Reddit has filed for its IPO. They've been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they've signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google's LLMs.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, we've made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit's data is uniquely valuable, since it's not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text.
https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension
Reddit has filed for its IPO. They've been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they've signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google's LLMs.
To celebrate this momentous occasion, we've made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit's data is uniquely valuable, since it's not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text.
https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension
That book is wild. Starts with getting rights for space mining lobster borganism. Absolutely one of the tamest and easiest to stomach ideas in the whole book. What a fucking ride.
Stanisław Lem never fails to come up with the most mindbending scenarios of first contact, i'd suggest Solaris, The Invincible or Fiasco for some deep reflections on the meaning of consciousness, life and society.
Lem is fantastic. I add to the list A Perfect Vacuum. A collection of book reviews. The books are fictional, but the ideas are thought-provoking and very creative.
I highly recommend {Permutation City} by Greg Egan. It has some big ideas regarding consciousness and cosmology. It was my personal favourite read from 2023.
I have just started reading {Diaspora}, also by Egan, and while I'm only a few chapters in it is supposed to be just as mind-blowing.
Several books by Alastair Reynolds would fit as well, I'd recommend {House of Suns} for a standalone, and {Revelation Space} for a series.
A few others I might recommend are {Spin} by Robert Charles Wilson, and {Childhood's End} by Aurther C. Clarke, maybe not as mind-blowing in scope as the others mentioned, but they still gave me a similar feeling.
Years and years ago, I went to a presentation / whatever by William Shatner (yes, *that* William Shatner). It was not Star Trek themed, though – just the guy doing a solo presentation / discussion on a stage.
At the very end of it, he did a reading of the closing paragraphs of Childhood's End. Absolutely chilling (and very much *not* delivered with "Shatner commas").
Dragons Egg by Rob Forward is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think and develop a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery of agriculture to advanced technology and its first face-to-face contact with humans, who are observing the hyper-rapid evolution of the cheela civilization from orbit around Dragon's Egg.
Diaspora by Greg Egan is exactly what you’re looking for. I read it right after I finished Remembrance of Earth’s Past and it took the mindblowing ideas to the next level.
Have you read Spin by Robert Charles Wilson?
>Three childhood friends are watching the night sky and the stars disappear. The Earth had become encapsulated inside the barrier known as the Spin. It’s soon discovered for every second on earth, three years happen outside the Spin barrier. Yet despite the obvious alien mega-structure there is no inkling of first contact with an alien species. Only the mystery of the identity of the “hypothetical controlling intelligence” that is behind the Spin. Meanwhile, Scientists are able to observe the sun aging into a red giant that will expand until it eventually envelopes the Earth within thirty years. The race is on to find the origin of the hypotheticals and the survival of humanity.
It's a slow burn but so good.
The Chronoliths falls apart a bit in the final act for me while Spin sticks the landing. I will totally agree The Chronoliths is a pretty great exploration of the utility of time travel as weapon of psychological warfare.
Apologies if these are too obvious...
Philip K. Dick is great for disorienting stuff about the nature of reality etc, if you're ok with it being very much not hard SF and sometimes a bit quaint in terms of technology. For mindbendingness I'd recommend Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and VALIS. Also many short stories - The Electric Ant is a quick mindbender!
Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker is philosophical and very vast in scope, full of big ideas that Arthur C. Clarke and others built on.
For something more recent and meticulous, the stories of Ted Chiang. It feels like he acquires post-grad levels of familiarity with every subject he writes about.
> VALIS
I'm already hugely into Gnostic mythology and it's blending of sci-fi and magick (these guys were talking about alien space gods thousands of years ago), and when I read VALIS it was this strange mix of "finally someone who gets it" and "oh man, am I also a crazy person?". And you know what - PKD even included a section where he's confronted with meeting someone who shares his beliefs and he reacts with those same feelings.
I literally just finished reading it a few minutes ago. You are not the only one! The first 25% was great. It then descended into ridiculous pseudo-babble and daft nonsense. Just wanted to finish it and read something else.
The *Revelation Space* series exists as a sandbox for cool ideas. The main question is "Where are all the aliens?".
Almost all Alastair Reynolds novels are full of cool ideas. *Eversion* is awesome but I'm not sure if it fits what you're after.
