In contrast with most of the opinions here, I prefer Fire Upon the Deep. I think the alien species it explores is much more interestingly non-human than the one in Deepness in the Sky and that the bad guys in Deepness are kind of comically over-done. They suffer from a common problem where the bad guys have to not only be bad for main reason X but also are sadistic rapists, torturers, etc. on top. As if we didn't already get the "they're bad" memo already. Plus all the action happens in the finale and, to a large extent, outside of our view. Still, both are great books, but I'd recommend Fire to anyone first.
If I'd rate my current collection of best SF I've read:
- Deepness in the Sky: super mustache twirling, one of the worst.
- Fire upon the Deep: I consider the blight to be twirling. Why treat lower civ that way? AFAIK, for mustache twirling.
- Iain M Banks: lotsa mustache twirling. Surface details and Player of Games in particular. My view of the culture AI is that they are constantly sarcastically toying with humans, and are thus secretly twirling.
- Fifth Season (Jemisin): no twirling. One of the most balanced novel on that front, every faction has believable reason to act the way they do.
- Book of the New Sun: no twirling, but OMG, stop what you're doing a good read these books! The tone and story was just perfect for me. Sure, it looks like a weird cross of SF and fantasy, but there is no fantasy at all in the novel in reality. Book of New Urth is, in comparison, just merely very good.
- Ancillary Justice (Lecki): some small twirling, but justified since it's an empire: absolute power corrupt. The twirling is commensurate with having a empress as head of state. She even becomes mostly sympathetic later.
- Left hand of Darkness: not only no twirling, but the power struggle is extremely believable. Great illustration of an interesting alien civilisation. Great for both world-building and character building. Another of those stop everything and just read it now novel.
- Roadside Picnic: no twirling. The conflicts and abuse of power are all believable.
- Collapsing Empire (Scalzi): lot of mustache twirling. Not DotS level, but not that far off. Plus, there is a plot point in the first novel that made me quit reading for a week. Incomprehensible because it was all of unbelievable (given the multiple characters behaviour before), idiotic and had zero impact on the rest of the book... so why write it. (Page 260 in my paperback version, for the record)
I think he says early on that the archive trap doesn't have self-awareness, except for a few subroutines that need to be self-aware like the simulations of the researchers which facilitate the escape. Even the name blight evokes a fungus. I was thinking of it's cruelty to lower civs as analogous to the cruelty of a fungus secreting an antibiotic.
Hunting down the OOBII comes down to the escaped personae having data that could be used against it by another power.
> Iain M Banks: lotsa mustache twirling. Surface details and Player of Games in particular.
I think both the Hell faction in Surface Details and the empire in Player of Games have reasons to be as nasty as they are; they're somewhat internally consistent, in that the social stability of both the Hell faction societies and the empire are dependent on the nastiness. There are, unfortunately, real life examples of this. Veppers is a bit gratuitous, granted.
In the Fifth Season, the entire planet is a mustache-twirling villain, sort of.
(Sure, it's revenging past wrongs... on humans, some of whom are far, far descendants of the original perpetrators, and none of whom have any idea what they're even been punished for.)
It's a reference to caricature of evil villains twirling their mustache as they gratuitously enjoy the extreme suffering they inflict upon others with no rationale other than enjoying being evil.
Thanks, I get it now and basically agree on the ones I've read too. I did feel like I missed some of the motivations for some factions in the Fifth Season series. I've added Book of the New Sun to my wishlist.