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These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.) If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Pe

These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.) If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).

jillesvangurp 2y ago
I read both of those. Peter Watts is a bit of an acquired taste. Not for everyone. I actually enjoyed it but it's a weird one. Genetically modified people that are effectively vampires, a main protagonist with severe brain damage, etc. There's a sequel to this too if you enjoy this. The Hail Mary project was actually enjoyable. Andy Weir peaked with the Martian his debut novel and this is kind of in the same style. Maybe not as good but enjoyable.
berkes 2y ago
> the alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother You put that as critique, and I understand that. But for me, this was actually the strength of the story. By making the differences smaller, they are more focused, stronger, and give opportunity to explore them in depth. Same thing I like about many of the Black Mirror stories: often they tweak, or magnify, just one parameter of our realistic, current (western) lives and then explore the differences that would bring.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  But Black Mirror is about us whereas the frustrating thing with depictions of aliens is that they're not us, that's their defining feature.
  - berkes 2y ago
    Stories about aliens aren't meant to describe aliens as theoretically correct as possible. Obviously. Aliens are hardly ever more than a tool to get a perspective. To look at humans, societies, structures etc. They are also stories _about us_.
    - tialaramex 2y ago
      In a story like "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" sure, the purpose of the aliens (Martians in that case) is purely to tell us about us. But you don't really need aliens for that, there are several Black Mirror stories which do roughly the same perspective trick, particularly "Men Against Fire". Aliens offer an opportunity to explore something quite different and it's always disappointing to see them used as something less interesting. It's like FTL. FTL is actually exactly equivalent to time travel, and so it's disappointing, though commonplace to see SF which decides to do FTL but no time travel (or indeed vice versa though that's less common).. I like Culture novels just fine, I like Greg Egan's Amalgam setting (with aliens who are basically just us again, although a bit less obviously so than a Star Trek alien) just fine, but, in both cases I'm a little disappointed. If your aliens aren't even as weird as the Octopus is (and we have no idea what the fuck is going on with an Octopus) then you're not really trying are you?
lynx23 2y ago
Beware, you'll also get Vampires in space, which is so silly, it kills the book.
- AlphaAndOmega0 2y ago
  They're a better depiction of Vampires than most, with Watts doing everything he could to make them biologically plausible (that can only go so far). That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines and sedate them when not in use! Spoilers: It seems weird to me that a society with other posthumans and intelligent AGI would be bowled over quite so easily by the vampires, but oh well.
  - lynx23 2y ago
    They still killed the book for me. The underlying idea (no spoilers) is absolutely great sci-fi. All this useless blast-from-the-past did was make the story look silly to me. Such a shame. He could have written a great sci-fi book without superstition, alas, he apparently didn't want to be talken serious....
  - randomcarbloke 2y ago
    disagree, the vampires are mostly abstracted away with hand wavy "we couldn't possibly understand how they think", interesting concept, the aliens are more interesting though, and echopraxia was a bit of a dud.
- therealdrag0 2y ago
  I found suspension of disbelief very easy, just like most SF.
- vundercind 2y ago
  That was so good it convinced me that one correct way to make a good sci fi novel is to construct a world and then add one insane thing and make it fit. FWIW, for calibrating recommendations, I tend to prefer literary sci fi and end up hating a whole lot of highly-praised-online sci fi novels. I really like that novel, and Watts’ short story that retells The Thing. That’s all I’ve read of his. [edit] For further calibration, I'd say the book's strengths are efficiency (above-average editing and/or author's taste of what to write and what not to); action writing that is very much to my taste, being quick and terse and requiring close attention to follow it (almost like action-poetry) but not actually being unclear; and an excellent core sci-fi concept, which I usually don't rate so important an aspect as (I think) a lot of sci-fi readers, but in this case it's so good that it overcomes my usual "well that's nice, but has almost nothing to do with whether it's good" attitude toward that element. It's weak on characters, but is so busy with other things that it's hard to tell whether that's a general weakness of the author, or whether that simply didn't make it to the page in this case. World-building is sufficient, but also kind of not the focus of the story—there's plenty there to support the story, but no more.
