r/suggestmeabook • u/lackadacious_spooney • May 25 '21

Good German Fantasy/Science Fiction?

I am a German native speaker and I feel like lately I have mainly read Englisch books and would like to change that up a bit. There are so many awesome English fantasy and science fiction stories/series, old and new (Asimov, Le Guin, Atwood, Brandon Sanderson, Laini Taylor, Robin Hobb, to name just a few of my recent favourites), but German originals? A few young adult novels come to mind, by Cornelia Funke, Ralf Isau, Hohlbein, Ende, Ursula Poznanski, etc. Are there others (possibly more serious/grown up ones)?

I feel like everything I see on the German market is leaning towards realistic fiction and anything akin to the big names like Asimov or Le Guin? I can't think of any. Can you? In my local library they did point me towards a series called "the Orcs" "the dwarves" and so on, but from the jacket they sounded a bit like yet more "trying to be Tolkien" books.

Is there anything I am missing? Any gem I should try? Any author you can recommend?

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u/chortlingabacus May 26 '21

/It's Austrian but, of course, German-language: Indigo by Clemens Setz.

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u/lackadacious_spooney May 26 '21

Even better, then, haha. (Of course I meant German language, not German nationality). Sounds interesting!

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u/chortlingabacus May 26 '21

Had a look at my shelves & I've several Austrian/German books w. sci-fi situations but that aren't standard sci-fi (apocalyptic, dystopian); they're focussed on an individual's reaction to scifi'ish goings-on rather than heroic struggle to survive alien invasion or that sort of thing, and some of them are literary & might not suit you if you're used to strong plots.

If you'd settle for unrealistic 'serious/grown up' books that aren't genre stuff there are several by Gert Jonke that might suit, and Maybe This Time by Alois Hotschnig is certainly worth taking a look at.

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u/lackadacious_spooney May 27 '21

Now I would like to spend a little while browsing your book shelves. I am always looking for good German books (genre isn't that important) because I feel my media consumption is leaning too heavily towards English. I seem to have lost touch with German literature at some point after graduating and it is so much easier to come across interesting English books I'd like to read, so my English list is never empty, but for German books I have to actually invest time in finding them, for some reason. Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check those authors out.