Hi all! I just finished “The Three Body Problem” by Liu Cixin and enjoyed it a lot. It’s got me curious about sci-fi written elsewhere in the world and what cultural differences may appear in sci-fi written from a non-US perspective.
Does anyone have recommendations for what I should check out next? I only speak English and (sort of) French so I’m reliant on translations to one of those languages. Thanks!
Anything by Stanislaw Lem. I really liked Fiasco.
Cyberiad is brilliant and funny.
I popped in to say this exact thing. The English translation I read was great.
I read it in Spanish. Same experience. I still laugh thinking about the classification of probability dragons.
Lots of people recommending Stanislaw Lem. I’ll add him to the list. Thanks for the rec!
Read the other books in the three body problem series! The story is wild.
Iain M. Banks.
Ordered the next book. I’ll check out Banks as well. Thanks!
Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Inspired the STALKER video games.
At some point in the 20th century, aliens esentially fired some rockets filled with garbage at the earth. The fallout of these rockets created several “exclusion zones” around earth. The book chiefly follows speculators who risk crossing military cordons in order to recover and sell salvaged tech.
Check out Roadside Picnic, inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series.
I was going to say “anything by the Strugatsky brothers” and this is the perfect place to start.
I would also recommend Stanislaw Lem.
This looks very cool! I’ve heard of S.T.A.L.K.E.R but never realized there was a book. Thanks for the recommendation :D
Another person already said Stanislaw Lem, so I’m going to take a side route and suggest one of my favorite series…
BUUUT… It’s not sci fi. It’s still genre fiction, but rather modern dark fantasy.
The Night Watch books by Sergei Lukyanenko
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel)
Premise is that magicians, wizards, vampires, witches, werewolves, sorceresses, they’re all real. The forces of light and dark were at war for centuries before they came to an agreement. The forces of dark would limit their activities to licensed behaviors, policed by the Night Watch, and similarly the forces of light would restrict themselves, policed by the Day Watch.
Now, here’s the problem… Lukyanenko is a Russian nationalist of Ukranian heritage. He fully supports the war in Ukraine.
The books have nothing to do with it and were largely written even before the Crimea invasion, but since then Lukyanenko has made a large number of unfortunate comments.
So how much you enjoy the works is going to depend on how much you can separate them from the author. ☹️
As a counterpoint I can recommend the Metro series by Dmitry Glukhovsky, who is an anti-war Russian, recently sentenced (in absentia) to 8 years in prison.
Interesting… that’s the 2nd video game based on a book that I had no idea was a book.
The other being S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which was based on the book Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who are also Russian.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
Now we have a whole rabbit hole of Russian genre fiction!
I recommend read him very attentively. The author is young, without a coherent picture of the world, in the middle of metro 2033 it turns into a hodgepodge of contradictions.
I’ve been meaning to read the Metro books! Loved the games but never got around to reading the source material. Thanks for the reminder!
Unfortunate about Lukyanenko’s comments nowadays but I might still check out the books because they sound interesting! Maybe I’ll avoid buying copies of those though. Thanks for the rec!
They really are very good books, and the first film, Night Watch, is good too. Based on about the first 3rd of the first book.
Then they did Day Watch and screwed it all up. :(
Not Before Sundown by Johanna Sinisalo.
Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky.
Like others, I’m hyping the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris.
With the caveat that I don’t really like his books, The Sands of Sarasvati by Risto Isomäki.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas by Jules Verne is absolutely worth the read. Just bear through the long lists of fish.
Thanks! What don’t you like about Risto Isomäki? This is the first I’ve heard of them.
Oh, well, it’s been a while, but… While Risto’s ideas tend to be interesting enough, as a writer and a storyteller I think he lacks finesse. Especially his characters and their interactions come off as flat and formulaic. Romance feels tacked on and clumsy and he’d be better off focusing on other areas. Still, I can’t say it’s all bad. I don’t want to drive anyone away from giving his work a chance.
If you’re interested in in humorous sci-fi, then check out The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Tarkovsky movies, either Stalker or Solaris. Both are incredibly slow but very solid. Admittedly, I watched them both during pandemic so the length bothered me less than it might of.
I’ll interpret non-US a bit broader as non-English. English is hugely dominant in scifi so it’s often hard to find good books in other languages. I’d also love to hear the recommendations of others too! A few I read:
- (German)
- “Die Welten der Skiir” trilogy (by Dirk van den Boom): https://bookwyrm.social/book/593373/s/die-welten-der-skiir-1 is really great . He also wrote another trilogy (Die Reise der Scythe) which is also quite nice.
- “3517 Anno Domini: Wir waren Götter” by Raik Thorstad. Note that his is a primarily an M/M romance, but it has a nice dystopian scifi setting.
- (Spanish)
- “En un lugar llamado tierra” - I read this long ago, don’t remember much: https://bookwyrm.social/book/979935/s/en-un-lugar-llamado-tierra
- La señal - https://bookwyrm.social/book/979918/s/la-senal
- (French) The works by Jules Verne should probably be mentioned here, despite being written well a century ago. “Vingt mille lieues sous les mers”, as already mentioned in another comment, is a must-read classic.
- “Helstrid” - I have this one on my e-reader for a while but haven’t properly started it yet: https://bookwyrm.social/book/1289177/s/helstrid , so I can’t say if it’s any good.
- (Dutch) Long ago as a teen I once read “Coriolis, de stormplaneet” and liked it: https://bookwyrm.social/book/979934/s/coriolis-de-stormplaneet
Thanks for the non-english recommendations! Jules Verne was mentioned elsewhere in the thread so I’ll have to check out his work. Great opportunity to brush up on reading French too :D
- (German)
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
I’ll suggest The Doomed City by the Strutgatsky brothers. I found it much more satisfying than Roadside Picnic. It’s much longer and much more philosophical. My username is from one of the characters in the book!
Perfect! Trying to get back into some more philosophical books since I’ve finished school. I’ll have to check this out too.
Anything by the Strugatsky brothers.
I recommend Ken Liu’s translated Chinese scifi short story anthologies, which include some stori3s by Liu Cixin. The books are called “Invisible Planets” and “Broken Stars”.
The Best of World SF is undeniably an excellent sampler of voices from around the world, both of authors and of translators.
The editor comes off as maybe a bit self-centred? But I can’t deny they have excellent taste and connections.
Andreas Eschbach is quite unknown outside of the German speaking world, but I can recommend e. g. his The Carpet Makers. It’s more of a soft sci-fi, dealing with a society on one quite strange world.