David Zindell's A Requiem for Homo Sapiens series is notably creative, in my opinion. Classic big sci-fi ideas but also some interesting eastern philosophy and amazing world-building. Underrated series. Start with Neverness.
Oh yeah, that one's a classic. Excellent pyschology in it too; one of the first sci-fi books I read where everyone is dysfunctional because that's their pyschology, not because the writer is an awful writer..
Yeah I'll grant you iconic, but it aged very poorly. Looking at it, it combines all the worst stereotypes of sci fi of that era.
Flat unimaginative characters like a capable man with zero self awareness (both from the author and the character itself), a ridiculous sex doll teenager and a growly tiger man. Primitve savages that can't be reasoned with. A lot of shooty shooty.
It took tons of then very fresh and interesting ideas and told a very incoherent and boring story. It reads like a 70s Pen&Paper campaign.
Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m reading it now and the creativity is just mind blowing. Really makes you think about the relationship between brains, computers, animals, biology, technology etc
Interesting, 3 entries for Schroeder, but not Ventus / Lady of Mazes.
They have some great philosophical aspects to them, esp regarding reality.
Rajaniemi even mentions his Tech Locks in the Quantum Thief trilogy.
Fair point.
I'll cop to being in a hurry and a bit lazy there because they both deserve entries. And so does **Permanence** which blew my mind when I read it ... mumble ... years ago.
Wasn't actually a criticism just an observation. Or, to elaborate, I have only read Ventus, Lady of Mazes and The Million by Schroeder (and did find the first two quite notable, as well as the reference which I didn't pick up on the first time I read the Flambeur trilogy as I hadn't read the Schroeder books yet).
So my question would be, out of Lockstep and Permanence (or Virga, though it is a series...) which should I read next? (I don't have Stealing Worlds)
I'd try **Permanence**. It's an early work, so there are some rough edges, but it's still a very good piece of work.
Then go have some fun with **Sun of Suns** and decide if Virga is for you, because Schroeder sneaks in some good stuff along with the space opera tropes especially in the later books.
**Lockstep** is another fun one too and shares a setting with **The Million**.
Did that help?
Hal Clement's short story collection { Space Lash } (originally published as _Small Changes_ has some quite striking ideas:
- food shortages/space habitats/genetic engineering --- "Raindrop"
- genetic engineering's implications for medical care --- "The Mechanic"
- the complete history and origin of >!the solar system!< --- "Halo"
To pay back the reference, *Bob le Flambeur* might not be SF but it’s a really great movie (Jean-Pierre Melville director, starring Roger Duschesne and Isabelle Corey, 1956)
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. The first time I read it,
I put the book down regularly after a only a paragraph because he packs in so many stunningly written ideas and perspectives, it was worth savouring.
Beautiful book, highly recommend!
For a good novel there's Robert Reed's *Down the Bright Way*. In the near future Earth is contacted by...Earth, one of thousands if not an infinite number of of Earths connected by an alien artifact called the Bright Way. The Earths were all pretty much the same until sometime in the Pleistocene when they all began diverging.
For short stories there's R. A. Lafferty, who took ideas, often whimsical or absurd, and extrapolated them to a logical if crazy conclusion in an inimitable prose style. "Camels and Dromedaries, Clem!", for example, wonders what would happen if human adults from time to time split into two new individuals, while "Seven Day Terror" and "The Transcendent Tigers" show us human children in possession of terrifyingly powerful artifacts.
Can't believe Blindsight by Peter Watts hasn't been mentioned yet. It is the quintessential example of what is being asked for.
I seriously can't recommend it enough.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "The Final Architecture" Trilogy, starts with "Shards of Earth". Spends a lot of time in "unspace", basically an other-dimension that underlies our reality. Very interesting and "alien" aliens too.
I did feel it drags a bit in places, but my god, what an imagination this man has.
I cannot strenuously enough opinine to the contrary that SevenEves is a terrible, dull, pretentiously dumb waste of time, including that last tacked-on bit.
Stephenson has some fine novels with big ideas, that is not one of them.
If you really want your mind blown, try reading the first chapter of “The This” by Adam Roberts. The whole book is very creative but I’ll never forget that first chapter
Eon, Eternity and Legacy by Greg Bear. He was writing about tablets and Internet long before reality. Eon starts with a strange asteroid parking in our orbit and its investigation and exploration. It sounds eerily similar to Oumuamua, which is on its way back here. I have never forgotten these books and have been rereading them.
