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?
I don't know what Heinlein you are reading but it certainly is not the one I read. Aside from"The Year of the Jackpot" and perhaps "Farnham's Freehold", Heinlein did not write "we are all going to starve to death" books or stories.
Check out an author ... Charles Stross. You almost need a Computer science degree to keep up with some of the twists as technology approaches the Singularity in his books.
So much of the rest is ripoff Star Trek, and Star Trek wasn't terribly original to begin with, and ripoff Matrix, ditto. Walking around that section, it's hard to defend SF as being about "ideas" or anything except juvenile fantasies for people who aren't juveniles anymore, at least chronologically.
With the exceptions of Gene Wolfe, Connie Willis, and Dan Simmons, there's little for an adult reader with any grasp of good reading material.
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.
Niven's Known Space stuff is especially good. Pournelle is one step up from those "Survivalist" series books.
RAH - most of his books are very enjoyable.
Agree, especially his "juveniles", which are more adult than most of the sf written for adults these days. Starship Troopers is a little creepy with its gay undertones, and is indicative of his later obsession with sex. I've been told Friday is quite good, though.
Star Trek books
I'd rather read everything in the bookstore--including HRC's autoblabography--than one of these. Life's too short.
Asimov
Very hit-or-miss. His style is flat and his grasp of character laughable. But the original Foundation novels and many short stories are great reading.
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.
You're right on target there.
AC Clarke - very entertaining. Safe bets.
Like Asimov, very hit or miss. I loved Songs of Distant Earth (in which nothing much happens) but the Rama series and 2001 series are huge letdowns, each book worse than the one before. Imperial Earth was beyond boring.
It was published well over a decade before he died.
Eeek!
Synopsis from Heinlein website.
"Heinlein's fat 1970 tome tells the tale of a powerful tycoon adrift in his private lifeboat (not a literal boat, but rather the opulent, gun-encrusted enclave that only a man of great wealth could afford) somewhere just after the turn of the millenium, in an America swollen with bodies, riddled with violence and insanity. CEO of his own Gatesian empire, Smith has reached his nineties and plans to retire, but has little left to look forward to. Mind youthful but body senescent, he sits wheelchair-bound, swaddled in life support equipment--costly health care gone wrong, for it does not permit him to die. How, then, to shuffle off his mortal coil? In true bullying, billionaire fashion, Smith finds an expensive, ingenious way to dodge doctors, heirs, accountants and other obstacles to his desired suicide: he will have a pioneer surgeon transplant his brain into another body. But what he never counted on was that the operation would succeed; Johann wakes up in a borrowed body. What is more, the body is that of a friend.
A reader can treat I Will Fear No Evil as the exploration of what it might be like to have one's brain transplanted into another's body--that does indeed comprise a large part of the story. Still, there is another powerful aspect to the book: the glimpses one gets of the society Johann Smith has barricaded himself against. Johann's turn-of-the-millenium America has grown into a sprawling urban wasteland throughout which the have-nots wage gun battles in lawless Abandoned Areas. The haves venture out into this war-torn turf only in armored cars with armed guards riding shotgun, and return home to fortified enclaves. It is an America which has dismissed Horace Mann's dream and routinely shunts poor students into "illit" tracks in its public schools, and in which children can be prostituted in the aforementioned abandoned areas. It is an America held spellbound by television and sensational news headlines--classic "Crazy Years" items. Does all that sound a little familiar?
As a dying old man, Johann Smith had no cause to embrace that new society. He once comforted himself with reminiscences about the Roaring Twenties, when both he and America were young and vibrant. But after the transplant renews his youth, he begins to sample the society he had turned his back on, and does so with hedonistic abandon. Beyond the momentary idylls he encounters, Johann concludes that human culture on Earth has entered into its agonal throes and now has only one hope: the transport of its best and brightest to another seat--in this case, the Moon. Thus a metaphorical transplant shadows the real one, and if a reader is looking for "message Heinlein" in I Will Fear No Evil, it resides in that metaphor. I Will Fear No Evil is customarily panned by the critics for having a number of flaws: too great a length, too little action, arch dialogue and a fantastic premise. While the book is a departure from typical Heinlein material, it remains entertaining, readable and thought-provoking. Heinlein fell seriously ill with peritonitis after wrapping up the first draft of the novel, so the manuscript never got the cutting and tweaking that Heinlein usually gave a book before it hit the presses. Nevertheless, the book is still in print, selling well, and highly regarded by a good proportion of readers. ~ Beth Ager"
I've been a fan of his for 30 years, and it pains me to disagree. He's done a lot of lame repeating of the same things.
