Bester
Posted on 01/02/2014 10:37:30 AM PST by EveningStar
Happy National Science Fiction Day! January 2nd is the day selected for this wonderful holiday because it was Isaac Asimov's birthday. It's a day to celebrate, appreciate, and even read some of the many science fiction offerings at your local library, bookstore, website, or your own bookshelf.
(Excerpt) Read more at neatorama.com ...
ping
Much discussion on Mr. Bester's masterpiece The Stars My Destination.
Sci-fi screen name checking in....
Bester
I have loved Science Fiction since I first found it in the library. The first one that I can actually remember the plot line of was a juvenile story about a kid raising a triceratops born from a chicken’s egg. Shortly afterwards I encountered Robert Heinlein’s (RAH) juveniles as well as some of his short stories in “Boy’s Life” and was lost from then on. Branched out to Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Dickson, and so on down the alphabet but have always had a deep spot for RAH! Currently, I like a lot of David Weber, Eric Flint and John Ringo, probably because they load their stories with a lot of history, the other addiction of mine. Sad to think that we lost both Ray Bradbury and Fred Pohl last year, loved a lot of their writing!
SF Day should be July 7, IMO.
Science Fiction? You mean like Global Warming?
Bump for Weber, Flint and Ringo. May I also suggest SM Stirling, if you haven’t found him yet?
Have you read The Last Centurion (Ringo) yet? Possibly the most un-PC thing I’ve ever read. Written in a blog-like format, which means it’s largely unedited and has a lot of errors, etc. But oddly compelling, almost like listening to somebody tell a story directly to you.
I dumped my subscription to “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” after more than four decades. It seems the magazine took a hard left turn, for example spewing “watermelon enviro” and religion bashing.
The clincher is the new lame-brain movie reviewer using the words “Senator Joe McCarthy’s HUAC” in his column. Drooling moron actually wrote that with a straight face (pen), not as a joke.
Cultural rot? Maybe; maybe not — but I’m going back to the classics.
Love his "Island in the Sea of Time" but he has lost me with his 'Artos' series as it just seems to drag. Very talented but he do seem to have a pagan bias as more than just a story line.
Yup. Agree. Some of his less well-known stuff is also interesting. He has novels set on Venus and Mars as they were generally assumed to be by SF writers in the 30s and 40s. Mars a dying dry world and Venus a jungle world. The hook is that the probes of the 60s found that to be true.
He also wrote a dystopian series about the Draka Domination. What if history had turned out the worst it could have? A history in which the Nazis are the kinder, gentler racists in WWII. It’s pretty good if you like dystopias, otherwise NOT recommended.
I’ve read all the Artos novels, but the story arc should have ended about three back now. Stirling also has an “urban vampire” series going now. Avoid.
National Science Fiction Day.
Is this some sort of Obama Green Energy awareness initiative?
Ping.
Wye Knott.
Good call. See my #15
Sci-fi day bump
Here’s something I found a while ago, a list from a 1968 Galaxy mag of sci-fi authors for and against the Vietnam war. You might have to zoom to read it properly. I would take the pro authors over the antis on this one as far as which side I would want to read, if I had to choose. Asimov opposed involvement.
http://www.natsmusic.net/articles_galaxy_magazine_viet_nam_war.htm
Freegards
Bookmark. Thanks for sharing!
Spider Robinson - one of my favorites, always gives a rousing tribute to RAH. If you haven't read "The Free Lunch", it's a quirky book. :-)
I find my problem with David Weber, is that some of his series needed to end books ago (Honor Harrington- cough cough), and because he puts so much repetitive detail into some of the stories, they're twice as big as they need to be.
Although, when he added a completely new back story to "In Fury Born", it became even more totally awesome.
Ok, I am just contrary. :-)
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