Don’t really know how to explain this. I like sci fi and would love to dig deeper into it. Am avid reader and enjoyed Project Hail Mary (though set in space, this book is just amazing), Dune, short stories by Ray Bradbury and TV shows like Raised by the Wolves, Westworld, From (love From!). But e.g. Foundation I really disliked. Wheel of time is massive and I lost interest. Even the guide through galaxy I appreciated but was not really into it. Somehow, all those lots of traveling, lots of worlds, lots of many novel/invented names and terms render reading laborious for me.

Can you help me pin what is that I like and perhaps offer me a suggestion where to start? Thanks!

EDIT: thanks everyone for your excellent suggestions! So happy to be a part of lemmy community. I might make a follow up thread in couple of months so we can discuss some of the works. And lastly, if you been reading this far: have a good weekend.

  • _pete_@lemmy.world
    271·
    1 year ago

    How about The Expanse or The Martian? They’re both relatively hard sci-fi that focuses mostly on our own solar system.

    The Martian tells the tale of a man stuck on Mars and his ability to survive on his own whilst those back on Earth figure out a way to get him back. Both the book and the film are great so you can’t go wrong with either.

    The Expanse covers more of the local system. Earth and Mars are on the brink of war, whilst others live out near the asteroid belt, Jupiter and beyond. It goes a little sci-fi later on but it’s an inherently human story that has some great characters living in a time when space travel is still dangerous but achievable by humanity. It starts a little slow but ramps up brilliantly and has a nice conclusion that wraps everything up pretty neatly. You’ve got 9+ books, a 6 season TV series on Amazon Prime, and a newly released TellTale video game, all of which are well produced and worth investing time in.

    • giriinthejungle@lemmy.worldOP
      7·
      1 year ago

      The Martian I am saving as one of those cannot go wrong books, in case i ever run into reading blockage. But Expanse i didn’t check out. Will do now. Thanks

    • Chaotic Entropy@feddit.uk
      2·
      1 year ago

      My immediate thought was Expanse too. A fairly manageable scale to everything, for the most part, with space travel within relatively strict bounds.

  • CrayonRosary@lemmy.world
    272·
    1 year ago

    Dune is an example of massive world-building with a tons of jargon, but you still liked it? It seems that this post is saying you don’t like books like Dune, so how did you manage to enjoy it?

    • Tetra@kbin.social
      11·
      1 year ago

      It sounds to me like while OP can absolutely enjoy longer, more complex works, they can prove daunting and time consuming, so they’re looking for shorter and more straightforward stories.

      Maybe I’m casting my own experiences onto this, but I know that’s a feeling I get too, especially with some video games. Some of my favorites are 200+ hours of meticulous exploration and grinding, but I rarely find myself with the energy to engage with journeys of this magnitude, so I usually gravitate more towards shorter stuff.

    • giriinthejungle@lemmy.worldOP
      74·
      1 year ago

      You do know nothing is black and white in life, right?

      Anyways, I wouldn’t put Dune as my 5* read, but I did enjoy it. I only read the main part of the main Dune book, not the whole series, prequels etc. Also, it is mainly set on one planet.

      • comfortablydumb@lemmy.mlEnglish
        18·
        1 year ago

        I don’t blame you for not reading the rest of the Dune series, it wasn’t my cup of tea, either, but why don’t you watch a movie or something if you don’t want to actually read a book?

  • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
    18·
    1 year ago

    Have you tried Asimov’s short stories? ‘I, Robot’ is mostly logic problems presented in a dramatic way. Good read.

    • giriinthejungle@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      I haven’t. I thought I wasn’t really into short stories… Till I discovered Ray Bradbury. Now I am very much into short stories. So will give Asimov a try for sure.

      • p_diablo@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        VERY different genre, but if you’re digging short stories, i really dig earnest hemmingway’s stuff.

      • case_when@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Check out Ted Chiang as well – his two short story collections (Story of Your Life and Others; Exhalation) are some of the best I’ve ever read. He wrote the story upon which the film Arrival was based. Lots of things about time, consciousness, free will, humanity, all beautifully done.

