FOT Forum
FOT Community => General Discussion => Topic started by: yesno on March 24, 2009, 01:13:06 PM
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I alternately love and hate science fiction novels. I read something great, and then I get on a roll and bump right into Hugo and Nebula award-winner Hominids which is badly written, has a boring plot, and is driven forward by thinly disguised neo-fascist utopianism. So I get a bad taste in my mouth.
Some of my favorite contemporary authors:
* Vernor Vinge
* Ian M. Banks
* Ken Macleod
* Charles Stross
* Alastair Reynolds (he's hit and miss)
What do you think?
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good ones i've read:
player piano
slaughterhouse five
the moon is a harsh mistress
stranger in a strange land
currently i'm reading Ender's Game and it's pretty good.
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Is William Gibson on the "hate" side?
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Is William Gibson on the "hate" side?
He's always just been dull to me. Maybe I haven't read the right things. I tend to like it more when literary authors do sci-fi (Cloud Atlas, Never Let Me Go, Toward the End of Time, Plot Against America) than when sci-fi authors try to get too foncy. Maybe I'm misreading Gibson.
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I was gonna come in here specifically to mention Iain (M) Banks-- he's awesome. I've only read a few of the Culture novels, but they've all been good so far.
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What do you think?
I think everyone should pack up their unwanted science fiction and send it to me, because I like it, there's very little in my library, and I'm poor.
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Is William Gibson on the "hate" side?
He's always just been dull to me. Maybe I haven't read the right things. I tend to like it more when literary authors do sci-fi (Cloud Atlas, Never Let Me Go, Toward the End of Time, Plot Against America) than when sci-fi authors try to get too foncy. Maybe I'm misreading Gibson.
I read Gibson's Pattern Recognition. It was awhile ago. I can't say I remember being impressed either, but I do recollect enjoying the underworld he created, but maybe it was my own paranoid fantasies that fueled this enjoyment--I can't remember.
I like dystopian fiction. So I'll add The Road (McCarthy) and White Noice (DeLillo) to Steve's list.
I loved Plot Against America. So for alternate history, I'll add The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
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Is William Gibson on the "hate" side?
He's always just been dull to me. Maybe I haven't read the right things. I tend to like it more when literary authors do sci-fi (Cloud Atlas, Never Let Me Go, Toward the End of Time, Plot Against America) than when sci-fi authors try to get too foncy. Maybe I'm misreading Gibson.
you're both fucking nuts, Neuromancer is my favorite book ever.
while it's not technically sci fi, I just finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt. On the whole it was really good.
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Yeah, Kim Stanley Robinson is great.
As for Gibson, I tried reading Mona Lisa Overdrive when I was 12 or 13, didn't like it, and never really gave him another shot. Scratch that, I read The Difference Engine (which he co-wrote) and it was pretty good.
PKD, of course. Also, Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is one of my favorites.
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I had a similar William Gibson experience: I read Neuromancer when I was 14 or so, and it seemed boring to me. I was probably just too young for it, but I never tried anything else.
As mentioned in the other books thread, I really liked Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. (The sequel, Axis, wasn't as good.)
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Gibson got a little too abstract for me. I had a hard time wrapping my head around his narratives because he wrote more about the physical sensations of what was happening, rather then whatever the hell was going on. Still good reads though.
The grand-daddy of the 90's tech sci fi would be Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. It was way ahead of it's time and coined a lot of the language we use to talk about the internet. (Boy does it ever love language.) If you thought Gibson did too much of acid, holy crow, get a load of the beard on Stephenson.
For some really hard sci-fi, check out Stephan Baxter's Manifold series. I think Manifold: Space is the best and since they all stand on their own, none of them really relate to another. Read the three and you will probably put your head in an oven.
Niven & Pournelle's Mote In God's Eye & The Gripping Hand are terrible and should be avoided at all costs. Yes, they did the solor-sail crap first. Good for those two, they informed Count Dooku's dumb ship.
Nerd, nerd, nerd. That's all I have to say.
C
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I think Mote is good (though it has a weak ending--I reread it this weekend anyway) but the sequel is pretty awful. The Moties are cool aliens.
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currently i'm reading Ender's Game and it's pretty good.
That's my book club's current book. I need to get cracking on it.
My personal favorites include:
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
the VALIS trilogy by Philip K. Dick
Actually, I've liked every Philip K. Dick book I've read, and I've read quite a few.
Anyone read Lord of Light by Zelazny? It's in my to-read pile.
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Addendum: Manifold: Time is the better one.
Yeah, the Moties were cool, but if the ending was a let-down, then The Gripping Hand will push you into the red. There is a horny old man undercurrent to it that made me want to wash my hands.
