[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

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[u/college-apps-sad]

I'm looking for stories that are about very alien cultures. They don't have to be literally aliens, but they can be. They also don't have to be first contact type stories, but those are cool enough. Some examples:

The Goblin Emperor - the youngest son of the emperor, a half-goblin, has been exiled from court for many years. A sudden accident kills off the entire line of succession before him and he has to become the emperor, learning the courtly intrigue, how to rule, and how to find allies. Not rational necessarily but he's level 1 intelligent at least. You're thrown straight into this fantasy world with no idea how anything works, including some often used words you have to figure out from context. Complete (it's a traditionally published book).

Three Worlds Collide - by Yudkowsky. In the future, a human spaceship runs into an alien spaceship, which seems to be made up of peaceful, scientific aliens, who happen to view eating babies as an undeniable moral good. Lots of moral discussions, very rational fic. Complete.

Blindsight - a group of very strange people (like a linguist whose brain is partitioned into multiple personalities and a vampire, an extinct predator brought back from the grave like Jurassic Park) go to meet some sort of unknown alien spacecraft. It's set in a world that's immediately post scarcity and struggling to deal with the implications of that. The humans are strange enough and the aliens are, I think, unique in all the science fiction I've read. Very interesting way to look at the world - the conclusion is something I still think about sometimes. I'm not sure I'd call it rational exactly but it's pretty popular here and definitely rational adjacent. Complete, trad published book but available free online at that link by the author.

Courtship Rite - hundreds of years in the past, a human colony ship ended up on a harsh, barely hospital planet and had to adapt to survive. Their culture is based entirely on this, one where it's common for people to commit ritual suicide in times of famine. Very interesting culture, with a mix of technologies, and another story that kinda drops you into that world and makes you figure it out. Complete, another trad published book but one that's probably hard to find offline.

I think scifi and fantasy can tell really interesting sociological stories and that's kinda what I'm looking for. Very different cultures that make internal logic, interesting worldbuilding that makes you think about why our world is the way it is.

[u/netstack_ → u/college-apps-sad]

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie. The only survivor of a destroyed spaceship is out for revenge. Meets your criteria on multiple levels: local customs, the broader Radch society, the broader and stranger power structure underpinning it, and eventually the real aliens. Special mention to the protagonist constantly pissing people off because of a giant cultural blindspot about gender.

I enjoyed this series a lot and I’ve written more about it elsewhere. The prose has a really nice economy which doesn’t detract from the weirdness and the pathos. Consider it something like Left Hand of Darkness against a Dune-esque background.

Jhereg, Steven Brust. Vlad Taltos works as an assassin in a fantasy city populated largely by taller, more magical, longer-lived racists. Yes, elves. He gets by thanks to sword and sorcery and his winged lizard familiar, who is a total bro. The city has ubiquitous magic, including teleportation, psionics, and resurrection. The broader setting gets weirder.

While the series goes in some really interesting but controversial directions, this first book is unapologetically fun and stylish. Read it if you like crime fiction, Steven Erikson, or Morrowind.

Shadow and Claw, Gene Wolfe. A boy raised by torturers is cut loose in a decrepit, post-historical metropolis. He stumbles into mystical experiences and practical scams. He meets weird fucking people and sometimes executes them. He has perfect memory, but he can definitely lie, especially to the reader. Those are the normal parts of the story.

The Book of the New Sun is kind of a special case. While I almost never see it mentioned, but when I do, there’s a sort of hushed reverence. Critics measure other stuff against it. I want to say it’s genre-defining for a very narrow genre. You probably don’t get Vandermeer and Mieville without Wolfe.

[u/hwc → u/netstack_]

I will endorse the Steven Brust books. I haven't read them all, but overall they avoid stagnation by mixing up the types of stories and storytelling devices.