The Legend of Eli Monptress is a fantasy series about a master gentleman thief in a world where magic works. I know, I know, you've heard this meme before. But it's very well done!
The Dragon series is light and on the YA side, but quite fun if you're in the right mood.
She also writes good military SF under the name Rachel Bach.
Flatland is of course the archetypal popular math book. Life in 2D
has its problems... See also Dewdney's
Planiverse and the lesser known sequel Sphereland.
Watership Down was one of the favorite books of my family. We have
been known to use the words "silflay" and "hrududu" in conversation.
The saga of a band of rabbits who must find a new home, set in the
contemporary world. I'm classifying it as fantasy since it's a
talking animal book. But a damn good one, with a lot of psychological
depth and considerable worldbuilding of their mythology and religion
backstory.
Shardik is also an animal's eye view of the world, this one from a
bear's point of view. And The Plague Dogs, with escapees from an
animal testing lab - considerably more grim than the Rats of NIMH version.
What can I say? Everybody loves Dilbert. Me too.
Fantasy in an Arabic-flavored world with an interesting magic system.
Very satisfying.
Includes multiperspective short story that inspired Kurosawa's movie.
Hard SF. The Charon/Sphere series is fun - a physics grad student
screws up and the Earth vanishes. Puts my troubles into
perspective...
The Boat of a Million Years is one of these large timespan novels -
most of it is from a few thousand years ago til now, and the last
section is in the far-distant future. So it's a nonstandard blend
- the first two-thirds is essentially historical fiction about a few
people who find that they're immortal, and how they both hide and try
to find others like themselves. Then the last part is the hard SF of
their interstellar journey away from a future Earth which they no
longer feel a part of, into the unknown.
A fine book - although I don't quite understand why the friend
who lent it to me thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Chacun a son gout...
High fantasy, I think. Read these long ago and details are only dimly
remembered. Reasonable but not great. Possible that these would be
downgraded off the recommended list if I re-read them...
The Otherworld series is urban fantasy in the same paranormal romance
vein as the Mercy Thompson series of Patricia Briggs: lots on the emotional sociopolitics of
werewolves and witches/warlocks.
Details hazy, vaguely remember it being fantasy with some underlying
grimness/reality rather than sweetness-and-light. I've also read
Woman of the Iron People, but wasn't blown away by it. I think she is
worthwhile, but somehow doesn't resonate with me so much.
The Skolian Empire series is a set of interlocking novels about the
members of the Ruby dynasty, key players in a massive galactic
political power struggle. The individual novels are far more
standalone than most series. The telepath good guys are the only ones
who can run the machines of a long-extinct empire that handle
long-distance communication, but their empathic power also makes them
prime targets for their Trader enemies. The backstory is that a few
thousand years ago, Mayans were abducted by aliens and stranded on
faraway planets. By the time of this series, the Terrans are a third
political space-based empire, although they haven't been at the focus
of any of the novels yet.
Which brings to mind the somewhat similar backstory of Patricia Kennealy's Celtic series,
where Terrans of several hundred years from now are exploring space
and are shocked to find an existing empire of Celtic druids that have
both spaceships and magic. But Kennealy's Celts left Earth on their
own ships when threatened by the spread of Christianity, rather than
being abducted.
Unusually, the series progresses non-chronologically, so backstory
gets filled in more often than we find out What Happens Next.
Frustrating, but in a pleasant sort of way.
Alas, the non-Skolian books are awful. The Charmed Sphere is really
bad fantasy, and Sunrise Alley is astoundingly wooden AI/robotics.
Far-future hard-ish SF with a bit more bio than cyber flavor. Somehow
depressing enough that I haven't read too many, there are more.
One of the more famous crossover authors who writes SF/fantasy yet is
respected by the literary establishment. I keep meaning to read more
by her, but haven't yet. I think of her in the same spirit as Marge Piercy, to the point where I can't
keep track of which of them wrote what and have to look it up. They
both write books that snap my head back like an uppercut to the jaw,
and scenes from them bounce around my head for quite some time...
Another what can I say? Of course you've heard of her. She's somewhat
like Miss Manners, in that she's snippy with maximum politeness.
