Sci-fi books you must read....

joe mcclaine said:
Gigahurtz said:
joe mcclaine said:
Hitch-Hikers' Guide To The Galaxy is the only one I've read.

Any others would need to be pretty special to come close.

Read "the stars my destination" it was written in 1950s and beat the matrix and all other sci-fi films to the punch. It's fantastic.

Just checked and it looks like I have this on my PC.

Girl at work had one of those DVDs with 10,000 books on it.

It's now on my Kindle and ready to go.

You will not regret it.



Spares by Michael Marshall Smith. Great story, the Michael Bay film "the island" was very, very loosely based on the idea. When I heard they were making a film based on the book I was so excited and then Bay got hold of it LOL.

If you can get it do read it. I read it when I was 18 and it raised a lot of moral questions about our disposable society etc.
 
Bring argumentative as ever, I don't rate Bester at all - very much of his time, it seems to me - and Against A Dark Background is a favorite, though I didn't like it the first time through.

Anyway, some classics, in no particular order:

CJ Cherryh: Cyteen. Sociology as the S in SF.
Just about anything by Neal Stephenson. Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon for the non-hardcore SF reader, Anathem for the enthusiast. And for the cyberpunks, the one that ended out all by being unfollowable, Snow Crash. (Greatest first 20 pages ever, too.)
Ian M Banks - Use Of Weapons is the standout, I think.
Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon The Deep
For cyberpunk style in an alternate present, Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade.
Bruce Sterling: our great prophet? Heavy Weather.
Gibson: I actually think the short stories, Burning Chrome, are even more important than the novels. But you should read the first three, at least.
Nobody does the heady mixture of SF, intelligence, genuine anger and testosterone overload like Richard Morgan. Black Man. Then Altered Carbon. Then the others. (Any man who can write epic fantasy set in a homophobic feudal empire starring a self-loathing gay hero with serious anger management problems and his black lesbian half-alien friend, with swearing all over it, deserves respect just for baiting the deeply conservative fanbase.)
Kim Stanley Robinson: SF's intellectual leftwing individualist, a man who can write novels of unbelievably dense thought and research that still work as stories. Red Mars and its sequels are the classics, 40 Signs Of Rain my favorite.
The great classic nobody read: David Zindell, Neverness.
And one everyone did: A Canticle For Leibowitz.

I'd probably better stop there. For now.
 
Dr Rick said:
The great classic nobody read: David Zindell, Neverness.
And one everyone did: A Canticle For Leibowitz.

great reply... Very comprehensive! For what it's worth, you have those back to front for me. Neverness was hard going, but really rewarding at the end. That said, I never got on with his other stuff - seemed to focus too much on being clever and forgot that readers might want an interesting story.

I'll look out for A canticle...
 
Dr Rick said:
Against A Dark Background is a favorite, though I didn't like it the first time through.

I should give it another go really. Last time I got about fifty pages in. I am not the sort to read a whole book to the end even if I dislike it. I'd rather move on to another as life is too short.
 
I love the fact that basically everybody in it is either deeply unhappy or thoroughly unpleasant much of the time, and that they mostly have good reasons so to be. It's definitely one I can only pick up when in the proper mood, though!

My last favorite of the M books is probably Inversions. Though I have to be in the right mental space to be able to even try to read Feersum Endjinn, for obvious reasons!
 
Dr Rick said:
My last favorite of the M books is probably Inversions. Though I have to be in the right mental space to be able to even try to read Feersum Endjinn, for obvious reasons!

I found Inversions fascinating. I was lucky enough to read it having no idea it was a Culture novel so it was a brilliant feeling when it dawned on my what was going on.

Feersum Endjinn is nuts. Not just because of the language that's used - that starts to make sense about half way through! - but the virtual reality that it describes. Banks goes on to use this idea for the Hells and virtual wars in his excellent novel Excession.
 
Excession is my favorite of his (though not his best art imo). I'm not remembering the virtual hells etc though, or there being much virtual about the battles? Infinite Fun Space, certainly. And I love Gravious (the bird). What have I forgotten?

Edit: suspect you mean Surface Detail.
 
ChopperHarris said:
Oh, I also have a soft spot for Otherland by Tad Williams, but I met the author once and he was a genuinely nice chap, so I may be biased!

Read the Otherland series twice - really fascinating.

Also loved the Hitchiker series, in fact re-read it recently. Another blast from the past is Saga of Pliocene Exile or the Torc Trilogy as i remember it being called.

I didn't realise I was a SF fan until I read this post!
 
Dr Rick said:
Excession is my favorite of his (though not his best art imo). I'm not remembering the virtual hells etc though, or there being much virtual about the battles? Infinite Fun Space, certainly. And I love Gravious (the bird). What have I forgotten?

Edit: suspect you mean Surface Detail.

Yes I think I did! Sorry, just spotted your post. :blush:
 
Dr Rick said:
It was very useful, because it pointed out to me that I hadn't noticed there was a new Banks out! It's on my reading list :).

Well that's good then. I really enjoyed it and found the virtual parts of the book fascinating. Nudge it towards the top of your list. Fifty Shades can wait... :icon_razz:
 
Hitchhiker's of course. Harry Harrison, Stainless Steel Rat series, anything by Arthur C Clarke. Best of all, Starship Trooper by Robert A Heinlein. I can reread it time and again
 
Stan said:
Hitchhiker's of course. Harry Harrison, Stainless Steel Rat series, anything by Arthur C Clarke. Best of all, Starship Trooper by Robert A Heinlein. I can reread it time and again

Starship Troopers was a classic. Have you read Heinlein's Double Star?

Stainless Steel Rat, MacCaffrey's Dragonflight series. Most of Asimov. Oh, so much more! I kind of moved on to Fantasy after a whole, but there was some great writers working in SF. And Dick, Do Andoids dream of Electric Sheep? The spark for Bladerunner.
 
One Book? That's tough. But one book has everything you could want from Sci-Fi - Great writing, plausible plot, rational behavior, characters you care about.. And that book is Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard.
:icon_biggrin:

Just kidding, what a POS that book is.

One book is tough, but given due acknowledgment to some of the brilliant books already mentioned I think I'd go with War of the Worlds by H G Wells.
 
ChopperHarris said:
I also forgot my two favourite dystopian novels - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell. Not exactly a barrel of laughs, but good reads nonetheless!

Then I'd reccomend 'We' by Yevgeni Zamyatin, it's a precursor to BNW and1984 and was inspired by the Russian Revolution and his time at the Tyne shipyards.

The last two Sci-fi books I read were Consider and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I've not read anything by Philip K Dick before but I enjoyed so will have a look at some of his other stuff.
 
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