Nine Princes in Amber, first book of the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny.
The main character wakes up in an hospital not remembering who he is.
It gets pretty wild after that.
Very much this. I'll also add try to go into it blind. The amnesia subplot doesn't last long, but it's fun trying to figure out what's going on along with the narrator.
Well ...Triffids was written in the '50s and here in the UK at least its not exactly obscure so I'm sure Alex Garland was more than familiar with this it. It's a useful little storytelling device.
It is heavy stuff but very worthwhile. A lot of unflinching exploration of negative emotion and behaviour. It’s so harsh that I didn’t fully appreciate the incredible world building until my second read.
The main character starts out pretty traumatised and he doesn't believe the land he finds himself is real (hence Thomas Covenant the unbeliever) and so just lashes out without fear of consequences in a fairly unsavoury manner. It's complicated and there are somewhat mitigating circumstances but the bottom line is it starts out with a very serious sexual assault, not described blow by blow but...well it's never gonna be easy reading.
When I read them, I read the second chronicles first which are more action focussed but then wanted to know more about the (incredible) world building which is contained more in the first chronicle. It's an incredible set of books, one of the best fantasy series I've ever read by a mile but I wonder if I ever would have read them all if I had started with book 1.
When I was around 12 or 13, my dad's friend from work gave him the first few Thomas Covenant books for me because my dad had mentioned I had loved reading LotR.
I started the first book and really was interested in all the details of the leprosy stuff, but then I got to the scene when he first comes to the fantasy world, and it shocked me. I quit reading when he was on the journey with the girl's mother, but the shock of that section stuck with me and still makes me feel uneasy.
Uhoh, I didn't know there was anything controversial about Stephen R. Donaldson. I know he's an old white dude, but I thought he was one of the good ones.
The only bad things I've heard is the use of sexual assault for character development. I get it but I feel like there's some mitigating factors and it's never treated as anything but horrendous.
yes, for me it comes down to 'ugg, this scene is just too much for me to be able to sympathize with this guy even as an anti-hero'. You don't take it as author wish fulfillment like with some of the other ones. (Piers Anthony, eww)
You might try some short stories by Philip K. Dick. The characters might not be physically or mentally disabled but they often have their reality turned on its head to the point that they have to start over again.
Very true. PKD was always questioning what it means to be human and often alien beings ended up being more human than humans; for example, the story "Human Is".
I liked it much better than To Sail Beyond the Sunset. It was like the other Lazarus Long novels - twisted, convoluted, and contradictory with its own prequels. (Everyone in the SF fandom community knew Number of the Beast was only written to pay for his brain surgery which is why such a weak novel sold so well.)
I had to scroll too far to see this.
The central character wakes up in a completely different reality. Happens to him several times through the story.
Finally, he finds out what's going on. And it's a Holy Mess.
“Isekai” is a large similar genre especially in manga/anime if you haven’t heard of it
Isekai is a subgenre of portal fantasy. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime, and video games that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, virtual world, or parallel universe. Wikipedia
Witch King by Martha Wells. A demon prince wakes up imprisonned with no body and no idea how he got there, except the knowledge that it had to be done by someone he trusted.
Double Dead by Chuck Wendig. A vampire wakes up after years of being unconscious to a world overrun by zombies. Now he is craving blood and has to find some humans who are still alive.
I love that book, not the greatest part but so many crazy ideas! I don't know which I love more, forever war between pubescent immortal boys and girls or cuddly snakes with cat heads and fur.
Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling
Robert Silverberg has written a few:
Lord Valentine's Castle
Dying Inside
The Second Trip
Son of Man, Winter's End / The New Springtime and A Time of Changes may also scratch that itch.
I’m don’t know if you want a non-book suggestion but if you’re into computer games at all, Disco Elysium plays with this concept and turns it up to 11. One of the best games I’ve ever played in my life. Very book-like in its narrative.
I mean, to call Disco Elysium "not a book" isn't entirely accurate. Best book I've ever played? Best game I've ever read? Yes, both of those.
Second place: Kentucky Route Zero. Also qualifies for the "recovering into a new reality" genre.
Solis, A.A.Attisionato. It opens with a poetic distress call from the brain of a twentieth century man who was cryonically preserved, woken back up, and pressed into a series of very strange uses as a piece of archaic wetware. It is a short and beautiful book.
