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?
But allow me to recommend two authors to you:
David Brin and Greg Bear. 'Nuff said.
Yeah, Hyperion was good. REALLY good.
I want my own personal Shrike.
Well that certainly will put a hitch in the getalong.
"Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down." (I've seen this quote attributed to every one from A.E. Newman to Oscar Wilde!)
Mark
"I don't think Heinlein ever wrote such a book. It was a possibility mentioned in one IIRC, but to my knowledge there was never an entire book written with that premise."
There was, indeed. I Will Fear No Evil, IIRC. I enjoyed it back then, but I've grown up since then, and gotten religion, and I've cleared out most of his later stuff, i.e. anything after The Number of the Beast. He was writing that one when his carotid artery(or arteries) clogged up, and after the carotid bypass surgery, became totally obsessed with sex, particularly incestous sex.
His early work was outstanding, and in fact still is. If you don't mind porn, you may still like his later work. I've gotten to the point where I prefere my porn in braille, so don't care to read it anymore.
My girlfriend's dad once stuffed Harlan Ellison into a clothes dryer because he was acting like an ass. Helluva guy, my girlfriend's dad.
Ellison is a great writer, and he'll be the first to tell you that! lol. But, as you say, he can be a jerk, as his reputation shows. On the other hand, I have to say that at a convention that I saw him appear at in NYC many years ago, he was remarkably gracious and friendly to people, when he didn't have to be, away from the stage. The guy was just trying to have lunch and was being mobbed. I expected to see him go on a tyrade, but he didn't: He stopped eating, and answered every question, and signed every autograph until the people were gone. Unfortunately, he was then late for something at the con, and never did get to finish his lunch.
Mark
"Kelly--Think Like A Dinosaur--This stunning story tackles head on the issue of identity challenged by new technology. Will technological change radically alter ethics? Count on it."
I was channel surfing a few months ago and found the 90's verison of "The Outer Limits" just coming on. Being a big fan of anthology shows, I stopped there.
Lo and behold, it was "Think Like A Dinosaur"! I recognized it from the first scene of the first act as a short story I'd read several years ago, and it actually stuck with the original story pretty closely, to my pleasant surprise.
With so much great SF in short story form out there as potential source material, it pains me to see the Sci Fi Channel churning out cinematic dreck like "Snakehead Terror". (Not to mention how they botched and mangled Philip Jose Farmer's "Riverworld")
Ditto on the "Second Foundation Trilogy" by The Killer B's.
Check out his short story "Wang's Carpets" for a good, mind-bending read.
Dan Simmons does detective novels as well as SF.
Not reading the rest of the thread I may be ou to fthe Loop
Has anyone mentioned Stephen R. Donaldsen's Covenant Series?
Can't get enough of it
I think Shepherd Book had been an Alliance Operative in the past, realized that the work he was doing was evil, and his conscience got the best of him.
That's my $0.02, anyway.
Just read the thread-see you listed Donaldsen-Have you read the first book of his latest Covenant Series?
Why not? Any conceivable man-portable "death ray" weapons (phasers, blasters, lightsabers, etc) would require a large and HIGHLY advanced manufacturing infrastructure, as well as a means to safely store the enormous amounts of energy needed by such devices. Not to mention the means to maintain them.
Those might not be readily available on the less-advanced frontier worlds.
20th and early 21st century firearms would be much, MUCH simpler to manufacture and maintain.
Sorry. ;-) I'm in the middle of Erick Flynt's "1632" series, where a "Ring of Fire" transplants a small 21st century West Virginia mining town to 17th century Germany during the Thirty Years War. I seem to have technological "gearing down" on the brain.
From that book:
Sanchez smiled mirthlessly. "My name is Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz," he growled at the five still-standing French agents. "Prepare to die."
This time, Sharon couldn't stop the laugh from bursting out. A semi-hysterical laugh, to be sure. But still—
Where in the hell had Ruy Sanchez gotten his hands on a copy of The Princess Bride?
<snip>
Sanchez hadn't read the book. He'd probably never even heard of it. The character of Inigo Montoya was just an author's comic twist on an ancient and very real model.
Meet Ruy Sanchez. The original.
they do good fantasy, too...
Oh yeah! My favorite also has representation in the Free Library, too. It's Rick Cook's Wizardry series. The first two books, Wizard's Baen and Wizardry Compiled, are there for download. He is an IEEE Fellow and all of the jokes in his books are computer geek jokes, particularly really (good) bad puns. His main character "falls through a hole" and ends up in a world where magic works. Turns out this guy is a "wizard" of a computer programmer in the real world. He discovers that he can write a magic compiler. In the later stories he even has them return from the world where magic works to Las Vegas and they show up at Comdex. I swear to you that I was at the IBM party he describes!
We were at GenCon in Indy last weekend. Got to meet the guy who plays Apollo on "Battlestar Galactica". Seemed pretty cool, and my girlfriend got her picture taken with him.
The thing I enjoyed most about discovering Niven's Known Space series was that he'd come up with a science fiction idea, let's say the transporter, and then he'd write five or six stories about what they would do to society as fiction. What would happen to roads or car companies? What about airlines or airports? And think about the ability to "pop in" on any breaking news story. And forget about alibis for crimes. Then he'd write an essay on the science. Assume you have a transporter. Assume you get in it at the equator, traveling at 1,000 miles per hour due to the rotation of the earth at the equator. You get out at New York and, because of the relative difference in the earths diameter and therefore your relative speed, you need to exit the transporter traveling at something like 300 MPH!
Great stuff.
I gave Niven a written explanation of how I "fixed" the biology/evolutionary "errors" in the Protector story. It's simple. The Protector (or the Brennan Monster) simply lied about the connection between humanity and Protectors. We aren't their descendants. Like them, we are the result of genetically engineered "seed programs" left behind by the Tnuctip from the Slaver Wars. We each have programmed into our evolution the path to the warrior Protectors, which the Tnuctip fully intend to utilize to conquer the universe when they emerge from stasis. Telling us the truth would mess us up, so Brennan came up with the BS "we are descended from a failed Protector colony" story. He said he liked it, but I have no idea if he was really paying attention. It certainly hasn't shown up in the later Known Space stories.
I was thinking that myself, but on further reflection after watching the movie Serenity for the 39th time, I somehow doubt that "The Parliment" would allow an operative to retire while still breathing. While he might have been able to hide from the Alliance, given what happened in the episode "Safe" where he's identified by the Alliance and given emergency medical care would make that impossible.
Unfortunatly, I guess we're never going to find out. But the speculation sure is fun.
Mark
Yeah, the societal extrapolations Niven cooked up from technological advancement were what hooked me, too.
Here's one I cooked up as a more likely result of the invention of replicators and holodecks (a la Star Trek):
A world of lazy, shiftless people who live in fantasy worlds.
Just look at how placid and complacent Americans have become resulting from just television and our general affluence.
Why "boldly go where no one has gone before" when you can just load up an immersive adventure program?
Loved that story, especially about the little spermies exceeding lightspeed around Smallville, Creating a lightshow of Cherenkov radiation trails......Ripped from crotch to sternum.........paying child support by squeezing lumps of coal into diamonds.......
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