interludead 2y ago
Peter Watts really explores the concept of alien intelligence in a way that challenges our perceptions
ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
Thanks! I really like it when authors shock my neurons with ideas they never even came close to entertain. Alien aliens are always rare in sci-fi books. Although I really struggled with the octopodes in Children of Ruin, so I'm not sure if I'm ready yet. Can someone please suggest books with novel, really alien forms of life, social structures, etc.?
- Zardoz89 2y ago
  Diaspora by Greg Egan.
- Annual 2y ago
  I vaguely remember The Gods Themselves by Asimov being a strong contender here, but it's been decades since I read it. Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" series had a story towards the end that blew my tiny little teenaged mind back in the 90's. Octavia Butler, of course. Xenogenesis.
  - stevenwoo 2y ago
    The middle third of The Gods Themselves is so weird and different I thought it was a book printing error at first and I had to re-read some of it about six times to make it stick.
- bodantogat 2y ago
  Check out Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
  - alphan0n 2y ago
    We’re going on an adventure!
- Keysh 2y ago
  The Tines in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep are pretty good example. (The aliens in A Deepness in the Sky are physically alien, but psychologically pretty close to humans.)
ABraidotti 2y ago
I've read the latest Weir book (Project Hail Mary) and the two prominent Watts books (Blindsight and Echopraxia) recently and they were all memorable but frustrating. Weir writes like a blogger who also writes script treatments but doesn't actually read novels. He throws plot at you every page ("ok so this happened so I need to do this next") which makes his books readable, but he has zero character development. His characters appear, react to external stimuli and solve problems, but don't change over time. Watts's books, on the other hand, could use some of Weir's plot juice. Very cool ideas and interesting scenes, but the plots were hard to discern. I had no idea what needed to happen to resolve conflict most of the time. Echopraxia was particularly confusing. Watts did a Reddit AMA shortly after Echopraxia came out where he was put on the spot to explain fundamental plot elements. Watts Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_fiction_author_named_peter_watts_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f... Watts also gave a real-sounding lecture on vampirism, which is enjoyable if you liked that in his books: https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=6fTMtmf9yA8JT9at https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=6fTMtmf9yA8JT9at
- hnmullany 2y ago
  I also found Echopraxia extremely confusing and had to read that AMA to figure out what the hell I just read.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
I loved both of those books and their depictions of 'alien', each for their own reasons. Project Hail Mary is more... warm and fuzzy, but then one doesn't read Peter Watts for warm and fuzzy...
Annual 2y ago
Blindsight was the only sci Fi book I ever read that had citations used non-ironically.
- orbisvicis 2y ago
  It would be a stretch to call Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius science fiction, but like many of Borge's works is packed with references and footnotes.
woleium 2y ago
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is the most alien alien i have ever read. I read the old translation, but there is a new one now (2011 by Bill Johnston ) direct from polish rather than via french first
- tialaramex 2y ago
  Golem XIV also gets at the fact that an artificial intelligence needn't be anything like us either. The titular Golem is capable of communicating with us but finds the experience very frustrating because we're so very stupid, while the perhaps even more intelligent Honest Annie doesn't communicate with humans and is postulated to treat them the same way we treat flies, a nuisance deserving no great thought.
mariusor 2y ago
If you're able to look past the "hard-sci-fi" vampires. I know I wasn't.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
The depiction of the alien is something I really liked about that book - the concept of having to cooperate with an alien species rather than with being subjugated or subjugating, was refreshingly new (for me).
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  If you liked that, may I suggest the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh, or, really, almost anything else by her. But especially the Foreigner series.