Mr. Vertigo is a somewhat surreal book about someone who learns
(after much study) to levitate, one of my longstanding unrealized
dreams...
Timbuktu is told from a dog's point of view, but Auster manages to
steer clear of anthropomorphic sentimentality.
Good military SF. See also her fantasy, under the name Rachel Aaron.
The Windup Girl is mid-future biotech oriented, somehow took me a
quite while to get into it. I'm still not utterly in love, although
it's gotten high profile award attention.
The equivalent of an epistolatory novel, but told in the form of
reports filed by a librarian rather than of an exchange of letters.
Extremely charming if you're a book geek. (And if you're not, then
why in heck are you reading this page?!)
In the Garden of Iden is a time travel book mostly set in Renaissance
England. A botanist is surprised to find the contemporaries aren't
all as barbaric as she first assumed, when she falls in love with
one. The Company series continues for several more books, an
interesting mix of compelling and frustrating as we come closer and
closer to understanding the Big Seekrit Singularity Event in a way
that converges ever slower, like Zeno's Paradox - will we ever get
there?! And then we do, and it leaves me scratching my head. But in a
good way. Definitely recommended. I think I should re-read the whole
series soon. See also the many short stories in the series (not
listed here since I'm too lazy to type them in, now collected in a
few volumes of their own).
The Anvil of the World is a splendid fantasy farce, and I don't
normally enjoy humor in my SF/fantasy.
Mathematics for a broad audience - one of the best such books on 4D,
with lots of pictures.
Same guy as Iain M Banks, but without the M it's not SF. These books
all have a cruel/macabre streak to them, which somehow hits home more
since they're in contemporary settings.
One of my favorite SF authors. Most of these books are set in the
Culture, a future society with long-lived humans and refreshingly
irreverent sentient machines. The AIs, ranging in size from wasps to
moons, have
great
names.
Although the Culture is a utopia of sorts, the books manage to be
almost unremittingly bleak. I love them, although my mother objects
to the fact that usually everyone's dead at the end. (The same could
be said of Shakespeare...)
Inversions is (mostly) non-Culture, not quite up to the standard of
the others, but with a similar theme - the interwoven stories of two
people in self-imposed exile, dealing with the barbaric culture
around them.
Feersum Endjinn isn't a Culture book, and took me a while to get into
because the half of it in the voice of the main character is spelled
phonetically. It's worth reading anyway, just persevere.
Whimsical correspondence between two people, in the form of postcards
sent to each other between exotic locales. Mostly pictures, but a fun
way to while away an hour.
One for the Morning Glory is an idiosyncratic reworking of the
archetypal fantasy story of the hero's quest. And a must-read for
anyone who enjoys wordplay!
A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass explore the culture
shock of moving from one world to another, when travel becomes a
matter of stepping through a portal instead of decades of ship
travel. Earth's colonies comprise the Thousand Cultures, many of
which are synthetic cultures inspired by works of literature, created
by various eccentrics who sent off colony ships with idiosyncratic
versions of "history" in their archives. The advent of the portals
wreaks havoc with the self-identity of each of these cultures. The
Merchants of Souls is the next in the series, also good. And Armies
of Memory after that.
Orbital Resonance is a coming-of-age story, reminded me a bit of
David Palmer's Emergence, and is one of
my favorites.
The Sky So Big and Black is one of his very best, and a followup of sorts
to Candle which I appreciate but didn't like as much.
Mother of Storms and Kaleidescope Century are both near-future, but
not related to each other. Didn't like them as much as the others.
Finity is the best novel I've read that uses the quantum many worlds
hypothesis as a plot device, since Barnes doesn't let physics
exposition get in the way of the story. (As opposed to, alas, most of
Greg Egan...)
Apostrophes and Apocalypses is a book of short stories and essays.
The Duke of Uranium series is pretty light, in the Heinlein juvenile
tradition. OK if you're in the right mood, but not up to his usual
standard IMHO. The Patton's Bicycle etc etc cross-time series is also pretty
light, but left me wanting more.
The Last President series is pretty good post-apocalypse, but didn't
grab me as much as some of his others.
Lexicon is in the small but notable subgenre of "what if words/images really
could reprogram your psyche", see also Ian
McDonald's kickass Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone.