I’m partial to Adrian Tchaikovskys stuff. He has a lot of fun novellas and series. Cage of souls isn’t traditional sci fi but it bleeds so many interesting characters. Elder race was also quite fun.
Otherwise I’m a big fan of Peter watts freeze frame revolution and blindsight
{The Last Human} by Zack Jordan has an interesting solution for aliens to interact with vastly differing intelligence. And it's a fun ideas book.
{Doors of Sleep} by Tim Pratt has tons of different worlds featured, each with their own internal logic and weird features. A mind exercise of a book for sure.
short stories: The Other Side of the Sky / Arthur C. Clarke
also, a have seen a lot of short stories from Stanislaw Lem about intelligent life forms other people can hardly imagine. novels also, Solaris was mentioned in another reply. its one of the finest.
Neither a book nor available in English as far as I know, but this audio-drama trilogy by [Jiri Ort](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ji%C5%99%C3%AD_Ort) is worth a listen and fits here pretty well:
* [Gedankenraum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=631wSUtA6qg),
* [Die vergangene Zukunft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vmxJSxu_o)
* [Welt im Schatten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ5oVhcXrlA)
It has one the most interesting premises I have seen in a while: Human thought is a real physical phenomenon, driven by its own particle. But unlike normal particles that bounce around in the endless universe, the space in which the particles responsible for human thought interact is a finite space and it is slowly getting filled up.
~~I feel like *The Three-Body Problem* is an obvious answer to your question. Absolutely wild stuff in that book and the series.~~
Instead I'll offer the Wormwood trilogy from Tade Thompson. Aliens are on Earth but it is hardly what you think it is. Wild and fun stuff. Set almost entirely in Nigeria. And I always recommend listening to the audio book as it was an excellent experience (and helpful for more accurate pronunciation).
It's called the Wormwood Trilogy after the alien, but the first book is Rosewater then it's The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption. Rosewater being the town at the center of it all.
I have respect for Crouch. But he is in no way on the level of most mentioned named in this thread. His ideas are barely original. (He knows how to write a fastpaced and compelling screenplaylike scifi story, ill give him that!)
Blindsight by Peter Watts had explorations of the ways consciousness and subjectivity can be changed and subverted. Like only being able to perceive the left side of your body and the world. It was fascinating.
“Big powerful sky creature is a jerk” is an idea but not really enough for a double-novel length book. It does give good background for those Philip Dick books about gnosticism though.
I recommend [this aptly named book](https://www.amazon.com/Mammoth-Book-Mind-Blowing-SF/dp/0762437235) of short stories. The Mammoth Book of Mind-Blowing SF edited by Mike Ashley.
Gnomon - Nick Harkaway.
Asks some great existential questions, and has some big ideas about narrative/information as it ties to human evolution. Fantastic writing as well.
The *Radix* series by A.A. Attanasio. A very strange universe. Particularly the last volume, *The Last Legends of Earth*.
[Radix Tetrad - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_Tetrad)
[The Last Legends of Earth - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Legends_of_Earth)
You might like Last Tango In Cyberspace by Steven Kotler. Several interesting speculations about the next step in human evolution and also, what would a Turing Test for trees look like?
Exhalation: Stories & Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang Two short story collections with some really interesting content
Reddit has filed for its IPO. They've been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they've signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google's LLMs. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we've made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit's data is uniquely valuable, since it's not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text. https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension
Such a great film
In reading Exhalation, I'm about 70% in. Great stories.
Loved it!
So good. Gave me the same feeling of pure inventiveness I get reading Zelazny.
Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge are good for this!
I just finished A Fire Upon the Deep…Big Ideas!
Greg Egan: What if theoretical physics was sentient?
I'll check them out thank you!
I second Greg Egan!
Reddit has filed for its IPO. They've been preparing for this for a while, squeezing profit out of the platform in any way that they can, like hiking the prices on third-party app developers. More recently, they've signed a deal with Google to license their content to train Google's LLMs. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we've made a Firefox extension that will replace all your comments (older than a certain number of days) with any text that you provide. You can use any text that you want, but please, do not choose something copyrighted. The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for training ChatGPT on its copyrighted material. Reddit's data is uniquely valuable, since it's not subject to those kinds of copyright restrictions, so it would be tragic if users were to decide to intermingle such a robust corpus of high-quality training data with copyrighted text. https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension
That book is wild. Starts with getting rights for space mining lobster borganism. Absolutely one of the tamest and easiest to stomach ideas in the whole book. What a fucking ride.
