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r/printSF•
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Recommendations for speculative dystopian scifi books with good ideas (bit like Gibson's)

This really is the worst timeline.

Until a few years ago it felt like things were bad, but it was predictably bad. Books, films and tv series gave us a glimpse of what might come in the near future, and we kept pointing to prior art. "This is just like Black Mirror".

I've been looking around and feeling like the amount of progress in the past few years in mass data collection and processing, combined with more aggressively applied AI techniques have left speculative dystopia genre a bit behind. I can't see good ideas that predict where we will end up in the next 10 or 20 years.

I'm looking for recommendations for good speculative and dystopian science fiction. I say like William Gibson because his body of work in the 80s both shaped and predicted the 90s and 2000s.

Posted Aug 12, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

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weeee_splat•

Maybe Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan? It's set on a future Earth in a high tech society with the ability for consciousness to be easily backed up, stored or transferred, but is definitely very far from utopian (crime, corruption, extreme violence and inequality etc).

Someone already mentioned Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. I'd recommend his Snow Crash as well, a good early depiction of "cyberspace" in that.

Charles Stross has a couple of near-future type books that might fit your description, Halting State and Rule 34.

This might be stretching the "future" aspect a little, but John Brunner has some really good books that he used to explore potential future timelines. His most famous book is probably Stand on Zanzibar which focuses on overpopulation and it's impact on the global society he describes. Been a while since my last read but I don't think it suffers much from being written in the 60s or 70s. He also wrote the lesser known The Sheep Look Up, which is about environmental degradation and again probably remains pretty relevant today. Going from memory it isn't about climate change, more deliberate/unchecked pollution and corporations doing bad things, but I'd still recommend it.

(re-reading what you wrote I'm not sure how how well some of these actually match up, but I'll just post anyway, feel free to ignore!)

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jdp231•

Netflix took a lot of liberties with the story.

Although Richard K. Morgan is all about the extremely explicit sexual descriptions in his books. Doesn't matter if it is hetero-, homo-, or xeno- sexual.

I don't necessarily DISLIKE this, but it can be awkward, especially when one listens to Audiobooks almost exclusively, as I do. Standing on the bus in a crowd of commuters, while he goes on to describe the alternate-dimension alien pizzle in The Steal Remains...

I much prefer Black Man (aka Thirteen or Th1rt3en in the US). If they ever make this a movie, Idris Elba is the only man who could play Carl Marsalis.

Seriously. Morgan's great, but some of that stuff is "Letters to Penthouse" explicit. You Have Been Warned.

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crabsock•

If you liked Black Man, definitely check out his latest, Thin Air. It's set in the same universe, but on Mars. I really enjoyed it, one of his best, very noir feel to it

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jdp231•

YES! It was indeed very good!

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Aluhut•

A come on, I didn't like the changes they made to the books too but it wasn't that bad. It's not like we're talking about Gibson here. All his books are pretty much written for visual adaptation and half of the show was the book. There were even 1:1 parts in there and it's not like the characters are deep or something.

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uncle_fuh_uh•

I watched the Altered Carbon series and cringed a lot,

Trust me, as a reader and lover of all three of the books, so did I...

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beneaththeradar•

Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake, Year of the Flood, and MaddAdam

global warming, genetically modified everything, corporate/klepto states, designer diseases, antibiotic resistant plagues etc.

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beneaththeradar•

for me they present one of the most plausible future dystopias based on what's going on in the world presently. while I don't think the big "event" that happens in the first book is likely (don't want to spoil it for you), the state of the world up to that point seems scarily realistic.

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offtheclip•

Handmaid's Tale is a utopian novel for Pence

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neksys•

She expressly rejects the label “science fiction” so these books don’t end up on a lot of scifi best-of lists. But make no mistake, they are right up your alley.

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Darvon19EightyFour•

You might like Diamond Age

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Pccaerocat•

Love this one. My first Stephenson novel.

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Wold_Newton•

Apologies if already mentioned, but I really liked The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi.

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neksys•

And The Windup Girl!

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Xeelee1123•

You could try Daniel Suarez. He tends to take one idea and extrapolates it and then goes for it. Change Agent about biotech, Delta-V about asteroid mining, or Kill Switch about drones. He is a bit like an early Michael Crichton.

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jdp231•

Yeah, Suarez is pretty good most of the time. Crichton comparison == dead on

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Fr0gm4n•

His Daemon & Freedom novels explore AI taking over society and the economy.

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wd011•

Karl Schoeder's new book, Stealing Worlds, is of this ilk. BUT it's not a accessible as either Gibson or Stephenson. Close, but not quite there. Schroeder is a great "big ideas" writer, nonetheless.

