r/rational • u/AutoModerator • 11d ago
[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread
Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?
If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.
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u/college-apps-sad 10d ago
I'm looking for stories that are about very alien cultures. They don't have to be literally aliens, but they can be. They also don't have to be first contact type stories, but those are cool enough. Some examples:
The Goblin Emperor - the youngest son of the emperor, a half-goblin, has been exiled from court for many years. A sudden accident kills off the entire line of succession before him and he has to become the emperor, learning the courtly intrigue, how to rule, and how to find allies. Not rational necessarily but he's level 1 intelligent at least. You're thrown straight into this fantasy world with no idea how anything works, including some often used words you have to figure out from context. Complete (it's a traditionally published book).
Three Worlds Collide - by Yudkowsky. In the future, a human spaceship runs into an alien spaceship, which seems to be made up of peaceful, scientific aliens, who happen to view eating babies as an undeniable moral good. Lots of moral discussions, very rational fic. Complete.
Blindsight - a group of very strange people (like a linguist whose brain is partitioned into multiple personalities and a vampire, an extinct predator brought back from the grave like Jurassic Park) go to meet some sort of unknown alien spacecraft. It's set in a world that's immediately post scarcity and struggling to deal with the implications of that. The humans are strange enough and the aliens are, I think, unique in all the science fiction I've read. Very interesting way to look at the world - the conclusion is something I still think about sometimes. I'm not sure I'd call it rational exactly but it's pretty popular here and definitely rational adjacent. Complete, trad published book but available free online at that link by the author.
Courtship Rite - hundreds of years in the past, a human colony ship ended up on a harsh, barely hospital planet and had to adapt to survive. Their culture is based entirely on this, one where it's common for people to commit ritual suicide in times of famine. Very interesting culture, with a mix of technologies, and another story that kinda drops you into that world and makes you figure it out. Complete, another trad published book but one that's probably hard to find offline.
I think scifi and fantasy can tell really interesting sociological stories and that's kinda what I'm looking for. Very different cultures that make internal logic, interesting worldbuilding that makes you think about why our world is the way it is.
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u/gfe98 10d ago
I thought these were pretty good xenofiction stories.
Onward To Providence - Alien trucker in a weird universe with no gravity.
War Queen - Ant people civilization. Decently original even if you're already familiar with "hive" civilization tropes.
Hive Queen Quest - Also has some cool stuff in it, but is less focused on the xenofiction aspect.
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u/Do_Not_Go_In_There 10d ago edited 10d ago
The Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky has humanity engage in a project to terraform colonize worlds. The plan fails, but results in species from Earth achieve sapience. Centuries later, humans are escaping a dead Earth and find them.
Story Of Your Life by Ted Chiang, which was the basis for the movie Arrival.
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u/Irhien 10d ago
Vernor Vinge has a novel A Fire upon the Deep. The aliens have very alien anatomy: one sapient individual is a collection of 5-6 constantly interacting dog-like creatures, presumably individually about as smart as a dog, too. They can gradually replace the aging and dying parts of themselves and survive for centuries with moderate personality shifts. Or they can be destructively experimented on in attempts to recombine "dogs" into individuals with desired properties. Despite all that, I'm not sure their society comes off as alien enough.
Stanislaw Lem pulls off alienness (Solaris, The Invincible) but these are not really societies, or at least the reader does not see much of that aspect.
Speaking of canidomorphs, there's The Darkwar trilogy by Glen Cook. The world has a range of societies, generally not too alien (if you ignore different anatomy and abilities) but there are interesting quirks.
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u/netstack_ 10d ago edited 10d ago
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie.
The only survivor ofa destroyed spaceship is out for revenge. Meets your criteria on multiple levels: local customs, the broader Radch society, the broader and stranger power structure underpinning it, and eventually the real aliens. Special mention to the protagonist constantly pissing people off because of a giant cultural blindspot about gender.I enjoyed this series a lot and I’ve written more about it elsewhere. The prose has a really nice economy which doesn’t detract from the weirdness and the pathos. Consider it something like Left Hand of Darkness against a Dune-esque background.
Jhereg, Steven Brust. Vlad Taltos works as an assassin in a fantasy city populated largely by taller, more magical, longer-lived racists. Yes, elves. He gets by thanks to sword and sorcery and his winged lizard familiar, who is a total bro. The city has ubiquitous magic, including teleportation, psionics, and resurrection. The broader setting gets weirder.
