I just finished the first three books of the Wayfarer series by Becky Chambers. They are: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, A Closed and Common Orbit, and Record of a Spaceborn Few.
I’m waiting for the fourth to come out on audio (I have a 25 minute commute each way every day so I like audiobooks).
I decided I needed some light sci-fi after the grueling ordeal that was Ordinary Men. Yes it was edifying and I’m glad I did it, but it was rough.
The Wayfarer series is excellent.
The reviews are shit that almost made me not want to read them, e.g., one review called it “sci-fi for the Tumblr generation.”
Yes, Chambers does use some of the gender neutral neologisms like xir, but it works in the context of alien species with no gender or fixed sex.
The books had delightfully no political bend. She focuses more on world building and character development then action, which i greatly enjoy.
I’ve always preferred authors who can create interesting universes, which you can tell by the sci-fi stories I’ve posted.
The last two book series I’ve eaten up this ravenously were the Abhorsen (Old Kingdom) trilogy by Garth Nix and The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Two others that have extraordinary world building.
Her third book, Record of a Spaceborn Few, is very Heinleinian in that the story is a vehicle for discussing social philosophy.
I highly recommend the series.
It’s fine to have odd pronouns if you’re talking aliens with odd genders. Neil Smith has a couple of novels involving 9-legged crustaceans with 3 genders. (That includes his fun graphic novel “Roswell, Texas” which is on-line.)
On building universes, Larry Niven is a wizard at that. There’s “The mote in god’s eye” series, the “known space” series in particular the bunch of books dealing with Ringworld, and for a particularly exotic living environment there is the two-book series starting with “Integral trees”.
See also C. J. Cherryh’s Chanur series, with the polygender (and gender-shifting) Stsho. Weird species, weird pronouns. Nobody groks them.
Having finished _Ordinary Men_ you might want to read _Hitler’s Furies_. Same sort of academic writing. HF is more an exposure of how females of Germany participated in the evil of the Holocaust at multiple levels yet most were never punished.
She gives an example of a woman that worked as a secretary in the Gestapo who after the war worked with one of the prosecutors to help him find the evidence needed to successfully convict some of the higher ups. She was “instrumental” in locating documentation.
10-20 years later she couldn’t remember a darn thing when she was on trial.
I couple of “of course, why didn’t I realize that before” moments was when she wrote about the people of the villages coming out and finding 100s of bodies in the street after an “action” by the Order Battalion. The German’s had everybody close their shutters so they couldn’t witness what was happening as the Jews were driving through the street(s).
But they could hear the murders shooting for hours, they knew of the mass graves, they saw the bodies of the infirm and infants.
It wasn’t as heavy as _Ordinary Men_ but it it is worth a read. I still believe that _Ordinary Men_ should be required reading for every high school student. Not _Hitler’s Furies_