Thread:BunsenH/@comment-25404524-20181121083223/@comment-24577221-20181123182624

Ursula K. Leguin. She eventually extended her Wizard of Earthsea trilogy to six books, having rethought some of the original premises of the world. She wrote a number of classics of the genre, including The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven. Her father was an anthropologist, and her books have a good awareness of human behaviour and cultural conflict.

James White's "Sector General" series, beginning with Hospital Station, are lovely. The setting is an enormous hospital / space station, home to a variety of quite-varied races, of which humans are only one. The premise is that providing assistance to newly-met races is an excellent way of overcoming prejudices and cultural barriers. White was living in Northern Ireland at a time when there was a great deal of conflict: Protestants vs. Catholics, Irish vs. English; his view that better communication can reduce conflict shines through. Solving medical mysteries is the explicit focus of the series, but the background includes a lot of cultural clashing, and attempts to overcome prejudices. One warning: they were written some decades ago, and there are some assumptions about gender roles that don't look good today. By the end of the series, White was growing past that, at least to some extent.

Peter Beagle's The Last Unicorn is great. The animated movie caught the essence of the story well (since Beagle wrote the screenplay for it), but the book has a great deal that had to be left out of the movie.

John Barnes's One for the Morning Glory. A fantasy story in which the characters are aware that they're in a fantasy story, so they can make some assumptions about events. There's some clever word play. I don't think I've read anything else by Barnes, though; I'm told that he's very hit-and-miss, and that some of his misses are pretty dire.

What I'm doing here, basically, is looking around my shelves of books and noting which ones I reread regularly -- my "friends" / favourites / comfort reads.