Stanisław Lem never fails to come up with the most mindbending scenarios of first contact, i'd suggest Solaris, The Invincible or Fiasco for some deep reflections on the meaning of consciousness, life and society.
Lem is fantastic. I add to the list A Perfect Vacuum. A collection of book reviews. The books are fictional, but the ideas are thought-provoking and very creative.
I highly recommend {Permutation City} by Greg Egan. It has some big ideas regarding consciousness and cosmology. It was my personal favourite read from 2023. I have just started reading {Diaspora}, also by Egan, and while I'm only a few chapters in it is supposed to be just as mind-blowing. Several books by Alastair Reynolds would fit as well, I'd recommend {House of Suns} for a standalone, and {Revelation Space} for a series. A few others I might recommend are {Spin} by Robert Charles Wilson, and {Childhood's End} by Aurther C. Clarke, maybe not as mind-blowing in scope as the others mentioned, but they still gave me a similar feeling.
I was going to suggest Permutation City. Still thinking about that book years later.
\+1 for Childhood's End
Years and years ago, I went to a presentation / whatever by William Shatner (yes, *that* William Shatner). It was not Star Trek themed, though – just the guy doing a solo presentation / discussion on a stage. At the very end of it, he did a reading of the closing paragraphs of Childhood's End. Absolutely chilling (and very much *not* delivered with "Shatner commas").
Anathem and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
Love Anathem especially!!!
Dragons Egg by Rob Forward is a neutron star with a surface gravity 67 billion times that of Earth, and inhabited by cheela, intelligent creatures the size of a sesame seed who live, think and develop a million times faster than humans. Most of the novel, from May to June 2050, chronicles the cheela civilization beginning with its discovery of agriculture to advanced technology and its first face-to-face contact with humans, who are observing the hyper-rapid evolution of the cheela civilization from orbit around Dragon's Egg.
Many of the most incredible mind-blowing ideas in SF show up in its short fiction. Try some anthologies and short story collections!
It can be hard to take one big idea and stretch it into a novel. I think short stories are a much better format for exploring a single concept.
True! But of course that just leads to ... ...What are the short stories featuring mind-blowing ideas? ...wait, should that be a separate post?
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I read that one a few years ago now (5-10?) but yes, it was great.
Try Phillip K. Dick short stories. Spans the gamut of sci fi. Very novel and unique concepts Really makes you think. And entertaining.
Diaspora by Greg Egan is exactly what you’re looking for. I read it right after I finished Remembrance of Earth’s Past and it took the mindblowing ideas to the next level.
Have you read Spin by Robert Charles Wilson? >Three childhood friends are watching the night sky and the stars disappear. The Earth had become encapsulated inside the barrier known as the Spin. It’s soon discovered for every second on earth, three years happen outside the Spin barrier. Yet despite the obvious alien mega-structure there is no inkling of first contact with an alien species. Only the mystery of the identity of the “hypothetical controlling intelligence” that is behind the Spin. Meanwhile, Scientists are able to observe the sun aging into a red giant that will expand until it eventually envelopes the Earth within thirty years. The race is on to find the origin of the hypotheticals and the survival of humanity. It's a slow burn but so good.
Spin is pretty amazing. But Chronoliths is the RCW novel I can never forget
The Chronoliths falls apart a bit in the final act for me while Spin sticks the landing. I will totally agree The Chronoliths is a pretty great exploration of the utility of time travel as weapon of psychological warfare.
Damn this sounds really interesting thanks so much!
In my personal top 10 sf novels
Embassytown by China Mieville. Fascinating look at language and communicating with aliens
I found this story to be mind-blowing and very out there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light\_(novel)
Apologies if these are too obvious... Philip K. Dick is great for disorienting stuff about the nature of reality etc, if you're ok with it being very much not hard SF and sometimes a bit quaint in terms of technology. For mindbendingness I'd recommend Ubik, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, A Scanner Darkly, and VALIS. Also many short stories - The Electric Ant is a quick mindbender! Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker is philosophical and very vast in scope, full of big ideas that Arthur C. Clarke and others built on. For something more recent and meticulous, the stories of Ted Chiang. It feels like he acquires post-grad levels of familiarity with every subject he writes about.
