Thank you for starting this thread. I have noticed that for some reason there's nowhere on the forum to discuss SF/Fantasy books other than Trek books, which seemed...weird to me.
The most recent SFnal books I read:
Stephen Baxter - World Engines: Creator
This was the last book in his most recent series, which is meant as a sequel of sorts to his Manifold series from around the turn of the century. The Manifold series was an interesting rumination on the Fermi Paradox, with each of the books looking at a different possibility. Manifold: Time suggested we were alone in the universe, and involved far-future humanity. Manifold: Space that alien life is common, but "great filters" killed off advanced life before it could form galaxy-wide civilization. Manifold: Origin is more or less about the "galactic zoo" hypothesis, where life is common and we are being kept isolated for particular reasons.
Regardless, the World Engines series revisits the characters from this original series (they all had the same main character, Reid Manenfant, and took place in alternate universes). It's basically a mashup of all of Baxter's different interests (hard-sci-fi, rocketry, alternate history, evolution, etc.). However, the final conclusion of the novel is a bit of a letdown, because it attempts to be a "stich-up work" which ties the three original books together as one universe. This is essentially impossible, because Manfold: Space shows a universe full of life, and this book canonically says life only evolved naturally once (on Earth) and all life elsewhere in the multiverse was because far-future humans built portals through time/space to seed other locations.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time/Children of Ruin:
This is a newish duology I picked up on a lark because it was available quite cheaply online. It was a pleasant surprise, and a great read once I got past the absurd premise.
The first book basically begins with humanity beginning to explore nearby stars and terraform other worlds, though with humanity threatened by reactionaries back at home. There was a plan (for some reason) to seed an alien world with monkeys who would be speed-evolved into intelligence over the course of a few hundred years, as part of some extropian idea of filling the (seemingly dead) universe with life. However, things go awry, and instead jumping spiders become intelligent. The novel follows their development into an intelligent spacefaring civilization over a period of thousands of years, and their eventual misadventures when humanity crawls back into spaceflight. I love good xenofiction where the focus is first-person narrative of nonhuman characters, so this stuff was great, although the very pessimistic tone regarding humanity in particular felt like authorial fiat at time to make the universe work, though it salvages itself with hope at the end.
The second book mixes things up by introducing another solar system. This time there are uplifted octopus instead of spiders. I have actually read a nonfiction books on octopus cognition, and the author did his research well here. The octopus way of thinking is even more alien than that of spiders. There's also a great twist in this novel later on, but I don't want to give it away.
Tad Williams - Shadowmarch series:
This was actually a re-read on my part. When I was younger I was an anti-fantasy sci-fi snob, and was introduced to his sci-fi Otherland series, and decided to give his fantasy works a try. The series is ery reminiscent in certain ways of A Song of Ice and Fire which is ironic, because George R.R. Martin's main impetus for writing that series was Williams's earlier Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series. Regardless, there are underlying similarities in the initial setup, including a royal murder, young characters of high birth forced into exile, a boundary line across the north where something incomprehensibly old lurks beyond, and a seemingly unrelated side plot which involves a young woman in a vaguely "eastern" realm betrothed to a terrifying king. Yet Williams is less interested in court intrigue and much more interested in telling a coming-of-age story, along with exploring the detailed mythology of his world. He is a master at making supernatural realms which actually feel in some sense "real" in a spiritual sense rather than either mundane or just some random gobbledygook that characters in-universe believe. Not his best work, but worthy of a read nonetheless.
