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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
(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.
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
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".
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.