acollieralso vid about books

I really enjoyed this list of books, most of which I have not read, and your comments on them. I have read A Canticle for Liebowitz which is on my best list. I also read The Kragen Wakes by John Wyndam, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin, both of these I strongly recommend. Among my other top favorites are Invasion of the Body Snatchers (I don't remember the author right now), but both movies of this made in the 1950's and 1980's were excellent in different ways. The earlier one was very deep into human psychology, while the 2nd was pure terror. If they made this movie now, they would probably ruin it, just as they did with the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still (mid-1950's), movie by Robert Wise, with Michael Rennie as the spaceman. I also liked Lucifer's Hammer, a very long book. Jules Verne wrote true classics, including Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. By the way, I think "We" by Y. Zamyatin (I have not read this yet) was an early motivator for Ayn Rand, who fled Russia in the 1920's.

Russian is an interesting language worth learning, with a mountain of literature, & culture in general. I like Russians: most are smarter than the average bear (in our neck of the woods, the Anglosphere*). Ев-ген-ий Зам-я-тин Yev-gen-y Zam-ya-tin Yevgenii is the Russian equivalent of Eugene, but with a hard G. The vowel Я = ya, (like the vowel Е here) has a /j/ = y sound leading it; (see also Ю = yu, as opposed to У = u/oo; Ё = yo, as opposed to О = o). * I studied "We" for university & got marked down because the Russian literature professor simply had concept of entropy totally arse about. Half a lifetime later & that still bothers me! 😅

Great video that has left me with a longer reading list! Thank you! i'm a little late to this party--has anyone mentioned Samuel Delany? The Big Famous Experimental Dystopian One is "Dhalgren" but maybe my personal favorite is "Trouble on Triton," one of the best books dealing with gender I have ever read. He's also got some great early harder SF stuff and a really enigmatic sequence of fantasy novellas which at a certain point bleeds into his experiences during the AIDS epidemic in NYC. The following are maybe a little recent to be writing classics but I can also highly recommend them (plz forgive me if I missed a reference elsewhere/ downthread!): * Becky Chambers (mostly Wayfarers, which less a series than a group of independent novels in the same setting, with very little overlap; character-focused, sometimes gets called "gentle" but is also very challenging); * Iain M. Banks (wildly brilliant and often very funny, gone too early and doomed to an afterlife of being comprehensively misconstrued by idiot space billionaires he would have despised); * N. K. Jemisin (though probably her most staggering work, The Broken Earth, is a full-blown triple doorstop); * Deep cut: Leonard Richardson, who, unusually, has written a very useful Python library along with two extraordinarily good indie novels (third one on the way!)

Read "The Swerve". It's not fiction, but it directly speaks to "Canticle for Leibowitz" issues.

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane", though you may already have read that (I've seen some Gaiman on your shelves).

I've recommended to you on Blusky already but The Daughters of Egalia, or Egalia's Daughters, is a book that I really think deserves wider recognition! And it is sort of sci-fi.

For a Le Guin Feminist + Queer novel for pride month, I can’t recommend Left Hand of Darkness more, about a planet of humans that evolved hermaphroditism. The concept is so well executed it’s matched only by the gravitational weight of the story being told, of pacifistic diplomacy in the face of state power. My favorite sci-fi ever, and relevant now (with “gender ideology” under attack by reactionaries everywhere) more than ever.

Seconding "Childhoods End". A classic that holds up very well.

The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein is incredible. It is best read with as little info as possible. Kirstein writes so well, so precisely - it is just so good. Love this video. LeGuin, Russ, and Butler are the best!

Le Guin is so good, I just finished The Word for World is forest, after going through the 'previous' books in the Hainish Cycle, they give a bit more context around the society that invented the ansible and why the Cetian and Hainish humans were closer to the aliens in the forest! All great stuff so far. It's not really a series though Also, as I understand it, these books are where the idea of the ansible was first published, and I think the next book in the cycle is more about the invention of it, and I hope it explores more of the implications of its introduction across the human sphere of influence!