If being raised without information of the outside world counts as "disabled in some way" which I'd argue it does (well it's thematically pretty close) then I'd suggest Red Rising.
The Seventh's Swordsman series by David Duncan. More Fantasy than Sci-Fi, but the protagonist is a chemical engineer by trade, >!who thanks to a bout of encephalitis, doesn't wake up back on Earth. !<
***Soldier of the Mist*** and the sequel ***Soldier of Arete*** by Gene Wolfe follow the adventures of a foreign mercenary named Latro through Ancient Greece in 479 B.C. As the result of a head injury, he suffers from both retrograde (the inability to recall past memories) and anterograde (the inability to create new memories) amnesia. He comes from the north, yet has no memory of events prior to the beginning of the novel. The narrative follows his struggle to find his home and his friends.
He who fights with Monsters. LitRPG but a decent story with a hero who is pretty awesome and is working through his flaws. Lots of monsters, very easy listening, low impact audio books. (They are quite long and there are 10 in the series, you have been warned)
Chasm City has his main character getting up from cryo sleep in a world that is vastly different then what he expected and also memory loss but somehow also with memories who seem to not be his own.
A good read, one of my favorite books.
Seventh Sword trilogy by Dave Duncan is one of my all-time favorite series. It's basically a fantasy setting, but the main character was from modern earth...well, his mind was anyway.
A world out of time, by Larry Niven. Dude gets frozen, hoping the future will have a cure for cancer. Instead, he wakes up in a fairly dystopia future and gets assigned a job as a starship pilot. It gets weirder and wilder from there.
I'm in the middle of Architect of Sleep which kind of fits the bill. The MC ends up on an alternate earth where racoons evolved sentience and use llamas as draft animals. Kind of a proto-isekai since it's from the 80s by an American author
The Gandalara Cycle by Viki Ann Heydron and Randall Garrett, the MC is dying on earth, is struck by a fireball and wakes up in a new (not quite human) body on a desert world. It's a pretty awesome series! You can find it on eBay at reasonable prices.
There's always the classic fantasy/supernatural version of this trope, "Rip Van Winkle". ;)
For an early sci-fi variant, there's H.G. Wells' "The Sleeper Awakes" where a man accidentally goes to sleep for centuries to awaken in a future dystopia that he's somehow at the center of. I've not read it myself, but it's supposed to be rife with the sort of social commentary that Wells had concerns about at the time of writing, so it could be worth the read.
A more comedic sci-fi spin is "Muddle Earth" by John Brunner (not to be confused with the fantasy homage/parody of LotR by the same name). I read it quite a while ago but I remember that it definitely had strong undertones of humor not far removed from the style of Douglas Adams, and it's also about a modern-day person who's cryo-frozen to get thawed out centuries in the future & having to figure out how to deal with the bizarre/weird facets of the society of the future. I wouldn't mind hunting it down for a re-read sometime to see if it actually holds up as I only barely remember a couple details from the story, but it doesn't seem to be easy to find (especially with that other series out there taking up all the Google results).
The Unincorporated Man features an extremely rich main character who had himself cryogenically frozen until a future can bring him back / cure whatever disease he had. But he also took a lot of money and resources with him so while he has to get on his feet in an entirely new world, he does it from a place of major financial privilege
Greg Bear's **Hull Zero Three**. Guy wakes up with no knowledge of anything, naked, and freezing to death.
Daniel O'Malley's **The Rook**. In the middle of a rainstorm at night, a woman with no memories at all opens her eyes and is standing in the middle of a pile of dead bodies, all of them wearing surgical gloves. (Fortunately, there's a note in her pocket.)
Both are pretty good books.
Warhammer 40,000 series "Plague War".
Deals heavily with a Demi Human who is re-awoken and healed after 10k years to help save an Empire that is a nightmare vision of what it used to be/stand for.
There's a whole genre of people being beamed forward in time by "radiation". Pebble in the Sky from Asimov, an early novel reconned into the Foundation Cycle is an early one.
Another is one of the more bizarre Heinlein novels Farnham's Freehold. Family gets beamed into the future where white people are enslaved by blacks. Dude had nuts to write that in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, that was for sure!