Another older work is Bruce Sterling's Distraction.

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Pccaerocat•

I second Stealing Worlds. Very “20 minutes into the future”, but actually give you hope.

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jdp231•

The Big Sheep by Robert Kroese is also an interesting take on near future Dystopia.

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jdp231•

Yeah, I know it is post-apocalyptic but not as much in the vein of other big titles like Hunger Games and Wool and stuff that really hammers the "-Apocalyptic" point home.

Yeah, bad stuff happened (as part of the world building) and things are different now, but not SO different that we live in caves etc. I like to think of it as Post-Apocalyptic-Lite rofl

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jdp231•

It's also pretty good if you are a fan of lite humor in your scifi. Any HHGTTG fans here? They might really shine to The Big Sheep.

The title/book is also a homage to the noir detective genre; the title is the obvious nod. I read about this aspect somewhere early on; maybe a Goodreads book review?

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majulaa•

Super Sad True Love Story is this kind of near future dystopia but unfortunately a lot of stuff it predicted has already happened...

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jdp231•

Multiple different works by Cory Doctorow. A few standouts include:

  • Little Brother, and the sequel Homeland

  • Walkaway - surveillance state is just the setting/background but an interesting take

  • I, Robot - from a project where several authors used titles or phrases from classic Sci-fi as inspiration for new stories

Also, it's a big part of the background story in Neal Stephenson's Fall (or, Dodge in Hell) from earlier this year.

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doctormink•

I'm flip flopping about reading Fall. A lot of people seemed to really hate it, but you liked it? I enjoyed Cyptonomicon and Reamde for the record.

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jdp231•

Yeah, *Fall* is a really tough title to put into any one box.

Over all I liked it; parts of it felt like a waste of time. Some of it seemed like Stephenson was writing about his favorite pet characters solely for his own edification, and didn't give a crap if the story was any good or not.

However, parts of it were so amazingly insightful it felt like I was reading Snowcrash or Neuromancer for the first time. No joke, they really were that good. #Ameristan

This was mostly in the earlier parts of the novel. He was obviously writing about the recent turmoil in the United States over the political maneuverings of the parties and the corporations: "Fake News", "Alternative Facts", etc. Some really insightful and cautionary forward-thinking story points.

In many ways it is like Cryptonomicon. Overall it is pretty good, but reading it was quite a chore - both due to length and to the wandering story threads that never seem to be going anyplace near each other.

I would say give *Fall* a shot, and be prepared to just put it down for awhile when you need a break. It's how I got through it and I was very happy to actually complete it. I may never read the whole thing again, but I will certainly go back and read parts of it again (just like I do with Cryptonomicon).

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doctormink•

it felt like I was reading Snowcrash or Neuromancer for the first time

Well if anything's a selling point, that'll be it.

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da5id1•

Very true.

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for_t2•

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

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[deleted]•

Sigh...I guess I'll have to do it. Blindsight, Echopraxia and the short "The Colonel" by Peter Watts. The dystopia is mostly on the sidelines though, but what is there is pretty brilliant, ex: "Personal responsability as an outdated legal concept".

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Innova_too•

84K by Claire North. A near-future dystopian UK, where every life and every death has a price. That was the first book of hers I ever read and really liked the world she created. The train-of-thought writing style may not be for everyone, but I liked it.

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pbmonster•

I was blown away by Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

The variety of current subjects included in his world building is impressive.

  • climate catastrophe
  • rising sea levels
  • utra refugee crisis
  • advanced and widely available gene editing and violently enforced GM patents
  • total exhaustion of all fossil fuels
  • return of epidemic diseases (no vaccines, antibiotic resistance now common)
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neksys•

Came here to post this, as well as Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy.

The Windup Girl is one of those books I still think about a decade after reading it.

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mafaldinha•

Snowcrash has an interesting take on how corporations shape the world, read it recently and it feels like Stephenson predicted quite a lot. But it does get dated now.

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Putinator•

Infomocracy, perhaps?

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raevnos•

Vinge's Rainbows End.

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Kill-o-Zap•

You might want to consider Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. It's incredibly prescient about a lot of current issues, having been written in 1969. I think it's one of the classics of the New Wave and the writing still holds up, if I recall. Here's to our ongoing efforts to change this timeline for the better, to which end I wish you happy reading, stranger.

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art-man_2018•

The overlooked dystopian writer, John Brunner: Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up.

Another one of his, The Shockwave Rider is also very good. Though they seem dated, his visions of the future are very prescient in these times.

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Stamboolie•

It's nearly 20 years before Gibson but Stand on Zanzibar holds up well for its predictive abilities, The sheep look up is also recommended by many, but I still prefer Zanzibar.

..and of course the bobiverse is predictive

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