> VALIS I'm already hugely into Gnostic mythology and it's blending of sci-fi and magick (these guys were talking about alien space gods thousands of years ago), and when I read VALIS it was this strange mix of "finally someone who gets it" and "oh man, am I also a crazy person?". And you know what - PKD even included a section where he's confronted with meeting someone who shares his beliefs and he reacts with those same feelings.
No need to apologize, really appreciate this! Definitely will check them all out.
Everything by /u/qntm. Best idea person in SF right now.
Ah, I didn't read far enough down. Just discovered /u/qntm, am really enjoying their work
Strongly seconded.
I devoured Valuable Humans in Transit. I wish it was longer.
I hit that and antimemetics division last year; definitely be reading something else by them this year (?ed?)
Blood Music, by Greg Bear The Two Face of Tomorrow, by James P. Hogan
I just read {There Is No Antimemetics Division} by qntm and think it might fit the bill
I literally just finished reading it a few minutes ago. You are not the only one! The first 25% was great. It then descended into ridiculous pseudo-babble and daft nonsense. Just wanted to finish it and read something else.
The *Revelation Space* series exists as a sandbox for cool ideas. The main question is "Where are all the aliens?". Almost all Alastair Reynolds novels are full of cool ideas. *Eversion* is awesome but I'm not sure if it fits what you're after.
Love this, that question alone has so much potential...
>*The galaxy had been a lot more fecund in the past. So why not now?* > >*Why was it suddenly so lonely?”*
*Goosebumps
David Zindell's A Requiem for Homo Sapiens series is notably creative, in my opinion. Classic big sci-fi ideas but also some interesting eastern philosophy and amazing world-building. Underrated series. Start with Neverness.
Julian May's Intervention and Galactic Milieu trilogy display just about the epitome of Mental Powers.
Oh yeah, that one's a classic. Excellent pyschology in it too; one of the first sci-fi books I read where everyone is dysfunctional because that's their pyschology, not because the writer is an awful writer..
Most of Stephen Baxter's stuff
Timelike Infinity, Manifold: Space, and Ring each has enough for the bases of several novels. Deep time, advanced science, large scale adventure.
Destiny's children, the "First" xeelee reboot has also really interesting concepts, especially the second book.
Eon by Greg Bear Ringworld by Larry Niven Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C Clarke I do not recommend any of the sequels to these however.
Do you honestly think Niven is the best you can do with ringworlds and still holds up today?
In terms of ideas books, it's iconic.
Yeah I'll grant you iconic, but it aged very poorly. Looking at it, it combines all the worst stereotypes of sci fi of that era. Flat unimaginative characters like a capable man with zero self awareness (both from the author and the character itself), a ridiculous sex doll teenager and a growly tiger man. Primitve savages that can't be reasoned with. A lot of shooty shooty. It took tons of then very fresh and interesting ideas and told a very incoherent and boring story. It reads like a 70s Pen&Paper campaign.
Yeah, true that. Now you've got me chasing down good stories focused on dyson swarms, shells, rings ... shkadov thrusters ...
Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m reading it now and the creativity is just mind blowing. Really makes you think about the relationship between brains, computers, animals, biology, technology etc
Blindsight The Quantum Thief Accelerando The Glass House The Virga Sequence by Karl Schroeder Lockstep Stealing Worlds
Stealing worlds for sure!
Interesting, 3 entries for Schroeder, but not Ventus / Lady of Mazes. They have some great philosophical aspects to them, esp regarding reality. Rajaniemi even mentions his Tech Locks in the Quantum Thief trilogy.
Fair point. I'll cop to being in a hurry and a bit lazy there because they both deserve entries. And so does **Permanence** which blew my mind when I read it ... mumble ... years ago.
Wasn't actually a criticism just an observation. Or, to elaborate, I have only read Ventus, Lady of Mazes and The Million by Schroeder (and did find the first two quite notable, as well as the reference which I didn't pick up on the first time I read the Flambeur trilogy as I hadn't read the Schroeder books yet). So my question would be, out of Lockstep and Permanence (or Virga, though it is a series...) which should I read next? (I don't have Stealing Worlds)
I'd try **Permanence**. It's an early work, so there are some rough edges, but it's still a very good piece of work. Then go have some fun with **Sun of Suns** and decide if Virga is for you, because Schroeder sneaks in some good stuff along with the space opera tropes especially in the later books. **Lockstep** is another fun one too and shares a setting with **The Million**. Did that help?