I actually only read dictionary(s), autobios, bios, history, things like Newton Principia etc... and serious subject books. (some university courses). I don't read novels, and I haven't since I was a kid in school. I've broken that habit for very few sci-fi.. but I can't seem to take novel reading seriously. I still appreciate the lists. I actually might have to admit, at a young age I started voraciously reading "how to" magic books from all eras, and this might have fxxxed me up. I've read close to 1000, and then close to 1000 subject books. Old age has set in, and I'm embarrassed to admit, I have stifled on reading, so if you're young I suggest and promote you to read subject books as much as you can, as it allows you to surpass a lot of crap out there in the video and news realms. Gr8! Peace ☮️💜Love

A Mote in God's Eye - a classic

Dune is fine. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny is far and away my favourite sci fi. Peak recommend.

Horsell Common and the Heat Ray is a song from Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds Album that I think you'd enjoy! the wiki paints a less glamorous origin story for the album, but I had always understood it as Wayne reading War of the Worlds and being so inspired that he could almost hear the score as he read. it's kitschy and drenched in 70s vibes lolol unironically on my bangers playlist

I loved <i>The Once & Future King</i> when I was a teenager but I tried to re-read it a couple of years ago (I am now extremely not a teenager) and found it a complete mess. Couldn't finish it, even 😬 (I am half-Welsh, though, so maybe that's the problem 😁🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿✊) So anyway you may like it or you may very much not like it but it would probably at a minimum be interesting 💁‍♂️

Just to celebrate your spectacular project, I quote Harlan Ellison for a while. Let's just celebrate on pure, unconstrained intuition. <i>- People always ask me, what is the future of this and that? - Your business is to tell us. - No, I'm a professional liar! I make up whatever comes to my mind. I'm not bad it, but any of anybody's opinion in anywhere is just as good as mine. They always say sci-fi writers predict the future. That's horse pucky. That's what they put on us because the magazines were the bastard child of literature. ... Yeah, this stuff may be crap but we predict the future! We predicted night baseball and the submarine! Well, if you start to look at it nobody was really predicted anything. There were 10,000 sci-writers all predicting wildly, shotgunning in all directions so ocassionly they hit one or two things. ... Nobody in the entire field predicted that the goverment would be the one to put rockets in space. ... The only person who thought we'd be watching the moon landing on television was Artur Clarke, no one else ever thought of it.</i>

Since you liked the Stanislaw Lem book you read, I'd also recommend The Futurological Congress by him. Another dystopia with drugs and a pretty short read

I loved this video, thanks. Ursula Leguin is wonderful. If you don’t already know, she has a universe which many of her other novels inhabit, including the word for world. I think it’s The Dispossessed in which the principle of simultaneity is discovered. I loved City of Illusions at age 14, and The Lathe of Heaven later on. She’s wonderful. I got into a writer called Gene Wolfe because she would give his books blurbs. I think you would probably hate him. But everyone should read his long short story Forlesen, I think

The invention of the ansible (LeGuin) is covered in The Dispossessed. Highly recommend it.

On the Welsh thing: HP Lovecraft's discovery that he had some Welsh ancestry unsettled him so much that he wrote The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where a guy discovers he has some fish monster ancestry. He didn't like, reexamine his beliefs or rename his cat

Love this!

More dystopian than sci-fi, I liked "The Testament of Jessie Lamb". It gives a new view on the decision for or against getting children with a background similar to Children of Man. Fair warning: I am pretty certain the book is christian catholic motivated. But it doesn't overstay its welcome and is not preachy. It is the only book that is religiously motivated I liked so far, so that's a plus.

Hurrah, the return of BookTube Angela! Thanks for the recommendations, will definitely check out some of these out. Starting with TWfWiF, I remember being impressed by some of Le Guin's other works.

LOVE these sci-fi book videos from you, i'm excited to pick one for my next read! i also am (embarrassingly) dying to know your thoughts on Dune

Loved this video, thanks for posting. Talking about stuff / life is one of your particular strengths. I forget, have you read A Fire Upon the Deep? One of my favorites, though maybe a bit long, and sort of vaguely a series. Meanwhile, your video editor played some little tricks on you, your beginning of each book thumbnails are randomly rotated. Good joke, but you might need to tighten down on that, lol ; )

If you haven't read it yet, try Spin State. Some of the best hard science fiction I've ever found. Author is Chris Moriarty.

First comment! Yay!