Any Science Fiction/Fantasy Fans

[Paracelsus]

snip

I don't see shit on the SF shelves nowadays that really interests me, it's all sword and sorcery crap, except I saw some by Kim Stanley Robinson that looked ok.

Anybody read him, is he good?

I did not enjoy Antarctica (1997) very much. Too verbose, focused on environmental issues and sustainability, and some personal relationships seemed forced. I gave the Mars trilogy a try a long time ago but can't recall why I didn't finish it. Maybe his recent stuff is better, but I've been burned twice now by that match.

The reason is because Kim Stanley Robinson will never use a single word when six hundred will do. Not to mention that, like a lot of frankly second-rate sci-fi authors, he doesn't really get people. Not really. Many of his characters have the ring of glass where crystal would be much preferable.

 

[WestIndianArchie]

Chindi - Jack McDevitt

The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson This one may be on the edge of SF / Fantasy genres but if you have not read this author, give him a try with either Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, or Snow Crash.

Not a Stephenson fan anymore. Diamond Age and Snow Crash were his best, but he's been unreadable since Crypto, Anathem, Baroque Cycle. Even ReaMdE was a slog.

WIA

 

[WestIndianArchie]

I read a lot of the classic guys when I was younger, Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Silverberg, Dick, E.E. Doc Smith, Spinrad, Harry Harrison.

Out of all of them, the most on-target predictions were in John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar. That book was a pretty good picture of the world now (it's set in 2010) written in 1968.

I don't see shit on the SF shelves nowadays that really interests me, it's all sword and sorcery crap, except I saw some by Kim Stanley Robinson that looked ok.

Anybody read him, is he good?

I've read a grip of PKD, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Bester, P. Anthony, Dan Simmon's book above... More recently Iain M. Banks, Doctorow, Jim Butcher, Scalzi, and Charles Stross.

Haven't read KSR. I liked Hard SF when I was actually doing Hard Science. Now, cool science and techno-fetishism (aka Cyberpunk) don't really do it for me. I guess I really should shed my love for SF&F, but regular fiction...so unfamiliar.

I'm wondering if I've outgrown the genre, or maybe my tastes have shifted.

Will be a sad day when I can't hit escape velocity anymore.

WIA

 

[weambulance]

I just read Charles Gannon's Fire with Fire and Trial by Fire, and they were pretty good. Not knock-my-socks-off good but good enough that I'm pretty disappointed I have to wait awhile for the next book in the series to come out. Not much science and lots of this-is-so-high-tech-we-can't-explain-it handwavium, so I guess it's more like science fantasy (as is 99% of "science fiction" these days).

I don't remember if he's been mentioned but John Ringo has some highly entertaining military SF/F in print. The man is wildly creative but generally doesn't go off the deep end with his fancies. The sole exception I can think of is Ghost, and as I recall he wrote that with no intention of publishing it. A lot of his books are free in digital format through the Baen Free Library. I'm rereading There Will Be Dragons right now.

... I see that I mentioned his collab series with David Weber in my first post, but Ringo's solo stuff is quite good too.

There's a lot of other good stuff free from Baen as far as that goes. The free library isn't permanent, FYI, and they have shut it down before.

Michael Z Williamson also writes good military SF. Freehold is kinda preachy re: libertarianism for the first 1/3 or so but it gets really good after that. Good thing it's free online, because I let a girlfriend borrow it (along with a few other of my favorite SF/F books) a week before we broke up and never got it back. :dodgy:

David Brin's Sundiver and Startide Rising are worth reading. Sentient dolphins are involved.

Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series - first three books are really good; didn't read the others because I didn't know there were more. The first three books are essentially their own series anyway because books 4+ switch to different characters.

The Xanth series was mentioned and yeah it's pretty good. Only problem is there are about a thousand books in the series and I lost interest by ~ book 8. I'll have to read them again, though, just because some SJW twinks on the internets have their panties in a bunch over how misogynistic and awful Piers Anthony is.

 

[Sp5]

I read most of David Wingrove's Chung Kuo novels, some were good, the later ones "jumped the shark."

 

[Mikan]

I've personally read about 90% of the books mentioned in this thread and many more. I don't make many book recommendations in fiction either as my tastes run odd.
With that caveat, the current best fantasy series is the Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. Here is his landing page on Amazon.

http://smile.amazon.com/Steven-Erikson/e/B000APIXTU/

They story follows different units in a Roman Era style military conquest (but with magic) as well as political and religious figures in the same empire, the Malazan Empire. There is no protagonist and the lines between the good buys and the bad guys is often so blurry as to be completely meaningless. He kills characters often and terribly, and some meet fates even worse. Most of the story follows the surviving members of a Malazan special forces style unit that falls out of political favor when the old emperor dies and almost the entire division is killed in a set up early in the first book.

If you like fantasy and history, read these books.

The best thing about these books is that they exist. All 10 books are written and the series is done. There are quite a few other books with shared characters in the same fantasy world, but the initial 10 book series that they are all based on is complete. He has also written a trilogy that takes place over 20,000 years before the main story and a series that follows two necromancers on their adventures. I especially enjoy these as there are so few "Bad Guy" main characters in fantasy.

