Top SciFi/Fantasy Book Recommendations

I've had a couple people asking me for book recommendations recently, so here's my list of recent favorites. 

* Martha Wells

I've previously reviewed her, but everything she writes is still great. The only thing I can add to my last post is her new series, Murderbot Diaries about a lovable yet emotionally damaged cyborg who works as a bodyguard. I've seen it called an "IT Thriller" because it has a lot of computer-hacking.

* Terry Mancour

Spellmonger Series: I can only describe this as Lord of the Rings meets Dune... He has somehow managed to re-invent a Tolkien-esque fantasy world from the ground up, in a way that makes it seem so fresh that I'm surprised when I recognize his creations as classical fantasy tropes halfway through. The classic story elements of Necromancers, Elves, and Dwarves are re-built and characterized from the ground-up. The present fantasy world is unified with the SciFi remnants of older civilizations in probably the best and most coherent SciFi/Fantasy blending I've ever seen. The series of chalk full of politics on the order of Dune, and every book features some level of medieval institution that gets torn down and re-constituted with an in-depth examination of how Feudalism works in practice. I feel like reading the institutional analysis and flux in this series has leveled up my understanding of institutional politics and changed the way I think about other fantasy settings. 

* Christopher G. Nuttall

Schooled in Magic: This is an isekai-style magic-school series, where a girl from Earth starts introducing Earth-knowledge to revolutionize the medieval fantasy world that had previously been relying on decaying institutions maintained by magic. This is probably the best fantasy magic-school series I've ever read. He's 24 books in now, and the characters have all graduated and gotten caught-up in larger social issues. Besides the adventures, the series also examines the various social changes that take places paralleling similar historical developments on Earth like the Industrial Revolution, and how various crises formed or were averted.

The Zero Enigma: Another magic-school series (this time without an isekai) where civilization has been reconstructed from the remnants of a fallen empire. This series focuses a lot more on inter-house style politics and coming-of-age story-lines than Schooled in Magic, and the mechanics of the magic is much less of a focus. Not quite as good as Schooled in Magic in my opinion, but the story is still growing into it's larger world-changing issues. 

A Learning Experience: A bunch of Libertarians on Earth get advanced technology create a Libertarian utopia in space and then end up in inter-galactic wars. It's been a long time since I read this, and the books jumped forward in time to watch how the society evolved with new characters, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I remember liking it.

* T. Kingfisher

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking: The funniest coming-of-age fantasy story I've ever read.

Minor Mage: A boy gets sent on a quest to save his town because he was all they had. Somehow he manages to use his meager abilities to great effect.

* Kanata Yanagino

The Faraway Paladin: Another isekai story, where the protagonist spends his childhood training to become a Paladin under the tutelage of undead legends. The author is clearly an Ursula K. Le Guin fan, and this series has an unusually in-depth and positive treatment of the personal side of religion and the value of dedication.

* S.J. Ryan

The Star Wizards Trilogy: A man from the post-singularity future finds himself on a primitive world fighting a remnant from his old world. This has very unique world-building, although it was at times hard for me to follow as I had to fill in some of the details. But the interplay of future technology and trying to transplant modern values across cultures was great, as well as the exploration of what a post-singularity world would look like. I blow through a lot of random one-off self-published books on Kindle and forget about them, but the first book of this intrigued me so much I kept checking back until there was a sequel.

Timesense: A novella about aliens who perceive time very differently. I can't say more without spoiling it but it blew my mind.

* Okina Baba

So I'm a Spider, So What?: A isekai light-novel where Japanese school-girl is reborn as a Spider in a dungeon, and has to level-up her abilities to survive and find a way out. There are a lot of moving parts in this novel that slowly come together to reveal a picture of how the world is broken, and honestly I wish they'd focus on the spider-girl more than the rest of the characters, but still one of my all-time favorites.

