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[Recommend on] Sci Fi Book Edition
Fallingman
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy recently, and I’m kind of over it for now. I’d like to get into some good sci fi, as Mass Effect 2 has captured my imagination of late.
So, I’m looking for recommendations please. I’ve read a few, so I’ll jot down the memorable ones to save a bit of time. I’m not precious about pop vs serious sci fi, so post your favs with a description of the what and why’s.
Books I’ve read:
- Peter F Hamilton (Knights Dawn Triligy and more recently the Void Trilogy – any others worth looking into?
- The Thrawn Trilogy
- Starship Troopers
- Enders Game
- Armour (though they spell armour wrong)
There’s a few more, but not many – I’m a bit of a Nub.
So, I’m looking for recommendations please. I’ve read a few, so I’ll jot down the memorable ones to save a bit of time. I’m not precious about pop vs serious sci fi, so post your favs with a description of the what and why’s.
Books I’ve read:
- Peter F Hamilton (Knights Dawn Triligy and more recently the Void Trilogy – any others worth looking into?
- The Thrawn Trilogy
- Starship Troopers
- Enders Game
- Armour (though they spell armour wrong)
There’s a few more, but not many – I’m a bit of a Nub.
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(and 'Armour' is the British spelling)
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Particularly "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" "A Scanner Darkly" "The man in the High Castle" and "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said"
Also, The Diamond Age. Which features a character from Snow Crash if you pay attention.
And if we're talking John Steakley, my edition is called Armor.
I have heard of Snow Crash, the only thing stopping me was that I read Cryptonomicon and was underwhelmed. Should I let this worry me?
I tried Aisimov once, but didn't get into it for some reason, maybe I wasn't in the right mood.
Hmm, altered carbon sounds interesting.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
It's Heinlein, you really can't go wrong
Imagine swashbuckling adventures on a planet mostly covered by ocean, with all fauna based on a virus that regenerates the host and is used by gargantuan leeches to ensure that their prey grows back the chunks of flesh they tear out of them.
Now imagine humans infected with this virus, some of them nearly a thousand years old due to the regenerating virus, and with immense strength due to the virus gradually replacing their body with viral fibres - some of them barely even bleed when cut and have the wounds instantly close. They're called the Old Captains.
then
William Gibson's Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties)
The first ones pretty much defined cyberpunk and the others are set in the same universe.
The Heinlein Juveniles are all pretty great. Beyond that, tread very cautiously through Heinlein. His stuff gets weird in a hurry.
I know we're talking personal taste here, but even his weird stuff is pretty good
Have Space Suit Will Travel is considered pretty classic last time I checked, though
Oh, I agree. I like all his non-juvenile stuff but I wouldn't suggest somebody try it as an early foray into Sci-fi. Also, HSS:WT is one of the juveniles.
Simmons is a very versatile writer, and his books are a pleasure to read just on their surface merits. He's also big on allusions and homages to other works. Ilium and Olympos are essentially SF reimaginings of Homer's epics, with a bunch of Shakespeare and others throw in for good measure, and the Hyperion Cantos riffs on many of the major movements within SF.
Just very well-written, fun SF. Bujold, like Simmons, is quite versatile, and takes on all kinds of different subgenres within the series. I suggest starting with the first Miles omnibus, Young Miles, and going from there. If you like it--and you will--you'll have enough reading material to last weeks, if not months.
Astute and beautiful.
Post-apocalyptic England with killer plants.
A fairly zany take on first contact. Aliens hire a PR guy to handle their wider introduction. Lots of snappy dialogue, if you're into that sort of thing
Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space and Redemption Ark are pretty interesting. Unfortunately, the last ingredient, Absolution Gap was not particularly noteworthy
Though they lack the pulpy goodness of the Night's Dawn Trilogy, Hamilton's great work is really Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, if only for his world-building. They precede the Void Trilogy. Fallen Dragon is nifty too.
Callahan's Cross-time Saloon by Spider Robinson (kind of, uh, raunchy, so be prepared)
'Rendezvous with Rama' by Arthur C. Clarke is also a pretty good book
I've a few of his other books as well and enjoyed them.
Not only that, it's a phenomenal story and I would actually say it's a much easier and more beautiful story than Armor is...not that Armor is bad. Go Felix!
