Concerning Fine Literature

[DaShi]

Cool!

[Guynemer]

One more recommendation:

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. A near-future dystopia where people escape online, not unlike Snow Crash, but with a heavy dose of gaming culture and 80s nostalgia.

[snoopy369]

Oh, and Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. Classic and still very very very good.

[Dinner]

I'm currently on book three of the Song of Albion trilogy. It's entertaining enough but comes off as very dated fantasy from the late 80's/early 90's with a really strong dose of Christian moralism. George R. R. Martin this guy is not.

[Hauldren Collider]

Martian

You make the best typos Oerdin.

[Dinner]

I'm not sure how that extra A snuck in there.

[PLATO]

If you're looking for a seriously nerdy (but good!) book, read Larry Niven's The Integral Trees. And its sequel The Smoke Ring.

I read The Integral Trees when it was initially published serially in one of the Sci-Fi magazines I used to subscribe to. It really is a very good book.

[Hauldren Collider]

I read it last summer and it's now my favorite book.

[PLATO]

I looked it up in Wiki. It was 1983 in Analog Magizine. This one will be back on my reading list now that you have refreshed my memory of it!

[Dinner]

I read Ender's Game about half a year ago. It was a good series.

[molly bloom]

M John Harrison: The Pastel City, A Storm Of Wings, In Viriconium

http://www.amazon.com/Pastel-City-Tales-Viriconium-Vol/dp/067183584X

Keith Roberts: Pavane, Kiteworld, The Chalk Giants

http://io9.com/5413617/pavane-is-alternate-historys-lost-masterpiece

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Keith-Roberts-Gateway-Omnibus-Kiteworld/dp/0575105224

Paul McAuley: Pasquale's Angel, The Cowboy Angels, Red Dust

[Hauldren Collider]

I read Ender's Game about half a year ago. It was a good series.

I only really liked Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. I didn't like Ender's Shadow so I never read any of its sequels and Xenocide and CoTM were....bleh.

[Elok]

Thanks for the flood of suggestions, all. I didn't plan this well, posting the thread right after a library visit, but I'll keep the thread bookmarked for when I take this load back. I don't think it'll float for two more weeks.

I just finished Card's Empire. Not sure whether to recommend it. On the one hand, it's like he tried to channel Tom Clancy while watching Fox News and doing whippets of nitrous. On the other, it's still fairly entertaining in a desperately silly way.

[loinburger]

Anything by Harlan Ellison. I don't know if he's written any novels (I don't think he has), but he's written a great many short stories, probably the most famous of which is "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream," about a post-apocalyptic world in which the last five humans left alive are trapped in the belly of AM, the amalgamation of the US, Soviet, and Chinese military supercomputers that gained sentience, merged, and killed everybody. (He wrote the story in the 60's, I believe he successfully sued the makers of the Terminator film.) AM has kept the last five humans alive and tortured them for over a hundred years. The story is about their attempt to escape. "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" is about a man's attempt to disrupt a totalitarian society by such acts as dropping 200,000 jellybeans in the middle of a busy mall. "A Boy And His Dog" is a post-apocalyptic story about a boy and a telepathic dog - this was also made into a film. "The Deathbird" is about an attempt to kill God, who has gone insane. "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World" is a story about Jack the Ripper being transported to the far future, where he is supposed to alleviate the last humans' boredom by murdering them. "Paladin of the Lost Hour" is about an attempt to stave off the end of the world by trapping the worlds' last hours in a pocket watch. "Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54' N, Longitude 77° 00' 13" W" is about a man's attempt to retrieve his lost soul, which is locked away in his pancreas.

He has also edited Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, which are weird short stories written by several different authors.

He is also a colossal douchebag.

Ray Bradbury has also written a ton of short stories, generally more somber and less wacky than Ellison's - I can't recall any offhand except for "The Very Gentle Murders," about an elderly couple who make a game of trying to murder each other. He has also written several novels, e.g. Fahrenheit 451 about a dystopian future where books are outlawed, and Something Wicked This Way Comes about the devil attempting to corrupt a small town.

[loinburger]

Kurt Vonnegut has written several novels and short stories, tending towards dark humor with an emphasis on dark. Sirens of Titan is about the luckiest man in the world and the events that transpire when his luck takes a turn for the worse, leading him to travel across the solar system until he ultimately ends up on Titan. I'm not sure how else to describe the plot without giving everything away. Slaughterhouse Five is about a man who becomes unstuck from time, meaning that the book's chronology is all screwed up; Slaughterhouse Five refers to the German POW camp in Dresden where the man was held towards the end of WWII. The book is very loosely semi-autobiographical.

HP Lovecraft somewhat inadvertently helped pen what is now known as The Cthulhu Mythos back in the 1920's and 1930's, along with several other contemporary writers with whom he maintained correspondence. In a nutshell, mankind is utterly insignificant, and is surrounded by unfathomable Elder Things who don't destroy us simply because they hold us in such contempt when they bother to consider us at all. Cthulhu is one among many of these cosmic horrors; it lies dormant at the bottom of the ocean waiting for the stars to be right so that he can rise again and destroy us all; insane cultists help to bring about this apocalypse, and the protagonists of some of his stories try to battle these insane cultists.

Lovecraft's stories are available for free online; there are thousands of stories in the Cthulhu Mythos written by other authors starting in the 1920's and continuing up until today, but I suggest that you start with some of Lovecraft's classics to see if you like the Cosmic Horror genre. Be warned that Lovecraft was quite racist and this is evident in some of his stories (most of his cultists are "degenerate sub-humans"), so take him with a grain of salt. Start with "Call of Cthulhu," about a man's attempting to prevent Cthulhu's rise by doing battle with their cultists (the story is 95% prose and 5% action sequences). "At the Mountains of Madness" is about an Antarctic expedition that uncovers evidence of a sentient race that predated mankind by millions of years, and their horrific technology that is still extant. "The Colour Out of Space" is about a meteor landing in a farmer's well, tainting it and all who drink the water. "Pickman's Model" is about a mad artist's depictions of otherwordly beings. "The Rats In the Walls" is about a man inheriting a house that was built over a temple to, you guessed it, Cosmic Horrors. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" is about a fishing village in the American Northeast whose residents made a pact with a sentient underseas race that predates mankind. "The Whisperer in Darkness" is about an extraterrestrial race of sentient fungus that lives on Yuggoth (Pluto) that is worshiped by human cultists. "The Dunwich Horror" is about inbred rednecks and their worship of Cosmic Horrors.

Don Webb is one of my favorite modern authors of Lovecraftian horror. Charles Stross has written a series called The Laundry Files about a British occult intelligence agency tasked with preventing incursions by Cosmic Horrors, starting with The Atrocity Archive about the remnants of the Nazi attempts to use Cosmic Horrors to help them win the war. It also blends dark humor and computer nerd humor. Edward Lee writes books and stories that are 50% Lovecraftian Horror and 50% Pornographic Smut - I don't recommend him (this coming from the dickgirl guy). Other than that, just pick up any modern Cthulhu Mythos collection of short stories; if you don't like a story after ten or twenty pages, then skip it.