Fiction We Loved as Adults

“First Blood” by David Morrell is a good book. It is much more nuanced and interesting than the movie. I remember reading that Sylvester Stallone demanded that the script be changed to make the Rambo character more sympathetic which was probably a good idea when it came to marketing the movie to mass audiences but much of what made the novel fascinating was lost along the way.

I just finished The Magicians by Lev Grossman, and I was surprised how much it affected me emotionally. It’s been called Harry Potter for adults, but it owes a lot more to a rather clever reinterpretation of CS Lewis.

Again, where to begin? For one thing, I’m very with you on the Bujold stuff. Most of the rest of my tastes are in science fiction, occasionally fantasy.

C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series — this one is very important to me, and it’s been running for more than two decades. The basic premise is that a human colony space vessel gets lost in hyperspace, unable to determine whether it’s even in the same universe anymore, and chances upon a planet that is inhabited by the humanoid atevi, who are at this point at a steam-age level of technology. Some of the colonists go down to the planet after rebelling against the ship authorities, who leave in a huff. After a short war that nearly exterminates the human population, the humans are ceded an island by the emerging centralized atevi leadership, in exchange for “rent” paid in technology that keeps that atevi leaders in power, transferred by a single human delegated to live among the atevi governing class.

Fast-forward 200 years.

Bren Cameron is the new paidhi, the designated human, at time when atevi have nearly reached technological parity with humans, but the planned, mutually-agreed transfer has left atevi with a cleaner environment and better-preserved traditional culture. As such, the paidhi is now a nearly unimportant figure, an alien curiosity in atevi governing circles. Then an unauthorized attempt on his life (assassinations can be authorized in atevi society) reveals a very unanticipated crisis that kicks off the transition of the atevi to a spacefaring society, and forces a realignment of the relationship with the much expanded, but still relatively small human population. A transition still in progress, after nearly 20 years of writing,

Linguistics features prominently in this work, as well as psychology and anthropology — the atevi are behaviourally similar to humans, except not. Atevi don’t feel love, they feel man’chi, which is deceptively like love, but not, dangerously not. And atevi can be fooled into thinking that humans feel man’chi…

Julian May’s Galactic Milieu universe — this is three series of a total of eight books: “The Saga of Pliocene Exile”, “Intervention”, and “The Galactic Milieu Trilogy”. They’re a brilliantly-written time-paradox story, also written over a long period of time, with a great deal of planning, since the ending of the last book (written in the 90s) is the premise of the first book, written in the 70s. The story tells of the adoption of the human race into a galactic civilization called the Milieu, which intervenes in a near-nuclear annihilation after a group of “metapsychics” makes a desperate telepathic call to the universe for help. It turns out that there is a price to be paid, and the humans who don’t want to pay it end up losing, and killing four billion sentient beings in the process, and then being driven into Earth’s far, far past, where they encounter something they didn’t expect, and that is the opening premise of the series.

I come back to this regularly, and I utterly loathe the philosophy revealed, seemingly unironically, in the novels. It’s subtly but obviously fascist, corporatist, eugenicist, you name it, with an immortal and implacable galactic government running on a philosophy very similar to a subtly subverted form of Catholic mysticism, which humans are supposed to have accidentally stumbled on on their own.

But the things I disagree about it, and the skill with which it was written, drive me back again and again to read this series, especially the last books. Crucifixion is a central theme in this series, with many types of crucifixions appearing throughout the series — noble ones, subverted ones, demonic ones, etc. Because a central way of revealing “metapsychic” powers is through agony, and the universal appearance of “metapsychic” powers is so important to the Galactic Milieu, the infliction of pain is one of the banal medical therapies inflicted on “normals” on the brink of transition to “operancy” — without any critical comment whatsoever.

The series also contains some of the best depictions of psychological-political machinations in SF ever written.

Terry Pratchett — Enough said, right? However, I also appreciated his less widely-read works, like the non-Discworld Bromeliad trilogy, where a tribe of gnomes must find a way to leave the world and their gods, which happen to be a department store on the brink of closing down. “Everything must go!” Holy Albert Bros. commands it! Touching and compassionate, when the gnomes figure out who they really are, and who the giants are who seem to run their world.

