[Nicky Agate]

Welcome to the Humanities Commons speculative fiction group! I’m envisaging this as a place to share scholarship and events, of course, but also as a source of recommendations and discussion of contemporary speculative and science fiction. So… what are you reading? What would you recommend?

[Nicky Agate]

I’ll start!

I’ve just finished The Obelisk Gate, the second book in NK Jemisin‘s Broken Earth trilogy, and enjoyed it even more than last year’s Hugo-winning The Fifth Season. I find Jemisin’s world building to be remarkable, and am more than a little sad that the final installment doesn’t come out until the fall. February also saw me finally read Madd Adam, the phenomenal Margaret Atwood‘s follow-up to Oryx and Crake, and Neal Stephenson’s excellent Reamde, a madcap adventure involving hackers, Silicon Valley, the Russian mafia, a geologist, and the CIA.

As for other recommendations, I’ve been following the work of Nick Harkaway (particularly Angelmaker and The Gone-Away World) and David Mitchell (particularly The Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), and I’ll devour anything by China Miéville, whose The City and the City that keeps coming back to haunt me.

You? What are you reading? What do you recommend?

[sebastien doubinsky]

Hi! I am reading Cixin Liu’s fabulous trilogy, “The three-body problem”, “The Dark Forest” and “Death’s end” – which I very highly recommend. I don’t know if Berit Elligsen’s “Empty City” would fit in, but it’s a very interesting read and can be considered as a speculative vision of future cities.

[Camilla Hoel]

Hello!
I am actually working on an article on those two Harkaway novels! Though it is not my friend at the moment, so I have put it aside for some Victorian stuff.

I just finished The Three Body Problem! It took an odd turn (felt a little like going from a political police procedural to Stanislaw Lem quite suddenly), but I liked it. I do not read enough non-Western science fiction, so if anyone has any recommendations for that I would be very grateful.

I have also been reading some Octavia Butler lately. Reading Parable of the Talents in 2017 cut a little close. I also need to return to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy. I have only read the first book so far, but I loved that. It reminded me a little of Hannu Rajaniemi’s Jean Le Flambeur trilogy, which I would also really recommend.

[Nicky Agate]

Oh, @camillahoel, I would love to read that article when you’re feeling ready to share! And yes, I agree that Octavia Butler feels not-quite-speculative enough in 2017. Le sigh.

[Brent Ryan Bellamy]

Hi All,

 

I’m just finishing Invisible Planets ed. Ken Liu. It’s fantastic! I esp. recommend it to people reading The Three Body Problem as Cixin Liu has a short story in the collection.

 

–B

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