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A comment on Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations?.

Re:Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations? by dcminter on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @09:21AM (#28060693)
The one really first rate recent SF novel I can recall is: "This is how you lose the time war" [0] by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It's far from being Hard SF if you like that (I do) but the humour and poetry of it won me over very fast. I bought it purely on the basis of the delicious title!

The "Lady Astronaut" series [1] by Mary Robinette Kowal is not first rate, but it is reliably entertaining and a fairly Hard SF alternate history with some interesting choices.

I'm going to take a liberty and also recommend a much older SF book that I rarely see mentioned; "Fiasco" by Stanisław Lem. This one's all about the characterization and the big picture of humanity's fatal flaws. Not hard SF as such, but he tells a good tall tale when he needs to mess with space and time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_How_You_Lose_the_Time_...

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/series/193730-lady-astronaut-unive...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

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Re:Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations? by code_Whisperer on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @10:41AM (#28061545)
Thank you for this! Based on your recommendation of Lem's "Fiasco" I have purchased "This is How You Lose the Time War". I had not heard of this one and it sounds excellent!
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Re:Ask HN: Modern Sci-Fi Book Recommendations? by minnca on Wednesday August 04, 2021 @07:36PM (#28067831)
This is how you lose the time war is unlike any other book I've read! I thought it was super disorienting – and I loved that.
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