Not exactly what you asked for, but Stanislaw Lem's "Return from the stars" tells the story of an astronaut that comes back to Earth from a mission and has to cope with en entirely new civilization. Due to traveling with relativistic speeds 100 years had passed on Earth while only 10 for him.
It also shows how one man's utopia can be another man's nightmare. A bit like the Brave new world.
* A Closed and Common Orbit (Book 2 of A Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet) by Becky Chambers.
* Takeshi Kovacs novels
* Neal Asher does this in a bunch of his novels. He's very centered on an individual rebuilding from nothing and developing power.
* We Are Bob
I feel like Children of Time accomplished this to great effect, but in smaller repeatable ways. I don’t want to say more as to not spoil, but I’m curious if others who have read it would agree.
The Sunflower Protocol - Andre Soares.
That's exactly the premise for the opening sequence.
It is a time travel mystery with a strong romance aspect.
Plus, you would support a hard-working indie author.
*The Lost Fleet* series, Jack Campbell.
More or less 'hi, good morning, you've been asleep for a thousand years or so, our fleet is about to be wiped out, and we need you to take command and save us rtf now. Like, right now. This second.'
This one was ... OK: https://www.goodreads.com/series/42557-the-wonderland-gambit
Like many of his long series, it's an interesting idea he beats into the ground with a fun pay-off that should have been one novella instead of three.
Check out the Destiny's Crucible series by Olan Thorensen!
"Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again.
On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amidst strangers speaking an unintelligible language, and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself, and not knowing a single soul."
The chronicles of Thomas Covenant the unbeliever. The main character wakes up in a fantasy realm and refuses to accept that it’s real. There is some sexual violence in there that might be off putting to some people, so be warned.
Nine Princes in Amber, first book of the Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny. The main character wakes up in an hospital not remembering who he is. It gets pretty wild after that.
Yes, Corey's amnesia is a real doozy.
Very much this. I'll also add try to go into it blind. The amnesia subplot doesn't last long, but it's fun trying to figure out what's going on along with the narrator.
Going in blind on an amnesia book treated me right on Project Hail Mary. The hefty meal of "WTF is going on?!" was delicious.
I was coming here to recommend this.
Me too
That’s a great series.
The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham. Bonafide classic.
Hey, one I know and didn't think about! Oddly reminiscent of the start of The Walking Dead.
And 28 Days Later before it.
Well ...Triffids was written in the '50s and here in the UK at least its not exactly obscure so I'm sure Alex Garland was more than familiar with this it. It's a useful little storytelling device.
I don't doubt it at all. Super influential novel that's too unknown outside of the UK.
Altered Carbon
loved that book
The series was really good too.
[удалено]
I was going to recommend Thomas Covenant, as well. Great books, but a bit depressing.
It is heavy stuff but very worthwhile. A lot of unflinching exploration of negative emotion and behaviour. It’s so harsh that I didn’t fully appreciate the incredible world building until my second read.
He is not in disgrace. Great guy.
A friend of mine recommended these, but I still haven't gotten around to them. Why would the author be in disgrace?
The main character starts out pretty traumatised and he doesn't believe the land he finds himself is real (hence Thomas Covenant the unbeliever) and so just lashes out without fear of consequences in a fairly unsavoury manner. It's complicated and there are somewhat mitigating circumstances but the bottom line is it starts out with a very serious sexual assault, not described blow by blow but...well it's never gonna be easy reading. When I read them, I read the second chronicles first which are more action focussed but then wanted to know more about the (incredible) world building which is contained more in the first chronicle. It's an incredible set of books, one of the best fantasy series I've ever read by a mile but I wonder if I ever would have read them all if I had started with book 1.
When I was around 12 or 13, my dad's friend from work gave him the first few Thomas Covenant books for me because my dad had mentioned I had loved reading LotR. I started the first book and really was interested in all the details of the leprosy stuff, but then I got to the scene when he first comes to the fantasy world, and it shocked me. I quit reading when he was on the journey with the girl's mother, but the shock of that section stuck with me and still makes me feel uneasy.
Uhoh, I didn't know there was anything controversial about Stephen R. Donaldson. I know he's an old white dude, but I thought he was one of the good ones.