* Dojyomaru

How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom: A Japanese civil-servant is isekai'ed into a fantasy kingdom and promptly made King, where he tries to salvage and modernize it's corrupt bureaucracy. I enjoy the politics more than the slice-of-life subplots, but the interplay between the individual "Great Men" and how that translates into national and international politics is great.

* J. P. Valentine

This Trilogy is Broken: Hilarious parody of classic fantasy quests.

The Nothing Mage: I have only vague memories of this series, but I remember liking the meta-magic.

* Cath fach

Erryn's world: A dungeon recreates the world after an apocalypse, and wants an isekai'ed boy to judge it.

* Becky Chambers

Wayfarers: Deep soul-searching science-fiction stories about the meaning of individuals and the bonds between them

Book Reviews 2012: Martha Wells

I discovered a new fantasy author while touring a used bookstore, Martha Wells.  I've since bought everything of hers I can get my hands on.

The Books of Raksura, Martha Wells
The Cloud Roads (The Books of the Raksura)
The Serpent Sea (The Books of the Raksura)
The Siren Depths (The Books of the Raksura)
I rate them as 5/5 all the way across.  The series chronicles the adventures of a clan of "Raksura", sentient fantasy creatures (people?) in a realm of other sentient fantasy creatures.  There was some magic here, but it was fairly subdued, and mostly taken for granted.  The series was mostly about the cultural differences of the various peoples, and one misfit's attempt to assimilate, with some villains and adventure thrown in for fun.


The Books of Ile-Rien, Martha Wells
The Wizard Hunters (The Fall of Ile-Rein: Book 1)
The Ships of Air (The Fall of Ile-Rein: Book 2)
The Gate of Gods (The Fall of Ile-Rein: Book 3)
The Death of the Necromancer
The Element of Fire
Also 5/5 all the way across.  The first three books are trilogy, set in a fantasy world that has 1900's era technology (ie simple cars and air ships, electric lights, but not much else) and well-established schools of magic and sorcery.  The country of Ile-Rien finds itself fighting a war, and the characters set off in search of a powerful magic to defeat their enemies.  The world that she creates here has enough depth to it that I found even the back stories enthralling.

The last two books are stand-alone novels set in the same world but during earlier time periods.  They have some familiar characters, but were essentially distant back-stories for the events in the trilogy.


Wheel of the Infinite, Martha Wells
Also 5/5.  At a high level, this book follows the main characters as the restore balance to the "Deep Magics" that govern the world (my term, not hers).  Magic is assumed everywhere, but not actually exhibited much by the characters.  I thought this one was a little more adventure driven, with a little bit of deeper issues thrown in, and much less cultural focused than most of Wells' other works.


City of Bones, Martha Wells
I rate this at 4/5.  City of Bones was a set in a post-apocalyptic world with survivors struggling to survive.  The male lead (named Khat) carried this book in my opinion.  He was another cultural misfit trying to survive in a foreign city, honest enough to be endearing and with enough character flaws to get himself into trouble.  The world was interesting and all, but I found him fascinating.

Khat kind of reminded me of a more interesting version of the male-lead from the Ile-Rien trilogy.  And the overall crisis the characters solve felt a lot like the one in Wheel of the Infinite by the end.  So that's mainly why I rate this as only a 4/5.  But the book might stand better on it's own if you hadn't have just read her other books. :-D


And that's all the motivation I have for the evening, so I'll stick to one author for now.

The Design of Design

I recently finished reading The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist by Frederick P. Brooks, (better known for his classic text The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering).  I would highly recommend it for any computer science students, and even any other technical discipline that deals with design work.  While most of what he says about design isn't anything particularly new or sensational, he manages to cover the breadth of design wisdom and put it all into a coherent framework, with lot's of examples and stories to back it up.  It's also a fairly quick read.  My only complaint is that about half the book is an account of several iterations of him designing his family beach house.  That was boring enough that I skimmed or skipped most of it.  He used it mainly to illustrated some of his design principles in a way that was accessible to a general audience, and I'm sure it would be more useful to people who are hearing some of his design philosophy for the first time.  More useful, was his analysis of some of the early IBM computer architectures that he worked on, and some discussion on the constraints and trade-offs involved.

