Posted on 08/19/2006 7:09:57 PM PDT by Hacksaw
There have been several science fiction threads floating around in the near past - and I thought it would be good to hash out the books.
Here are my thoughts:
Almost anything by Larry Niven is worth it - especially stuff from the Known Space series. Jerry Pournelle is also good, but under-rated. His Janissaries books were a good read, along with Starswarm.
RAH - most of his books are very enjoyable. His later stuff (which some consider his classics) I didn't like at all, especially that one about a guy getting his brain transplanted in a womans body. I didn't make it 1/3 of the way through before I gave up.
Ben Bova - readable. Not great, but still a page turner.
Star Trek books - unfortuneately, many of these are BORING. Notable exceptions are those written by by Diane Duane or Michael Jan Friedman. JM Dillard also seems good.
Asimov - almost always worth it.
Orson Scott Card - most of the time worth it. The Enders Game series was very good.
Saberhagen - good read. His berserker concept has also been picked up by other authors.
Kim Stanley Robinson - bleech. I kept wishing the characters in his books would get killed. Unfortuneately they were the heroes. Picture a bunch of disciples of Hugo Chavez colonizing Mars and you get the picture.
AC Clarke - very entertaining. Safe bets.
Other thoughts?
Other guys whom I have read lately:
Greg Bear (good "hard" SF),
Greg Egan (Whacky guy I think, books aren't very long, but the concepts in them require you to read them carefully.)
Vernor Vinge "Fire upon the Deep" and "Deepness in the sky" were pretty good, not as great as some felt.
A book I read a few years ago and enjoyed more than I wanted to (Cheesy name, obscure author, didn't want to like it but I did), was "Sister Alice", by Robert Reed. Quite imaginative.
Way.
Go read it again.
You may find some comments about "overpopluation" that are merely "asides" about some societal circumstances that may be pressures on various actors in his books...
Oh I see they are there but they don't count. Got ya.
The predictions that Heinlein discusses in "Expanded Universe" did not appear in any of his fiction as you implied.
The Predictions that he discusses in "Expanded Universe" are indeed his view points of future history that appear in his books.
Go read them all. They are quite interesting.
Look at the quotations you cited. They are not in the form of prose used in fiction... they are the type of writing you would find in a scholarly essay... which is what they are referring to.
I never claimed that they were fiction in fact this is exactly what I said about it " Read "Expanded Universe" (the 1980 version) where he talks about his predictions for the year 2000 and how he hit or missed." Please note the use of the words his and he referring to Heinlein rather then a fictional characters.
Yes. Just not with you, who started the insults.
Hope you learn to chill out and not write foot-long angry, insulting posts when someone dares have more perception and objectivity about a book than you.
142 replies and yet no mention of Horselover Fat, aka Philip Kendall Dick?
Virtually anything... but "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", "UBIK", and "The Three Stgmata of Palmer Eldrich" come to mind.
Jurassic Park was a great book. Exponentially better than the film.
Interesting faction, Poul's daughter Astrid is married to one of the authors I mentioned, Greg Bear. Not sure as to his political leanings, but he has written fondly of Poul.
That was the one where he began to lose me as well.
It was also the one where his characters really began to move into the "Superman" category. His earlier heroes were much more human.
It still does not establish Heinlein as a pessimistic author of "we're all going to starve to death" school of SF writing as you claimed. Harmless, it simply does not exist as a theme in his writing.
Does anyone else who has read Heinlein find such a theme running through his work???
I was not aware of that- I read most of his books as a teenager, and still have "The Skylark of Space" somewhere around here. Of course, that was in my H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs period of reading- might not have been Great Literature, but it was entertaining.
At lot of them were stuck in that mindset. Humans would breed like out of control bunnies. We would be forced to colonize the other planets because of population pressures on earth. Unless of course we were forcibly restrained by a tyrannical government
I am reminded of what was said of Marxism,"good theory, wrong species".
Go search "Heinlein" and "Food shortages" and you will find a number of readers who agree with me.
You may think it is not there but a good number of other people do. And the author himself has stated it and also stated that he got it wrong.
You really need to read that part of "Expanding Universe".
I never said that he was.
Although as his predictions of us colonizing other planets for food supplies has turned out to be impossible I guess it was a really good thing that he was so wrong about how much food we can produce on earth.
My point, Teddy, is that pessiistic "food shortages" were not a recurring theme running throughout, or even in any but one or two (if that), his fiction works. Population pressure was commented on in any book about colonization... and even in Farmer in the Sky, the colonization intent was never to ship food back to Earth but to find additional living room and for the colonists to achieve self-sufficiency.
You certainly won't find it in The Door Into Summer, Beyond This Horizon, Double Star, Red Planet, The Star Beast, Sixth Column, Methusalah's Children, If This Goes On, Rocket Ship Galileo, Starman Jones, The Rolling Stones, Tunnel In the Sky, Tme for the Stars, Citizen of the Galaxy, or Starship Troopers which comprise the bulk of his early works.
Aside from my "asinine" comment, please provide any example of any insults I have directed toward you. Note especially any insults that come up to the level of the following:
whiney BABYAll of which you have directed at me in a mere seven replies. All because I dared to challenge your "perception and objectivity about a book" and atempted to have a discussion with you.
such a wuss
Oedipal gumbo that appears to be your mind
SEEK HELP, dude.
You have problems.
you're ridiculous-
it's embarassing watching you shuck and jive
You don't WANT to see your hero
arm-long, truly bizarre, and frightened posts.
your contact with reality.
You remind me of those folks who are shocked to learn the hero isn't white.
you do know how to ramble on
Because you're starting to make me wonder...
Your behavior on this thread is, frankly, weird.
But it sure is interesting you read that into it.
And informative.
your self-righteous blowhardiness
sniffed
You're obviously way too uptight
Sorry to touch on a subject that's obviously making you crazy.
Your rage is pretty self-explanatory.
If it's convenient (and safer) for you to believe that, go right ahead.
Astounding.
They were readable but made the Harkonans violent to the point of comedy. Any society as barbaric as the Barons would self destruct in a short amount of time, or the Baron himself would be asassinated (much like Rome's Caligula was by his own guards).
Here is what I said... "It still does not establish Heinlein as a pessimistic author of "we're all going to starve to death" school of SF writing as you claimed."
This discussion started because you said:
"He was one of the few of the "we are all going to starve to death" future history writers who had the honesty to later admit that he had totally missed the boat.
implying that was his major theme. There actually was a genre of distopic SF writers who's themes were how, when, and how gruesomely we were all going to die... sort of like modern Liberals.
Heinlein always tried to be on the cutting edge of hard science fiction... and as such he took the latest "science" and extrapolated on what that currently was. In the 50s and early 60s, it was Malthusian geometries... Malthus noted how food supply growth was linear but population growth was exponential... it was the "global warming" science of the period. Heinlein wrote SOME stories based on that potential... but certainly not all.
Well now you at least admit that he wrote some. I guess that is progress.
Never said he didn't... just that his overall work was optimistic and not pessimistic, even about food shortages. Heinlein did not write pessimistic Science Fiction... he didn't write about problems, he wrote about solutions.
And, I agree, he admitted it when he was wrong.
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