Charles Stross — I’ve become a big fan of his Lovecraftian-horror IT-support nerd-joke spy novels, The Laundry Files. The Laundry is a code name for a secret British spy organization, so secret that not even the elected government knows about it. And it is charged with defending the realm against the horrifying threats that lurk beyond the space-time continuum and are attracted to our universe by…excessive computation. And to stamp out deliberate uses of this dangerous magic outside its own aegis…by absorbing potential perpetrators into its ranks! The main character, Bob Howard, is at the beginning an IT support desk worker, whose particular skills are needed on certain field missions involving breaking into Unix computers in corporate labs whose scientists have figured out too much, etc.

The series is at its eighth novel and counting, and the problem with an unaccountable secret government agency with magic powers is not lost on the author, trust me.

David Brin — Brin in some ways embodies a lot of what people around here think is long with technocratic centrists (you can find his blog where he writes about how to solve the world’s problems by the application of Reason ™). But he is nevertheless an excellent and imaginative science fiction writer. His most famous work is the Uplift series — humanity emerges into a very densely populated universe, in which pretty much all alien races have been “uplifted”, genetically modified into sentience, by some other race, creating hierarchies of species “family tree” alliances. And humans emerge with no patronage…but having previously uplifted chimpanzees and dolphins, without realizing how they were presumptuously imitating their betters!

The arrival of humans creates an epic-scale political crisis across the Five Galaxies, in part to do with the origin story of the whole galactic system (who did the first uplift?) and in part to do with the ancient governing structure for interplanetary migration and environmental protection. This is also space opera SF that does not assume that any of the alien races are meaningfully similar to humans in physical terms. Humanity’s closest allies are “slow” shapeshifters that make themselves look roughly human, and then in part because they find human shapes fashionable…

Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy — starting with “Range of Ghosts”, Bear paints a fantasy world that is very similar in cultural structure to our world and focuses on a Mongolian-equivalent steppe people, who are threatened by invasion and displacement by wielders of an ancient magic. A central and very interesting conceit here is that the gods of each people manifest themselves in the colour and contents of the sky, and whoever is dominant in a land has a sky that suits their cosmology. Meaning, the next morning after a conquest, a very different sun may rise, including the sun of the gods of a dead alien race, which is deadly to all biological life. Themes of sacrifice and responsibility are explored in great detail here.

Sheri Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country — Tepper passed away recently (like Pratchett), she’s considered a writer of near-classic feminist SF. The Gate to Women’s Country is, I think, considered her magnum opus. It is set in a postapocalyptic future in the the vicinity of Oregon (I think — the USA no longer exists in the story). A small number of cities scrape by, run by women. Outside the cities, men live in garrisons as warriors for a corresponding city, except those men who (voluntary) pass through the ritual Gate to Women’s Country, and become effectively public servant city administrators, considered a very dishonorable fate by the men.

But nothing is really as it seems, and the protagonist, a young woman from the ruling female class, experiences both what is wrong with her society — and why her elders deemed it necessary to do what they have done and deceive the world.

It contains some of the tropes in a very raw form that some people dislike about 70s radical feminism. Tepper went on to write a lot of “revenge of Mother Nature and, yes, Mother Nature is a woman with a cruel sense of humor” fantasy and SF of varying quality.

Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age; or, a young lady’s illustrated primer” — the gold standard in futuristic dystopia-cyberpunk, in my opinion. Humanity is divided into decentralized nation-corporations, except for the teeming masses, who are trapped in a kind of luxurious techno-poverty outside of a corporate umbrella. A corporate leader constructs a self-modifying, self-referential educational program to teach his daughter the virtues required for her to grow up a member of the ruling class of her corporate clan. It falls into other girls’ hands…and its self-modifying nature creates a very complex political crises involving a dispute over the right way to use nanotechnology. I appreciated this standalone book partly because it makes a strong case for the relative nature of poverty and wealth.