Herbert -- good up to and including the 5th Dune, then seems to have had a complete psychotic break.
Also known as death--he was dying as he wrote the sixth one.
I guess you didn't read his early stuff.
All about how we would have a calorie allowance and of course what food we got would be fake.
Farmer in the Sky was all about people having to farm other planets because of food shortages on earth.
Read "Expanded Universe" (the 1980 version) where he talks about his predictions for the year 2000 and how he hit or missed.
This was prediction number 6
We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by.
Not necessarily. In 1950 I was too pessimistic concerning population. Now I suspect that the controlling parameter is oil. In modern agriculture oil is the prime factor -- as power for farm machinery (obviously) but also for insecticides and fertilizers. Since our oil policies in Washington are about as boneheaded -- counterproductive -- as they can be, I have no way to guess how much food we can raise in 2000 A.D. But no one in the United States should be hungry in 2000 A.D. -- unless we are conquered and occupied. -Heinlein 1980
This was prediction number 18
Fish and yeast will become our principle sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.
I'll hedge number eighteen just a little. Hunger is not now a problem in the USA, and need not be in the year 2000 -- but hunger is a world problem and would at once become an acute problem for us if we were conquered... a distinct possibility by 2000. Between our present status and that of subjugation lies a whole spectrum of political and economic possible shapes to the future under which we would share the worldwide hunger to a greater or lesser extent. And the problem grows. We can expect to have to feed around half a billion Americans circa year 2000 -- our present huge surpluses would then represent acute shortages even if we never shipped a ton of wheat to India. -Heinlein 1966
It would now appear that the USA population in 2000 A.D. will be about 270,000,000 instead of 500,000,000. I have been collecting clippings on demography for forty years; all that the projections have in common is that all of them are wrong. Even that figure of 270,000,000 may be too high; today the only reason our population continues to increase is that we oldsters are living longer; our current birthrate is not sufficient even to replace the parent generation.-Heinlein 1980
He said it and he was wrong and he admitted it, well sort of .
ping
I prefer Fantasy: LORD OF THE RINGS, anything in the genre by Robert E. Howard, C.L Moore and Howard Kuttner, any Sprague de Camp, The BELGARIAD by David Eddings.
Last scifi series I read was Hyperion. I give it high marks.
It's been sitting on my To Read pile for a long time. But then, my To Read pile is several hundred books tall. I have made a huge effort this summer to eliminate that pile, but there's a long way to go. I've read about 200 books in the last year, and want to read that many more by year's end.
You are the one who mentioned Dan Simmons, right?
Read the book. It's amazing. Put it on the top of your pile. You won't regret it.
I have all four of the books handy, so when I dive in I will go through all four. I tend to binge.
BTW, DS's new book looks awesome.
The bestselling author of Ilium and Olympos transforms the true story of a legendary Arctic expedition into a thriller worthy of Stephen King or Patrick O'Brian. Their captain's insane vision of a Northwest Passage has kept the crewmen of The Terror trapped in Arctic ice for two years without a thaw. But the real threat to their survival isn't the ever-shifting landscape of white, the provisions that have turned to poison before they open them, or the ship slowly buckling in the grip of the frozen ocean. The real threat is whatever is out in the frigid darkness, stalking their ship, snatching one seaman at a time or whole crews, leaving bodies mangled horribly or missing forever. Captain Crozier takes over the expedition after the creature kills its original leader, Sir John Franklin. Drawing equally on his own strengths as a seaman and the mystical beliefs of the Eskimo woman he's rescued, Crozier sets a course on foot out of the Arctic and away from the insatiable beast. But every day the dwindling crew becomes more deranged and mutinous, until Crozier begins to fear there is no escape from an ever-more-inconceivable nightmare.--Amazon.com
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