The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein, and the Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross—both series that may not seem like sci-fi at first, but become increasingly so as they progress.

Currently on the worldbuilding/outlining phase.

I’m using a customized self-hosted Semantic MediaWiki installation, and can’t imagine doing it any other way—it’s like Wikipedia with the added ability to aggregate and live-update information from related pages. For instance, I can create a story event page with the place, date, and list of characters involved—and just from that, each character’s page has a map of all the places they’ve been, a timeline of all the events they’ve been present at, and a list of all the characters they’ve met; and it all gets updated whenever I add or edit an event.

Plus it’s on a web server, so I can access it from any device with an internet connection.

I remember seeing a study in which most participants expressed dislike for spoilers—but when groups watched films (or read stories—I forget which) with and without being given spoilers beforehand, the reported enjoyment of the groups that had been given spoilers was higher.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke would be a good one.

When a few exceptions of Soviet literature emerge out of the iron curtain, it turns out to be some anticommunist rambling, just like Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.

Most good literature is critical of the society in which it’s written—in the west, we tend to view anticapitalist novels as better than anticommunist ones, but we shouldn’t assume the same was true within the Soviet Union.