The Apolyton Science Fiction Book Club: November Nominations

[ajbera]

Originally posted by JohnT
Oh, man! I got on this thread to nominate Vinge's superior A Deepness in the Sky.

I'm sorry... y'know, I haven't actually read the book yet (intending to try to do so in PEI during vacation), so if you want to nominate ADitS, I'll withdraw my nomination. I've got a handy back-up title to suggest.

[JohnT]

No, I'll just rig the next nominating thread.

[JohnT]

And weren't you the one, ajbera, who nominated Man in the High Castle? If so, go to the thread (handily linked in my signature) and say something!

[Bosh]

I nominate In Conquest Born by CS Friedman.

From amazon.com:

In Conquest Born is the monumental science fiction epic that received unprecedented acclaim-and launched C.S. Friedman's phenomenal career. A sweeping story of two interstellar civilizations-locked in endless war, it was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award.

Great book, based on a pretty much endless war between two human civilizations, with one character from each culture as the main characters. What really makes it a winner is the fine description of the cultures (especially the militaristic Braxians), complete with their vicious internal politics, poetry and 42 speech modes. The two main characters and their growth from childhood to military leadership is also well charted, and they're the characters that you love silly no matter how amorally bloodthirsty they get, with neither one being easily labeled as the "good" guy or the "bad" guy, they're both ruthless but fundamentally honorable (in very very different ways). Its based far more on character development than laser guns, although there is a bit of that too. My only gripe is with the ending, which I'm not going to discuss now

[JohnT]

So far I have...

The Forever War
Lord of Light
The Left Hand of Darkness
Tits-Out Teenager Terror Totty
A Fire Upon the Deep
Rendevous with Rama
Uplift War (in keeping with the tradition of taking the first book listed when people nominate multiple books)
Schilds Ladder
In Conquest Born

The last two books I haven't read and they both sound really good. I also haven't read "Tits-Out."

[JohnT]

I'll nominate Michael Flynn's very, very good novel about the start of a true space Industry, Firestar. The first in a series of four (but self-contained!) None of the Amazon reviews do it justice, but here's the best of a sorry lot:

Firestar is the first novel in the Firestar Saga series. Mariesa Gorley van Huyten is the teenage heiress of an old and very rich family. She is eager to take over the management of the family business from her grandfather and has decided to obtain a degree at Chicago to learn the basics of administration and management. During the summer before leaving for college, however, she has a vivid vision of a large meteor strike and resulting destruction which haunts her for the rest of her life.

In the following years, Mariesa concludes that the only protection against human extinction from meteor strikes is an active and prosperous space industry throughout the solar system, providing both defense capabilities and dispersal of the population in self-sufficient habitats. Since very few others are concerned with the meteor risk, she determines to promote such industry by means of Van Huyten Industries.

Christian van Huyten III had begun naming his companies after mythological characters in 1873, so the space initiative adopted by Mariesa shortly after she takes over is named the Prometheus Project. She recruits several of the VHI executives into the Prometheus Steering Committee. Development of a single-stage to orbit prototype for the project is performed by Daedalus Corporation, a Brazilian subsidiary, with materiel and expertise provided by other VHI companies. Daedalus hires Ned DuBois and Forrest Calhoun as test pilots for the new "Plank" SSTOs.

Mariesa also sees better education as a necessity to support Prometheus, so she acquires Mentor Academies, a private education concern, and expands it to manage public schools, under contract with the states and local school districts. One of the first managed public school districts is North Orange, New Jersey, near her home. Barry Fast, a teacher within the North Orange district, becomes a Mentor Institute Fellow and confidante of Mariesa.

As Mariesa begins to build an autonomous space industry within VHI, she finds both supporters and opponents within VHI, in the other aerospace companies and in government. She also finds herself developing a special relationship with a group of students within the North Orange district.

This novel spends a great deal of time attacking the current education establishment. It doesn't take any position on the dogmatic issues, but rather supports an eclectic approach that enables teachers to control their own presentations and relegates much of the administration to the managerial staff. Success is measured by the degree to which the student body achieves stated objectives. As someone who has been exposed to the education curriculum, I tend to agree the author in that the style of teaching must vary according to the student, but current public education thinking seems to consider such an approach to be too expensive. However, my reading in psychology suggests that the evidence tends to support the author's position: lockstep teaching is too expensive as well as also ineffectual.

This novel lays the foundation for a provocative series. It has been much compared to Heinlein's works -- i.e., The Man Who Sold the Moon -- but it is much longer and thus more detailed. Moreover, it has more room for character development and uses it aggressively.

Highly recommended for Flynn and Heinlein fans and for anyone else who enjoys hard science fiction with believable characters and excellent plot development.

[Jon Miller]

I liked her other books better

Jon Miller

[Jon Miller]

I was refering to the CS Friedman book

Jkon Miller

[Bosh]

The Coldfire ones Jon?

[Harry Seldon]

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Flying is forgetting to fall.

[Wraith]

Hmm. Some good ones on the list. Think I'll renominate one I mentioned before.

Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams.

From Amazon.com:

Williams's novel Hardwired was a well-written but standard entry in the cyberpunk sweepstakes launched by William Gibson's Neuromancer. This followup, however, is much more interesting and successful. Etienne Steward is the clone ("Steward Beta") of a hero of the Artifact Wars, in which multinational corporations fielded armies to plunder alien ruins. He's been given Steward Alpha's memories minus the last years of the hero's life: the war and its aftermath. Now Steward Beta begins an investigation, tracking down Alpha's wife, friends, enemies and fellow vets to fill in the picture and learn why Alpha was murdered. In particular, Beta probes the war, its horrors, its betrayals and The Powers, the aliens who ended it. Resonances of Vietnam-era moral concerns make this deft updating of the postWorld War II genre of psychological thrillers about amnesiacs one of the best of its kind.

Wraith
"Écrasez l'infâme."
-- Steward ("Voice of the Whirlwind")

[Imran Siddiqui]

Hmm. Some good ones on the list.

Yep... it just shows that the 'Theme' addition was a bad one. The best books come out when there is no theme to think of.

Rendevous with Rama is good.

Damn straight . It was even more of a page turner than Harry Potter for me, and that's saying something . Just a totally facinating story.

[Harry Seldon]

Isn't Rendevous with Rama a sequel, ie not the first in the series? I have the set in paperback but haven't read it yet.

What about the first Neuromancer book? I've never read that, either.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Isn't Rendevous with Rama a sequel, ie not the first in the series?

No, it's the first.

[JohnT]

RwR is the first one in the series, and it is self-contained.