Ender's Game is great, but there are diminishing returns with everything that follows. Ender's Shadow is interesting, but Giant series that follows becomes a military fanatic's wet dream with Morman undertones. Be warned.
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There is a horny old man undercurrent to it that made me want to wash my hands.
In addition to Hominids, mentioned above, being a poorly written book with alarming political undertones, it uses the phrase "bra and panties" at least three times.
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Some of the Ender books are great. Some of the Alvin Maker bookers ain't half bad, either.
I'm fond of Gibson and adored Snow Crash, which I picked off a library shelf knowing nothing about it or the author. Thus began my love affair with Neal Stephenson.
If you're looking for horny old man undertones (and overtones and all the tones in between), Heinlein is your guy.
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Anybody do Rudy Rucker? He's not note-worthy as a stylist, but he's got some funny ideas.
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People should check out The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe.
It's three novellas combined into one novel about a human-colonized planet whose supposedly extinct indigenous life is rumored to be able to shape shift. Ridiculously good book when taken as a whole, and almost feels like a puzzle. Here's an amazon review about what I'm too lazy to describe:
THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS, Gene Wolfe's first book-length work of note, is a collection of three seemingly unrelated novellas that are, at the close of the third, shown to be cunningly interlinked. The first novella, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus", was published in one of Damon Knight's Orbit anthologies in 1974, while the latter two were written and published together to expand the themes and plot of the first. The setting of it all is Sainte Anne and Saint Croix, two sister planets revolving around a common center of gravity in a far-away solar system, colonized first by Frenchmen and later occupied (in a brutal fashion, it is hinted) by later waves of English-speaking colonists. Before men arrived, legend goes, Sainte Anne was inhabited by an indigenous race of shapeshifters, which humans wiped out. Or did the aboriginals wipe out the colonists, imitating them so faithfully that they forgot their own origins? The novellas touch upon many themes of post-colonial theory.
In the first novella, a young man grows up in a strangely sheltered environment on Saint Croix, discovering at last the secrets of his scientist father's work. Here, the aboriginal inhabitants of the sister planet are only briefly mentioned, but the plot has much more local concerns. The second novella "'A Story' by John V. Marsch" is inevitably confusing to first-time readers, and initially seems unrelated to the first. It is the story of an adolescent's initiation to manhood in a primitive society, a dreamquest that brings him across a bizarre landscape and introducing him to various tribes espousing peculiar religious beliefs. In the third novella, "V.R.T." a bureaucrat on Saint Croix goes over the diaries of an imprisoned anthropologist. Again, it seems a complete change of direction with little to link it to the first two, but by the end a story arc spanning the three novellas is revealed. THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS is an excellent example of Wolfe's love for mysteries, some revealed so casually the reader might easily miss it, and others so deeply buried that it may take several tries for the author to find the key. This all gives the book excellent re-read value. And here one can see the genesis of the techniques that Wolfe used in later works, such as his masterpiece The Book of the New Sun.
The narrative here is so ingeniously constructed that I would recommend THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS to any lover of literature, even those that are usually wary of anything called science-fiction. Wolfe's novel PEACE, published a year later, continues this strong writing and is also highly recommend, and its plot might be attractive to a more general audience.
http://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Head-Cerberus-Three-Novellas/dp/0312890206/
I've been meaning to reread it.
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I liked John Kessel's "Good News from Outer Space" (an apocalyptic picaresque) and "Corrupting Dr. Nice" (The Lady Eve re-imagined as a time-travel caper.) They're both quite funny.
edit: I may have used the word "picaresque" incorrectly. That's what I get for trying to sound smart.
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I love Gene Wolfe. Sometimes. His last book was awful, but the New Sun series is my favorite sci-fi series ever. I guess it's actually Science Fantasy but wtf ever.
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he's getting pretty up there in years, so it's not surprising
he's in his mid 70s I think
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Ender's Game is great, but there are diminishing returns with everything that follows. Ender's Shadow is interesting, but Giant series that follows becomes a military fanatic's wet dream with Morman undertones. Be warned.
A while back I picked up Speaker for the Dead at Salvation Army for like a quarter.
Do I have to read Ender's Game first to understand it?
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Nah. You might be a little confused at first, but you'll get over it.
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Nerd trivia: Orson Scott Card wanted to write Speaker for the Dead as the main story, and only wrote Ender's Game as a prequel to pave the way for the story he really wanted to get to.
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Ditto a lot of the stuff so far on this thread. The only Stephenson I've attempted was Necronomicon and it was a snooze, I barely made it 100 pages in and I finish everything.