There’s so much more and I can’t believe how long this ended up being, but here was a sample of what I would like to recommend…

Ian, I wish you and your readers the same thrill of discovery I felt reading the very first Spenser novel, ” The Godwulf Manuscript,” when it came out in the mid 1970s. Parker’s construct of Spenser seemed (at the time) like a surprisingly original, ground-breaking and genre-busting updating of the hardboiled detective Hammett and Spillane wrote about. But instead of wearing a rumpled fedora, a trench coat and nicotine stains on the fingers, Spenser knew a thing or two about English tweeds, fine wine, Romantic poets, and academia—yet could bench 250lbs all day long and hold his own in a boxing ring. I’m not sure if that kind of character seems either too improbable to be true, or too old-hat nowadays; but again, I wish everyone that sort of thrill of discovery.

I’ll also mention Dorothy Sayers’ “Gaudy Night,” ostensibly a crime novel but one with a lot to say about the lives and experiences of high-functioning women academics in the 1930s –something of a departure from Sayers’ long train of Peter Wimsey mysteries in that it features Harriet Vane and a collection of well-drawn female characters at a women’s college much like Sayers’ own alma mater, Shrewsbury College. It was for me an immersion into a rarefied and fascinating world, so much so that the ‘crime’ aspects seemed almost incidental to the larger picture.

What geology texts? I’m serious. I loved my college textbook and liked some of McPhee’s stuff. I have a coffee table geology book from the 60’s called Geology Illustrated, full of absolutely gorgeous black and white photos of landscapes that illustrate various concepts. Not a geologist, but I could imagine being one if I relived my life.

I tried reading The Magicians, but about halfway through volume 2 realized I didn’t like it at all and didn’t care what happened to anyone.

I loved Tolkien and Lewis’s fantasies ( including the little known Till we have Faces) and in large part because I like the good vs evil aspect. I don’t need my fantasies to be gritty, though I did like George Martin until the fourth and fifth volume.

The Spenser novels are great, though repetitious. The character of Hawk doesn’t really make much sense. He is apparently a scary hit man, but we never see the ugly side– we only see him helping Spenser be the good guy.

Fiction;
Hyperion series by Dan Simmons
Dune by Frank Herbert

Non-fiction;
The Dancing Wu Li Masters

I’m now and for the last few years consumed by history;

David Graeber’s; Debt; the First 5,000 Years; Best history of money I’ve ever read.
John Taylor Gatto’s; The Underground History of American Education; must read history of education and the origin of the educational system in the U.S. and why it’s so fucked up.

Tony Hillerman were page turners, read them all.

Read voraciously from about 4-5 through high school, including a lot of SciFI: Asimov, Van Vogt, Heinlein, Alan Dean Foster & M.A.Foster. As a teen, very into the Beats, particularly poets and playwrights. After USAF & college came the ’60s with their own genres. In more ‘traditional’ mode, I am quite fond of John Masters (in fact, I’m currently re-reading his Loss of Eden trilogy), Conrad Richter, Willa Cather, Maurice Walsh. More recent stuff like Down By The River, The Son, Goodby to a River, The Art of Racing in the Rain. Usually have two books in-progress at a time; one fiction, the other non-fiction. And poetry. Always poetry.

Good Grief, I can’t do this memory is gone, trying to remember my favorites. Reading is breathing.

In the 1970s I devoured High-Lit: Joyce, Mann (Buddenbrooks and Doktor Faustus more than MM, though I read these all multiple times. Read Proust, but not a favorite. Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat. John Fowles Daniel Martin liked better than French Lieutenant. Gide Counterfeiters. Cheever short stories. Pynchon up to the 80s. Rilke. Wallace Stevens. Nietszche, Wittgenstein, Kierkeggaard.

