Recommend Good SciFi

[spartak]

Anything by Cordwainer Smith.

[Hueij]

My fav's:

Asimov, Foundation (but only the first three, the rest sucked)
Fredric Brown, Martians Go Home
Asimov again: The End Of Eternity (about time-travel)

[redbaron]

Originally posted by Taz
Anything by Cordwainer Smith.

Also,
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination.
James Blish - The Cities In Flight series

[Dr Strangelove]

I'm taking notes. Thanks to everybody and a merry christmas.

[spartak]

The sci-fi masters seriers you can get at Amazon doesn't have adud book in it and some of the books are masterpieces. I mention this because RedBaron mentioned books in the series.

[LDiCesare]

David Brin (uplift series, particularly startide rising)
Stanislaw Lem (quite varied in tone, evreything is good but the best ones IMO are Solaris and His Master's Voice. Can be either gloomy or, if not serious, hilarious)
Also Andreas Eschbach (not many books by him, maybe he is not translated in English, but he has been translated from Geman to French).
Usually, look for non-English speaking authors. If they have been translated, they are good.

[Starchild]

I'll second The Years of Rice and Salt as a good book but beware, it gets surreal when KSR mixes Buddist and Islamic afterlives.

David Brin is excellent too. I also have to put a vote in for Bruce Sterling, one of my favourite authors. Try Holy Fire (introspective look at a fossilising society at the end of the 21st century) or Distraction (political love story set in a broken, chaotic America) or his collections of short stories (Globalhead and A Good Old Fashioned Future). I haven't read Heavy Weather or The Difference Engine but they are on my todo list.

Also, William Gibson, the father of cyberpunk. I had to analyse Neuromancer to pieces for an English course and fell in love with it.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by redbaron



Also,
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination.
James Blish - The Cities In Flight series

I might also suggest Blish's A Case of Conscience. For a real interesting compare and contrast, follow Case with Mary Doria Russells The Sparrow. Both books are about Catholic priests whom undergo crisis' of faith after establishing contact with alien races. Both novels take place in mature interstellar societies, so they are not First Contact stories, btw. The Sparrow contains a pretty big spoiler at the end of it, a spoiler which is revealed in the second sentence of Amazon.com's review of the sequel, Children of God.

My science fiction discussion group is doing Poul Anderson's Boat of a Million Years next month, which isn't a pretty bad read. It postulates that there are some people whom live forever, provided that trauma doesn't get to them (sort of like Highlander) and how they've made it from the earliest Phoenicians to an interstellar civilization. It kind of loses itself in the end, but the first 300-400 pages are pretty gripping, imho.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Ramo
For starters, try Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, Frank Herbert's "Dune" series, and Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep"/"A Deepness in the Sky" series.

Of all the posts given in this thread, this one earns an A+ for quality picks. These three series really give you a glimpse of the development of modern science fiction, especially if you take them in the order published (exactly as Ramo has above). Vernor Vinge can even take credit for inventing cyberpunk, as is argued in the book True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which contains Vinges original 1981 story and 11 essays. I've toyed with buying this one, but I think I'll wait until it hits the dump bins for $5.99. I've said earlier that A Deepness in the Sky is, imnsho, the finest single volume space opera of the past 5 years (he says, deftly placing a chronological limit that doesn't have it competing with Iain M. Banks' Excession. )

Good post, Ramo.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ramo


It was a decent book, but it had too much Buddhist theology in it, IMO.



Gotta love that kangaroo. Are emus also typical Aussie Christmas food?

Only amongst weirdo immigrants like me. Seriously, native Australian foodstuffs (kangaroo, crocodile, wallaby, emu) despite their incredibly healthy nature (no hormones, no antibiotics, free range, organic,) are not items that many native born Australians eat as yet.

In Great Britain one of the best selling new ready made sauces is an Australian import based on Australian rivermint and peaches (if memory serves me correctly).

I could buy things such as Australian Illawarra plum sauce and wattle seeds easier in London than in Melbourne, for a time. I can certainly recommend the spices and herbs of Australia- bush tomato, native lime, macadamia nuts, pepperberry, lemon myrtle- uniquely Australian flavours.

Anyway, more book recommendations:

Michael Moorcock: Gloriana

An alternate world empire Britannia, with Native American Dukes, John Dee and other characters. A phantasmagorical read. Also, his Cornelius Quartet, and his Oswald Bastable, Warlord of the Air, trilogy.

Philip K D!ck's Clans of the Alphane Moon, Martian Time-Slip and The Crack in Space.

M John Harrison's The Pastel City and In Viriconium.

John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar

Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron

J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Vermilion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition

Samuel R Delany's Triton and Nova

George Turner The Sea and Summer

Kate Wilhelm Let The Fire Fall

Paul J McAuley's Pasquale's Angel and Fairyland

Robert Silverberg's Good News From the Vatican

Roger Zelazny's A Rose for Ecclesiastes, Isle of the Dead and Lord of Light

Simon Ings's Hot Head and Hotwire

Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net

China Mieville's Perdido Station.

[Zero]

Originally posted by reismark
I'm shocked that no one has mentioned Orson Scott Card yet.

Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Ender's Shadow
Shadow of the Hegemon
Shadow Puppets

I got my friend ender's shadow and shadow of the hegemon for christmas. He was overjoyed.

How does shadow puppet fit into the ender series? is it a sequel to children of the mind?

[VetLegion]

recomendation... hmm.. Canticle for Leibowitz was good. Felt like Fallout, the game.

My science fiction discussion group is doing Poul Anderson's Boat of a Million Years next month, which isn't a pretty bad read. It postulates that there are some people whom live forever, provided that trauma doesn't get to them (sort of like Highlander) and how they've made it from the earliest Phoenicians to an interstellar civilization. It kind of loses itself in the end, but the first 300-400 pages are pretty gripping, imho.

do you have a web page or something?

[monolith94]

Harry Harrison - Stainless Steel Rat series

[GePap]

Originally posted by LDiCesare
David Brin (uplift series, particularly startide rising)
Stanislaw Lem (quite varied in tone, evreything is good but the best ones IMO are Solaris and His Master's Voice. Can be either gloomy or, if not serious, hilarious)
Also Andreas Eschbach (not many books by him, maybe he is not translated in English, but he has been translated from Geman to French).
Usually, look for non-English speaking authors. If they have been translated, they are good.

I must wholeheartedly agree (though I have not read Eschbach)..

I love Lem, and you can find most of his works translated: The futurological Congress is very good, and Tales of Pirx the Pilot are also very good. The first is relatively short, the second a series of short stories. Eden is a great story of first contact. Solaris is sort of muddled. Good but very deep. ... in a bathtub (I don't remmeber if the first word is diary, or transcripts) is a very weird tale of espionage, counter-espionage, counter-counter espionage, and counter-counter (you get the point). He has one bok, with 'doctor' in the title which deals with an asylum in Poland during the Nazi occupation (By the way, Lem is polish) that is good but depressing. Lem is famous for having being inducted into the American association of Sci-Fi writers (even if he was part of the Eastern Block) but then causing a furor when he wrote that most American sci-fi, with a few exceptions, was utter crap.

[Tuberski]

Originally posted by CyberGnu
Tuberski, I love the Deathstalker, but I'm slightly ashamed of it... BTW, I swear to god, if he writes "combined to a whole greater than the sum of the parts" one more time I'm going to track him down and see if the reverse is true....

Very true, but anybody who writes this:

"she looks as confused as blind lesbian in a fishmarket."

can't be all bad....



ACK!