What sci-fi/fantasy do you like?

[Dry]

Cherryh, Cherryh, Cherryh!

Especially Chanur. Pride of Chanur is first, followed by the Chanur's Venture Trillogy.

I remember bumping into C.J. Cherryh back in the days when I became tired of sci-fi.
Every thing I read then had a feeling of deja-vu. Nothing felt unusual or surprising.
So I gave a go to female writers in the hope they would come with something different.

So I came across "The pride of Chanur".
And jeez, this was refreshing.
The two main reasons I really enjoyed it:
- Humans exist in this universe, but they are not the main species, nor the hero species. This was quite unique back then.
- The reverse sexism toward males is believable. Any other story, novel, movie describes sexism toward males by putting them in female roles.
When you try to show sexism 'against women' by putting males in female roles, you do not show sexism against women at all, you show sexism against femininity.
What this book manage to do is instead is to propose a society with prejudices against masculinity. As a male reader, I could 100% identify with the Hani males. It is not the main topic of the book, but it is there in the background. And what strikes me is that I have never read or seen any other fictional reverse sexism story like that.

[Cort Haus]

As a big Discworld fan, I'd agree that the very early wizardy ones are probably best avoided. I recommend Guards! Guards! and all the Vimes series, with the ultimate reward of the superb Night Watch. Small Gods is also wonderful, so basically I'm giving a +1 to JM's post, but on the whole his later ones (not so much the very last ones when he was ill) are the better. Thief of Time and Monstrous Regiment are two of my faves. I like the witches too.

Give it a go, Elok. I promise you won't regret it.

[Will Nightingale]

Forgot to mention that I recently read Hyperion and liked it a great deal. Annoyingly, the library doesn't have the rest of the series. May have to ILL that.

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion are the two amazing books I have ever read.

[Proteus_MST]

Haven't readall too much SciFi/Fantasy during the last years.

But among the things I read the most, surely will be HHGTTG from Douglas Adams, as well as the Discworld novels from Terry Pratchett.

Among the Scifi/Fantasy books I read in the past, a lot were from the Battletech universe (with several authors, like Michael A. Stackpole or William H. Keith jr.), the books from the Star Wars EU (I especially liked the ones about the Yhuuzan Vong), the novels from Anne Mc Caffrey about the Dragonriders of Pern or the Midkemia saga by Raymond Feist.

Regarding Dune ... while I tried to read the later books of he Dune - Saga, I have to say that they turned out a little bit dry and too expansive for my tstes ... but te last time I looked into them actually was in my youth, ~2-3 decades ago ... maybe I would judge more favorably if I would try them again nowadays

I also should mention that H.P. Lovecraft is one of my favorite authors

[Dinner]

Try the origonal outlander books. More like historical fiction with a bit of fantasy (in the form of time travel) mixed in.

[Elok]

Bumping with results:

Tried Small Gods, found it irritating and gave up a few dozen pages in. My wife (who's been doing Discworld far longer than I) said she didn't like that one either, but pointed me to ones she did like. So I got Hogfather, which I loved. I'll keep trying Discworld.

Neal Asher's Dark Intelligence just wasn't my thing.

Re: Bujold, I started with an obscure fantasy novel called The Spirit Ring, since I couldn't tell which Vorkosigan novel came first, and if the library had same. I would describe The Spirit Ring as "inconsequential, but fun." I then checked out two more Bujold books, only to discover one was a romance novel and the second, despite not saying so anywhere, was a sequel. Have ordered the first book (Curse of Chalion) from another branch of the library.

I'm in the middle of Modesitt's "Imager." I'm sort of in-between on this one. It's an interesting set of concepts, and he thinks things through nicely, but I really cannot give a crap about this world's politics, and the way every name and term has a vaguely European gloss on it is more distracting than interesting--if "Solayi" is Sunday, there's really no reason you can't call it Sunday. My wife read the first couple of pages and declared that she could not stand the author's love of gratuitous H's in names. If you thought I was picky ...

EDIT: I also checked out Simmons's Ilium, but decided early on that I didn't feel like sparing the mental energy to invest in working out all the details of this world. Which is somewhat hypocritical, given how turgid my book is, but whatever.