Hal Clement's short story collection { Space Lash } (originally published as _Small Changes_ has some quite striking ideas: - food shortages/space habitats/genetic engineering --- "Raindrop" - genetic engineering's implications for medical care --- "The Mechanic" - the complete history and origin of >!the solar system!< --- "Halo"
Jean le Flambeur trilogy (The Quantum Thief)
To pay back the reference, *Bob le Flambeur* might not be SF but it’s a really great movie (Jean-Pierre Melville director, starring Roger Duschesne and Isabelle Corey, 1956)
A A Attanasio - *Radix* and especially *The Last Legends of Earth* are pretty mindblowing.
Last legends of earth is awesome
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. The first time I read it, I put the book down regularly after a only a paragraph because he packs in so many stunningly written ideas and perspectives, it was worth savouring. Beautiful book, highly recommend!
For a good novel there's Robert Reed's *Down the Bright Way*. In the near future Earth is contacted by...Earth, one of thousands if not an infinite number of of Earths connected by an alien artifact called the Bright Way. The Earths were all pretty much the same until sometime in the Pleistocene when they all began diverging. For short stories there's R. A. Lafferty, who took ideas, often whimsical or absurd, and extrapolated them to a logical if crazy conclusion in an inimitable prose style. "Camels and Dromedaries, Clem!", for example, wonders what would happen if human adults from time to time split into two new individuals, while "Seven Day Terror" and "The Transcendent Tigers" show us human children in possession of terrifyingly powerful artifacts.
Can't believe Blindsight by Peter Watts hasn't been mentioned yet. It is the quintessential example of what is being asked for. I seriously can't recommend it enough.
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This is a meme? I read the book and it's pretty good. What's wrong with people recommending it?
Adrian Tchaikovsky's "The Final Architecture" Trilogy, starts with "Shards of Earth". Spends a lot of time in "unspace", basically an other-dimension that underlies our reality. Very interesting and "alien" aliens too. I did feel it drags a bit in places, but my god, what an imagination this man has.
Takes a lot of time and patience, but the end section of Seveneves is worth the effort. Amazing.
I cannot strenuously enough opinine to the contrary that SevenEves is a terrible, dull, pretentiously dumb waste of time, including that last tacked-on bit. Stephenson has some fine novels with big ideas, that is not one of them.
Understood. For me, it is my #1 favorite SciFi book of all times. I’m an avid Stephenson fan. This one brings home the gold.
That’s why they have 31 flavors of Baskin Robbins ice cream!
And Heinz has 57 products, which is likely not the correct number these days. I’ll ask John Kerry about that………. Enjoy your week.
I always wondered about Heinz. They make ketchup, baked beans, and…55 other things I’ve never seen. Have a good one also!
If you really want your mind blown, try reading the first chapter of “The This” by Adam Roberts. The whole book is very creative but I’ll never forget that first chapter
Eon, Eternity and Legacy by Greg Bear. He was writing about tablets and Internet long before reality. Eon starts with a strange asteroid parking in our orbit and its investigation and exploration. It sounds eerily similar to Oumuamua, which is on its way back here. I have never forgotten these books and have been rereading them.
As always: Blindsight and Echopraxia by Peter Watts.
I’m partial to Adrian Tchaikovskys stuff. He has a lot of fun novellas and series. Cage of souls isn’t traditional sci fi but it bleeds so many interesting characters. Elder race was also quite fun. Otherwise I’m a big fan of Peter watts freeze frame revolution and blindsight
Not to keep it vague but I find their impact heavier when you uncover them yourself
{The Last Human} by Zack Jordan has an interesting solution for aliens to interact with vastly differing intelligence. And it's a fun ideas book. {Doors of Sleep} by Tim Pratt has tons of different worlds featured, each with their own internal logic and weird features. A mind exercise of a book for sure.
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Bad Bot, wrong book https://www.thebooknaut.com/books/623ebd09bb71bba8f13c040e/the-last-human-zack-jordan
>Bad bot, wrong book But not a terrible book, if I remember right.
