floydv
Elio Addict
Yes, Ridley Scott is a scifi movie god, a total visionary.
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What Is Your Favorite Sifi Book?
- Thread starter AriLea
- Start date
Stranger in a strange land. - Read it 42 years ago, and it was the right book for where my head was at the time. It has stuck with me ever since.
Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. - Funny, but it all made sense to me as a real possibility; enjoyed the movie also.
Hobbit - Read it from cover to cover in the same day; I have a vivid enough imagination that as I read it, I saw it as a movie at the same time (in my mind)
Tried to read Lord of the Rings after and lost interest half way through the first part of the trilogy; the writing style in old English was just too much for me to enjoy.
Rather then books I was a TV and Movie person; didn't have the time to sit down and read without a disturbance with everything I was doing.
Hitchcock, Twilight Zone, Matrix, Silent Running, and a whole pile of others; that was my "escape" time; head to the theater and couldn't be bothered there.
Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. - Funny, but it all made sense to me as a real possibility; enjoyed the movie also.
Hobbit - Read it from cover to cover in the same day; I have a vivid enough imagination that as I read it, I saw it as a movie at the same time (in my mind)
Tried to read Lord of the Rings after and lost interest half way through the first part of the trilogy; the writing style in old English was just too much for me to enjoy.
Rather then books I was a TV and Movie person; didn't have the time to sit down and read without a disturbance with everything I was doing.
Hitchcock, Twilight Zone, Matrix, Silent Running, and a whole pile of others; that was my "escape" time; head to the theater and couldn't be bothered there.
BaldGuy
Elio Addict
Been watching Red Dwarf, nothing at all deep in that one, or??. They do all the SiFi cliché and none of the serious thinking. (I think) But my wife loves British comedy and yep, this is. But do I like it? hmmmmm, guess ahmmm, I d..oo, yep I like it. I got all 12 DVD's so I must. But I guess in a way they do address "what is life?" Sure, life as a series of blundering comedic dramas. Space doesn't change that.
My dad loved SiFi. Every book he read got tossed into a 24x24x24 box. I 'discovered' it half full one summer when I was twelve. Read a book a night all summer. That went fast! My all time guilty pleasure was the Null-A series. Among other things, it expanded on the thoughts of General Semantics. More than a few Star Trek scripts seems to have come from that series. Yes, I adopted the way of seeing things in multiple ways at once after that. The map is not the territory. (read the book) Sounds almost like that famous artistic quote, "this is not a pipe".
You all are not disappointing me with your choices, they are good. But what is the meaning to you? Feel free to drop some links as I did. We miss half the fun if we don't contemplate the implications that the stories present.
But I'll postulate something, we need SiFi for the same reason we need myth, as a way to help us cope in a universe of the unknowable. If you read this last link, keep in mind Science now has a theory dealing with...(wait for it).... "Uncertainty Principle". and also "Entanglement" with no identifiable (and therefore not knowable) linkage.
So, by way of testing the unknowable, my thoughts on weed are..(no I don't)... what do you have if every atom in the universe is entangled with every other, but their individual states are uncertain?
I always wondered, if two duplicate wave forms are made to be 180dreg out of sync but travel exactly the same path, is their energy lost? Can you prove anything about that, at all?
My dad loved SiFi. Every book he read got tossed into a 24x24x24 box. I 'discovered' it half full one summer when I was twelve. Read a book a night all summer. That went fast! My all time guilty pleasure was the Null-A series. Among other things, it expanded on the thoughts of General Semantics. More than a few Star Trek scripts seems to have come from that series. Yes, I adopted the way of seeing things in multiple ways at once after that. The map is not the territory. (read the book) Sounds almost like that famous artistic quote, "this is not a pipe".
You all are not disappointing me with your choices, they are good. But what is the meaning to you? Feel free to drop some links as I did. We miss half the fun if we don't contemplate the implications that the stories present.
