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?
A thing I enjoy about other cultures is seeing what is unusually different about them. In the Three Body Problem, spoilers to follow for the series, humanity aren't The Bad Guys With Agency. We aren't even The Big Bad or The Big Good. We're sort of just other participants in this universe. The dual vector foil is employed by someone else, the guys who want space back from the pocket dimension to reboot the universe are just someone else, everything is someone else. We are bit part players in this play.
This goes on even to a few movies. The Wandering Earth movie (somewhat different from the short story) has this part at the end (obvious spoilers to follow) where the heroes accomplish the task and reboot their Earth Engine after conquering all odds - only for the camera to zoom out and show numerous other teams also having done the same. This wasn't the only struggle won. Cool alternative tale where it isn't so much One Team Saves The World or One Team Ruins The World.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel this is one of the reasons I liked Fire upon the Deep with the group mind based Tines
uh uh, uh
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.
My first Tchaikovsky was children of time and TBH none of the sequels nor his other space operas were as captivating as that one for me.
Yet, I will read this one too. I believe that his ideas and stories are great in books and would never be able to make them into movies. So unique.
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.
Didn't really do much for all the other species though!
I find his writing style really enjoyable, to the point that I really need to dive into his entire repertoire now.
mmh. very appropriate
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.
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.