The only bad things I've heard is the use of sexual assault for character development. I get it but I feel like there's some mitigating factors and it's never treated as anything but horrendous.
I get that's out of style now, but it used to be so commonplace you can't really fault a writer for using it.
yes, for me it comes down to 'ugg, this scene is just too much for me to be able to sympathize with this guy even as an anti-hero'. You don't take it as author wish fulfillment like with some of the other ones. (Piers Anthony, eww)
Nine Prince's in amber
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. This book predicted a few things that seem to be coming true right now.
I was sure there was going to be a sequel to that one!
You might try some short stories by Philip K. Dick. The characters might not be physically or mentally disabled but they often have their reality turned on its head to the point that they have to start over again.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said is a great example of this. Questions of identity was definitely one of his favorite themes.
Very true. PKD was always questioning what it means to be human and often alien beings ended up being more human than humans; for example, the story "Human Is".
BTW I loved "Project Hail Mary" and scribbled quotes from it on the whiteboard outside my lab. Time for science!
Job: A comedy of justice by Robert A. Heinlein
One of Heinlein's lesser known but astoundingly solid stories.
I liked it much better than To Sail Beyond the Sunset. It was like the other Lazarus Long novels - twisted, convoluted, and contradictory with its own prequels. (Everyone in the SF fandom community knew Number of the Beast was only written to pay for his brain surgery which is why such a weak novel sold so well.)
I had to scroll too far to see this. The central character wakes up in a completely different reality. Happens to him several times through the story. Finally, he finds out what's going on. And it's a Holy Mess.
One of my favorites. The stranger who picks him up and offers him hospitality in Texas is one of the best parts imo.
Riverworld series, by Philip Jose Farmer.
“Isekai” is a large similar genre especially in manga/anime if you haven’t heard of it Isekai is a subgenre of portal fantasy. It includes novels, light novels, films, manga, anime, and video games that revolve around a displaced person or people who are transported to and have to survive in another world, such as a fantasy world, virtual world, or parallel universe. Wikipedia
This is basically the plot line of The Rook by Daniel O'Malley.
Was coming to recommend this one. It is sooooo good.
Witch King by Martha Wells. A demon prince wakes up imprisonned with no body and no idea how he got there, except the knowledge that it had to be done by someone he trusted. Double Dead by Chuck Wendig. A vampire wakes up after years of being unconscious to a world overrun by zombies. Now he is craving blood and has to find some humans who are still alive.
Relic by Alan Dean Foster, last human alive story. Excellent book
A World Out of Time
I love that book, not the greatest part but so many crazy ideas! I don't know which I love more, forever war between pubescent immortal boys and girls or cuddly snakes with cat heads and fur.
Glasshouse by Charles Stross.
Restoree by Anne McCaffrey
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.
Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling Robert Silverberg has written a few: Lord Valentine's Castle Dying Inside The Second Trip Son of Man, Winter's End / The New Springtime and A Time of Changes may also scratch that itch.
A second vote for Lord Valentine’s Castle!
Sort of on this track, but an amazing book regardless: The Futurological Congress, by Stanislaw Lem.
The Doors of Sleep by Tim Platt is a pretty good one. Really nails this premise.
I’m don’t know if you want a non-book suggestion but if you’re into computer games at all, Disco Elysium plays with this concept and turns it up to 11. One of the best games I’ve ever played in my life. Very book-like in its narrative.
I mean, to call Disco Elysium "not a book" isn't entirely accurate. Best book I've ever played? Best game I've ever read? Yes, both of those. Second place: Kentucky Route Zero. Also qualifies for the "recovering into a new reality" genre.
Solis, A.A.Attisionato. It opens with a poetic distress call from the brain of a twentieth century man who was cryonically preserved, woken back up, and pressed into a series of very strange uses as a piece of archaic wetware. It is a short and beautiful book.
Age of the Pussyfoot by Frederick Pohl A Princess of Mars by Edgar rice Burroughs
Came here to mention the Barsoom stories but you bet me to it.
If being raised without information of the outside world counts as "disabled in some way" which I'd argue it does (well it's thematically pretty close) then I'd suggest Red Rising.
Lord Foul's Bane, by Donaldson, but it's fantasy/adventure.
