Sci-fi recommendations by non-western authors?

Cat Country by Lao She is debatably science fiction, being set on Mars as a way to satirise and criticise some parts of Chinese life in the early 1900s; there isn't much science in it, it's social commentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Country

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky were white Soviet Russian men, famously wrote Roadside Picnic (among other works) which became the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_Picnic

They were trying to tell stories critical of the way things were, but set in a fantastic world so it could get past the censors. Part of a genre of Russian/USSR sci-fi: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/22412.Russian_Science_Fi...

Possibly including Stanisław Lem writing in Eastern-bloc Poland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem

Reddit thread on African sci-fi and fantasy book suggestions: https://old.reddit.com/r/suggestmeabook/comments/11zngrs/afr...

(My first thought when reading the title is Three Body Problem, but of course you already read it) Some manga / anime recs:

- Planetes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes) is a hard scifi manga with anime adaptation about daily life of astronauts cleaning up space debris. It feels pretty grounded, you can feel how its like living in Earth orbit and Moon

- Space Brothers / Uchuu Kyodai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Brothers_(manga)) tells the story of a Japanese worker getting kicked out from his company and then he applied to JAXA, following his younger brother's footstep

Not manga/anime/books, but there's a Korean scifi movie at Netflix called Space Sweepers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Sweepers), similar to Planetes. What I found interesting is that they have people speaking different language, and you can hear their universal translator translating their conversation to their own languages. Different than western scifi where everyone speaks English

* "The Sword of Kaigen" by M.L. Wang

* "The Green Bone Saga" by Fonda Lee

* "The Weirkey Chronicles" and "Street Cultivation" by Sarah Lin

See also:

* Middle East/Middle Eastern SFF: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/128ozc6/the_2023_r...

* Set in Africa: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/ttrhvf/the_2022_rf...

* Set in Asia: https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/mhz3k7/the_2021_rf...

Hiroshi Sakurazaka wrote 'All you need is kill', which became Edge of Tomorrow film.

And, while not SciFi, I think Haruki Murakami's books are worth a read and might scratch and itch you didn't realise you had. Start with Norwegian Wood if you want a light intro, but then Windup Bird Chronicle next. Possibly 1Q84 after that?

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It's a truly mind-bending work.

Other people are covering the big names, so I'll throw in a suggestion in completely the opposite direction: Large portions of the fanfiction and online amateur fiction community, even in English, are international. Even the Western authors frequently bring minority perspectives. Amateur fiction and especially fanfiction doesn't have to be accepted by a publisher or get through editing, so they're free to explore topics and reinterpretations that would be anathema to marketing and PR and the need to make a profit.

Stanisław Lem is great, if Polish counts as non-Western. I'd especially recommend Cyberiada and Summa Technologiae.

I’d highly recommend Tade Thompson’s novel Rosewater. It’s a bit hard to describe honestly but it’s an afrofuturist novel taking place in Nigeria and involves aliens and mind altering experiences.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewater_(Thompson_novel)

Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson is also very good but set on a different planet so a bit more divorced from today. It is still afrofuturism, and still covers a lot of the topics you describe. It can be a bit tough to read, at least I found it to be, as the Caribbean accents are very strong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Robber

The podcast Imaginary Worlds has often covered Science Fiction and Fantasy from around the world and different cultures. Just reading the show notes will give you authors to check out and other links. Even the episodes that are more focused on standard USA/UK works often bring in wider view points than we typically get. Just a few example shows: https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/african-sci-... https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/creating-hin... https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/octavia-butl... https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/postcolonial...

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binti_(novella)

Not sure if quite sci fi, certainly not in the Three Body Problem vein, but Viktor Pelevin is mind-bending stuff. Dark, funny and quite unique. Well, some debt to Kafka, TBF.

Another Russian bonus, this 2014 short story[0] by Kremlin-insider Vladislav Surkhov[1] is, well, give it a read, a well spent five minutes. Make of it what you will.

[0] http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue582/without_sky.html

[1] https://londonpolitica.com/europe-watch-blog-list/vladislav-...