In When We Were Real, the male protagonist escapes a matriarchal
society to become a corporate mercenary, for lack of any better
alternative. Reasonably bleak future despite functional immortality -
people don't die of natural causes, but they can be killed - and often
are, since the corporations don't put much value on human life.
Nonhumans (cyborgs, gengineered "optimods", robots) are legally
chattel, as are some humans. The flavor reminded me a bit of Ian McDonald's The Broken Land or Desolation
Road.
It's not the best book I've ever read, but it's the first book that
I've read that rang true about the bleak psychological implications
of extended lifespans - that it's not just an unbroken wonderland of
eternal happiness, but that you'd often be forced to episodically
rebuild a new life/home multiple times, often through circumstances
not of your own choosing.
Fantasy but not swords 'n sorcery. Gentle is a word that comes to
mind...
The Hammered/Scardown/Worldwired series is good and cyberpunkish.
Carnival and Undertow are both standalone, very different in flavor.
Dust is the beginning of a great new series, followed by Chill and
Grail which were not as strong but still satisfying. Alas, I was
disappointed by All the Windwracked Stars, too disjointed to
recommend. I can't figure out what I think about the Blood and Iron
series. It's high fantasy elfdom, very well done but the first two
were sufficiently bleak that the third book in the series has
languished unread on my shelf for many years...
I've liked everything he's ever written. Mostly it's SF, except for
the fantasy series of Infinity Concerto and Serpent Mage which is
also great. Many of his books deal with the possible implications of
nanotech. It's the focus of Blood Music, but forms the backdrop of
some of the others. Eon and Eternity are a duo about a female
mathematician who's in a team that investigates a mysterious object
that suddenly appears in orbit. I particularly like the part where
she needs to use a pi-meter: a device that measures the value of pi
in the local spatial neighborhood.
Re Blood Music -- most SF writers have this technology-will-save-the-day feel, and
usually Bear is one of them. Not this time...
Not deep, but diverting in the right mood.
Fun House is a tour de force, an autobiographical comic. Gripping,
but not happy.
The Galactic Center series starts near-future with Across the Sea of
Suns, but by Great Sky River it's far future where the sentient
machines dominate the galaxy. Humans are barely surviving in the
fringes, like cockroaches, desperately using technology they no
longer understand as they try to avoid total extinction.
Against Infinity (not a Galactic Center book) is set on Ganymede,
about humans trying to hunt an alien artifact. Matter's End is a
short story collection.
I was deeply disappointed by Foundation's Fear, the first in a
trilogy set in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe. The
characterization was just as wooden as Asimov's - I expected much
better from Benford. I'm refusing to read the other two, since Brin
and Bear are also favorite authors that I don't want to have a bad
taste in my mouth about...
Cosm and Timescape are both contemp/near-future accounts of
physicists discovering cool stuff. Classic hard SF, well done. Cosm
is about creating and observing a universelet. (His academic
left-bashing a la Foundation's Fear was a bit tiresome, though.)
Similar subject matter to Lethem's As
She Climbed Across The Table, but of course a very different book.
Yet more Elrod vampires.
Your basic fantasy about a long-lived weredragon - subplots include
foiling the bad guys (evil magicians) and finding a mate (after
hundreds of years, after almost giving up hope). But really quite
well done, despite my snippiness (I just finished One for the Morning Glory, so I can't help but be arch).
Everyone raves about how well Bester's books stand the test of time,
and it's true. Much less dated than most of his contemporaries. The
protagonist of The Stars My Destination is a man who can teleport
interplanetary distances when everyone else can only do short hops.
I was certainly surprised to come across this book in the New
section, since both authors were already dead. It was a (partially
posthumous? whut??) collaboration. A little zany, but fun. Not as
self-indulgent as Zelazny at his worst.
Fantasy, doesn't particularly stand out.
Winsome meets LA spacey, you gotta love the names: Weetzie Bat, My
Secret Agent Lover Man, Witch Baby. If I say "weetzie bat" five times
in a row really fast, I can't help but to grin for a while...
Good military SF. Seems like there's been a wave of that lately,
including Marko Kloos and Rachel Bach.
