> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

Hyperion? Ringworld? Rendezvous with Rama? Brin's Uplift trilogy? Neuromancer? A Fire Upon the Deep? Robinson's Mars trilogy?

I'm just going through Hugo novel winners, picking some of the ones I've read:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#Categories

Alastair Reynold's Revelation Space series is modern and without humans as the bad guys. And highly recommended too. The books are also more standalone than calling it a series would suggest, but he also has lots of other one-shot books, and a few trilogies, if that would be a better way for you to try him out. I got into him via the standalone Pushing Ice.

> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

Was about to post some examples that I liked, but then realized that anything from the previous century (1900's) probably can't be called "modern" any more. And after that, realized that I don't think I've read any "modern" corporate-published SF by that standard. I'm getting old.

If fanfiction counts, I'm enjoying this: https://archiveofourown.org/series/3516793

There’s a subreddit called HFY which stands for “humanity, fuck yeah!” Which has little short stories about humanity being badass normally in a scifi setting in one way or another. https://old.reddit.com/r/HFY (I have Reddit blocked so can’t verify that’s the correct link)

> One thing I am curious about is whether there is a different kind of science fiction out there.

One recommendation: Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora: We went there. It didn't work. We came back. We did good and bad things to each other along the way. It was beautiful and painful.

> A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them.

This is a very strong theme throughout Ursula Le Guin’s books and short stories; perhaps you might find those interesting.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

Startide Rising by David Brin

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

Semiosis by Sue Burke

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.

You might enjoy Beckey Chamber's Galactic Commons series. She does a great job of creating all kinds of interesting characters and exploring them and what makes them unique.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is very compelling.

And I seconded it below but I'll mention it again - the Bobiverse series is excellent with amazing exploration.

Try some CJ Cherryh. Her science fiction touches on many ethically-tricky concepts and difficult situations and explores different styles of alien interaction without a lot of the satirizing/politicking/moralizing that many use scifi and fantasy settings for.

Reviewing Hugos last 20 years or so:

Ann Leckie is great, Tamsyn Muir is gothic horror lesbian necromancer-ish and super cool, Andy Weir is a full humanist in the best sense, Arkady Martine is a thoughtful writer I enjoy, Yoon Ha Lee was a fresh voice at time of pub, and worth reading, Cixin Liu fits your request, I love me some Stephenson novels, in your request category I recommend Anathem, Kim Stanley Robinson can be tiring, but is also pretty great, everything China Mieville has written is worth reading, full stop, Paolo Bacigalupi's adult fiction is fucking great, although I sort of bounced off his YA stuff, Vernor Vinge will read like near-history reportage, but was way ahead of its time when published, if you haven't read Iain M. Banks (also goes by Iain Banks for non-genre), you have 10-20 novels that are just fantastic waiting for you, Dan Simmons Hyperion is excellent, Bruce Sterling is worth reading.. Let me know if you get through this list.

Schild's ladder by Greg Egan is a pretty good novel for this. You have groups of people vying to collapse and try to coexist with a new but threatening form of nature, and I think both are treated as reasonable actors.

The Hyperion Cantos hits this topic. We're the good guys and we're the bad guys. And sometimes we're the bad guys through no malicious intent, just volume and social norms (the consul's tale in the first book). Other times we're the bad guys to do good things (Lamia's tale).

The first book is really good by itself. The others are just as good but very different and way more political (meaning covering the politics of that universe, not political like involving current day politics).

Give short story anthologies (like the "Best of Year" type) a look. The late great Garder Dozois was always my favorite, but I personally also get good hit rates from Neil Clarke and Jonathan Strahan, among others. There's a lot of good stuff in there... and bad stuff... and forgettable stuff. But that's part of the draw of short fiction.

> I enjoy the "what if we're the baddies" just as much as anyone else. But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?

That's my problem with horror media as well. They all eventually devolve into the "humans were the real monsters all along" cliché.

In the sci-fi film Arrival (also based on a short story), humanity are kind of like irresponsible young students. If we get past our focus on war/conflict/us vs them perhaps we can learn new things from the aliens.

I think that breaks the style a little of 'humans bad for aliens' enough, right?

Either way I enjoyed Arrival (and the short story).

Greg Egan? His stuff is way out there, some may do the we're the baddies trope but most doesn't.

The Sun Eater series is an interesting one that kind of goes both ways. The big alien baddies are basically demons, and humanity gets a lot of love, but all the politicking and whatnot shows humanity to be both good and bad

Project Hail Mary?

Bobaverse series.

I've only read the first book, and that a while ago, but my memory is that, while humans are the focus of Thompson's Rosewater trilogy, they are again neither the Big Bad nor the Big Good.

