Bonus points for any books you believe are classics from that time period. Any language, but only fiction please.
I'm really excited to see what Lemmy has.
Brandon Sanderson
The man is a top flight book generating machine. Where he's taking the Cosmere, I don't know, but I'm gladly awaiting for the novels he'll write the in future to find out. Reading the Stormlight Archive and Mistborn is a joy.
I also really enjoyed how he wrapped up The Wheel of Time. He is much less reluctant to kill off characters than many other authors, and that series needed some serious character culling to bring closure.
Neil Gaiman. The man can write novels, YA novels, graphic novels, children’s books. And they all have such well crafted worlds that you just want to lose yourself in them.
I also think Neal Stephenson and Corey Doctorow deserve WAY more attention than they get.
This isn't a perfect example but Cormac McCarthy has been my favourite author for years now, and his first major work Suttree was from '79.
My all time favourites novel is Blood Meridian from 1985. If you're familiar with metamodernism, which is basically very modern works that have their cake and eat it when it comes to modernist ideals and postmodern critique, you'd clock that practically every western is either a modernist white hat western or a metamodern "the west is grim and hard, but also fucking cool" western. The only straight postmodern takes on the west that I know of are either Blood Meridian or pieces of work that take direct notes from it, such as the films Dead Man from '95 (except maybe the Oregon Trail video game from. 85'). Blood Meridian otherwise is a fantastic novel which meditates on madness and cruelty, religion and fate, race, war and conquest and so many other themes. It also has one of the best antagonists ever written in Judge Holden, a character who I would have called a direct insert of Satan if not for the fact that his deeds and the novel as a whole are closely inspired by true events. I feel the novel takes inspiration from Apocalypse Now, specifically the '79 film and not Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness. If you enjoy that film, you're likely to enjoy this book. The opening and closing chapters are fantastic, but I often find myself re-reading chapter 14. It has some of the best prose and monologues of the entire novel, and encompasses in my opinion the main turning point of the novel.
His other legendary work is The Road, a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. I'll talk on this one less but as our climate crisis grows and our cultural zeitgeist swings more towards this being the critical issue of our time, the novel fantastically paints itself as both a fantastic warning to our 21st century apocalypse and the unresolved 20th century shadow of nuclear winter. Despite this, it hones in on a meditation of parenthood and could be considered solely about that, with other themes of death, trauma, survival and mortality being explored through parenthood. Of course the unsalvageable deatg of the world that make the setting also makes this theme extra tragic. There is an adaptation into a film from 2008 but it isn't anywhere near as potent as the novel and I'd suggest should only be seen in tandem with reading the novel. The prize of this novel has really evolved to fit the novel too. McCarthy is renowned for his punctuation lacking prose, but where Blood Meridian is practically biblical in its dramatic and beautiful prose which juxtaposes the plain and brutal violence, The Road sacrifices no beauty in it's language but is so somber and meanders from mostly terse to so florid, while also always perfectly feels like how the protagonists are seeing their world.
I was looking for McCarthy ITT. I'm going to read Blood Meridian this year after listening to the audiobook years ago. I read The Road around the same time and struggled to get through it because it was so absolutely dreary. I get it obviously I just wanted to say that.
I would recommend also No Country For Old Men as I thought it was all the things McCarthy is amazing at but isn't so violent as the Judge's gang or as consistently hopeless as the world of The Road. It's paced like a thriller while still having an amazing villain. Talking about CM makes me think I should reread these books. I was just out of college when I read/listened to them.
Cormac McCarthy, wrote some books you might have seen as movies such as The Road and No Country for Old Men.
Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is a crazy good book.
Terry Pratchett (first book 1971 so barely counts haha)
Two authors I haven't surprisingly seen mentioned
Neil Gaiman is great. If you haven't read his works yet, start with *the ocean at the end of the lane". A wonderful, short read.
This second one is going to be controversial.
George RR Martin. The books are actually well written, and yes the final book probably won't get written, but it won't take away from your enjoyment. He is a very good writer.
GRR Martin knows how to write people. I think I learned a great deal of humanism just by reading his works alone
- Greg Egan
- Rudy Rucker
- Vernor Vinge
Hard, computational SF aren't given nearly the respect they should, and these apply math, comp sci, and physics in a way nobody else does. If there's any civilization in the future, they'll be seen as visionary.
Runners-up are Robert L. Forward, Alastair Reynolds, but Forward has very little computation, and Reynolds doesn't show his math too often.
Haven't read Egan or Rucker, so I can't speak to them. Vinge had amazing ideas that still pop into my head from time to time, but I couldn't get into his writing style; he never really pulled me in, despite how much I wanted to bet pulled in.
I couldn't finish a Deepness in the Sky. It didn't seem like the sci-fi was important - it was just a setting.
Some of Rudy's books are free, and they will blow your minds. Software, etc. and Postsingular as "what technology can do to us", and White Light as "how does infinity work in a story context"; he also has a couple non-fiction books on infinity.
Vinge's Deepness in the Sky is a masterfully done book that's tough to chew through but I'll be dammed if it isn't one of the best books written with an alternative species perspective to that of the human
Agreed. And I've never read anything quite like The Savage Detectives. His short stories are great too, and you can find a lot of them online published by the New Yorker.
I hesitate to call her a great author in her own right and I detest her attitude towards transwomen. That said, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series transformed the young adult fiction genre from a bit of a wasteland of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy novels into a quality genre with significant cross-generational appeal.
I'll mention Orson Scott Card as well, but his books have worn thin over time as he squeezes every penny out of the Enderverse. Ender's Game got me through a miserable hospital stay as a young child, so it will always have a special place in my heart. Speaker for the Dead I also loved.
I have read Ender's Game something like twenty times now over the course of only a few years and the drop off in quality between this book and his others is severe.
Octavia Butler and her likely prophetic Sower series on how US descent is gonna occur
Cixin Liu. Not only is the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (Three Body Problem) epic, his short stories are really fun reads.
To me, it has to be Steven Erikson. Malazan series is simply amazing.
Just finished book 1 earlier this year, looking forward to getting to the rest of them.