I really liked the original essay. The book-length version is more sprawling and thus
less hard-hitting, but still worthwhile. Her main point, which is
worth remembering, is that the Silicon Valley libertarians
conveniently forget just how much of their success grew out of government
subsidies, from public education to the highway system to clean
water, but most importantly the vast amount of direct funding from
DARPA and other agencies. While it's a nuanced issue, I appreciate her
arguments. There are a hell of a lot of irritating libertarians in the
Valley, some of whom we both know. And there are also some cool ones...
Fourteen cardboard pages. Big type. A good thing to read when you
need a bit of cheering up. I keep it in my office.
I read the entire Darkover series years ago, but haven't looked at it
much since. I did reread the Heritage of Hastur and Sharra's Exile in
order to remember the background for Exile's Song and The Shadow
Matrix, which deal with Lew Alton's daughter.
Darkover is a world ruled by the comyn, a red-haired feudal overlord
caste with laran - psychic powers which can be amplified by matrix
crystals. Many of the books deal with the conflict caused by its
rediscovery by the Terran Empire, since it turns out to be a lost
colony that's unenthusiastic about being reabsorbed.
MZB can be a little heavyhanded sometimes, but mostly keeps it under
control in this series (unlike, say, The Firebrand). Some of her
other books like Hunters of the Red Moon aren't really worth
recommending. I bet if I reread The Mists of Avalon I'd put it on the
good list, but it was so long ago that I can't really remember my
reaction to it.
Biographical novel from the climber who made the IMAX movie Everest.
In Dragon Bones the protagonist has pretended to be an idiot for
years to avoid being killed as a threat to his father the king, and
is ambivalent about shedding the mask. Swordfighting, magic and
dragons are key plot elements, and dwarves do pop up in a subplot,
but it's a well done and not derivative coming of age story.
The Uplift series is set near-future where the Earth comes into
contact with galactic civilization only to find that it's a weird
anamoly - all known intelligent species were created by others, in an
unbroken chain lasting millenia back to the mysterious Progenitors.
Startide Rising is very high on my list. The Uplift War is almost as
good, Sundiver (the first one) is not quite so good. The next trilogy
(Infinity's Shore, Brightness Reef, Heaven's Reach) doesn't quite live
up to Startide Rising, but I really did want to find out what happens!
Glory Season is a totally different universe, a seafaring world with
significant gender role differences from our world.
The Practice Effect is somewhat fun - a physics grad student ends up
on a world where one of the laws of thermodynamics doesn't hold. But
it's not up to the standard of the Uplift books. The Postman is also
a decent post-apolcalypse story of one man's effort to bring back
civilization by donning a uniform and delivering mail. I bet if
someone else wrote it I'd put it on the list, it only suffers by
comparison to his other stuff.
Nudist on the Late Shift actually does do a halfway reasonable job at
communicating the flavor of Silicon Valley, which is a hard thing to
do. I was prepared to hate it, since I'd read some excerpts of his
previous book (The First 20 Million is Always the Hardest) and
thought it was absolutely inane, a very second-rate imitation of
Douglas Copeland's Microserfs. But I picked it up in a bookstore and
had to buy it to find out what happened to all the people whose
stories he tells...
Even though it dates back to the 70's, Shockwave Rider is sometimes
cited as proto-cyberpunk, because of the hero living the cracks of
society who hacks into master database to manipulate the system at
will plotline.
The Jhereg series is sword and sorcery, but not at all Tolkeinesque.
The terminally sarcastic assassin Vlad is both a witch and a
sorcerer, and suffers from the handicap of being a short-lived human.
The dominant Draegerans live to be a thousand, have a rigid caste
system, and usually despise Easterners (humans). Since Vlad is also a
member of the criminal caste, he's got yet another strike against
him. Good thing he's got a few friends in high places.
This series is also unusual in that it gets better, not worse, as it
goes along. Even if you aren't totally blown away by Jhereg, give the
next few a try anyway. Soon you'll be addicted.
He's also written some Three-Musketeers-esque books about the same
world, set hundreds of years earlier (Five Hundred Years After and The
Phoenix Guards). I didn't like them at first, but warmed to them
later when I wanted to read the ones that came afterwards.
