Quote: (05-17-2013 12:00 PM)aphelion Wrote:
Cosign on We by Zamyatin. Very good book.
The best book I've ever read is Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. If you want a book to expand/blow your mind, this one tackles the entire (fictional) history of the universe, development of sentience and the character of deity all in 250ish pages. Humanity only accidentally occupies a single page worth of mention. It's a little dense, but absolutely mindblowing in scope.
And to top it off, it was written in 1937.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Maker
As you seems to be learning Polish, you may try Jacek Dukaj 'Inne piesni' in a similar style, I believe. Dukaj's Polish is very creative, and difficult to translate, but it is worth your time. As a curiosity, he also wrote the story about a male-female war, 'Wielkie podzielenie' (Great divide) but I believe it has never been republished since original appearance in 'Nowa Fantastyka' monthly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inne_pie%C5%9Bni
Personally, I trust only in old books, tested by time, and this is my list:
Robert Musil 'The man without qualities': lot of red pill stuff in this marvelously meandering novel.
Albert Camus 'The fall': his last and best novel, I believe, but also the one least talked about. His only red pill stuff, reading it in high school, unlike 'The plague' and 'The stranger', alerted me to the fact that
something is deeply wrong with the official narration of the world . Still remembering the passage where the main character asks 'I heard once about a man who started sleeping
on the floor as soon as he had learnt that his friend was in prison. He could not bear living more comfortably than his friend. Now, can you nowadays imagine anyone in the West who would even consider that?!'
Miguel Unamuno 'The mist': A poetic red pill out of old Spain.
Balzac 'Human Comedy': very captivating, intoxicating even, has the quality of devilish phantasy later developed by other French fantastique writers like Barbey d' Aureville or Villers d'Isle-Adam.