The Book Recommendation Thread

I'm just about finished with Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's long and somewhat dry, but it has a pretty good handle on the science it deals with, and feels like something that could actually happen.

For you alternate history buffs, also by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Years of Rice and Salt. Basic scenario, its "What if the Black Death wiped out 99% of Europe's population instead of one third".

Answer, Europe is repopulated by the Muslims, and becomes a new nexus for Islamic culture. China discovers the New World among other things. More or less, its an interesting picture of how the world would develop in the absence of European Christianity.

If you like fantasy and don't mind young adult books, The Chronicles of Prydain is a great series for those of you that can find copies.

Guns Germs and Steel. Actually pretty great for what's effectively a history book.

Desert of Souls. Sword and Sorcery in golden age arabia.

Throne of the Crescent Moon. Sword and Sorcery in golden age !Arabia.

Another voice in favor of Dresden Files, Codex Alera and Desert of Souls.
Adding to the list:
The tales of Conan of Cimmeria, Solomon Kane, Cormac Mac Art and Kull of Atlantis et al. by Robert E Howard. The man is a largely under recognized genius who pretty much invented Sword and Sorcery/Low Fantasy (interestingly enough at the exact same time that Tolkien was creating High Fantasy).

The Alloy of Law - Brandon Sanderson. A magic infused western adventure from a current darling of fantasy writing.

The Old Kingdom Trilogy - Garth Nix. YA fiction that I adore.

The Snarkout Boys and the Avacado of Death - Daniel Pinkwater. Absurdist humor and literature as rendered for grade school kids, what's not to love?

Geekomancy and Celebromancy -Michael Underwood. Ebook only urban fantasy in a world where magic not only exists, it's post-modern and defined by passions. Props can be made real, for a time(imagine that Carnifex replica working), watching Sherlock gives you his mind, and demon's are known for causing universal retcons. Plus it's incredibly trope aware, indulgently geeky and drops references with near every sentence.

My favourite author ever is Charles Stross

There are many varieties of Stross for you to enjoy, including

The Atrocity Archive and the rest of the Laundry series, a darkly comedic series about a low-level bureaucrat in a government agency tasked with repelling cuthuloid horrors.

Rule 34 Based on the famous internet rule, a London cop tasked with investigating internet crime is forced to investigate a series of murders before they go viral.

Glasshouse He was a man, and then he was a weapon of war, and then he was...a participant in an experiment in replicating the history of the lost 20th century? A post-singularity story of personal identity.

Dark Fantasy fans should check out Richard K. Morgan's The Steel Remains and it's sequel.

Sorry for the necromancy, but this thread is too good to die, and hey, someone mentioned


so I've got to second the recommendation and also let people know that he got me onto my new favourite book ever - The Guantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (and the sequel, obvs).

The Quantum Thief is a science fiction revolving around post-humanity's greatest thief (Jean Le Flambeur) being broken out of the most secure prison ever built by a mysterious Finnish space commando and the goddess she works for to steal one last thing. The catch? Before anyone can even tell him what the job is, Jean has to figure out exactly how his former self hid most of his memories on Mars, a world where privacy settings have been made completely physical.

If the plot doesn't sway you, consider this: the books are full of references to, well, everything. The Quantum Thief alone ties into game theory, prison design, the impossibility of true privacy, Jewish mysticism, late French Renaissance philosophy, architecture, trans-humanism and even passages more-or-less lifted from the bloody Ramayana.

In short, Rajaniemi is an incredible writer and if you can find copies you wouldn't be disappointed!

Ack Ack Macaque was incredibly disappointing. Doesn't fulfill the premise, profoundly unambitious, random rape in the third act. Edit: Oh, yes, remembered another thing. Large sufferer of 'Three Act Syndrome'.

The Leviathan Trilogy was also disappointing, and vaguely offensive the more I look at it. Excellent art courtesy of Keith Thompson, but for the life of me it's not really got anything else going for it and it falls right into a lot of the worst tendencies of Steampunk vis-a-vis not being Punk and whitewashing history.

In this case the whitewashed history is World War 1. Yeah.

The Bartimaeus Trilogy, by Johnathan Stroud, on the other hand is fucking amazing and you should all read it.

As is Triumff: Her Majesty's Hero, by Dan Abnett. Though I should warn you of a high concentration of puns.

Revenge of the Fermi Paradox!

First, a gamebook rec: Eclipse Phase! A game of body hopping and body horror. The Singularity came and it kicked our asses. You're a member of Firewall, tasked with protecting the remnants of transhumanity (containing altered humans, uplifts, and shackled AI) from existential threats. Fire up the nano-assemblers, prepare the backup bodies, and search the mesh, because it's just you between a strange new humanity and nanobot plagues, Jupiter brains, and really inscrutable aliens.

Next, some novels with similar themes.

James S. A. Corey's Expanse series (Leviathan Wakes, Caliban's War, Abbadon's Gate, and the upcoming Cibata Burn) James Holden is an ice miner serving the expanding colonies of the asteroid belt. Of course he finds something. Of course it unravels a terrible secret. Something ancient and terrible has awoken, and it has upset the tenuous peace between Earth, Mars and the Belt.

Someone mentioned whitewashing. I love the Expanse for the diversity of it's leads. Despite being spacey-monster kickbutt action, it's not a white man's galaxy. Indian UN Bureaucrat. Female Martian-Polynesian powered armor user. Lesbian priest. (This gets more pronounced later in the series). Even Holden, American-whitebread boy, grew up in a group household and had six parents.

It's been a while since I last touched this book series (read in junior high, so that's five or six years now!), but the Hyperion Cantos from Dan Simmons was in my opinion a very good series.

Without spoiling too much of the plot, I'd classify the four books as epic sci-fi with few bouts of technology so advanced it's indiscernable from magic (or vice versa). If you can find the time (all four are doorstoppers!) for the Hyperion Cantos, do so.