Hes about as brilliant as one can get in the space opera genre.
john brunner- plenty of good popsci novels like the super barbarians when he started out but he wrote the sheep look up and stand on zanzibar which are these fantastic near-future books that mesh pretty nicely with our present despite being written some forty years ago.
james white- the escape orbit, a short pop novel about escaping a hellish prison planet
andre norton- wrote a ton of books but I recommend the free traders/space queen series which is about a spaceship crew that trades raritiesacross the stars to live a free life. also the stars are ours followed by star born are two good novels about an earth colony ship that tries to escape despite desperate conditions on earth.
frank herbert- santaroga barrier and hellstrom's hive: two excellent novels about radical cultural change aided by a technological leg up that permits the rapid change. he's done other great stuff as well like the dune trilogy.
larry niven- ringworld series- I love these books, the universe he created is really compelling. if you get into this read the man-kzin war books as well.
harry harrison- deathworld trilogy: a great little series about a colony of tough motherfuckers making their place on a hostile new world.
jack vance- wrote a bunch of good pop sci like the five gold bands, the dragon masters, son of the tree,houses of iszm, etc. they're really good and it'll take forever to describe them all but they are like fiction popcorn
a.e. van vogt- slan, a transhumanist type novel, the war against the rull- a novel about human vs alien psyche battling it out for the galaxy, the world of null-A which is about both a plot to bring humans into the galactic fold and about non aristotlian thinking. I enjoyed the last the most but they are all v. enjoyable reads.
charles sheffield- the compleat mcandrew- more of a hard/realistic scifi book, it's a compilation of short stories into quite sn interesting novel about exploration into our solar system over the next few centuries
ah what else
jack williamson- the humanoids- which is a good scary robot counterpart to asimov's benevolent robot series.
this is all old stuff though, and the perspectives reflect worldview of the time- you'll see stuff like AHHH communism and women = flowers etc which is fairly amusing for me,at least. going more modern you should check out...
ill wind by kevin anderson and doug beason, a 90's book responding to oil economy fears with a postapocalypseview of the removal of oil products
iain banks has some great novels out but he's been mentioned
greg bear's darwin series (starting with darwin's radio) is pretty great with the genetic mutation stuff he's got goin on
im a big fan of ben bova but his stuff is a heavy read at times which slows things down.
I think that's it for me, I ended writing more down than I thought i would.
I actually think Altered Carbon is the weakest of his books (possibly discounting the recent fantasy novel, which I haven't read, but I've heard it's terrible). I think it's worth reading to set up Broken Angels and Woken Furies, but upon reading them again I think both of those are superior books. Woken Furies in particular. Also his other two unrelated sci-fi books (Market Forces and Thirteen) are worth a read. Market Forces has a more interesting premise but the wrting is crisper in Thirteen.
Dune has been mentioned and it's a must read - I only recently read it and I wanted to smack myself for not reading it 20 years ago.
The Vernor Vinge books that were mentioned, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky are both excellent, dense sci-fi.
And if you want a complete mind-fuck of a book, pick up Vurt by Jeff Noon. It is a trippy-as-fuck cyberpunkish book. Features objectively real virtual experience triggered by sucking on color-coded feathers, telepathic women made of shadows, people who fuck dogs, incest, and guns that fire bullets with fractal viruses which convert the target's body into fractal data until the data collabses. I've never read anything like it.
Really can't lime that hard enough. The stories Reynolds tells are pretty epic, spanning entire galaxies and thousands/millions of years. Though only a few (two?) of his other books take place in the Revelation Space universe, all of his books have the same style.
Others have mentioned the Hyperion books by Dan Simmons, which I've just started. Enjoying them but finding them a bit slow to start out.
Starfish by Peter Watts
I have to disagree with whoever advised against reading the Ender series beyond Ender's Game. The next three books (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) are very different from the first, but I think they're better, more interesting books. They're not as good adventures as the Ender's Game, but they made me think more. The "Shadow" books are more in the vein of the first, and quite enjoyable.
In order to actually add to what has been said, I'll recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series (Red, Green, and Blue Mars.) They're excellent, hard science fiction about the colonization of Mars and where the human race may find itself in a couple of hundred years scientifically, socially, and politically.