For those who like PKD, LeGuin, and literary SF like Atwood, I would add:
Octavia E. Butler
Stanislaw Lem
Brian Aldiss
Samuel Delaney
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Nerd trivia: Orson Scott Card wanted to write Speaker for the Dead as the main story, and only wrote Ender's Game as a prequel to pave the way for the story he really wanted to get to.
decent human being trivia: orson scott card is a homophobic dickhead.
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Some of the best Hard Sci-Fi that I've read has come from this guy named Jules Verne. He really gets into the nitty-gritty of some real technical stuff, like the Moon and underwater.
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The only Stephenson I've attempted was NecroCryptonomicon and it was a snooze, I barely made it 100 pages in and I finish everything.
Isn't it funny how different people can be. That book filled me with joy. All Stephenson's books do, to greater or lesser extent.
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Can someone explain what people mean when they say "hard sci-fi"? Does it suggest an emphasis on the science part?
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Can someone explain what people mean when they say "hard sci-fi"? Does it suggest an emphasis on the science part?
hard sci fi?......you like sex movies...?
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In hard science fiction things are either kept as realistic as possible, or there's some kind of single central screwy idea, and the novel explores its consequences.
I liked Cryptonomicon, but everything after that left me cold. I couldn't finish any of the baroque cycle books and I thought Anathem was terrible, even though I did finish it. But Diamond Age and Snow Crash were tops.
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Thanks for the correction, Sarah -- I think I actually liked the Necronomicon, though I don't think that's the kind of book you actually finish. That was the Alistair Crowley one, right?
I found the weird math machismo in the book off-putting. But I still have an unread copy of Snow Crash that I'll take a crack at one of these days.
Sidebar: I'm teaching a sci-fi class this semester at Rutgers and almost know what I'm doing!
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The Necronomicon is the brainchild of H. P. Lovecraft. I don't think it actually exists.
Here are Aleister Crowley's writings, per the all-knowing Wikipedia:
* The Book of the Law
* Magick (Book 4)
* The Book of Lies
* The Vision and the Voice
* 777 and other Qabalistic writings
* The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
* Magick Without Tears
* Little Essays Toward Truth
* The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King (translation of original text)
* The General Principles of Astrology (with Evangeline Adams, Hymenaeus Beta, and others)
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OK, now I have no idea what it was that I read. But it was weird and scary and I liked it!
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Uh-oh. I'm getting a bad feeling about this, Grote. Was the book you read bound in the skin of infants? Did it happen to open a portal to a netherworld of one sort or another? Did the pages bleed?
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I think maybe you're thinking of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues? That sounds like the first infant-skin edition, from like 1978.
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I was going to suggest it might be Trout Fishing in America.
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The metal kids in my high school totally had the real Necronomicon, as well as the Anarchist Cookbook which you can totally go to jail for having.
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The metal kids in my high school totally had the real Necronomicon, as well as the Anarchist Cookbook which you can totally go to jail for having.
did you go to Arkham High?
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We used to sell the Anarchist Cookbook at the Montclair Book Center, and it was pretty prominently displayed, but that was pre-Oklahoma-City-bombing.
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I was just reminded of how much I love J.G. Ballard. He's not so much pure sci-fi these days, but I do think he's one of the best writers around, full stop. His recent stuff (Millennium People, Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes) is really, really good: lurid, apocalyptic detective stories.
His earlier stuff (The Crystal World, The Drowned World, Concrete Jungle and a bunch more I haven't read), which was definitely sci-fi, is pretty prescient - it's mostly environmental/survivalist horror kind of stuff. His whole oeuvre makes for uncomfortable reading these days, because he's probably right about everything, and that's bad news for us.
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Check out some Greg Bear if you get a chance. The famous one is 'Blood Music', where a scientist creates nano-sized life that ends up taking over almost all-life on Earth. People turn into big blobs of dough on their way to completely dissolving.
Also there's a book 'Eon' where scientists find out the inside of an Asteroid is actually bigger than the outside. Actually IIRC it was an infinitely long tunnel. Trippy.
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I was just reminded of how much I love J.G. Ballard. He's not so much pure sci-fi these days, but I do think he's one of the best writers around, full stop. His recent stuff (Millennium People, Cocaine Nights, Super Cannes) is really, really good: lurid, apocalyptic detective stories.
His earlier stuff (The Crystal World, The Drowned World, Concrete Jungle and a bunch more I haven't read), which was definitely sci-fi, is pretty prescient - it's mostly environmental/survivalist horror kind of stuff. His whole oeuvre makes for uncomfortable reading these days, because he's probably right about everything, and that's bad news for us.
I read Crash about 2 years ago, and I am still damaged.