Hacker News Books

Parable of the Sower is a nice quick novel, a great place to start, and feels very relevant these days. Lilith's Brood is a lot wilder, a very unique experience.

3 more days: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/women-of-scifi-and-fantas...

Includes Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower for $1.

Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash were great. Others you might:

- The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang (superb short story that Arrival was based on)
- The Three Body-Problem (Cixin Liu)
- Dune (Frank Herbert)
- The Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler)
- Lucifer's Hammer (Larry Niven)
- The Kundalini Equation (Steven Barnes)

I vote for "Parable of the Sower", definitely. I've enjoyed some of her other books, and I still have more to read, but this is the one that really left a mark on me.

I recently read Parable of the Sower for the first time (wrote about it here: https://andrewliptak.substack.com/p/three-novels-about-unbal...) and really was blown away by it.

Happy to see some great books recommended there. Specifically, let me call out:

The Three Body problem.
The Lathe of Heaven.

And while I haven't read Parable of the Sower yet, everything I've read of Octavia Butler has ranged from really good to some of my favorite books ever, so I'm sure it's a good one.

One anti-recommendation (kind of): I recently read Finite and Infinite Games, after many (many) recommendations for it, and didn't particularly like it. Obviously I'm in the minority on this, but I really wonder what other people saw in it.

Thanks for sharing this here.

FYI for those who haven't read it, Butler's "Parable of the Sower" is one of the most crucial novels of the last century. It mixes a future so dark and plausible it makes other dystopias look sweet and cartoonish with -- incredibly -- a cosmic optimism so deep and hopeful it makes you proud to be human. It's really an amazing book.

I was very late coming to Octavia Butler's writing, despite being a huge scifi nerd from a very young age.

I wish I'd discovered her sooner...she's easily in my top five favorite scifi authors, today. Parable of the Sower (and its sequel) is beautiful and thought-provoking; the Lilith's Brood series (starting with Dawn) was way ahead of its time, tackling gender, race, sexuality, and xenophobia, in a really thoughtful and nuanced way (in a genre that is not renowned for nuance on any of these subjects). Even her early Patternist series is awesome. It's like she sprung up fully formed as one of the great scifi writers (though, apparently, she had several years of rejection, so I guess she honed her craft in relative obscurity).

I suspect I was slow to read her because her best known work, Kindred, just didn't sound like something I would like (I did end up reading it, and liking it, though it's not my favorite of her work, and I don't really get excited about alternate histories or time travel stories). But, most of her other stuff is right up my alley. She's got dystopia covered with the Parable series, she's got weird aliens in Lilith's Brood, and she's got creepy evolutionary speculation in the Patternist series.

I really just can't say enough good things about Butler, and strongly recommend every scifi fan check her out. I wish she'd written more, as I've read most of her novels a couple of times, and loved nearly all of them. It's disappointing to have discovered someone so good, and then run out of books by them to read, knowing there will never be another. (Similarly, I never "got" Asimov as a kid, but then read Foundation as a young adult and finally understood it and loved it, only to find he'd died a couple months before...but, at least Asimov wrote enough books to keep one busy for years.)

"With Perseverance departing from its touchdown site, mission team scientists have memorialized the spot, informally naming it for the late science fiction author Octavia E. Butler. The groundbreaking author and Pasadena, California, native was the first African American woman to win both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award, and she was the first science fiction writer honored with a MacArthur Fellowship. The location where Perseverance began its mission on Mars now bears the name 'Octavia E. Butler Landing.'

[...]

'Butler’s protagonists embody determination and inventiveness, making her a perfect fit for the Perseverance rover mission and its theme of overcoming challenges,' said Kathryn Stack Morgan, deputy project scientist for Perseverance. 'Butler inspired and influenced the planetary science community and many beyond, including those typically under-represented in STEM fields.'

[...]

Butler, who died in 2006, authored such notable works as 'Kindred,' 'Bloodchild,' 'Speech Sounds,' 'Parable of the Sower,' 'Parable of the Talents,' and the 'Patternist' series. Her writing explores themes of race, gender, equality, and humanity, and her works are as relevant today as they were when originally written and published."

See:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26370664

I've been thinking about how familiar Children of Men feels in recent months, especially given civil war in Syria and the wave of nationalism sweeping Western Europe and the United States.
This article is a great analysis of how the film creates this uncanny sense of familiarity. I'm overdue to watch it again.

(On a side note, I just finished reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, which resonantes with today's world in a similar way.)

> The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

The first of those books was published in 1993. Most of the shit happening right now was already being talked about as a problem then.

The Ted Chiang anthology is sooo good. Every story's premise was so unique - it blows my mind that one person can come up with so many out there ideas.

I know OP wasn't looking for dystopias, but if you like Parable of the Sower, I recently read two excellent new scifi/dystopia books: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and American War by Omar El Akkad. American War was really cool - it's by a journalist who covered military trials at Guantanamo Bay and the Arab Spring, who transposes the stories/atrocities he witnessed as a reporter onto the future US.

Sure, my Top 5 books by non-whitemen I read in 2014 are:

FICTION

1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Americanah
2. Terezia Mora - Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent (not translated yet I think)
3. Octavia E. Butler - Parable of the Sower
4. Jose Saramago - Blindness
5. James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk

NONFICTION

1. Melba Patillo Beals - Warriors Don't Cry: The Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High
2. Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir - Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
3. Laura Fermi - Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi
4. Judith Newton - From Panthers to Promise Keepers: Rethinking the Men's Movement
5. Sikivu Hutchinson - Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels

and as a bonus, because it's written by a white man...

Jeffrey Haas - The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

Misc responses:

It's common to see people harvest blackberries, mushrooms, chestnuts.

Sustainable Ballard organizes gleanings from the local public market. Here's one of their projects. http://www.sustainableballard.org/food-gleaning/ I hope this practice is widespread.

My city has a couple groups that will come and harvest your trees. https://www.cityfruit.org/great-seattle-fruit-harvest

Find food near you. https://fallingfruit.org http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/04/23/178603623/wan...

I was once told that one of the bluesky uses cases for Google Maps was to enable someone to publish urban food sources. That person had a map online for while, much like falling fruit above, but I can't quickly refind that URL.

Urban food gathering always reminds me of Octavia Bulter's "The Parable of the Sower", where the protaganist is very resourceful. (A fate I hope we manage to avoid.) http://octaviabutler.org/2017/03/parable-of-the-sower-new-ed...