Hello all! I am just coming to the end of the fantastic Culture series by Iain M Banks and I am looking for recommendations for similar books/authors. I have also enjoyed James S A Corey’s The Expanse books so if anyone has a good recommendation for similar sci-fi books it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I really liked Adrian Tchaikovsky’s stuff. Particularily “Children of Time” and a lot of his standalone novels like “Alien Clay”, “Shroud”, and “Service Model”.
Another good book that explores truly alien aliens is “A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge. I really like how a lot of concepts are presented in a way that initially lets you sort of figure out whats going on before too much exposition is used to clarify alien ideas.
Finally, I need to recommend David Brin’s books, like the uplift trilogies or oven his weirder stuff like Kiln People. He does a good job of establishing a technology or social convention and building a world around it.
“Children of Time” surprised me quite a bit. It was a gift from a family member. One of those “oh…they like sci-fi…” kind of gifts. And it was really good.
I would add some Stephen Baxter to this list with the caveat that he really gets in to the wild mathematical stuff. Not as “hard” as Greg Egan, but not far off either