I never know what people mean by western, heres some stuff I like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) - Written by a Russian. Allegedly inspired Orwell.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5450488.Bryn_Hammond Bryn Hammond is an Australian woman who writes chiefly about mongols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaro Charles Saunders Imaro is one of my top all time reads.

So, taking the spirit of the question - authors with unique perspectives - if you haven’t read anything by Ursula Le Guin, you really owe it to yourself to do so.

For work that explicitly draws on other cultural backgrounds, Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James is fantastic, and someone else mentioned Nnedi Okorafor, whose whole catalog is great. Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series is also worth a read.

Yoon Ha Lee "Conservation of shadows". Korean-American, I can't get all their folklore references in this collection of (SF/fantasy) stories but I see an otherworldly Calvino touch in it.

Or, Xia Jia - start with "The spirit of the fox" for a huli jing shapeshifter in a steampunk world.

I recently read The Poppy Wars trilogy by Rebecca F. Kuang, it's more fantasy and mythology than sci-fi, but it's very entertaining and I found the mythology and history (which I believe is based in China, though in the novel no real countries are named) very interesting.

I highly recommend Vandana Singh's works, particularly "Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Singh

Last and First idol is a parody of otaku (Japanese) culture.

https://j-novel.club/series/last-and-first-idol

It's really 3x short stories (~200 pages each) but here's a synopsis for the first:

    The story follows Mika Furutsuki's journey to become an idol.  [...] After the Monopole Super Flares hit though, humanity is on the decline. Maori still tries to revive her idol friend and ultimately succeeds after 30 years. Mika may no longer human, but that doesn't stop her quest to become the #1 idol.

Ted Chiang is American but not white... you've probably heard of him? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang

Here’s a good first cut:

https://escapepod.org/people/s-b-divya/

Escape Pod had a strong Indian and other overseas author bend under SB Divya’s editorship. Not everything she hosted was non-western, but much was.

I’ll also throw in The Quiltbag by Ashok K Banker. Lightspeed runs plenty of foreign authors:

https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-quiltbag/

Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang. A really enjoyable story about people on Mars and Earth after their societies and cultures diverge. Definitely felt like a new perspective to me.

Lots of anime and manga are adaptations of light novels. The first one that came to mind was Haruhi Suzumiya.

Does Somtow Sucharitkul count? He is Thai but went to university in England and spent a lot of time working and writing in the US. He is back in Thailand now (https://www.somtow.com/).

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Written a few years ago from the perspective of an AI child companion.

Is Poland non-western? This book is certainly unlike anything else I’ve read.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(novel)

https://www.amazon.com/Selfie-Hir-Dulo-ebook/dp/B0CVWYYJXJ

Bangladesh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_science_fiction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Liu worth looking into as well.

Katsuhiro Otomo, Akira [japanese, manga, psychics, destroying Tokyo, destroying Tokyo, destroying Tokyo]

I'd recommend Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, or maybe His Master's Voice.

You'll get a fascinating blend of psychological realism and eastern-euro science fiction, which I find fascinating (it is much more analog/mechanical, and also refreshingly real about scientific progress / knowledge creation vis a vi the human condition).

They are both rather short, also.

Saturnina from time to time - Alison Spedding - Amazing Bolivian Sci-fi

Like most of sci-fi anime/manga counts right?

Not sure if they count but the novelisation of Mobile suit Gundam https://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Suit-Gundam-Escalation-Confron...

Yukikaze and Good luck Yukikaze by Chōhei Kambayashi it ends on a cliffhanger though since the later books did not get translated. https://www.amazon.com/Yukikaze-Chohei-Kambayashi/dp/1421532...

I read Calcutta Chromosome by Amitav Ghosh few years back. It's kind of magical.

It deals with the invention of discovery of the method of transmission of malaria by Ronald Ross. The novel is set in late-1800s Calcutta.

There is science, conspiracy, and local occult involved in the story.

It is one of the most unique SciFi I have ever read. And Ghosh is not a SciFi writer.