Be warned about these books, they are not for casual readers or people with low comprehension skills. This author has two Phds in archaeology and anthropology and these books are conceptually dense. There is also very little exposition, you are dropped into the middle of an ongoing major event with dozens of characters with established history, all of which has to be inferred from dialog and subtext. These are not books for the Harry Potter crowd.

The fantasy world is also shared with another Author, Ian Esslemont.

http://smile.amazon.com/Ian-C.-Esslemont/e/B001QV1XBC/

Ian has fewer books but they are all good. Each new book follows a few characters from the previous book on a related but distinct adventure. These books also use many of the characters from the Book of the Fallen as minor characters in their stories as the books take place at the same time, major events in Erikson's books are referenced by the characters in Esselmont's books and vice versa. These books are quite as difficult to understand as the Erikson books, but they also aren't as vibrant.

 

[Sombro]

Uchronia.net is a great source for the alternate history genre, as some of the books overlap with SF.

 

[Hotline]

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. A must read for fans of the genre.

 

[enderilluminatus]

 

[tattiemasher]

Some excellent suggestions in the thread, particularly 'The Forever War' and 'Starship Troopers', real classics. From the western world I really enjoyed most of the stuff I've read by Olaf Stapledon. He's a bit too left-wing in some of his beliefs, but he attempts some novels on an epic scale and it's really interesting to see where he goes with it. In particular, 'Last and First Men' which traces the entire history and extinction of humanity, 'Star Maker' which looks at the entire history of life in the universe, and 'Nebula Maker' which imagines celestial bodies as forms of life as well. 'Odd John' was worth a read as well.

For some sci-fi from the former Soviet bloc, the Strugatsky brothers did some great stuff in Russia. 'Hard to be a God' is probably my favourite of theirs, the setting is basically a future world in which Earth is observing a primitive world, and has inserted an agent to observe what is going on. He gets caught up in a personal feud, and starts his own form of revolution against what he sees as an oppressive religious dictatorship. 'Roadside Picnic' you should also read if you liked 'Stalker' by Tarkovsky, it's the book which the film was based on. Metro 2033 is probably one of the better modern sci-fi books from Russia, set in a post-apocalyptic Moscow where humans eke out an existence in the Metro system. I loved 'Memoirs Found in a Bathtub' by Stanislaw Lem, it's a reflection on just how ridiculous bureacracy and state secrecy is getting to.

An honourable mention to 'A Canticle for Leibowitz', it's also in the post-apocalyptic mould, but I really enjoyed it.

The most recent sci-fi I read was 'Player Piano' by Kurt Vonnegut. The premise is a future world where automation and computer-controlled society renders most people economically inefficient and so the overwhelming majority of society is either propped up in monotonous maintenance work or enlisted in the army. It was good enough to get a thumbs-up from me, though I found some of the characters a bit hollow.

 

[CJ_W]

Looking to read something new.

Just finished Red Shirts (Scalzi).
Read The Peripheral (Gibson) last month.

Both were...mediocre imo.
Red Shirts for the dumb plot.
Peripheral for the lack of plot, been there already tech, and forgettable characters.

WIA

You need to read the foundation series by Issac Asimov those are just amazing My favorite one is Foundation and Empire.

Make sure you don't look up any info about it before you get into it though, you really don't want to spoil yourself.

Weird that Time Enough For Love by Heinlein hasn't been mentioned yet.

If there is one red pill science fiction book- or red pill book for that matter- that absolutely everybody should read, it is this one.

Assume that you are a man who has lived a thousand lives - been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Knowing what you now know- from lived experience - what kind of life would be truly worth living? And what is the operating manual for living that kind of life - what life skills and mental attitudes must a man develop?

After rereading that book as a mature adult, the message finally clicked, and it changed the world for me.

I remember reading this when I was in 7th grade, it was just lying on my Dad's desk at home so I picked it up and started reading it, even though I couldn't really understand a lot of it I loved it, and I think that some of Heinlein's red pill-ness seeped into my head back then, giving me the foundations to see how the world really is in regards to women and not vehemently reject it like many other guys do.

 

[Socrates]

An honourable mention to 'A Canticle for Leibowitz', it's also in the post-apocalyptic mould, but I really enjoyed it.

The most recent sci-fi I read was 'Player Piano' by Kurt Vonnegut. The premise is a future world where automation and computer-controlled society renders most people economically inefficient and so the overwhelming majority of society is either propped up in monotonous maintenance work or enlisted in the army. It was good enough to get a thumbs-up from me, though I found some of the characters a bit hollow.

I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It's one of the few books that I keep thinking about days and weeks after I finished reading it.

For Vonnegut, perhaps my favorite of his is Sirens of Titan.

 

[tattiemasher]

An honourable mention to 'A Canticle for Leibowitz', it's also in the post-apocalyptic mould, but I really enjoyed it.