  • OhStopYellingAtMe@lemmy.world
    17·
    1 year ago

    Try some cyberpunk stuff, it’s great “local” sci-fi, with hardly any of that muck you don’t like.

    “Neuromancer” - William Gibson
    “Snow Crash” - Neal Stephenson
    “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” - Philip K Dick

  • MoonManKipper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    1 year ago

    I suggest Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. The whole series is good but each is stand alone. There is a world and it’s in space but the stories are people scale.

    • giriinthejungle@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      This is such a good recommendation really, I have to elaborate why: I love The Stand (rebuilding the society), Heart is a Lonely hunter (american southwest) and 1000 years of solitude (story that spans across number of generations). So thanks!

      • GrabtharsHammer@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        A great book, but it certainly includes a lot of invented vocabulary to deal with, and the reader is expected to just roll with it and sort the vocabulary out on their own.

    • Slotos@feddit.nl
      5·
      1 year ago

      I believe it was advertised as a trilogy before the third book got published. And frankly, third book is written as the final book of a trilogy. The newer books should’ve been a separate saga, and there’s a chance that they were initially planned as such.

      • DreadPotato@sopuli.xyz
        3·
        1 year ago

        I started on the fourth book, it just doesn’t hit quite as well as the first three. I feel perfectly content stopping the series after the third book, it finishes Darrow’s story really well.

  • wrath-sedan@kbin.social
    11·
    1 year ago

    I’ll throw in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Both classics that are great page turners. Take place against the backdrop of an intergalactic society but remain focused on singular planets and their societies (well if you include their anarchic moons). Great characters with meaningful relationships. Left Hand has more of an interpersonal focus, Dispossessed more societal, but both amazing in their own way.

  • Teodomo@lemmy.world
    10·
    1 year ago

    Ursula K. Le Guin is an example of a writer that does deep but focused worldbuilding. Her sci-fi books tend to be about a single planet, sometimes two like in The Dispossesed. You could try that one or even better start with The Left Hand of Darkness. I like how she sets up various unusual alien factors (geopolitics, biology, society, natural environments) and lets them interplay but also without forgetting a plot.

  • Zeram@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    I’m surprised no one has mentioned The Culture series by Iain M. banks. Much like Dune there is a ton of world building that occurs in the novels but it’s not the focus of any one novel. You can read them independently and still enjoy them. The concepts he tackles in the novels were way ahead of their time and his prose and s second to none. The novel Consider Phlebas is typically where most people start, but I started The Player of Games.

    • jantin@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      Against a Dark Background from Banks is good too, much less space travel, a very adventurous plot and worldbuilding which is dense but doesn’t overtake the book.

    • marzhall@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      Seconding The Player of Games as the place to start in the Culture novels, although there is notably a lot of space travel in the Culture series overall which might be why people are avoiding them for this request. But 100% worth giving TPoG a read, for sure - and it in particular has no space travel past the opening, iirc.

  • AFK BRB Chocolate@lemmy.world
    7·
    1 year ago

    Oh there’s just so many. A favorite of mine is Replay by Ken Grimwood. It’s a kind of a time travel book, but different from most, and a lot of fun - written in 1986, so not new. Broad plot is that the main character, a middle aged man, dies on the first page and wakes up back in college, back in the 50s, I believe. It gets more interesting from there.

    You might enjoy the Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells, which is a series that starts with All Systems Red. The first couple are novellas, and the first one was published in 2017, so much more recent. They won a lot of awards. It takes place in an unspecified time in the future, told from the perspective of a cyborg of sorts who is a security bot who has hacked his control unit and doesn’t have to do what he’s told, but he doesn’t want people to know that so he can watch soap operas when he can. He’s guarding a small group on an alien planet when things get weird.

    I’ll recommend one other, very different: Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. I believe that was 2007. It’s told from the perspective of a guy in near earth future who had late stage Alzheimer’s but was given a cure, so is slowly getting back his mental function. Wearable computers are ubiquitous at the time. Also a big award winner.

    I hope you find something you like.