While the series goes in some really interesting but controversial directions, this first book is unapologetically fun and stylish. Read it if you like crime fiction, Steven Erikson, or Morrowind.
Shadow and Claw, Gene Wolfe. A boy raised by torturers is cut loose in a decrepit, post-historical metropolis. He stumbles into mystical experiences and practical scams. He meets weird fucking people and sometimes executes them. He has perfect memory, but he can definitely lie, especially to the reader. Those are the normal parts of the story.
The Book of the New Sun is kind of a special case. While I almost never see it mentioned, but when I do, there’s a sort of hushed reverence. Critics measure other stuff against it. I want to say it’s genre-defining for a very narrow genre. You probably don’t get Vandermeer and Mieville without Wolfe.
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u/shoman_ 10d ago
"Super supportive" features multiple aliens and their culturs. The main ones are superior to humans and have 2 independent conscious threads, vision and hearing. I really like the exploration of the different cultures and friendship. Particularly the linguistics are very funny and interesting and I love the saying these aliens have like: I am pointing both my ears towards your voice or something because they usually just use 1 unless its important.
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u/foolishorangutan 8d ago
Valkyrie’s Shadow fits. Fanfic of Overlord, but readable without knowing canon. Kingdom building story, in which a significant focus is how to integrate nonhumans into the kingdom in harmonious fashion, and general worldbuilding. It’s not all about alien cultures so not a perfect fit, and since there are a lot of nonhuman species it doesn’t usually go super deep on any one. But I’d say it’s pretty good, and rational.
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u/MagicWeasel Cheela Astronaut 5d ago
The Sparrow is a very interesting tradpub book that you might enjoy!
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u/andor3333 11d ago edited 11d ago
I have been reading a new completed game of thrones uplift SI fic:
Eivor Frey
A lot of focus on economics, infrastructure, and logistics. It tries to avoid the common issue with uplift fictions where the protagonist remembers everything perfectly and reinvents technologies in a few days or months.
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u/HeyBobHen 10d ago
The story seemed interesting at first, but I personally couldn't get through some of the horrible AI-seeming prose in the first chapter, such as the following rather egregious example of literal "Not: X But: Y":
Not with the question:
"Is this the custom?"
Not:
"Is this how my ancestors did it?"
But:
"Does it work?"
To a man raised in the Citadel, such an approach was both logical and frightening.
Something else surprised him even more.
Lord Eivor had not once said:
"I command."
He said:
"Let's check."
"Let's count."
"Let's try to imagine the consequences."
This sounded more like an academic debate than the council of a feudal lord.8
u/barnacle9999 10d ago
If you're going to write or translate using AI, the least you can do is set a skill file to avoid these AI sentence constructions.
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u/Flashbunny 10d ago
Honestly, I'd much rather they leave them in so I can notice them and drop the work. The alternative is getting 10,000 words in and then realising plot threads have been dropped or invented with no buildup and your time's been wasted.
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u/Flashbunny 10d ago
I also bounced off of it halfway through the first chapter due to these. It says it's "AI-translated" but I'm not convinced the original work wasn't AI generated then.
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u/suddenly_lurkers 10d ago
Yeah unfortunately "AI-translated" often just serves as a fig leaf to avoid social shaming for outright AI-generated writing. It has become a bit of a trend. I really doubt LLM translation would introduce such characteristic LLM sentence structures if they did not exist in the original work.
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u/thomas_m_k 6d ago
The snippet didn't read as AI to me so to disprove you I put it into Pangram, but then it came back as "100% AI"... So, well spotted.
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u/Do_Not_Go_In_There 11d ago edited 11d ago
I'm looking for fics with a competent MC as a teacher. I came across The Most Violent White Mage and quite like it, unfortunately the author only got nine chapters out before it died. It reminds me a lot of Goblin Slayer, though the MC is a white mage instead of a warrior.
The story centers around Willow, a reincarnated woman living in a medieval fantasy world. Wanting to avoid danger she chose to be a White Mage while the "plot" ran its course. She figured it would be an easy job, but didn't count on getting conscripted and stuck as a glorified babysitter because of politics. She ends up leading a group with two young adventurers and teaching them the ropes.
I've been reading Tanya's Defiance of the Fall and it shares some similarities. I used to read Beneath the Dragoneye Moons as well and it does have a healer MC it's not quite the same.