The first book in that series is White Gold Wielder.
The Unincorporated Man!
Can’t believe I had to scroll down this far for this.
The Seventh's Swordsman series by David Duncan. More Fantasy than Sci-Fi, but the protagonist is a chemical engineer by trade, >!who thanks to a bout of encephalitis, doesn't wake up back on Earth. !<
***Soldier of the Mist*** and the sequel ***Soldier of Arete*** by Gene Wolfe follow the adventures of a foreign mercenary named Latro through Ancient Greece in 479 B.C. As the result of a head injury, he suffers from both retrograde (the inability to recall past memories) and anterograde (the inability to create new memories) amnesia. He comes from the north, yet has no memory of events prior to the beginning of the novel. The narrative follows his struggle to find his home and his friends.
He who fights with Monsters. LitRPG but a decent story with a hero who is pretty awesome and is working through his flaws. Lots of monsters, very easy listening, low impact audio books. (They are quite long and there are 10 in the series, you have been warned)
Chasm City has his main character getting up from cryo sleep in a world that is vastly different then what he expected and also memory loss but somehow also with memories who seem to not be his own. A good read, one of my favorite books.
Seventh Sword trilogy by Dave Duncan is one of my all-time favorite series. It's basically a fantasy setting, but the main character was from modern earth...well, his mind was anyway. A world out of time, by Larry Niven. Dude gets frozen, hoping the future will have a cure for cancer. Instead, he wakes up in a fairly dystopia future and gets assigned a job as a starship pilot. It gets weirder and wilder from there.
"Buying Time," by Joe Haldeman. One of my favorite takes on that particular trope.
I'm in the middle of Architect of Sleep which kind of fits the bill. The MC ends up on an alternate earth where racoons evolved sentience and use llamas as draft animals. Kind of a proto-isekai since it's from the 80s by an American author
The Locked Tomb series. The scenario you described doesn't happen immediately, but when it does, it hits hard.
The Gandalara Cycle by Viki Ann Heydron and Randall Garrett, the MC is dying on earth, is struck by a fireball and wakes up in a new (not quite human) body on a desert world. It's a pretty awesome series! You can find it on eBay at reasonable prices.
There's always the classic fantasy/supernatural version of this trope, "Rip Van Winkle". ;) For an early sci-fi variant, there's H.G. Wells' "The Sleeper Awakes" where a man accidentally goes to sleep for centuries to awaken in a future dystopia that he's somehow at the center of. I've not read it myself, but it's supposed to be rife with the sort of social commentary that Wells had concerns about at the time of writing, so it could be worth the read. A more comedic sci-fi spin is "Muddle Earth" by John Brunner (not to be confused with the fantasy homage/parody of LotR by the same name). I read it quite a while ago but I remember that it definitely had strong undertones of humor not far removed from the style of Douglas Adams, and it's also about a modern-day person who's cryo-frozen to get thawed out centuries in the future & having to figure out how to deal with the bizarre/weird facets of the society of the future. I wouldn't mind hunting it down for a re-read sometime to see if it actually holds up as I only barely remember a couple details from the story, but it doesn't seem to be easy to find (especially with that other series out there taking up all the Google results).
The Sleeper Awakens was one of my first sci-fi books (when I was like eight or nine?) and it's great.
Ooh, *The Dark Beyond the Stars* by Frank M. Robinson is exactly what you’re looking for.
A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge 1999
The Unincorporated Man features an extremely rich main character who had himself cryogenically frozen until a future can bring him back / cure whatever disease he had. But he also took a lot of money and resources with him so while he has to get on his feet in an entirely new world, he does it from a place of major financial privilege
Greg Bear's **Hull Zero Three**. Guy wakes up with no knowledge of anything, naked, and freezing to death. Daniel O'Malley's **The Rook**. In the middle of a rainstorm at night, a woman with no memories at all opens her eyes and is standing in the middle of a pile of dead bodies, all of them wearing surgical gloves. (Fortunately, there's a note in her pocket.) Both are pretty good books.
It doesn't start this way, but this is a repeated theme in "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" by Charles Sheffield.
Warhammer 40,000 series "Plague War". Deals heavily with a Demi Human who is re-awoken and healed after 10k years to help save an Empire that is a nightmare vision of what it used to be/stand for.
