[kwyjibo1230]

Whenever a reading list gets to the front page of HN, I always find the most interesting books to add from the comments!

I did add Roadside Picnic from the link to my list, but thanks commenters for helping me find:

- We (very excited about this one given the possible influence to 1984 and Brave New World)

- Red Star

- Monday Starts on Saturday

[kej]

>Whenever a reading list gets to the front page of HN, I always find the most interesting books to add from the comments!

Do you maintain this list publicly anywhere? "Books that have been recommended in HN comments" would be an interesting list to see.

[ainar-g]

You can add “The Doomed City” to the list as well. It's an interesting take on the “aliens pull people from different places and times to conduct a social experiment” trope.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomed_City

[bootsup]

My favorite Soviet/Eastern Bloc scifi novel is The Day Lasts More Than A Hundred Years (1981) by Chingiz Aitmatov.

"Ethnic" writers were accorded more freedom of topic than white Russians, confined to village prose in the Breznev era. Aitmatov's book sweeps the vast steppes of Central Asia and interstellar space, begins from the perspective of a fox, considers traumas of the Great Patriotic War and Stalin's resettlement, thousand-year-old traditions, the quest to give a dead railroad switchman a proper Muslim burial, and an international incident caused in space.

Aitmatov was ethnically Kyrgyz. The book's mostly set on Kazakh steppes.

OP was looking for context on the meat-grinder in Ukraine. He won't find it in the meat-grinder near the end of Roadsite Picnic.

Sienkiewicz (1884), With Fire and Sword, set in 1640s-1650s Khmelnytsky Uprising (Cossacks of Zaporozhian Sich vs Polish-Lithuanian empire) is remarkably good, and geographically contiguous with the current meat grinder in Ukraine. A pre-Soviet book from outside what became USSR (Polish), not scifi, but which clearly inspired Frank Herbert and possibly Tolkein. Scifi and fantasy continued the adventure genre, after all. If you read it, be prepared for Iliad or The Bridge on the Drina-level violence at times.

For more non-scifi lit grounded in war in previous iterations of Ukrainian statehood, see especially Bulgakov's (1925) The White Guard. A love song to Kiev, loving and complex critique of its bourgeoisie that could only have been written by a physician.

Roadside Picnic's a fast-paced philosophical read. Solaris (yes it's Polish, but Tarkovsky painted it in film) has the dreamy, encyclopedic quality of something like Moby-Dick. (Post-Soviet) Metro 2033 is lower quality, more pulpy, feels like it was written to be turned into a series, video game, etc. (it was), but it's an interesting page-turner.