"But are there big stories with these exciting concepts where we aren't the baddies in the Anglosphere?"

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Personally, a story where there’s any clear-cut “baddies” at this point would violate immersion. We can realistically and objectively classify a given person as a psychopath, an egomaniac, etc. (and such a person can end up having a disproportionate influence over some part of history), but things are a little more nuanced when larger societies are concerned.

I think the Culture series by Iain M. Banks does mostly a good job at not being overly black and white, even though one of the sides has an obvious technological advantage.

Try reading Project Hail Mary

My kid got me hooked on Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Super fun.

It's of a genre called LitRPG. Exactly as you'd expect. And yet somehow Dinniman makes it work.

I hate myself for loving it. h/t Joan Jett & The Heartbreakers

I concur on "really good" but have to disagree on the "series" part. Children of Time is a remarkable book, one of the best science fiction stories in a very long time.

Children of Ruin is ... okay. Children of Memory is not a good book, IMO. Both of these suffer from the same mysticism-used-to-spin-up-a-red-reset-button plot device plague that fundamentally guts Xenocide. Nowhere as bad as that, of course, but the unpleasant echoes are there.

As it happens I'm in the middle of the Architects series and while it has its distant whiff of Stainless Steel Rat[ß], on the whole the series and its universe have so far remained consistent.

ß: Stainless Steel Rat was notorious for repeatedly putting the protagonist into impossible situations and then whipping up near-magical pieces of technomancy that just happened to solve the problem of the moment.

I was not particularly a fan of them - the plot seemed to find overly easy solutions to all the actual messiness that comes when dealing with others very unlike yourself, which given the rest of the stories, feels like it undercuts the entire point of them.

The Tchaikovsky novella I really like is Elder Race. Technology-as-magic is done in so many places (Ventus is another favourite), and I usually enjoy it, but I felt that in Elder Race it was pulled off in an unusually elegant way.

It'd be (insert noun) and the first one is far and away the best but on the big picture you are absolutely correct that it is fantastic. Children of Time (first one) is maybe my favorite book ever.

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

Apart from "Solaris", which many probably know because there's been a reasonably well-known movie, I recommend "Fiasco" by the same author, Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by Stanisław Lem. Spoiler: It does not end well. The aliens are too alien, and the humans do what humans often do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiasco_(novel)

I have a spider phobia, and struggled not to put the book down at first!

But the concepts and writing are excellent... really engaging stuff. And by the end of the book I'd learned so much about spiders that I honestly felt less scared of them! Definitely not cured by any means, but a year on and I still fear them less than I used to.

Children of Time sparked more comments from strangers in NYC than anything else I’ve read. I came almost to expect them when reading it.

Alien Clay is also fantastic. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I think it gives the best intuition I’ve seen for a scientific concept that can be difficult to really grok otherwise.

> Good science fiction where the aliens are very alien are hard to come by.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Reach_Series ?

The "aliens" are just spiders. With a lot of magical thinking. It's more like fantasy than science fiction. And character development is terrible. Only one or two are interesting and they get killed too early.

I can take SciFi that's at least either good story or good science. To this day I don't know why people recommend this author so much, even more than Watt's Rifters trilogy or Firefall. He is a "legal executive" who dropped out of zoology/biology. Explanations are just "nanovirus!" or "bioengineering!" and left at that.

Spoiler: the spiders make a space elevator and an asteroid catcher out of spiderweb; really. Stuff like this doesn't pass the suspension of disbelief for me. Reading it was quite annoying.

Feel free to downvote me, but if you do, I ask you the minor kindness to refute my points.

Edit: also "nanovirus!", what? All viruses are nano. And this virus being so complex it can't be too short, either.

I would think before. This would be one of the vaguely referenced previous places they had found to exploit (in Shroud). I think FenJuan appeared in Shroud as well, with a vague backstory that nevertheless seems consistent with this story.

The Tyrant Philosopher series became (surprisingly) my favorite series from him. There's just something about the way how he depicts colonization and pressure to destroy other cultures and minorities that's oddly compelling.

Hands down one of my favorite series. It's inventive, cynical, wry, dark, and entirely engrossing.

If you enjoy him, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the Dogs of War series (1st and 3rd especially).

At some point you start to see his themes recycled across all these series, but it's still fun.

Russian culture should be banned. It's as praying German music during WWII while in England

I really love this series, probably my favorite of his stuff along with Cage of Souls. I got a little bored with the first one but glad I kept on, the second and third were amazing.

I almost like everything he writes which is something because there's a ton of it and it's all over the place. Only ones I've DNFd are the Shards of Earth which is weird because I normally like space opera.

You're the first person I've ever encountered who has also read that book. I really enjoyed it.