when I say 1984 it is going to be very cleche but hear me out
so I grow up in China and only moves out around 12 when I was 10 they suddenly banned a book that the name is just a year I get super confused and pleed the local Liberian to read it before they destory it. holy shit that is some messed up shit for my age at the time, but it made be see the environment around me a lot more clearly
I hated reading 1984 because I knew it was saying a very true, gross thing about humanity.
Same with Dune but I mostly had fun reading that one lol.
How ironic to ban 1984 lol
even more ironic is that they didn't ban three body problems. given the opening of the book
Whaaaatt fr lmao. Honestly couldn't get past that part because of how painful some of the rhetoric was. X(
Stranger in A Strange Land was called "the hippy bible" for a reason...
It was written in the 1960s tho, so even the "woke" parts can be pretty problematic. That just means society progresses tho. If 60 year old media doesn't have anything problematic in it, it means society has stalled instead of peogressed
Thou are God.
The problems with this book are not just "a product of it's time". There were authors at the time who could write women characters, Heinlen just wasn't one of them.
This was my favorite book when I was in my mid 20s. I tried to read it a couple of years ago and just couldn't.
I've always had problems with Heinlein. Early on, my problems were more that his dialogue just seemed.... too pat. He couldn't separate his characters in his mind, so they always had the perfect comebacks to what each other were saying.
And as I got older, I have more and more problem with his women. But then again, I adore Isaac Asimov, and he can't write women well, either. But better than Heinlein.
The Left Hand of Darkness and other Le Guin stories. Good timing on when I started expending my scifi reading in her direction; I was in high school, meeting more people outside my little conservative family and church bubble, trying to form new conceptual models for the much bigger world that I was previously insulated from.
Le Guin is phenomenal. Her acceptance speech at the 65th National Book Awards makes me tear up to this day.
"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality."
Edit: Here's the full speech if anyone is interested in listening to it. It's only six minutes and well-worth it.
Anything by Le Guin. She's a revolutionary and visionary. Imo greatest sci-fi author ever.
I have to drop "The Dispossessed" here.
For anyone else scrolling by, you can read The Dispossessed here for free! :D
Umineko. It's a visual novel that teaches you that empathy and imagination are necessary to understand other's actions. It's very good. If you like mysteries or detective stories then you will definitely love it but it is still very good if you don't.
There's plenty I could list, but when it comes to seeing the world through a new lens it's all about Discworld. Just keep reading and it'll change you. Sir Pratchett's understanding of people, society, and philosophy is phenomenal.
I've wanted to read the series for a while, but getting into it seems so intimidating because of just how much Sir Terry wrote. Do you have a good starting recommendation?
While there are recurring characters, locations, themes and ideas, each book is an independent, self contained story. As the other commenter mentioned, it doesn't really matter where you start.
Also, there may be a large number of books, but they are all really short and easy/quick to read. I went from being intimidated by the number of books in the series when I picked up The Colour of Magic to crying during the epilogue in The Sheppard's Crown in an eye blink.
Small Gods is probably one of the greatest books I've ever read. I fucking love it so much.
Sounds weird, but Ascendance of a bookworm and time. Use to work agile and doing things quick, then I read bookworm and the tiny gremlin who wanted to do things quick and now, and the consequences for doing so.
Now I give as much time as I can/need for anything and everything. And I now start getting annoyed when family says they’re dropping in. Like dude, give me time to prepare, like 2-4 days heads up so I can clean, get more food and properly welcome you.
In his Discworld novels, Sir Terry Pratchett gave me a love for humanity. He's so good at writing, but especially at characterization. The people he writes are just so human, and for me, it increased my empathy for people overall.
Also, even though I'm an atheist, after having grown up fundie Southern Baptist, I'd like to think that if the spiritual and supernatural exist, that it works somewhat along Discworldian lines. Certainly there are two Deaths that I wouldn't mind meeting: The Discworld Death, and the Sandman Death (Neil Gaiman).
But it was with Pratchett's help that I've come to believe that there are no good people and no bad people. Just people, and all the choices they make. Which in some ways makes "evil people" more terrifying, because I believe they make those choices. But it's also heartening: People can choose to be better.
The principles expressed in the novels helped me change my views on what's important: I think the most important thing you can do is to make others' lives a little better, if you can. Huge projects like social safety nets, but even making a stranger laugh for a moment and brightening their day.
This life is all we get, and anything that makes it better is the main thing that's worth anything at all.
The Good Place, especially the ending of it.
Tap for spoiler
How much of our lives now through capitalism are passively “bad actions”, how people can always change and grow still even if it should be the “end” of their journey, how shitty the idea of living forever somewhere in the afterlife actually would be, and becoming comfortable with the idea of death and the whole unknowing nature of it.
Really a wild piece of work from the same man who made The Office, Parks and Rec, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
NINE NINE!!
