Discworld

If you love hard sci fi it’s not a given you’ll love it. If you love Douglas Adams and enjoy fantasy you should like it. It’s philosophical and deep and deeply silly.

So if you want to give it a fair shake and didn’t like it before, try Thud or Lords and Ladies. They’re in the middle of a series so I don’t recommend most people starting there and there’s context you’re going to be missing but are funny, smart, and powerful. I don’t know anybody who ranks either as one of their least favorite discworld books. And if you don’t like it, consider maybe it’s just not to your tastes as a series. It’s a powerful series filled with angst and hope and love of humanity, but it’s also silly stories about a flat world where fantasy tropes are turned on their heads. That’s what we love it for, but if you don’t like that then you don’t like it.

And for an example, Night Watch is Les Mis where the cop is the good guy who’s standing up for the people. Wyrd Sisters is Hamlet where the witches are heroic and the fool is painfully prudent. There’s Phantom of the Opera with a fat witch trying to be edgy, theres a story about a known con man being forced to run a post office and another where he has to run the treasury. There’s an “oops all Mulan” book too. These premises are played as silly as they are but also as deep as they can be.