These are all painfully mid reads. (The alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother.) If you want real alien aliens, read Blindsight (Peter Watts).

jillesvangurp 2y ago

I read both of those. Peter Watts is a bit of an acquired taste. Not for everyone. I actually enjoyed it but it's a weird one. Genetically modified people that are effectively vampires, a main protagonist with severe brain damage, etc. There's a sequel to this too if you enjoy this. The Hail Mary project was actually enjoyable. Andy Weir peaked with the Martian his debut novel and this is kind of in the same style. Maybe not as good but enjoyable.

berkes 2y ago

> the alien in Hail Mary is about as alien as a rival fraternity brother You put that as critique, and I understand that. But for me, this was actually the strength of the story. By making the differences smaller, they are more focused, stronger, and give opportunity to explore them in depth. Same thing I like about many of the Black Mirror stories: often they tweak, or magnify, just one parameter of our realistic, current (western) lives and then explore the differences that would bring.

tialaramex 2y ago
But Black Mirror is about us whereas the frustrating thing with depictions of aliens is that they're not us, that's their defining feature.
- berkes 2y ago
  Stories about aliens aren't meant to describe aliens as theoretically correct as possible. Obviously. Aliens are hardly ever more than a tool to get a perspective. To look at humans, societies, structures etc. They are also stories _about us_.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    In a story like "The Day After the Day the Martians Came" sure, the purpose of the aliens (Martians in that case) is purely to tell us about us. But you don't really need aliens for that, there are several Black Mirror stories which do roughly the same perspective trick, particularly "Men Against Fire". Aliens offer an opportunity to explore something quite different and it's always disappointing to see them used as something less interesting. It's like FTL. FTL is actually exactly equivalent to time travel, and so it's disappointing, though commonplace to see SF which decides to do FTL but no time travel (or indeed vice versa though that's less common).. I like Culture novels just fine, I like Greg Egan's Amalgam setting (with aliens who are basically just us again, although a bit less obviously so than a Star Trek alien) just fine, but, in both cases I'm a little disappointed. If your aliens aren't even as weird as the Octopus is (and we have no idea what the fuck is going on with an Octopus) then you're not really trying are you?

lynx23 2y ago

Beware, you'll also get Vampires in space, which is so silly, it kills the book.

AlphaAndOmega0 2y ago
They're a better depiction of Vampires than most, with Watts doing everything he could to make them biologically plausible (that can only go so far). That being said, I found the way they were "shackled" to be ridiculous. If you've got superintelligent and superstrong predatory hominids running around, you have no reason to have them physically free even if you put the medical safeguards in place. Break their spines and sedate them when not in use! Spoilers: It seems weird to me that a society with other posthumans and intelligent AGI would be bowled over quite so easily by the vampires, but oh well.
- lynx23 2y ago
  They still killed the book for me. The underlying idea (no spoilers) is absolutely great sci-fi. All this useless blast-from-the-past did was make the story look silly to me. Such a shame. He could have written a great sci-fi book without superstition, alas, he apparently didn't want to be talken serious....
- randomcarbloke 2y ago
  disagree, the vampires are mostly abstracted away with hand wavy "we couldn't possibly understand how they think", interesting concept, the aliens are more interesting though, and echopraxia was a bit of a dud.
therealdrag0 2y ago
I found suspension of disbelief very easy, just like most SF.
vundercind 2y ago
That was so good it convinced me that one correct way to make a good sci fi novel is to construct a world and then add one insane thing and make it fit. FWIW, for calibrating recommendations, I tend to prefer literary sci fi and end up hating a whole lot of highly-praised-online sci fi novels. I really like that novel, and Watts’ short story that retells The Thing. That’s all I’ve read of his. [edit] For further calibration, I'd say the book's strengths are efficiency (above-average editing and/or author's taste of what to write and what not to); action writing that is very much to my taste, being quick and terse and requiring close attention to follow it (almost like action-poetry) but not actually being unclear; and an excellent core sci-fi concept, which I usually don't rate so important an aspect as (I think) a lot of sci-fi readers, but in this case it's so good that it overcomes my usual "well that's nice, but has almost nothing to do with whether it's good" attitude toward that element. It's weak on characters, but is so busy with other things that it's hard to tell whether that's a general weakness of the author, or whether that simply didn't make it to the page in this case. World-building is sufficient, but also kind of not the focus of the story—there's plenty there to support the story, but no more.