I thought the ending was cop out garbage, lets jump into a void because I can't think of how else to end a story about the afterlife
Type of ending I would write because I'm lazy.
The whole living in the afterlife is so shitty that everyone's bored thing is the wrost concept I can imagine. Like you woildn't just be able to be on drugs 24/7 with no tolerance so it would always feel good.
Every issue they have is something a living person would have not a soul. They just couldn't fathom a proper afterlife so ofc it's boring. The assumption is every single mf in existence would choose to erase themselves and no longer exist as themselves with that identit/persona. Doubt it, im sure the creator would, but the creator is weak willed and lacks imagination. Just look at their show about the afterlife which feels like the most low/light fantasy sht ever.
Maybe it's because I read comics all the time where entities live forever without issue, but it really felt like they lacked the imagination to play with their own concept.
The Dispossessed. No question. No other work of fiction has made me question more about my beliefs and worldview than that book. It makes you question everything you believe about society and your role in it. It's both an engaging science fiction work and an incredible work of philosophy. The author's worldview very clearly bleeds through into every page, and she does an excellent job of creating characters that actually feel like real people. The heroes are deeply flawed yet morally engaging, the villains are sophisticated and well-spoken. The Dispossessed made me rethink how I see my purpose in my life, my relations to the society around me, the ways we perform gender, and whether or not it's actually possible for equality to exist. Whether or not you agree with Le Guin's politics, she is easily one of the best authors of the 20th century.
Fahrenheit 451. I started noticing increasing censorship and the growing intentional denial of knowledge and learning more and more. It's terrifying.
Redwall - I didn't realize when I was reading the series but looking back now they absolutely instilled in me the knowledge that I could stand up to those in power despite being weaker or smaller. Those books lead to me rebelling against my abusive parents and striking out on my own. I shed their conservative views and hatred. All because a mouse and his friends stood up to a rat.
I've got more but this one probably had the largest impact on how I think overall in the long term.
1984 and it's spiritual prequel, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas .
These books opened up my teen mind to the fact that we are always, individually and as a society, creating, editing, and manipulating consensual reality.
Unfortunately the bad guys are way ahead of us on the manipulation bit, and with LLMs/Gen-AI I fear a total collapse of consensual reality. But if we have enough Hunter S's in the world, we may still be in the fight.
Ghost in the Shell. It really changed how I seen my body, not as something that I am, but as something I control. Now I can start and stop peeing whenever I want.
Going to go with a video game: Outer Wilds. The game is very story and mystery oriented, so I don't want to spoil it, as that can ruin the experience. In short though, it's an exploration game where you get to do your first flight around a miniature solar system - exploring it freely without a linear sequence or quest markers.
The story is told in a nonlinear way, depending on how you explore it, and the way it comes together and the conclusion it reaches were amazing to discover.
A Demon Haunted World by Sagan should be taught in school.
Go Tell it On the Mountain by Baldwin is such a beautiful work of fiction that you could totally miss the profundity of it's themes.
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. Made me realize how dogmatic religion is, also its a really fun and accessible book to read, teenage coming of age story, with a sprinkle of religious criticism.
I'm pretty sure it made me the scientist I am today.
Back in the nineties, for me it was the TV show Northern Exposure. I grew up in a small town dominated by hockey jocks, pickup trucks and underage drinking--always being labelled a nerd for reading books or being in cadets (where we flew gliders on weekends and got teased for it.) This show really encouraged me in its depiction of an isolated, northern backwater town where people appreciated literature, philosophy, and valued different backgrounds and unorthodox endeavours. As I was reaching adulthood, I felt it normalized self-reflection and provided a perspective for me to see a bigger world outside of where I grew up, opening a lot of windows to seek out real self-actualization at a time in my life where I needed it.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
What did I take from it? I personally took the point to be "world's fucked, people are fucked, but who cares? Goof off more!"
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Neon Genesis Evangelion also (positively) changed my view on life and what makes it worth living.
Gurren Lagann is much more overt with the positive messaging.
My older brother left home for college and I was legitimately so depressed I got left behind. I remember looking out of the living room window seeing him drive off in my parent’s car. Gurren Lagann was one of the first things I watched after that. And I’m sure you can tell what my reaction was when a certain event happens a quarter into the show. But what really saved me was everything that came after that. I’m almost doubled the age I was when I first saw it and nothing has ever come close to affecting me that way. I will personally forever put it in the magnum opus of human creativity and art.
Dogma helped me see how absurd religion, specifically Catholicism, was and helped be begin to untangle what it all meant for me, a hyper-religious teenager at the time.
Imajica by Clive Barker flipped a switch in my (then) teenage brain making me understand that "fantasy" books don't need to have swords, wizards, and all the other tropes. That the idea of "fantasy" as a genre is far far richer than I imagined.
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