In the 80s I got a list of Hugo and Nebula nominees and read them all, and everything by the authors, visiting the used book stores to get the out of prints: Lafferty, Cherryh, Doris Pischeria, Early and middle Silverberg, Leiber, Disch, Compton, Bester, Tanith Lee

Switched to horror: King, Robert McCammon (They Thirst is terrific fun), Dan Simmons, Graham Masterson,oh oh Thomas Tessier is special more more

Around 1990 I moved to mysteries, mostly hardboiled: Sorry, didn’t like Parker at all, read all the Vachss but didn’t care much. Sorry I am looking at the shelves and the paperbacks are behind the DVD’s but there are hundreds to thousands. Pronzini. Loren Estleman. Le Carre. Westlake. Chandler was in the 70s. Stout as a kid. All McBain. Nah it’s unfair maybe tomorrow.

Gave up on fiction with the millenium and maybe read 2-3 this century.

I love these posts. I love reading about what other people read and am amazed at how much sci fi and fantasy is beloved by Ian and his readers.

Reading Roth’s, I Married a Communist, right now. Everything by Roth, Chabon, Updike, Atwood, McCarthy, some Pynchon, Amis, Beckett plays. Also loved a whole bunch of Southern writers, Kennedy, Donald Harrington, Faulkner, Porter, Warren. Where Ian reads series about the same characters, Roth and Updike write novels where the same, or similar, characters appear in multiple novels. Roth = Nathan Zuckerman = Roth. I go on kicks where I read the same two or three authors for a few years. I turn down the corners of pages with particularly good writing that sticks in my craw. Stories about New Jersey, New England, the early factories, strikes, race riots, unions, appear in these authors’ books, and speak to our history and who we were and have become.

English. McEwan, LeCarre, PD James. French (French Lit major), everything by Gide, Robbe-Grillet, Sartre, Rousseau, Voltaire, Dumas, Saint-Exupery, Baudelaire (les fleurs du mal), Racine, Balzac, Maupassant. My wife gave my collection of French authors away to our local used bookstore, because I had not read one in many years.

I come from a planning background, so have read a lot of Rybczynski, Kunstler, Davis. It’s why I particularly like Ian’s posts on cities and planning.

Dune? Hillerman? All of that and more…wandered into the wrong comment section.

Incidentally, if there are kids around cause it may not work for olders, I kinda recommend my program above which may have similarities to academic training or 2nd language immersion learning. Very opposed to Tyler Cohen’s or speedreading, you don’t look for the core idea in a paragraph or page of Jane Austen.

In your twenties read the toughest stuff you can find, way above your level. Read every word without worrying much about comprehension. The idea is to get into the flow and author’s voice and accumulating context. Learn how to not let the mind wander, focus on concentration without comprehension. Stop thinking while reading, they are two unrelated practices. Intuition and holographic memory will supply meaning. Reread for meaning and critical reading if desired.

After you are able to read a Nabokov novel in an evening after work then you will able to read 2-3 Dicks in the same amount of time.

Academics read too purposely, seeking the nuggets that they can use in their work and missing the whole. I can’t tell you how many critical works on Joyce I felt missed the point and feelings in Ulysses.

Or I could be full of shit.

Historical fiction:

Dorothy Dunnett, “The Lymond Chronicles” Renaissance politics, Scotland to Russia
Thomas Flanagan, Irish history, ”The Year of the French” and two more
Paul Scott, “Raj Quartet” India colonialism in detail

Most anything by Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley and the unedited original manuscripts of Zane Grey. Last of the Duanes is a good example.

Fiction:
All of the Farseer books by Robin Hobb
I started with Fool’s Errand, finished that trilogy, then went back to read the Assassin trilogy then finally the Fool & the Fitz trilogy. Her writing is superb, the sympathetic hero is an assassin, and I will never forget her characters, who are as real as anyone in real life.

Araminta Station, Jack Vance
No one can create an entire complex culture through words the way Vance can. Elegant, cryptic, precise, with great command of style. I re-read this series just to savor his language and characters.

Wave without a Shore, C.J. Cherryh
Our hubris puts humans at the center of the universe, in this book to the extent that the native people of the planet cannot be “seen”. The central character, Herrin, excels in this hubristic and competitive society, until the day he sees the others, and himself becomes unseen.