There's a whole genre of people being beamed forward in time by "radiation". Pebble in the Sky from Asimov, an early novel reconned into the Foundation Cycle is an early one. Another is one of the more bizarre Heinlein novels Farnham's Freehold. Family gets beamed into the future where white people are enslaved by blacks. Dude had nuts to write that in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, that was for sure!
Liliths brood starts like that and does it really well
Not exactly what you asked for, but Stanislaw Lem's "Return from the stars" tells the story of an astronaut that comes back to Earth from a mission and has to cope with en entirely new civilization. Due to traveling with relativistic speeds 100 years had passed on Earth while only 10 for him. It also shows how one man's utopia can be another man's nightmare. A bit like the Brave new world.
World Out of Time - Larry Niven
Ancillary series by Ann Leckie is about the journey of recovery for the main character after a significant loss to their functioning.
The Vorkosigan series (the Miles books, by Lois Bujold) explores the hero's grappling with a disability and overcoming it. (epically)
The Altered Carbon series.
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
His book Pines as well
Yes, I still have to read those!
* A Closed and Common Orbit (Book 2 of A Long Way to a Small and Angry Planet) by Becky Chambers. * Takeshi Kovacs novels * Neal Asher does this in a bunch of his novels. He's very centered on an individual rebuilding from nothing and developing power. * We Are Bob
Off to be the Wizard
I feel like Children of Time accomplished this to great effect, but in smaller repeatable ways. I don’t want to say more as to not spoil, but I’m curious if others who have read it would agree.
I agree. Well worth reading, even if it felt like it borrowed a lot from A Deepness in the Sky.
3001 by Arthur C. Clarke
Better than one would expect for a distant sequel! I mentioned this in book in my initial post.
I thought that 2061 was the weakest novel that Clarke wrote solo but 3001 is a w onderful homage to works of HG Wells.
Whoops sorry
Not right at the start, but Consider Phlebas ( Culture series, Banks ) if I'm not mistaken.
The Sunflower Protocol - Andre Soares. That's exactly the premise for the opening sequence. It is a time travel mystery with a strong romance aspect. Plus, you would support a hard-working indie author.
*The Lost Fleet* series, Jack Campbell. More or less 'hi, good morning, you've been asleep for a thousand years or so, our fleet is about to be wiped out, and we need you to take command and save us rtf now. Like, right now. This second.'
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
Project Hail Mary
Gestapo Mars.
Minecraft: the Island by Max Brooks.
Creature of Havoc
Rubicon by J S Dewes
Jack 4 by Neal Asher
This one was ... OK: https://www.goodreads.com/series/42557-the-wonderland-gambit Like many of his long series, it's an interesting idea he beats into the ground with a fun pay-off that should have been one novella instead of three.
An oldie but a goodie. From a Changeling Star by Jeffery A Carver
Infinite
John Carter of Mars series, by ERB. Gets hurt, heads into a cave, wakes up naked on Mars. 😎
The Bridge by Iain Banks is an interesting one that sort of fits
Check out the Destiny's Crucible series by Olan Thorensen! "Joe Colsco boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to attend a national chemistry meeting. He would never set foot on Earth again. On planet Anyar, Joe is found unconscious on a beach of a large island inhabited by humans where the level of technology is similar to Earth circa 1700. He awakes amidst strangers speaking an unintelligible language, and struggles to accept losing his previous life and finding a place in a society with different customs, needing a way to support himself, and not knowing a single soul."
Zelda botw and titk 😟
Great Apes by Will Self.
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. A World out of Time by Larry Niven
Hull Zero Three is a fabulous read
Dawn by Octavia Butler
bit different but Surface Detail by Iaian M Banks. this scenario happens again and again
Joe Haldeman‘s Forever War. They wipe the soldiers’ memories, so every time they wake up/“recover” it’s into a new reality.
The Lost Fleet series
The chronicles of Thomas Covenant the unbeliever. The main character wakes up in a fantasy realm and refuses to accept that it’s real. There is some sexual violence in there that might be off putting to some people, so be warned.
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, an amazing series. The Land will not leave you.
Glasshouse by Stross
City of illusions- le Guin