/lit/ - Literature

>>439 (OP) 
The Martian is actually good, well worth reading. The MLP fanfic is even better.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep i believe is one of like 5 books you should read in your life

>>441
Silly question but I watched Blade Runner 2049, is that gonna ruin the book for me?

Also should I still imagine the main character lookin like Ryan Gosling

DADOES by K Dick is not like the movie it inspired, Blade Runner. His style is kind of all over the place.  Read starship troopers, it is a political philosophy set within a coming of age story set in the postwar science fiction universe.  I also enjoyed Herberts books, but in an abbreviated form. Dune Messiah, God Emperor of Dune, stop. If you want to start from the very beginning you can Dune as well but I hardly consider it necessary.

>>442
BR2049 is an original story with no connection Blade Runner outside of brand recycling

I also Enjoyed GITS 1 and 2 in the manga form. It's the same universe as the movie but with many novel side-stories, a completely new plot in the second Manga. It's what inspired the films

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>>444
May the fours be with...ah NVRMND
Nice GET though.
Philip K. Dick is excellent, Classics like Bradbury's collections,'R is for Rocket' and 'The Illustrated man" are also good, if a little dated,(but not as much as you'd think, plus the juxtaposition of what might be then and what IS now is interesting, if not a little jarring.)

For more technical SF try the Mars trilogy By Kim Stanley Robinson, or perhaps some of Isaac Asimov's stuff--however, Asimov's writing was great when I was a teenager, but he was better as an editor, and seems pretty lackluster decades later.

Ender's game by Orson Scott Card also jumps to mind. Come to think of it, It's funny that the short story published ANALOG, Science Fiction and Fact in 1977 wasn't turned into a book until 1985
You might consider looking into the old SF magazines to sort of "Shop around" for authors' styles you like, since there are so many different ones.

>>441
I prefer Man in the High Castle..."Singapore"

>>439 (OP) 
Forever War is my recommendation. It was written by a top tier sci-fi writer as a critique and response of Starship Trooper, which itself was a great novel and concept on its own. Unlike ST and its author who still boundlessly believed in the government and multi-cultural fascism, the author of Forever War buried countless redpills in that book such as showing that the powers that be want to enforce LGBT protocols for population control, want to encourage race-mixing to create a rootless brown serf race, and that they cannot be trusted no matter what in the end. Besides all this, it plays very well as an audiobook after around the 10-15m mark when you absorb the universe and setting if you listen to it.

>>448
I don't remember SST being a globohomo racemixing piece. The Protagonist is some hispanic bastardnbut so are most marines in real life. It's a good book and a good philosophy

>>449
It's a good book, but it is blindly optimistic of government control and military autocracy under a multi-cultural banner (the U.S. military has been this since the 1960's). The Forever War, intentionally or not, took this concept to absurd lengths to demonstrate the negatives that inevitably result from it along with critiquing military fascist states (which inevitably resulted in critiquing non-ethnocentric military states). On the whole, The Forever War's relationship to Starship Troopers is what Machiavelli's The Discourses on Livy / The Prince is to Plato's Republic. SST, like Plato's Republic, deals with idealism and utopia-like potentials; TFW and Machiavelli's work deal with reality and how things actually are. Read both, but TFW is more valuable if you only have time to read or listen to one.

>>449
And to clarify, I did not believe that SST is pro-globohomo by intent. It's pro-fascism under multiculturalism. TFW isn't pro-globohomo either but its contents and story show what SST's future inevitably leads to which is pro-globohomo in reality, as it was written as a critique of SST's philosophy and content.

>>451
Do not*, bunch of typos

>>450
It's not that I've read the forever war, and probably it's a good book. But I doubt it overturns the worldview SST is about. Which is your basic boot to officer transition arc universal to all military experiences. Heinlein's book is like you say a utopian fiction, but these kinds of stories are valuable in that they can point the way for aspirational states. I think it would be a nice imagined community kind of scenario frankly, since there's something very  wonderful in these kinds of martial communities much closer in line with masculine precepts. 

I'll get back to you maybe. As much as I enjoyed the Prince as a very young teenager, I don't consider Machiavelli an expert on anything. Much less Plato. A man who worked in municipal level politics for a stint before losing and being banished is hardly the words of a winner.