Villette, Charlotte Bronte
The spiritual pain and isolation due to brutal barriers to self-actualization imposed by society (in this case 19thC Europe) – usually hidden in the works of Jane Austen – are revealed here in the central character who defies those limits by insisting on being allowed to be fully human.

Songmaster, Orson Scott Card
Card’s recurrent themes of achieving inborn potential through both inner control of childhood pain or abuse and outward surrender to one’s duty are evident here, but it is the magic of Song and its beauty and mutilating terror when wielded by a Songmaster that shines in this book.

The City & The City, China Mieville
A new and original voice in scifi; the novel is reminiscent of a European cold war detective thriller set in a city riven by two universes whose characters both profit from the tacit agreement to ignore the other reality and who develop illicit partnerships across it.

Sabriel (Abhorsen trilogy), Garth Nix
To me, Sabriel is even braver than Harry Potter, navigating the nine levels of the icy river of Death with her set of bells, from tiny Ranna to Saraneth, strapped in a bandolier across her chest. Mysterious and engrossing.

Non-fiction:
The Fiction of a Thinkable World, Michael Steinberg
It is not surprising that our self-contained, individualistic, dichotomous view – of thought, of ourselves and the world – led to our current cultural/socio-economic system. But thought is an iterative, social process, and other ways of being are possible.

Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown, Alan Watts
Or almost anything by Watts. More concise than Tolle yet equally consciousness-shifting.

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, William Cronon
The”Nature” on which our U.S. civilization (so to speak) is built is itself a second layer imposed on the underlying nature through both physical and economic processes. However, see below.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles Mann
The vast American wilderness described by European colonists was no such thing, but instead a landscape with a long history of both efficient and poor, but in all cases extensive, management by those who lived here in the centuries prior. These advanced civilizations existed across thousands of years and both the North and South American continents.

Geology and by extension plate techtonics, vulcanology and planetary science – all disciplines pretty much as young as I – have been my hobby since I witnessed St Helens erupt, not too long after witnessing a total eclipse, a hobby I can now retired happily delve jealously into. Not to mention you need to know more than just a little about geology to understand what’s happening in our deteriorating atmosphere.

My focus is of course Cascadia, and I would recommend The Restless Northwest, A Geological Story as a primer. In storyform it tells the ninety million year process by which Cascadia came to be. I call it young because I’ve a 1955 college text – Cascadia – that makes no mention of plate techtonics (didn’t know about them), continental subductions, or an interconnected Ring of Fire. I often troll trolls with I’ve oceanfront property for sale, cheap, cash only. In Idaho. It’s only a couple of tens of millions of years away from the truth.

If I were to name the one work of fiction that had the greatest influence, that happily time and again reread, it would be Sometimes a Great Notion.

