Oh neat! My first ask!
Favorite sci-fi and fantasy authors:
- My current favorite is James S. A. Corey (which is the pen name for the duo of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham). The Expanse series is really something special. The first book is a little rough, but still enjoyable, and then I think they get much better over time. Excellent characters, satisfying stories, huge unexpected swings. Love it.
- I love what I have read from Becky Chambers. The Wayfarers series has a big fun space opera setting, but the stories are focused on human scale conflicts. Like the first book is about a crew of people drilling wormholes, basically a space road construction crew, and their personal conflicts as a new crew member joins the team. The last book is about some people who are trapped for a few days at a space truck stop. It's not that nothing happens; on the contrary, some of the stories are emotionally affecting enough to get me to cry. But we're not trying to save the galaxy here; we might be trying to throw a nice party or trying to figure out what career we want to pursue. Anyway, she's won Hugo awards for good reason.
- Peter Watt's books Blindsight and Echopraxia are absolute pinnacles of the sci-fi/horror genre. They are dense with fascinating ideas about the human mind and how other minds might evolve differently. Also there are vampires, and there's a really interesting exploration of how vampires might work in a realistic setting. His other books are less compelling, in my opinion, but these two are excellent.
- N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth series (starting with The Fifth Season) is excellent--stories about trying to get justice in a world where apocalypses happen every few decades (and all the surviving societies are the ones who prepare for disaster). There are people who have power over geology, able to still (or bring) earthquakes at will, and they're feared and oppressed.
- On the fantasy side: Terry Pratchett's Discworld books are fantastic. They're more comedy-fantasy, and he definitely gets better later in his career. There's a ton of these; a good starting book is Guards! Guards!, the first of the City Watch run of books. Sam Vimes grows into a really fun character, a place for Pratchett to put his anger at injustice. He's also very clever, lots of great turns of phrase in these books.
- I'm going to put Jim Butcher on here with a big old asterisk: The Dresden Files are a lot of fun, and sometimes they're even moving. The story starts as basically, what if a wizard was also a private eye in a film noir story? And then it expands in scope as Dresden builds in power and makes connections with more and more supernatural entities and groups. The audio books are read by James Marsters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and he gives an amazing performance. But. There is a streak of misogyny in these books, and it's hard to tell if the main character/narrator is a misogynist or if the author is. Other characters will point it out, but sometimes that criticism comes books later. I don't know, I enjoy them but I could see someone finding it too off-putting to ignore.
- Neal Stephenson, when he hits, he hits hard. Anathem is one of my favorite books, Reamde is a great action thriller, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is a really fun time travel story (with witches!). When he misses, he misses hard: The Diamond Age is really fun, but it just stops and doesn't have an ending, which I found infuriating. And the Baroque Cycle is just terrible and boring.
- If you haven't read it, This Is How You Lose The Time War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar is really, really good. It's science fantasy that is abstract enough to drift into poetry; it's a series of love letters. It's beautiful and fierce and compelling.
Anyway, that's probably enough--I've just been scrolling back through my Audible history and seeing what stood out.
As for coding: I'm very much a dabbler myself. To me, coding is a fun hobby. I like it as figuring out a puzzle, and often it turns into making some tedious little computing task easier.
For that, I love Python. I find it easy to read and understand, comparatively, and there are a TON of libraries out there that make it easy to solve problems without having to reinvent the wheel.
What I would recommend trying is going through the archives of the Advent of Code. These are basically a series of little coding puzzles that aren't tied to any one particular language. They release these in December of every year, like an advent calendar. The neat thing is that there's a subreddit where people do the puzzles, so after you do the puzzle you can see how other people solved it in the same (or other) languages. I found this HUGELY instructive (and kind of humbling sometimes)--you learn about different approaches to the problem, or different tools you might not have been aware of.
Once you've got an idea of what you can do, you can start to see applications for problems you can solve or automate.
It can be fun to see if any of the tools you use have API's also. You can make them do new things! This weekend, for example, I spent some time troubleshooting a tool that someone else wrote for downloading articles from Omnivore (a read-it-later type service like Pocket or Instapaper) and putting them onto a Kobo e-Reader. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon, and now my e-Reader is more useful!
The other thing is, your code doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to work for whatever problem you're trying to solve today. There's always gonna be a more efficient or elegant way to do something, but something that's ugly and works is still better than something that doesn't exist at all. And as the prophet says, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.
Thanks for the asks, this is fun!
