Anything by Cordwainer Smith.
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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)Within weeks they'll be re-opening the shipyards
And notifying the next of kin
Once again...
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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.Clash of Civilization team member
(a civ-like game whose goal is low micromanagement and good AI)
web site http://clash.apolyton.net/frame/index.shtml and forum here on apolyton)
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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.Exult in your existence, because that very process has blundered unwittingly on its own negation. Only a small, local negation, to be sure: only one species, and only a minority of that species; but there lies hope. [...] Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence [and the] gift of revulsion against its implications.
-Richard Dawkins
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Originally posted by redbaron
Also,
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination.
James Blish - The Cities In Flight series
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.
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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.
Good post, Ramo.
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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?
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.Vive la liberte. Noor Inayat Khan, Dachau.
...patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone. Edith Cavell, 1915
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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
How does shadow puppet fit into the ender series? is it a sequel to children of the mind?:-p
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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?
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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 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.If you don't like reality, change it! me
"Oh no! I am bested!" Drake
"it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong" Voltaire
"Patriotism is a pernecious, psychopathic form of idiocy" George Bernard Shaw
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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!Don't try to confuse the issue with half-truths and gorilla dust!
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