alt Hacker NewsThe Children of (insert adjective) series by Adrian Tchaikovsky is really, really good, especially the second in the series. Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.
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I was not particularly a fan of them - the plot seemed to find overly easy solutions to all the actual messiness that comes when dealing with others very unlike yourself, which given the rest of the stories, feels like it undercuts the entire point of them.
The Tchaikovsky novella I really like is Elder Race. Technology-as-magic is done in so many places (Ventus is another favourite), and I usually enjoy it, but I felt that in Elder Race it was pulled off in an unusually elegant way.
It'd be (insert noun) and the first one is far and away the best but on the big picture you are absolutely correct that it is fantastic. Children of Time (first one) is maybe my favorite book ever.
> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.
Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.
Alien Clay is also fantastic. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think it gives the best intuition I’ve seen for a scientific concept that can be difficult to really grok otherwise.
Children of Time sparked more comments from strangers in NYC than anything else I’ve read. I came almost to expect them when reading it.
> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.
I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!
But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.
The "aliens" are just spiders. With a lot of magical thinking. It's more like fantasy than science fiction. And character development is terrible. Only one or two are interesting and they get killed too early.
I can take SciFi that's at least either good story or good science. To this day I don't know why people recommend this author so much, even more than Watt's Rifters trilogy or Firefall. He is a "legal executive" who dropped out of zoology/biology. Explanations are just "nanovirus!" or "bioengineering!" and left at that.
Spoiler: the spiders make a space elevator and an asteroid catcher out of spiderweb; really. Stuff like this doesn't pass the suspension of disbelief for me. Reading it was quite annoying.
Feel free to downvote me, but if you do, I ask you the minor kindness to refute my points.
Edit: also "nanovirus!", what? All viruses are nano. And this virus being so complex it can't be too short, either.
I concur on "really good" but have to disagree on the "series" part. Children of Time is a remarkable book, one of the best science fiction stories in a very long time.
Children of Ruin is ... okay. Children of Memory is not a good book, IMO. Both of these suffer from the same mysticism-used-to-spin-up-a-red-reset-button plot device plague that fundamentally guts Xenocide. Nowhere as bad as that, of course, but the unpleasant echoes are there.
As it happens I'm in the middle of the Architects series and while it has its distant whiff of Stainless Steel Rat[ß], on the whole the series and its universe have so far remained consistent.
ß: Stainless Steel Rat was notorious for repeatedly putting the protagonist into impossible situations and then whipping up near-magical pieces of technomancy that just happened to solve the problem of the moment.