The Science Fiction book thread

www.Freerepublic.com | 8-19-06 | "Hack"

[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?

[FierceDraka]

Oh! I forgot about that episode. Too bad Firefly got shafted by Fox.

[Zeroisanumber]

William Gibson's "Bridge" and "Sprawl" trilogies are both worthwhile, and his short story collection Burning Chrome is excellent.

Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower is very good, allthough the sequel is forgettable.

I've never been a fan of Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea" series, allthough I know many people who are. I did, however, enjoy her book The Left Hand of Darkness.

And, of course, the granddaddy of them all: Phillip K. Dick, whose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, The Man in the High Castle, and Through a Scanner Darkly are all masterpieces of Sci-Fi.

[garbageseeker]

I think that the sequels to the Forbin project would be great. Colossus is the original Skynet. It would be nice to have a remake of that.

[JockoManning]

What a story it was. When the eyeglasses showed up, I was hooked. Nice touch by Crichton.

[JockoManning]

Good book. But I think ol' Steve was on a diet while writing parts of that one, judging from the drawn-out descriptions of what the characters were having for lunch. LOL. BIG fan of Stirling here - check the handle. "Service and Glory!"

LOL, yep, odd the meal descriptions -- maybe he was on a diet.

Stirling is real popular. Sorry, I don't follow. Draka is a Stirling character? I need help understanding.

[annie laurie]

Ping to self

[MadLibDisease]

"How are the sequels?"

Ugh,don't remind me

[MadLibDisease]

I'm glad to see someone else visits Pournelles site, it's where I stole my tagline

[Hacksaw]

Fred Saberhagen

Robert Heinlein

Howard Phillips Lovecraft

Larry Niven

Jerry Pournelle

Ben Bova

Diane Duane

Isaac Asimov

[Paradox]

Greg Bear is unabashed lib.

Does not surprise me. Regardless, he is a smart fellow. He and I once exchanged a few emails regarding a topic he likes to talk about ("garbage" code in our DNA which may in fact have a purpose), I even made it to his blog.I suspect most fiction authors are liberal, which is why I am pleasantly surprised to find the few conservative, or at least, non-moonbat author.

[garbageseeker]

That is a stellar list. BRAVO!!!!

[OregonRancher]

In Fury Born along with the Honor Harrington series by
David Weber is the best of the new generation.

[OregonRancher]

You have to be older than dirt to remember "SLAN", a classic for it's time.

[af_vet_rr]

I like Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy - and just ignore the politics - he tied the politics way too closely to the period of time when he wrote them - around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly thereafter when it looked like a lot more of the USSR would stick around longer than it did. Then again, that's always the problem when you mix in politics - you try to mirror your times and 10 years later they are way outdated. Other than the politics, the technology and the impact on people was really good.

One that I haven't seen mentioned, and this maybe because at times he's very politically incorrect - Harry Turtledove. If you like Sci-Fi, World War I, and World War II, he's got several series out that you might enjoy - two of them being what would happen if Aliens surveyed our planet a few thousand years ago, prepared a colonizing force that was tailored to human technology (or lack thereof) of that time period, and they dropped in right in the middle of WWII.

The other is not quite as sci-fi, more of an alt-history - it concerns the big "What if" the South had managed to hold on during the Civil War - what would be the ramifications come World War I (and would there even be a WWI and if so how would it be fought in North America).

[Starter]

Draka isn't a person, it's a society from one of Stirling's alternate history novels. In it, after the American Revolution, the colonists bascially told those loyal to the crown to hit the road, instead of staying in the US. They headed to South Africa, which the UK had recently aquired from the Netherlands, and begin settling. They are later joined by former Canadians (the US occupied Canada while the Brits were proccupied) and later by the Southern losers from the Civil War. In the meantime, the Draka (the colony was renamed after Francis Drake) began to change. Having developed a dislike with the US after having been kicked off the continent, the Draka began to embrace everything that the US opposed. The US is Christian; the Draka become atheistic. The US is egalitarian; the Draka declare them selves to be a master race. The US ends slavery; the Draka, well, they go a bit nuts about it. The enslave pretty much everyone they come across. During the 1800s, they militarize in a manner that would make the Spartans impressed. They conquer Africa during the 1800s. During the Great War, they conquer the Ottoman Empire. The rest of the Middle East falls while Europe is proccupied with the Russian Civil War. They then declare themselves independent of the crown and begin working on conquering China. When World War 2 rolls around, they declare war on, well, pretty much everyone. While the USSR and the Nazis are battering each other, the Draka invade and end up conquering all both powers. Eventually, the Draka and the US end up facing each other down in a not-so-Cold War. It doesn't end well for the free world.

It's an interesting series of books, but it is not a bright and cheery place.

[JockoManning]

Thanks, Starter. I don't know that I would have made it through the whole series. Glad for your input.

jm

[Old Student]

"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."

David Weber did my favorites; Oath of Swords being the first of them. He is a REALLY good writer. I'll have to check out the Wizardry books. I'm not a programmer or a professional geek, but I've been playing with computers since the mid-70's just for fun. I'm also former SCA type, and our branch used to have a pun tax that kept us in funds when nothing else would. I was never really good at it, like my wife is, but I used to throw a fiver in at the beginning of a meeting... at a dime a pun.

[Wormwood]

Fantastic list.

Good to see some of the classics getting respect.

[Starter]

I'll toss in a few more here.

Although they're generally frowned upon, there are a few good Star Trek novels. John M Ford's "The Final Reflection" and "How Much for Just the Planet?", Dafydd ab-Hugh's "Fallen Heroes" (who also writes the Big Lizard blog) and most of Peter David's stuff are pretty enjoyable.

I'll echo some of the other recommendations as well. Weber, Ringo, Flint, Stackpole, Turtledove, and Brin are all quite good. (Even Brin's "The Postman", which was a much better book than movie. It took Costner 45 minutes to get to am event which happened on page 3 of the book.)

Also recommended: Stephen Baxter, who writes some very good hard SF. Of particular note are "Voyage", which describes a US Mars shot in the 1970s, "The Time Ships", which is a hard-SF sequel to HG Wells' "The Time Machine" and the Xeelee series, which are just odd.

Peter Hamilton's "The Reality Dysfunction" series (aka "The Night's Dawn" series, which are best described as a Space Opera with strong horror tones.

Neal Stephenson. He's a bit of a lefty, but he writes novels with some very interesting concepts in them. Unfortunately, he can't write a decent ending to a book to save his life, but the ride up to the end is quite enjoyable.

[Starter]

Yeah, like I said, it's pretty well written, so it is an interesting read. But it's pretty unsettling as well. In the first novel, which is set during World War 2, you get the creepy feeling that the Nazis were a bit more nicer than the Drakas were.

The last two books in the series are a bit easier to take. In "Drakon", the Draka try to invade our Earth. And there's a short story anthology called "Drakas". Some of the stories are just as unsettling, but they're over in a few pages. Still, they're definitely not to everyone's taste.