The most recent sci-fi I read was 'Player Piano' by Kurt Vonnegut. The premise is a future world where automation and computer-controlled society renders most people economically inefficient and so the overwhelming majority of society is either propped up in monotonous maintenance work or enlisted in the army. It was good enough to get a thumbs-up from me, though I found some of the characters a bit hollow.

I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It's one of the few books that I keep thinking about days and weeks after I finished reading it.

For Vonnegut, perhaps my favorite of his is Sirens of Titan.

Good to see another fan of Canticle for Leibowitz, a real classic. I haven't read that Vonnegut book, but a quick look at the synopsis reminds me of a film based on his works, 'Between Time and Timbuktu'. It pieces together various novels, but the main character travels via the Chronosynclastic Infundibulum from 'Sirens of Titan'. Check it out if you can find a copy.

 

[Cobra]

Anyone remember "Tales from the Crypt?" The stories in the series were based on comic books from the 50's. These were the comics that pushed the envelope back then and became the catalyst for the establishment of the "Comic book code Authority" in the USA.

Anyways, they also had a "Science Fiction" line called "Weird Science." I collected these like a madman when I was a kid. Still have them buried somewhere. They had some great stories and even adapted some of Asimov's works as well as "I, Robot" in addition to others such as Ray Bradbury.

One of the most memorable (and well known) stories from these books was "Judgment Day" adapted from Ray Bradbury. It tackled the issue of race head on and upset the authorities back then. Link below that provides some insight to those interested.

https://cacb.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/ec-comics-judgement-day/

 

[RIslander]

I just started reading Starship Troopers. Fantastic novel. I had put it off due to the cheesyness of the film but the two are almost entirely unrelated. Relevant to today's political climate.

“If you can't listen, perhaps you can tell the class whether 'value' is a relative, or an absolute?"

I had been listening; I just didn't see any reason not to listen with eyes closed and spine relaxed. But his question caught me out; I hadn't read that day's assignment. "An absolute," I answered, guessing.

"Wrong," he said coldly. " 'Value' has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human — 'market value' is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible." (I had wondered what Father would have said if he had heard "market value" called a "fiction" — snort in disgust, probably.)

"This very personal relationship, 'value,' has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him ... and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that 'the best things in life are free.' Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted ... and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.

The noblest fate that a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war's desolation.

 

[Alsos]

Reaching way back on this...

Weird that Time Enough For Love by Heinlein hasn't been mentioned yet.

If there is one red pill science fiction book- or red pill book for that matter- that absolutely everybody should read, it is this one.

Assume that you are a man who has lived a thousand lives - been there, done that, got the T-shirt. Knowing what you now know- from lived experience - what kind of life would be truly worth living? And what is the operating manual for living that kind of life - what life skills and mental attitudes must a man develop?

After rereading that book as a mature adult, the message finally clicked, and it changed the world for me.

I absolutely loved this book until I tried to re-read it a year ago for probably the 7th or 8th time. Made it as far as the shift of action to Tertius before giving up in disgust. Heinlein may have been red pill in a lot of ways, but damn if he wasn't the bluest of blue-pillers when it came to his female characters.

 

[Alsos]

If you're interested in SF classics, I recently read Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man" and "The Stars My Destination".

Both are good.

"The Demolished Man" is a criminal procedural involving telepaths (you can readily see where Bester and the Psi Corps in "Babylon 5" originate). Man uses telepathy and subterfuge to commit the 'perfect murder', cop who is also telepathic hounds him relentlessly while searching for tangible proof of his guilt (telepathy itself being inadmissible as evidence). Has a cool vibe to it, like the Rat Pack meets "Twin Peaks".

"The Stars My Destination" is an odd story, 'experimental' without being unreadable New Wave garbage. Guy wakes up in remains of a destroyed spaceship, has to figure out who he is and what happened to him (and the spaceship) while being dogged by an apparition of a flaming head. The story gets stranger and more baroque until the big reveal, at which point everything snaps into place like in the closing minutes of "Usual Suspects". Psychic teleportation is involved - it's a pity "Babylon 5" didn't borrow that idea from the real Bester, too.

 

[tatted-mormon]

I see a lot of the usual suspects in this thread (as well as some new ones I'll be checking out) and I'd like to recommend one I haven't seen mentioned.

My recommendation is 'The Windup Girl' by Paolo Bacigalupi. Set in future Thailand it follows the POV of a genetically engineered prostitute and a corporate expat. I wouldn't tout it as the best book ever, but it's definitely worth a read if you're a fan of the sci-fi genre.

 

[El Padrone]

Great thread WIA.

Whatever you do people, stay the hell away from Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time fantasy series. It has a great enticing epilogue and goes downhill from there.

Wasted my money and time.

Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth Book 1 Wizards First Rule is cool. The rest in the series is crap.

Outside fantasy.

I found Cabinet of Curiosities very interesting. Book was about a man who found a way to live forever.

And I cannot recommend enough the book of Proverbs as a massive life guide.

 

[RatInTheWoods]

I like collections of high quality short stories.

Sci Fi is such a great imaginative platform to go crazy and set up an amazing short story.

I don't have time for those 15 telephone sized book series