interludead 2y ago

Peter Watts really explores the concept of alien intelligence in a way that challenges our perceptions

ahmedfromtunis 2y ago

Thanks! I really like it when authors shock my neurons with ideas they never even came close to entertain. Alien aliens are always rare in sci-fi books. Although I really struggled with the octopodes in Children of Ruin, so I'm not sure if I'm ready yet. Can someone please suggest books with novel, really alien forms of life, social structures, etc.?

Zardoz89 2y ago
Diaspora by Greg Egan.
Annual 2y ago
I vaguely remember The Gods Themselves by Asimov being a strong contender here, but it's been decades since I read it. Spider Robinson's "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" series had a story towards the end that blew my tiny little teenaged mind back in the 90's. Octavia Butler, of course. Xenogenesis.
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  The middle third of The Gods Themselves is so weird and different I thought it was a book printing error at first and I had to re-read some of it about six times to make it stick.
bodantogat 2y ago
Check out Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
- alphan0n 2y ago
  We’re going on an adventure!
Keysh 2y ago
The Tines in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep are pretty good example. (The aliens in A Deepness in the Sky are physically alien, but psychologically pretty close to humans.)

ABraidotti 2y ago

I've read the latest Weir book (Project Hail Mary) and the two prominent Watts books (Blindsight and Echopraxia) recently and they were all memorable but frustrating. Weir writes like a blogger who also writes script treatments but doesn't actually read novels. He throws plot at you every page ("ok so this happened so I need to do this next") which makes his books readable, but he has zero character development. His characters appear, react to external stimuli and solve problems, but don't change over time. Watts's books, on the other hand, could use some of Weir's plot juice. Very cool ideas and interesting scenes, but the plots were hard to discern. I had no idea what needed to happen to resolve conflict most of the time. Echopraxia was particularly confusing. Watts did a Reddit AMA shortly after Echopraxia came out where he was put on the spot to explain fundamental plot elements. Watts Reddit AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_fiction_author_named_peter_watts_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2enwks/iama_science_f... Watts also gave a real-sounding lecture on vampirism, which is enjoyable if you liked that in his books: https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=6fTMtmf9yA8JT9at https://youtu.be/wEOUaJW05bU?si=6fTMtmf9yA8JT9at

hnmullany 2y ago
I also found Echopraxia extremely confusing and had to read that AMA to figure out what the hell I just read.

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

I loved both of those books and their depictions of 'alien', each for their own reasons. Project Hail Mary is more... warm and fuzzy, but then one doesn't read Peter Watts for warm and fuzzy...

Annual 2y ago

Blindsight was the only sci Fi book I ever read that had citations used non-ironically.

orbisvicis 2y ago
It would be a stretch to call Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius science fiction, but like many of Borge's works is packed with references and footnotes.

woleium 2y ago

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is the most alien alien i have ever read. I read the old translation, but there is a new one now (2011 by Bill Johnston ) direct from polish rather than via french first

tialaramex 2y ago
Golem XIV also gets at the fact that an artificial intelligence needn't be anything like us either. The titular Golem is capable of communicating with us but finds the experience very frustrating because we're so very stupid, while the perhaps even more intelligent Honest Annie doesn't communicate with humans and is postulated to treat them the same way we treat flies, a nuisance deserving no great thought.

mariusor 2y ago

If you're able to look past the "hard-sci-fi" vampires. I know I wasn't.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

The depiction of the alien is something I really liked about that book - the concept of having to cooperate with an alien species rather than with being subjugated or subjugating, was refreshingly new (for me).

BobaFloutist 2y ago
If you liked that, may I suggest the Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh, or, really, almost anything else by her. But especially the Foreigner series.