The value in role-modelling works is they can take you into a first person experience secondhand of what an idealized system looks like. Which I agree, should be centralizing and authority-based. People get too much into the jading and cynical mode of nonfiction sometimes, spend all their days reading sheet music to the tune of "it's in decline, that's in decline, can't fix it, don't even try" and all the rest. That'll not lead to a mass movement. We need heros and simple stories for people to ape, I would say in that vein SST is an excellent work for that. Especially for a young person in peak testosterone and masculinity. This libertarian ethos posed as the alternative is for grass-eaters, it won't get us a strong society

>>453
Machiavelli led the first all volunteer militia / republican army, to surprising success as he predicted it would compared to conscript armies (his work on Republics through the Discourses on Livy is his most influential work, along with The Art of War, despite The Prince being the most known). This actually his real influence on the world—being a proponent of all-volunteer militaries and republics. Even Founding Fathers and key players such as John Quincy read his works for building such republics. I view Machiavelli's refusal to change loyalty or break under literal torture by the Medici's as further signs of not being a mere theorist as well.

On the core subject again though, Plato's Republic dealt with ideals much like SST. TFW deals with the real, as TDOL does. If I had to make another parallel here, it's pure vs applied mathematics. Again, read and value both, but you should definitely go with the one that deals with how human nature actually is and how all of recorded history actually works when it comes to politics (non-utopia) if you must choose as a newbie to sci-fi works.

>>455
Italy was a failed region even In Machiavelli's time. The pattern of behaviour you are talking about, which is antisocial deception and a lack of social trust, is probably a big part of what led to this. 

I have a very big reading stack and not the time I wish I had for reading at the moment. But I will note it, just for you. Can't rightfully dismiss what you haven't read

Sorry, I'm falling asleep. When I looked at Discourses on Livy I was about 17 years old, that's a long time back and I don't remember much of an impact on my thinking. My reaction, to put it simply, is that I don't find Machiavelli particularly relevant to the modern political scene. These people did not exist in the information age, or even in the age of machines or more sophisticated forms of politics using influencers, demographic outreach strategies etc. The political philosophy of such an older time is too removed from real levers of power to have value. But this is mostly a question of tastes, aspirations and whatnot. Later

>>456
>>457
>I have a very big reading stack and not the time I wish I had for reading at the moment. But I will note it, just for you. Can't rightfully dismiss what you haven't read
They are very long reads unlike The Prince. I don't think they'd be super valuable to you outside of Machiavelli's select chapters on the political cycles of states which itself was derived from the ancient Greeks' concept of The Kyklos (anarchy -> dictatorship -> tyranny -> aristocracy -> oligarchy -> democracy -> mob rule -> rinse and repeat). The Forever War, however, is a great read and/or listen. 
>>456
>These people did not exist in the information age, or even in the age of machines or more sophisticated forms of politics using influencers, demographic outreach strategies etc. The political philosophy of such an older time is too removed from real levers of power to have value.
You may wish to re-evaluate the value which ancient and historical writers offer: the actions they observed had often immediate consequences, and their lessons were derived from hardwon experience. Fuck up enough times as a businessman, merchant or politician—you and your family would have their hands cut off, you'd be beheaded in the streets, or you'd be sold into slavery along with your children as a blood debt. As mentioned before, Machiavelli was tortured medieval style for a political misstep. Kings and rulers did not have the luxury of providing the illusion of temporary prosperity despite making catastrophic mistakes as our leaders do with economic magic through entities such as the Federal Reserve in my country or digital fiat currencies in yours. In other words, their observations in older times of what works and what does not are universal since they did not really possess the means of bullshitting their way out mistakes or lying for long about objective reality. If I had to name a downside, it's that these writers automatically assume you already possess a basic recognition of universal wisdom and truth such as not permitting multi-culturalism (since this always catastrophically fails), not race-mixing, not allowing women to vote or work or hold high status, etc., as it was already seen as self-evident why this is a bad idea and didn't need to be mentioned.

>>458
What I mean is that the technologies of today are so different the underlying way it all works is not the same. I studied quite a bit of the classics of political philosophy in postsecondary and it's left in me personally a permanent disdain for it. In the their time it was not as though they had rigorous standards of deep data to pull from. It's often mere prejudices from people who consumed less aggregate information than I have throughout their lifetimes.

>>447
not sci-fi thats alt hist