Like the title! I’ve been getting back into reading for pleasure, and want to know what you like! I recently read Piranesi and loved it. I’ve heard good things about The Poppy War and Babel by R.F. Kuang, has anyone read them?
Generally just want a bunch of recommendations from your favorites, on our commie corner of the internet. No genre needed!
Robert Rankin likes to go all in on the weird fiction, but my favourite is probably The Brentford Chainstore Massacre, 5th in the 12 part Brentford Trilogy, featuring good and evil clones of jesus, or A Dog Called Demolition, about a kid who’s best friend is the antichrist.
Unjust Depths is excellent. Communist undersea trans lesbian gundams.
The Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is as close as I’ve ever seen hard SF approach the Star Trek future. Humans meet intelligent jumping spiders.
I’ve been absolutely raving about the Books of Babel series (Scenlin Ascends, Hand of the Sphinx, The Hod King, Fall of Babel) by Josiah Bancroft lately. They’re nothing totally unique and have some questionable moments (the basic premise is that a schoolteacher is trying to find his wife who went missing on their honeymoon to the Tower of Babel, now a tourist attraction. Unfortunately his wife used to be one of his students, which is rather creepy, but the books do go out of their way to point out that that’s fucked up), but Bancroft’s writing is gorgeous and the setting is just wonderfully weird and imaginative, and they’re one of the few book series I absolutely devoured lately
My guilty pleasure for scifi is the Honor Harrington books by David Webber. They’re just Horatio Hornblower style stories in space, very hard scifi, but the author’s brain worms are an one of a kind variety and it’s fascinating to see them on display: he’s a staunch liberal and monarchist (the main character is a captain in Space Britain’s space navy, with all the monarchism of the 18th century), he’s sex positive, he’s positive about polyamory, he correctly realizes that centuries in space with every culture intertwining will result in everyone being far darker skinned and names not matching ethnicity - or ethnicity mattering at all. On the flipside, he’s incredibly against any form of social assistance (he’s a laissez-faire capitalist through and through), homosexuality isn’t as common as one would expect (there’s mentions of it and all but almost every main character is straight), and the main villain for the first third of the series is a thinnly veiled reference to the Revolutionary France (there’s a character named Robert S. Pierre leading it) mixed with anticommunist USSR brain worms. It’s a mess but a mess I kinda love anyway
A Dead Djinn in Cairo and Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark are urban fantasy set in the early 1900s in a world where magic and mythical creatures returned to the world, and we follow a lesbian detective as she solves a murder. Lots of weird steampunk-adjacent magic stuff, some pretty imaginative fantasy elements, secret society type stuff. Dead Djinn is a novella that sets up Master of Djinn so give it a shot to see if you like his writing
Someone also mentioned Becky Chambers in the thread, and I would recommend her too. I’ve only read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet but it’s a delightfully cozy, queer story that’s basically an episodic space opera about the crew of a survey ship, and it’s just a great time. I need to re-read it myself actually
I just read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver and loved it. It’s about a family that goes on a religious mission to the Belgian Congo just before Lumumba comes to power.
I think it’s one of the best novels I’ve ever read, but I always think more highly of books I’ve recently read, lol.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Righfully legendary.