@all: thanks for all your responses and suggestions. I made an account on Goodreads and started collecting much of what was mentioned on the want to read list, and already downloaded several samples.
Some of them really sound promising. Others… I had a look at some reviews they received or the publishers description and might give them a pass. Interestingly, Ian M. Banks Culture is among those which I might not read in the near future, being described at somewhat of an analogy on the Cold War. Others, like Charlie Stross’s apparently satirical (or cynical?) take on the UK as described by @robertmckenna sound really promising, despite that I am not a real fan of horror (which I can honour, but usually don’t enjoy that much).
While I was looking at the books and authors you fellow mutants suggested, I also came across a series which wasn’t mentioned here, but which I heard mentioned before. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. Out of a whim, I read a sample, and added it to my reading list. I am a bit unsure about using the Kindertransporte as an attempt to background in fantastic fiction, but I think I am interested to see if this is going to be expanded, and how. The topic might be dropped, which would be on the safer side for the author. But this could be interesting if explored in more detail. Or it might go very bad indeed. Difficult choice of a subject, indeed.
Mieville is a master in making strange worlds where you have to struggle before you figure out what’s going on. The City and the City, for example, where it takes a while to understand how the two cities fit together.
I’ve read them all (some time ago) and never got that from them in general. And they are not a series. There are several different books - different stories - all just set in a shared milieu. There is background ‘war’ - opposing/confilcting factions within the milieu - but it is often a background for more personal stories.
The Culture series is a science fictionseries written by Scottish author Iain M. Banks and released from 1987 through to 2012. The stories centre on The Culture, a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoidaliens, and advanced superintelligentartificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy. The main theme of the series is the dilemmas that an idealistic, more-advanced civilization faces in dealing with smaller, less-advanced civilizations that do not share its ideals, and whose behaviour it sometimes finds barbaric. In some of the stories action takes place mainly in non-Culture environments, and the leading characters are often on the fringes of (or non-members of) the Culture, sometimes acting as agents of Culture (knowing and unknowing) in its plans to civilize the galaxy. Each novel is a self-contained story with new characters, although reference is occasionally made to the events of previous novels.
But also, I’m inspired by this idea that you don’t have to let go of the world of make-believe to tell a serious story. This idea that persists in fiction and in storytelling that realistic fiction is the grown-up genre and that fantasy is child’s play, even though fantasy, at a certain point in our evolutionary history, was considered fact. At one point, Zeus was a fact. For a lot of people, Shango is a fact. Game of Thrones supported the idea of telling a story that is decidedly adult—although I have no problem with teenagers stealing this book—but retain the fantastical and even the supernatural. It liberated how I always wanted to tell a story but never felt I could.
I was going to recommend the Laundry series as well but the books have tracked increasingly too close to reality, except of course for all the gibbering horrors from beyond spacetime, which can only be a matter of time anyway… I agree with you about the New Management spinoff series as well, i’m half way through the second one and my decreasing enjoyment might well be because it’s no longer a stretch of the imagination to foresee this authoritarian government classifying all homeless and unemployed as “de-emphasised” or the home secretary having a Tzompantli erected to set an example! So proceed with caution but escapism it’s not.
Charlie has blogged that over the last decade or so it’s been getting harder and harder to write both near-future sci-fi and horror, because he keeps getting overtaken by real events recapitulating or outstripping his ideas for the next book.
Yeah, i read his blog and it’s hard not to see his Lovecraftian urban fantasy as now essentially reality-adjacent but with extra-dimensional mindeaters.
Switching between two novels about london Vampires, one deadly serious and set in the 21 century, the other quite silly and set in the 19th. My mood determines whether I prefer Mhari to Alexia.
He resisted doing a sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends for years, and when he finally gave in, it was a great example of why certain kinds of stories shouldn’t be continued
The sequel had to undue all the events that resolved the plot of the previous book, then the characters ran around randomly, then he had to put everything back the way it was before
All Moore’s books have the same kind of tone and pace and style—they don’t literally have to be about the same people, that’s not actually helpful
AFAIK his stand-alone novel Fluke is the only one that could be characterized as science fiction, people might want to check that one out if that’s their preferred genre
Add Glen Cook to the list. He did two book series that I loved when younger: the Black Company series and a detective/fantasy mashup that starts with Sweet Silver Blues. Honestly, though, they may be dated and my bias from misty eyed nostalgia.
The moment I realized that I’d have to pronounce the words with accent was key to my understanding of Ridley Walker. Even then I was missing so much. It’s a rewarding multiple read. Hoban was a genius.
I read Riggs’ series. Its a really interesting conceit, using found photos and constructing a tale around them. You could see where it got difficult in a few places, but overall, it was an enjoyable escape. Which sounds like what you are looking for.
I think Gibson said something similar in regard to his Peripheral trilogy. He had to postpone the second, and apparently struggles again with the third book.
In a way, it’s a shame because I liked his (pre-Brexit) vision of a Scotland in the EU, Britain reduced to only England and Wales, how he addressed a world coming to terms with global warming.
If you want ‘in at the deep end’ gobbledegook of the highest order, and you haven’t already read it, then Yoon Ha Lee’s Ninefox Gambit is the good stuff. If I could edit my brain to have not read it several times already, I’d do so so I could enjoy its Banksian high weirdness afresh.
I find that a problem in a lot of literature from the 1970s and 1980s: back then, it was novel and somehow forward thinking to even address these things, to acknowledge it. Over time, we realise just how ham-handed most those first attempts are, and now they come off more creepy and juvenile than mature.
Which, really, is another problem with science fiction in general: it tries to project into the future how things might turn out, how society may change, but the authors often make false assumptions about which mores will carry into the future. The chauvinism is only visible in the rearview mirror, and can get in the way of grasping the author’s intent. It’s why I find the changes made by AppleTV+ to Foundation quite enjoyable, as it’s the tale of what Hari Seldon set up with the Foundation that is interesting, not so much the political manoeuvering of a cigar-chomping mayor or the gushing 1950s love affair with nuclear power.
Science fiction simply has the problem that it has a freshness date, and it’s pretty damn hard to see which examples will age gracefully, and which will become chintzy and lose life.