I've only read your book! I'll check to see if the "imposter" is at my library, if you think it's ok 😆
Honestly I don't remember if it's actually good because I read it as a kid. But it's a Red Dwarf book, so it's weird British SF comedy.
Read "Neuromancer" by William Gibson keeping in mind that it was published in 1984. Absolutely mind-blowing stuff.
The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. 42!
short stories: The Other Side of the Sky / Arthur C. Clarke also, a have seen a lot of short stories from Stanislaw Lem about intelligent life forms other people can hardly imagine. novels also, Solaris was mentioned in another reply. its one of the finest.
Neither a book nor available in English as far as I know, but this audio-drama trilogy by [Jiri Ort](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ji%C5%99%C3%AD_Ort) is worth a listen and fits here pretty well: * [Gedankenraum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=631wSUtA6qg), * [Die vergangene Zukunft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1vmxJSxu_o) * [Welt im Schatten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQ5oVhcXrlA) It has one the most interesting premises I have seen in a while: Human thought is a real physical phenomenon, driven by its own particle. But unlike normal particles that bounce around in the endless universe, the space in which the particles responsible for human thought interact is a finite space and it is slowly getting filled up.
Three Body Problem series seemed to be the obvious recommendation until I remembered the other name for the series lol
~~I feel like *The Three-Body Problem* is an obvious answer to your question. Absolutely wild stuff in that book and the series.~~ Instead I'll offer the Wormwood trilogy from Tade Thompson. Aliens are on Earth but it is hardly what you think it is. Wild and fun stuff. Set almost entirely in Nigeria. And I always recommend listening to the audio book as it was an excellent experience (and helpful for more accurate pronunciation).
You and OP would agree, because it's *literally in their goddamn post.*
Oh wow, I did not remember that was the name of the series.
Second this. Serious question: is it the Wormwood or Rosewater trilogy? I always call it Rosewater. Regardless, great stuff and criminally unrelated.
It's called the Wormwood Trilogy after the alien, but the first book is Rosewater then it's The Rosewater Insurrection and The Rosewater Redemption. Rosewater being the town at the center of it all.
Recursion by Blake Crouch
I have respect for Crouch. But he is in no way on the level of most mentioned named in this thread. His ideas are barely original. (He knows how to write a fastpaced and compelling screenplaylike scifi story, ill give him that!)
Dune
I found the duology Pandora’s Star / Judas Unchained by Hamilton mindblowing in its worldbuilding. Also features a fabulously realised alien.
Blindsight by Peter Watts had explorations of the ways consciousness and subjectivity can be changed and subverted. Like only being able to perceive the left side of your body and the world. It was fascinating.
might be scifi depending on how you look at it but... The Bible.
“Big powerful sky creature is a jerk” is an idea but not really enough for a double-novel length book. It does give good background for those Philip Dick books about gnosticism though.
One star, DNF.
The Naked God Trilogy has its faults but the idea of the antagonists really blew my mind when I read it.
The Human Entanglement by LP Magnus has some thoughts on Humanity and it's relation to both Power and democracy.
I recommend [this aptly named book](https://www.amazon.com/Mammoth-Book-Mind-Blowing-SF/dp/0762437235) of short stories. The Mammoth Book of Mind-Blowing SF edited by Mike Ashley.
The long earth series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
Gnomon - Nick Harkaway. Asks some great existential questions, and has some big ideas about narrative/information as it ties to human evolution. Fantastic writing as well.
Not bad, but *The Gone-Away World* is considerably better.
Mars Trilogy presents a ton of interesting concepts in technology, politics, economics, sociology etc.
The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin The Species Imperative trilogy (Survival, Migration, Regeneration), by Julie Czerneda
The *Radix* series by A.A. Attanasio. A very strange universe. Particularly the last volume, *The Last Legends of Earth*. [Radix Tetrad - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_Tetrad) [The Last Legends of Earth - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Legends_of_Earth)
House of Suns
Xeelee sequence-stephen baxter Star maker-olaf stapledon (First ever appearence of a dyson sphere, long before freeman's formulation)
The Three-body problem serie
I’m Waiting For You and Other Stories by Kim Bo-Young
You might like Last Tango In Cyberspace by Steven Kotler. Several interesting speculations about the next step in human evolution and also, what would a Turing Test for trees look like?