What is the best science fiction book, ever?

[JohnT]

I'm gonna give a to my favorite sub-genre, space opera. I enjoy nothing more than the titanic struggles undertaken by interstellar empires, whether the events take place on a small scale (much of Fire in the Deep) or on an intergalactic level (Stephen Baxter.)

Currently my favorite space opera writer is Peter F. Hamilton. While his ending to his first big story was a let down, he has been creative enough to create not one but three separate self-contained Universes: the Night's Dawn universe, the Fallen Dragon worlds, and the Commonwealth of Pandora's Star. All of them rest upon different physical and economic assumptions about space travel, and all of them work.

His biggest issue is writing himself into a corner, getting his protagonists so over their heads that they can do nothing but lose. How he resolves this difficulty has not been popular.

Iain M. Banks is always readable, but he's a little too esoteric at times - I just want to say into some pages "Yes, you're smart and you have a way with words. Can't you just tell the story now?"

I've never gotten into Ken MacLeod. I've read two of his books (Cosmonaut Keep and another), but for the life of me I can't tell you what they were about (CK was about a female space ship captain who... something about genocide?)

And they're getting up there in years, but I have to give a shout out to S.R. Donaldsons Gap series, a densely plotted and, at times, painful series to read. Donaldson is not to everyones taste (I'm convinced the man needs somebody to talk to, at the least), but if you can handle it, you will find a very rewarding experience as this little nothing of a story about a space pirate who kidnaps and rapes a young girl turns into an epic upon which rests the fates of civilizations.

[General Ludd]

Of the ones that I have read, Colony by Rob Grant is my favorite.


But I heard a radio show about Le Guin a week ago, and some of the passages acted out where amazing. I haven't read any of her books, but I plan to now.

[Imran Siddiqui]

my favorite sub-genre, space opera.

So, are you saying space opera is sci-fi?

[Agathon]

I forgot The War of the Worlds until I saw JohnT's thread. That is an excellent work.

[Anaximander]

Can't pick just one...

Dune
Enders Game
Martian Chronicals
Red/Blue/Green Mars
Brave New World
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

[Hueij]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
A Canticle for Liebowitz

You beat me to it

And for the rest: everything else written after Burroughs' Mars and Venus series sucks.

[Sandman]

I think my favourite is Asimov's The Positronic Man.

I've tired of the genre recently. Too many cliches.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

my favorite sub-genre, space opera.

So, are you saying space opera is sci-fi?

Never said differently.

[Nostromo]

If a single book, not counting any series, my choice would be Solaris by Lem

great book

[Nostromo]

Am I the only one here who thinks Nineteen eighty-four is one of the greatest sci-fi books ever? Most of you probably think it isn't sci-fi, like Asimov, who claimed that it wasn't sci-fi, that it was a satire of totatitarian regimes. Why can't it be both, sci-fi and a satire?

[Ben Kenobi]

A Canticle for Leibowitz is also a great sci-fi book.

The problem with classifying 1984 as a science fiction, rather than a fiction book, is to look at the role that science, and scientific endeavours play in the book. Yes, it describes a future world, but there isn't much place for technology in the book.

Particularly when compared with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

[Agathon]

Brave New World...

hmm.... pneumatic women.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
A Canticle for Leibowitz is also a great sci-fi book.

The problem with classifying 1984 as a science fiction, rather than a fiction book, is to look at the role that science, and scientific endeavours play in the book. Yes, it describes a future world, but there isn't much place for technology in the book.

This can be said about most science fiction.


We should do away with the term and just include it all into fantasy instead of creating redundant categories.

[Nostromo]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi

The problem with classifying 1984 as a science fiction, rather than a fiction book, is to look at the role that science, and scientific endeavours play in the book. Yes, it describes a future world, but there isn't much place for technology in the book.

Particularly when compared with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.

But I hope you realize this is one definition of sci-fi among many others? Basically, a definition is good if it includes what you want it to include, and exludes what you want it to exclude.

Btw, I'm not even sure you have to exclude 1984 from the realm of sci-fi based on your definition. How about the use of tech to destroy privacy, to monitor people? How about the use of tech to manipulate the media and the public's mind?

But it seems to me that you're definition excludes sci-fi classics like Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness or Philip K. Dicks The Man in the High Castle. Like Le Guin pointed out herself in her intro to Left Hand of Darkness, these are thought-experiments:

Science fiction is often described, and even defined, as extrapolative. the science fiction writer is supposed to take a trend or phenomenon of the here-and-now, purify and intensify it for dramatic effect, and extend it into the future. [...] A prediction is made.

Fortunately, though extrapolation is an element in science fiction, it isn't the name of the game by any means. [...]

This book is not extrapolative. if you like you can read it, and a lot of other science fiction, as a thought-experiment. Lets say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; lets say (says Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the second world war.

I like that definition. Sci-fi as thought-experiments. Of course these thought-experiments are about stuff that is scientifically possible.

And Mary Shelley's Frankenstein definitely should be a runner-up.

[Whaleboy]

War of the Worlds -- HG Wells, and it's piss-take, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

I'd actually class Edgar Allen Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as sci-fi for it's speculative ideas about the human conditions in weird situations... if it had a couple of light-sabres we'd be regarding it as one of the greatest sci-fi's of all time, but then I already do .