TOP TEN TOPIC: BOOKS! (FICTION)

Best books is always hard in my opinion. I find awesome books all the time and I forget them just as often. I will mention a couple of authors and their books (hopefully it'll make about ten) but I won't rank them or anything. It'll just be recommendations.

China Miéville
British author of a couple of books and some short stories (some of which you should be able to find online) His first novel King Rat is a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin in modern London. His following novels have been set in a fantasy world that is really quite interesting and... well weird. It's a bit steampunky but with a fair amount of magic and strange "fantasy" races. All with the gritty realism you expect from punk.
I recommend. Even though it can be pretty heavy to read at times.

Jeff VanderMeer
His collection A City of Saints and Madmen made a really huge impression on me when I read it. A couple of stories all set in the same city but told in very different ways. All the stories have been published individually but together they create a whole that is very interesting as you notice how different things combine.

Shriek - An Afterword is another novel set in the same "world" and is basically an afterword. It is treated like a "found" manuscript and has scribbled notes on the side from another person who is commenting on the manuscript. Add to that that there's also a fictional editor who has chosen to put it together and who has an afterword with comments on what he edited from the manuscript.

You just don't know where the fiction ends and reality begins.

Cory Doctorow
I haven't read a whole lot from him. Only Someone comes to town, someone leaves town, but it's a wonderfully strange story that combines the hugely weird (the main character's mother is a washing machine and father is a mountain) with the apparently normal. It handles it pretty well and by the end of it you don't wonder at all about how the hell that washing machine could be a mother. It's just obvious.

He's also a big "free culture" proponent and occasionally reads his fiction on his podcast (craphound.com) or release them to read for free on the internet under Creative Commons licenses. (Try to find "When Sysadmins Ruled the World" a very interesting take on the apocalypse.)

Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman is old in the game and has written a bunch of really stellar novels. And comic books. And Screenplays. And nearly anything else that can be written. I don't really know what else I could add about him. If you haven't read anything by him make sure to try to find something. If you don't want to read anything longer dig up the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors or Fragile Things. Both of these come with comments on the creation of the stories themselves. Something I find hugely interesting.

Terry Pratchett
I just read his new Making Money and I just have to put him on this list. His books are so... Readable. They're not overly complicated or heavy to read (like some of the authors I've mentioned earlier) but instead they're full of humour and references you either get or not get or just don't care about. I also think that his novels are getting better with each one. The early ones parodied fantasy clichés but nowadays there's so much more "commentary" on all kinds of aspects of today's world. All put into a world with a very different world view of our own.
I also recommend all three Science of Discworld books, which are popular science books with a lot of interesting facts in them.

Philip K. Dick
I have to mention some author who isn't alive anymore. And Dick seems as good a fit as anyone. His stories of strangeness are hard not to like. The always present old-school "mindfuck" and paranoia. With everything from Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep to Time Out of Joint to The Man in the High Castle.

I also love how an author whose books often seem very "unfilmable" has had so many movie adaptions. (It seems every year there is at least one)

Hal Duncan
Vellum. I read this last month. It completely blew my mind. I just read it and I had no idea what was going on but on some level it all made sense but thinking about it made my head hurt. Thankfully the font changed occasionally so you could kinda tell where you were.

K.J. Bishop
The Etched City, when I got that book I judged it by its cover. It had a nice cover and it felt like I wanted that book. It was a good choice and it told a story about how everyone is the center of their own world but how sometimes these world may collide. Or at least that's what it was about in the end. Before that it was a fairly regular story. Or two. Or depending on who was the narrator at the time.

George R.R. Martin
Basically his Song of Ice and Fire is the only book series I really care about nowadays when I'm trying to stay away from anything longer than one book. (They used to be able to put all stuff into a 300 page book. Why do they fifteen tomes of 600 page books nowadays? I blame Tolkien and his followers) But A Song of Ice and Fire has all that political intrigue and "realism" to it combined with characters that really face some of the most unpleasant things I can think of but hopefully pulling through.

I've recently watched the HBO series Rome and I can find a lot of similarities. Scheming and backstabbing combined with the occasional battle. It is never wrong. Never ever wrong. (and HBO has apparently gotten the rights to make a Song of Ice and Fire into a TV-series so here's to hoping they do it right)

Before this mammoth fantasy series though, Martin also has a huge backlog of great stories that deserves to be brought up.


9 authors and a lot more books. I'm sure there's a bunch of others to recommend as well so I leave the tenth spot open. It's all mostly SF so if you don't generally like that genre my recommendations probably won't get you too far. However even so a lot of these authors offer some pretty unique insight into things. And if you like to read books but basically just dismiss SF as "children's literature" or "lame spaceship battles and women in tight suits" (my father got a great book for Christmas. "Great Balls of Fire an Illustrated History of Sex in Science Fiction" where all the important aspects of male baggy space suits and female skintight space suits were explored) you could give some of these a try as well.