* Three Body Problem. I've heard of it many times, but never read it. Picked it up a month or two ago, read the whole thing in a few sessions, one of my favourite sci-fi books ever. Will read the next book in the series.
* Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive. Best pop-sci book I've read in a while. Strikes the right balance between including pertinent information without being overwhelming, explaining things in a digestible way without dumbing down, etc. Inspired me to read a proper immunology primer (How the Immune System Works), which was also very good.
* How Rights Went Wrong. An excellent, level-headed take on the U.S. conception of rights, and how it leads to zero-sum thinking in supreme court cases. The author is so relentlessly reasonable that it's hard not to buy into his argument. Even though this book is about the U.S., it has lots of case studies where it contrasts with various other countries, which helped me understand my country's (Canada's) court system and system of rights better.
Let-downs:
* Seeing Like a State. The first few chapters are interesting, and do a good job of explaining the world-view of the author. Worth buying just for this. However, the last half or two-thirds of the book is a tedious re-hashing of the same ideas through various examples.
* The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Many interesting factoids in here (killer asteroids: solved problem). However, the book's central argument failed to convince me. Many of the analyses and probability estimates were disappointingly shallow and hand-wavy, especially for the #1 risk cited in the book--unaligned AI--which he thinks has a 10% chance of ending civilization this century.
Three Body Problem's sequel, The Dark Forest, is one of the most mindblowing books I've ever read. When they go over the Dark Forest theory, I thought, wow, the author came up with a novel solution to Fermi's paradox, after all this time.
After reading Seeing Like a State and Utopia of Rules, I'm keen to learn more about "bureaucracy". My hunch is the battlelines and dogma wrt making the world "legible" (measureable, manageable) and "bullshit jobs" (make work, no value add) are overdue for an update.
I'm going to use my vote to vote against the Three Body Problem. If more people keep recommending it, more people will have to read it, and that would make me sad.
Because it's a terrible book.
It epitomizes the sort of sci Fi that sci Fi people keep recommending, with it's kinda interesting concept and embarrassingly bad writing. It's just hundreds of pages of unreadable.
And it ends abruptly before resolving anything so it tricks you into getting the sequel. Which is somehow even more poorly written.
I wouldn't call it bad writing. It is different from what I used to. It is non-linear, which is actually quite common (eg see Hyperion) and I would say not-character-focused. It is more about a concept itself. And even though latter I don't like much, the core idea of the book is very interesting.
For me it was harder to read, but still very enjoyable experience.
>And it ends abruptly before resolving anything
hmmm, I wonder what kind of books you usually read. Because this is very common approach, when authors don't do full LoTR ending, but end story at the point when reaching it would be rewarding, but won't everything to the last bit, so readers can still think about for a while.
I know what you mean about the bad writing, but I don’t think that makes it a terrible book. Unfortunately most sci-fi has flat writing for the same reason most great literature recycles the same ideas and concepts: it’s hard to do everything at once.
Sci-fi generally sacrifices prose quality and character depth to pack in more interesting ideas; great literature generally makes the opposite tradeoff. If you read a sci-fi novel expecting great writing you’ll be frustrated.
Three Body Problem had enough interesting ideas to keep me turning the page, where most sci-fi novels don’t—I prefer short stories for sci-fi exactly because of the generally low quality writing.
Some people like this kind of book. In fact, I sometimes wonder if explicitly "bad writing" is good for hard sci-fi, at least some authors. My personal favorite example is Greg Egan. In Permutation City/etc., characters are cardboard cutouts, but the books are wonderful based on the ideas. Then in Teranesia he tried to write characters but the ideas fell flat IMHO. It's almost like there's limited bandwidth...
+1 for poor writing. I tried to read it after hearing recommendations and being interested in the idea of Sci-fi happening outside of the US. I got bored halfway through the first volume and dropped it.
If you haven't read Ted Chiang's short stories yet, do so. His first collection (Stories of Your Life and Others) was my favourite, but his more recent one (Exhalation) was also very good (the title story, Exhalation, is gorgeous). Stories of your Life is what the movie Arrival was based on and (as ever) the story was better than the movie.
As far as sci-fi novels, I have pretty generic tastes for this crowd: Dune, The Dispossessed, The Martian. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favourite books. Not exactly sci-fi but close.
I really had hard time getting into the expanse and dropped it in the middle of first book. Heard so many good things about it I was maybe biased but I couldn't stand every chapter being written on the exact same structure with the mandatory cliffhanger just before the next one.
I couldn't get the idea of a book being written following a formula learned in writing school off my head.
* Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System that Keeps You Alive. Best pop-sci book I've read in a while. Strikes the right balance between including pertinent information without being overwhelming, explaining things in a digestible way without dumbing down, etc. Inspired me to read a proper immunology primer (How the Immune System Works), which was also very good.
* How Rights Went Wrong. An excellent, level-headed take on the U.S. conception of rights, and how it leads to zero-sum thinking in supreme court cases. The author is so relentlessly reasonable that it's hard not to buy into his argument. Even though this book is about the U.S., it has lots of case studies where it contrasts with various other countries, which helped me understand my country's (Canada's) court system and system of rights better.
Let-downs:
* Seeing Like a State. The first few chapters are interesting, and do a good job of explaining the world-view of the author. Worth buying just for this. However, the last half or two-thirds of the book is a tedious re-hashing of the same ideas through various examples.
* The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Many interesting factoids in here (killer asteroids: solved problem). However, the book's central argument failed to convince me. Many of the analyses and probability estimates were disappointingly shallow and hand-wavy, especially for the #1 risk cited in the book--unaligned AI--which he thinks has a 10% chance of ending civilization this century.