Elder Race

"Mockingbird", by Walter Tevis. 40 years old but startlingly timely: centuries after humanity ceded all authority and responsibility to AI, the last superintelligent robot is ready to die of boredom – and one human has learned to read. "Elder Race", by Adrian Tchaikovsky. This short novel is a bit reminiscent of Iain Bank's "Inversions" in that it combines sci-fi and fantasy through the perspectives of an anthropologist from an advanced space-faring culture and a second protagonist from the medieval world they are secretly observing.

Mostly science fiction, and most Adrian Tchaikovsky science fiction at that: * Elder Race - Tchaikovsky's Hugo-nominated novella does this really neat thing where it tells the same story from two different perspectives, which happen to perfectly meld fantasy with hard scifi in a super clever conceit. * Children of Time - A hard scifi-meets-entomology-study take on how shifting perspectives work and the no-stone-left-unturned world building he does just really works. Its sequel Children of Ruin was great too, and the final in the trilogy comes out next month.