H Beam Piper is my all-time favorite, and SPACE VIKING is my favorite H. Beam Piper. The man was just uncompromising: he prefered Order to Chaos, Civilization to Barbarism, and benevolent Feudalism to amoral capitalist democracy -- and he wasn't shy about making those preferences plain. He felt that some people were naturally better than others, and that such people had a God-ordained duty to protect the weak, preserve culture, and prevent the rise of demagogues to power. By today's standards Piper is unpublishable -- even hardass SF types like Eric Flint deride him as a "naked apologist for colonialism", as if that were a bad thing. Yet Peper never apologized for anything. He was an entertainer, not a philosophy teacher. His books were never polemic (a la Ayn Rand and RAH), were blissfully short (SPACE VIKING packs a trilogy's worth of fun into 191 short pages) and conained no mother-son or father-daugter sex scenes. Noblest of all, he never stooped to writing Mary Sue stories (i.e. "self-insertion fiction"). He was hard, clean, and pure.
Maybe that's why he blew his brains out young.
What a waste.
I hope nobody ever makes a filmed version of SPACE VIKING, because they'd ruin it. Instead, it's my wish that technology continues to improve to the point where I can make my own animated version of the story... because only I, B-chan, can do it justice!
Um...
Anyway, if you like good, classic SF, you might also check out Lee Correy's works. Correy (pen name of famed rocket scientist G. Harry Stine) pemned some of the coolest nuts and bolts SF ever back in the '50s. One of my favorites is CONTRABAND ROCKET, which was half of an Ace Double in which three young ham radio nerds living in a world where space travel is considered a bit nutty salvage an old military spaceship from a junkyard (!) and rebuild it for a moon flight. Stine/Correy lovingly describes the entire rebuilding process from his own POV as a crack engineer. A more recent work of his, SHUTTLE DOWN, is equally good, though in a different vein. It's the story of a Space Shuttle launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base that goes wrong, forcing the crew to make an emergency landing on Rapa Nui (aka Easter Island). The story from there is a mix of political intrigue and NASA procedural as the Shuttle team struggles to retrive the crippled bird from the remote and decidedly un-space-age island. SHUTTLE DOWN is easy to find at used bookshops, but Correy/Stine's juveniles are a damn sight more rare. Most are owned by book collectors and command high prices IF you can find them. A copy of the one I want most (STARSHIP THROUGH SPACE) will set you back about $250. Ouch!
The SF book I would most like to see made into a movie is FOOTFALL, by Jerry Pournelle.
I would like to see ARC LIGHT by Eric L. Harry made into a GOOD 12-hour TV miniseries.
Michael McCollum wrote an interesting series of books beginning with ANTARES DAWN. Worth searching for.
I like Philip K. Dick a lot -- but who doesn't? My favorite is TIME OUT OF JOINT.
The late Jean Raspail's THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS is creepy, thrilling, and more timely today than when it was written. This comes close to being a "must-read".
If you're of a mind for something a bit more substantial, I can't recommend DIE GLASPERLENSPIEL (aka MAGISTER LUDI aka THE GLASS BEAD GAME aka MASTER OF THE GAME) by Herman Hesse mighly enough.
And my favorite SF novel of all time? You'll never guess. It's not what you'd expect!
The Mote, right?
Your favorite is "Swan song"
>>The late Jean Raspail's THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS is creepy, thrilling, and more timely today than when it was written. This comes close to being a "must-read". <<
Yes, it was written in the early 1970's !
That book has been circulated a great deal by various 'close the border' groups.
It is also mentioned in Thomas Chittum's CIVIL WAR TWO: The Comming Breakup of America(non-fiction, but a scary read !)
that would be an awesome movie. Or even better ... "Invasion". Of course the PC police would kill that one in it's cradle.