Another chunk of the book was devoted to discussing the design process as it interacts with an institutional framework such as a business.  Having recently started a full-time job as a computer programmer, I found this to be the most interesting part of the book.  He balanced theory with examples and lots of practical advice, which is fairly rare among most of the people I've seen try and cover the topic.

Book Review: Priests and Programmers

I recently finished reading Priests and Programmers by J. Stephen Lansing, a book on irrigation practices and native religion in Bali.  To be honest, I found this book in the $1 used book bin at a textbook store outside UC Irvine, and I thought they were talking about computer programmers.  So I bought it expecting to find some Orwellian tale of a totalitarian government using religion and technology to blind it's populace.  Turns out they mean "programmers" as in "people who make up schedules," in this case, the priests setting the irrigation schedules.  Once I started reading it though, it was so interesting I kept going.

Apparently, the island of Bali (located in Indonesia) has an amazing irrigation system that has to be carefully maintained in order for anyone to grow any rice.  During the rainy season, there's water enough for everybody, but during the dry season, the water usage has to be regulated so that all of the farmers get enough water for their rice.  This gets slightly tricky since rice needs lots of water at the beginning of it's growth cycle, and very little at the end, so if you stagger the planting of the various farmers in the region, you can minimize the water shortages and maximize the rice.  The real trouble comes from the rice pests, which hop from field to field as long as somebody nearby is growing rice.  So to control the pest population you want to coordinate nearby fields so that they all lie fallow at the same time and the bugs and things die.  Striking the correct balance between synchronizing and staggering the fields is a complicated process that has to be tuned to the current conditions like rainfall and local weather.

In Bali the farmers attach mystical significance to the river and irrigation waters as being the property of the various gods and goddesses that inhabit the island.  As such, all of the water usage is coordinated by priests that inhabit temples built at the source of each canal, river, and lake.  These are called water temples, and serve to coordinate the water usage and planting cycles of all of the farms that belong to a particular watershed.  Lansing also argues that the religious rituals of the Bali people that involve the mingling of holy water from the various springs and lakes attached to the temple, symbolize the reliance of all these separate farmers and peoples on each other, and create a sense of group consciousness of the responsibility and social implications associated with water use.

Besides offering detailed accounts of the relevant religious ceremonies and an analysis of a computer model demonstrating the impact of water temple coordination with pest cycles, Lansing also tells the history of the Bali island and its water temples.  The Dutch arrived and eventually conquered the island in the 1850's or so, and tried to manage the local populace and the rice production.  However, they failed to notice the role of the water temples in coordinating the farming activities, because they tended to discount anything related to the local religions.  So the system kept functioning undisturbed until the "Green Revolution" hit Bali in the 1970's and 1980's.  Bali was now being run by Western-educated Indonesians, who didn't understand the roles of the water temples, and started disrupting the traditional farming practices by introducing new high-yield crops and farming technologies.  This quickly resulted in disaster as pest populations swarmed out of control, and devastated rice yields.  Farmers who resisted the transformation were written off as religious conservatives who were fighting change.  (Granted, it's not clear to me that the farmers or the priests completely understood their role in regulating the ecology of the rice fields, so I don't think you can completely write off the Western influence as being unduly dismissive of the traditional practices.)  At the time of the writing, the government of Bali was starting to study and understand the role the water temples play in managing rice production, and is beginning to allow them greater control in regulating the rice production.

All in all it was a good read.  There was a little bit of social-science style "Marxian Analysis" at the beginning and the end, but the rest of it was just anthropological study, history, and ecology.  I think it's definitely worth the few hours it takes to read it.  (It's not quite 200 pages altogether).