Boy, where to start? I second all the recs for PKD, Ursula LeGuin called him “our Borges”. Some popular fiction it seems this readership would like is Harry Turtledove, who specializes in the alternate history genre(though he’s written some straight fantasy). He’s got a whole series set in “not the Byzantine Empire” and another of “WWII but with magic and Dragons instead of technology”. His novel, “The Guns of the South”, in which time traveling white supremacists give General Lee 100,000 Ak-47’s has been called by serious scholars “the most important book on the Civil war in the last 50 years.” He has another series in which a race of space-faring reptiles invade in the midst of WWII. He’s a professor of Byzantine history, in his mundane life, so the details of his various periods always have the sparkle of veracity.
James Ellroy: “The Black Dahlia” and everything after that. Ellroy went from being a perfectly adequate genre writer to being in the company of Raymond Chandler and maybe Dostoevsky in terms of his examination of the very depths of humanity and the sheer excellence of his prose. His characters are variously corrupt and venal, tormented by the past and possessed of the wisdom that comes with the long experience of Evil.
Its hard to put a label on the kind of fiction Tim Powers does. Fantasy is probably the best catch all term, though he’s done some more-or-less SF as well. A good, stand-alone, introduction might be “Declare!”, a novel of British intelligence during and after WWII, the Kim Philby spy ring, and the “djinn” of “1001 Nights” fame. He’s done Historical, in “The Stress of Her Regard” about Byron and Shelly and Co. and their unexpected relationship with an ancient Greek spirit. He’s done Contemporary in “the Fault-line Series” that starts with “Last Call”, in which mysterious forces contend for the crown of “The King in the West”, once held by Bugsy Siegel.
William Vollmann: Everything. His series, “Seven Dreams” are series of novels that explore the coming of the white man to the New World, starting with the Norse in “The Ice Shirt”, continuing with John Smith and Pocahontas in “Argall”, the French Jesuits in “Father’s and Crows”, the Franklin expedition in “The Rifles”. And he puts a world of meticulous detail into these novels, so much so that the chapters have end notes where he cites sources. Vollmann is a writer of great compassion and there is a certain wistful sadness that pervades his historical works as the inevitable doom and degradation of the characters unfolds. His contemporary novel, “The Royal Family” is a sprawling saga of magical realism(ala’ Marquez) and a cast of outsiders: prostitutes, hobos and a pedophile and its absolutely riveting, despite being 800+ pages long.
Joyce, Celine(you think Terry Pratchett is funny? Celine is FUNNY!), WS Burroughs, Faulkner, Bukowski, William Gaddis! There’s somebody who needs his horn blown. He has to have the most original voice in American literature in the last 50 years. He only wrote 4 novels but established a whole new format to tell them with. They are almost entirely composed of what the characters say, sometimes dialogue, sometimes monologue, with barely any connective narration and you can only tell who is speaking by HOW they speak. He’s also an absolutely wicked satirist. His 2nd novel, “J.R.” tells the tale of a struggling young composer and his some time student, the 11 year old title character, who become enmeshed in the workings of Wall Street, due to said 11 year old’s spectacularly successful investments in “penny-stocks”.

Lot of good picks in these comments! I’d like to add Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin series. Talk about old friends. O’Brian’s characters inhabit their early 19th century milieu with ease, and the minutiae of sailing is lots of fun. Best to read them in order, to get the full arc of the main characters.

Since a lot of SF has been mentioned, Id like to throw in two nearly forgotten short story specialists: Cordwainer Smith and R. A. Lafferty. Smith’s stories occasionally pop up in used book stores and on amazon. R. A. Lafferty’s stories are hard to find but worthwhile.

I second the Philip Kerr series starting with March Violets, and Alan Furst’s stories set around the second World War. I’ve reread Chandler more times than I can remember, and never tire of him. I liked Spenser, but was really put off by Parker’s completion of the Poodle Springs Story (unfinished by Chandler).
One rule I’ve learned the hard way: anything raved about on public radio is likely to be a major disappointment. About 10 years ago, “On Chesil Beach” was all the rage, and I read it from a library copy. It made no impression. About a year later, I got a copy with a box of other books, and I reread it. On rereading it, i was really annoyed that I had wasted several hours twice in my life on this twaddle.
I’ve been reading a good bit of John Michael Greer recently (formerly blogging at The Archdruid Report; now at Ecosophia.net) His latest (The Weird of Hali:) is a series taken from the view of H.P Lovecraft’s weird elders, and I’m loving them. That may have to do with my living right behind the home of Charles Dexter Ward…..
Any other book listed here which I’ve read I can also recommend, so I suspect you can’t go wrong anywhere on these lists.

Don’t have much time at the moment, so please accept a mostly bare list:

1) The Revelation Space trilogy by Alastair Reynolds. Other good books by him include the Poseidon’s Children Trilogy (book 2 drags, but 3 ends *very* well), Terminal World, and Pushing Ice.
2) Wool, Third Shift, and Dust by Hugh Howey. Excellent world-building, including a decent amount of thought as to the psychology of said world.
3) Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. Also, Embassytown.
4) Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross.
5) Sister Alice by Robert Reed.
6) John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War books are quick, fun reads.
7) Neal Asher’s writing is clunky at best, but two of his books, conceptually, stand out for me: (a) The Skinner and (b) Hilldiggers.

I really need to start reading fiction outside the “scifi” label…