that bridge be mended? In a way that middle school me could appreciate.
It seemed to complete Enders Game in the sense that in the first novel, he accidentally genocides a species based on a historic cultural misunderstanding between alien sentient races, and Speaker is his chance to learn from his experience and prevent it from happening again. I ate up that moral.
I may have rose-tinted glasses and only remember the good parts.
Also I remember liking Xenophobia (?) but even then I realized that even though the OCD descriptions were really interesting, there was something *off about making them all Asians with genetically-engineered disabilities to keep them from being too smart (I forget the exact plot, but that felt pretty icky even though I didn't understand why and still can't really explain it).
I liked Enders Shadow because Bean's background was eye-opening, but the other Shadow novels felt pretty weird in how they framed and simplified world politics.
view more: next ›