I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?
A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them. In the Three Body Problem, spoilers to follow for the series, humanity aren't The Bad Guys With Agency. We aren't even The Big Bad or The Big Good. We're sort of just other participants in this universe. The dual vector foil is employed by someone else, the guys who want space back from the pocket dimension to reboot the universe are just someone else, everything is someone else. We are bit part players in this play.
This goes on even to a few movies. The Wandering Earth movie (somewhat different from the short story) has this part at the end (obvious spoilers to follow) where the heroes accomplish the task and reboot their Earth Engine after conquering all odds - only for the camera to zoom out and show numerous other teams also having done the same. This wasn't the only struggle won. Cool alternative tale where it isn't so much One Team Saves The World or One Team Ruins The World.
Hyperion? Ringworld? Rendezvous with Rama? Brin's Uplift trilogy? Neuromancer? A Fire Upon the Deep? Robinson's Mars trilogy?
I'm just going through Hugo novel winners, picking some of the ones I've read:
Thank you to everyone else for recommendations. I'll have to give KSR's Aurora a shot. I couldn't get into New York 2140 very much but I'm down to try again.
Was about to post some examples that I liked, but then realized that anything from the previous century (1900's) probably can't be called "modern" any more. And after that, realized that I don't think I've read any "modern" corporate-published SF by that standard. I'm getting old.
If fanfiction counts, I'm enjoying this: https://archiveofourown.org/series/3516793
But ya, I love that genre. eg Haldeman's The Forever War, Scalzi's Old Man's War, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin
One recommendation: Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora: We went there. It didn't work. We came back. We did good and bad things to each other along the way. It was beautiful and painful.
This is a very strong theme throughout Ursula Le Guin’s books and short stories; perhaps you might find those interesting.
Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds
Startide Rising by David Brin
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
Semiosis by Sue Burke
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds
This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is very compelling.
And I seconded it below but I'll mention it again - the Bobiverse series is excellent with amazing exploration.
Ann Leckie is great, Tamsyn Muir is gothic horror lesbian necromancer-ish and super cool, Andy Weir is a full humanist in the best sense, Arkady Martine is a thoughtful writer I enjoy, Yoon Ha Lee was a fresh voice at time of pub, and worth reading, Cixin Liu fits your request, I love me some Stephenson novels, in your request category I recommend Anathem, Kim Stanley Robinson can be tiring, but is also pretty great, everything China Mieville has written is worth reading, full stop, Paolo Bacigalupi's adult fiction is fucking great, although I sort of bounced off his YA stuff, Vernor Vinge will read like near-history reportage, but was way ahead of its time when published, if you haven't read Iain M. Banks (also goes by Iain Banks for non-genre), you have 10-20 novels that are just fantastic waiting for you, Dan Simmons Hyperion is excellent, Bruce Sterling is worth reading.. Let me know if you get through this list.
The first book is really good by itself. The others are just as good but very different and way more political (meaning covering the politics of that universe, not political like involving current day politics).
That's my problem with horror media as well. They all eventually devolve into the "humans were the real monsters all along" cliché.
I think that breaks the style a little of 'humans bad for aliens' enough, right?
Either way I enjoyed Arrival (and the short story).
Bobaverse series.
A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
I think the Culture series by Iain M. Banks does mostly a good job at not being overly black and white, even though one of the sides has an obvious technological advantage.
It's of a genre called LitRPG. Exactly as you'd expect. And yet somehow Dinniman makes it work.
I hate myself for loving it. h/t Joan Jett & The Heartbreakers
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.
I agree that Children of Memory is not very good, mostly because it repeats itself so much. That could've been handled differently while still advancing the plot. I LOVE the overall concept, and the author's skills describing Gothi and Gethli's unique kind of intelligence was great, so I was okay with it overall... but too much of it was just a slog. First book is by far the best in my opinion as well.
I read this as Stainless Steel Rat[ss], and was befuddled until I read the end of your comment.
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.
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.
I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines
uh uh, uh
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.
I find his writing style really enjoyable, to the point that I really need to dive into his entire repertoire now.
Didn't really do much for all the other species though!
My first Tchaikovsky was children of time and TBH none of the sequels nor his other space operas were as captivating as that one for me.
Yet, I will read this one too. I believe that his ideas and stories are great in books and would never be able to make them into movies. So unique.
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.
If you enjoy him, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Dogs of War series (1st and 3rd especially).
At some point you start to see his themes recycled across all these series, but it's still fun.
I almost like everything he writes which is something because there's a ton of it and it's all over the place. Only ones I've DNFd are the Shards of Earth which is weird because I normally like space opera.
mmh. very appropriate
Also he does love his evil, totalitarian states. Here it's the Concern. In Alien Clay it's the Mandate. I think his name for the philosophy in his Tyrant Philosophers series is very clever: Perfection. The fascist ersatz-Imperial-Britain-copies pursue a doctrine they call Perfection - which is obviously what every monomaniacal totalitarian pursues, the word they'd give to their philosophy is always best translated as Perfection.