I'm not overfond of Brokedown Palace, a fantasy not connected with
his others.
As you can see from the number of times I admit to reading the Miles
Vorkosigan series, I'm totally hooked. While it could be categorized as
military SF, the witty writing and jaw-droppingly astute
characterization is a *much* higher caliber than your basic space opera.
It's difficult to articulate exactly why it's so compelling to me, but I'm not alone in
this. My particular favorites are Shards of Honor, Memory, Konarr, A
Civil Campaign, and Gentleman Jole. Mirror Dance is gruelling but
necessary. The only two books in the series that I'm not rabid about are Ethan
of Athos and Falling Free, which are merely OK.
The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls are utterly outstanding. As
are the Penric novellas set in that same world. I appreciate The
Hallowed Hunt but it doesn't grab me as much as the first two (but
that's a very very high bar).
The Spirit Ring is a quite reasonable fantasy book, but not nearly as
addictive as the others. Ditto for the Sharing Knife series.
The War for the Oaks is in the (larger than you might think) fantasy
subgenre of contemporary elves live among us, music is tied to magic.
Wait, stop - don't roll your eyes and move on - it's the best example
of this genre that I've found, much better than books like Lackey's nonrecommended Serrated Edge
urban elf series or Gael Baudino's vaguely remembered Gossamer Axe,
which give this area a bad name. If you're a fan of the Minneapolis
band Boiled in Lead then you've got to read this one too, since a
show of theirs is a key plot point in the book. (And along those
lines the drummer Robin is the spacey Aibynn character in Brust's book Phoenix.)
Finder is also elf-oriented fantasy, but with a slightly different
twist: it's in the shared Borderlands world, check out also the elf
books by yet another Minneapolis fantasy writer, Will Shetterly. Another note of
encouragement: don't let the phrase "shared world" send you screaming
for the door -- I know that most shared worlds books are just inane,
but I really enjoy these.
Falcon is SF not fantasy, a little cyberpunkish, quite worthwhile.
Aaronovitch, Ben
Abbott, Edwin A.
Adams, Douglas and Carwardine, Mark
Adams, Richard
Adams, Scott
Ahmed, Saladin
Akutagawa, Ryunosuke
Albom, Mitch
Allen, Roger MacBride
Anders, Charlie Jane
Anderson, Poul
Andrews, Ilona
Angelou, Maya
Anthony, Mark
Arkady, Martine
Armstrong, Kelley
Arnason, Eleanor
Arsenault, K. Rivera
Asaro, Catherine
Ash, Sarah
Asher, Neal
Athill, Diana
Atkinson, Kate
Atwood, Margaret
Austen, Jane
Auster, Paul
Babcock, Linda and Laschever, Sara
Bach, Rachel
Bacigalupi, Paolo
Baillie, Martha
Baker, Kage
Ball, Andrew S.
Banchoff, Tom
Banks, Iain
Banks, Iain M.
Bantock, Nick
Bardugo, Leigh
Barnes, John
Barry, Max
Barton, William
Beagle, Peter S.
Bear, Elizabeth
Bear, Greg
Beard, Henry
Bechdel, Alison
Benett, Robert Jackson
Benford, Gregory
Bennett, Nigel and Elrod, P.N.
Bertin, Joanne
Bester, Alfred
Bester, Alfred and Zelazny, Roger
Bishop, Anne
Bishop, Terry
Black, Holly
Blish, James
Block, Francesca Lia
Bois, William Pene du
Bonesteel, Elizabeth
Borchardt, Alice
Borsook, Paulina
Bourdain, Anthony
Boyett, Steven R.
Boynton, Sandra
Bradley, Marion Zimmer
Bray, Patricia
Breashears, David
Brennan, Marie
Brennan, Sarah Rees
Briggs, Patricia
Brin, David
Britain, Kristen
Brodsky, Johanna Max
Bronson, Po
Brown, Eric
Brown, Rachel Manija and Smith, Sherwood
Brunner, John
Brust, Steven
Brust, Steven and White, Skyler
Buckell, Tobias S.
Buechner, Frederick
Bujold, Lois McMaster
Bull, Emma