this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Another person already said Stanislaw Lem, so I'm going to take a side route and suggest one of my favorite series...
BUUUT... It's not sci fi. It's still genre fiction, but rather modern dark fantasy.
The Night Watch books by Sergei Lukyanenko
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_(Lukyanenko_novel)
Premise is that magicians, wizards, vampires, witches, werewolves, sorceresses, they're all real. The forces of light and dark were at war for centuries before they came to an agreement. The forces of dark would limit their activities to licensed behaviors, policed by the Night Watch, and similarly the forces of light would restrict themselves, policed by the Day Watch.
Now, here's the problem... Lukyanenko is a Russian nationalist of Ukranian heritage. He fully supports the war in Ukraine.
The books have nothing to do with it and were largely written even before the Crimea invasion, but since then Lukyanenko has made a large number of unfortunate comments.
So how much you enjoy the works is going to depend on how much you can separate them from the author. ☹️
As a counterpoint I can recommend the Metro series by Dmitry Glukhovsky, who is an anti-war Russian, recently sentenced (in absentia) to 8 years in prison.
Interesting... that's the 2nd video game based on a book that I had no idea was a book.
The other being S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which was based on the book Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, who are also Russian.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic
Now we have a whole rabbit hole of Russian genre fiction!
I recommend read him very attentively. The author is young, without a coherent picture of the world, in the middle of metro 2033 it turns into a hodgepodge of contradictions.
I've been meaning to read the Metro books! Loved the games but never got around to reading the source material. Thanks for the reminder!
Unfortunate about Lukyanenko's comments nowadays but I might still check out the books because they sound interesting! Maybe I'll avoid buying copies of those though. Thanks for the rec!
They really are very good books, and the first film, Night Watch, is good too. Based on about the first 3rd of the first book.
Then they did Day Watch and screwed it all up. :(