But I'll postulate something, we need SiFi for the same reason we need myth, as a way to help us cope in a universe of the unknowable. If you read this last link, keep in mind Science now has a theory dealing with...(wait for it).... "Uncertainty Principle". and also "Entanglement" with no identifiable (and therefore not knowable) linkage.
So, by way of testing the unknowable, my thoughts on weed are..(no I don't)... what do you have if every atom in the universe is entangled with every other, but their individual states are uncertain?
I always wondered, if two duplicate wave forms are made to be 180dreg out of sync but travel exactly the same path, is their energy lost? Can you prove anything about that, at all?
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Read the description on Amazon. Ahhh, perfect. Bought it just now(not just cause I'm an old man, either!). Thanks!
The deep question I see right now. Does the experience of a lifetime make us any better? What does then?
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BaldGuy
Elio Addict
Those type of questions is why I liked this book. Also, Accepting to go on this adventure isn't a bed of roses. I think the reason they gave the choice to only old people is a young person would never take it. Hope you enjoy the read. It also has at least one sequel, if you enjoy it.
WilliamH
Elio Addict
van Vogt totally slipped my mind. Must have read the Null-A books half a dozen times in my mid teens.
Sethodine
Elio Addict
My all-time favorite Sci-Fi book series is Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. The first time I picked it up, I stayed up all night and into the next day and read the entire first book all in a single sitting; it had me riveted from start to finish. The final book of the quartet was such a perfect bookend to the first that it makes the entire series feel like a complete story (rather than a chain of plots connected by the same characters). As a side note: the American publication of the series was given the cheesy name "The Hungry City Chronicles", but don't let that put you off. The name comes from the fact that Traction Cities in this post-post-post-apocalyptic future travel the world and eat each other ("Municipal Darwinism - survival of the fittest city). But the cities are only the backdrop, it's the characters that make the series shine.
floydv
Elio Addict
The Dune series fascinates me for a number of ideas it poses: (1) the sheer number and complexity of "plans within plans" that someone or some group can put in play to accomplish a goal, even hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands in the future, can be thwarted by a single, random act or event; (2) the single, seemingly random act in (1) can itself be the result of intentional plans and manipulations spanning a long time; and (3) even an astonishingly advanced society can be doomed to rot from the inside, and without the entropy of societal upheaval, it cannot move on to the next level of advancement.
Dark City and the Matrix (first movie) are interesting to me because they both ask in a different way whether a person is simply the sum of all his/her memories. Come to think of it, that's a central question in Blade Runner as well.
Dark City and the Matrix (first movie) are interesting to me because they both ask in a different way whether a person is simply the sum of all his/her memories. Come to think of it, that's a central question in Blade Runner as well.
I'll probably be making several posts to this thread, as I simply cannot limit myself to one favorite. To paraphrase Homer Simpson: "Too many books? That's like saying there are too many donuts!"
Absolute favorite book: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. One of the first and the the absolute best post-apocalypse novels ever written. Contains my favorite scene in all of literature:
A portion of the monastic order is going to be split off and sent into space to ensure the survival of the order in the face of an upcoming atomic war. A monk has to decide if he's going to accept the request to become the new abbot of this order. He agonizes in the monastery courtyard -- which is in the desert -- and finally looks up into the night sky and asks God to send a sign. Just then he hears something rustling in the bushes behind him. He remembers when one of the brothers killed a rattlesnake in the courtyard. The rustling gets closer. "Please, God, a sign really isn't necessary", and he wonders: would a sign from God ... slither?
Something touched his wrist. He jumped up with a shout and threw a stone at it. Nothing. He tossed another stone into the bush, and again, nothing. He looked up to the sky and said, "You knew I would throw a stone at it, didn't You?"
Later, during the ceremony to establish him as abbot, the current abbot asks him (in Latin -- and BTW, I'm doing this from memory so if I get the Latin wrong cut me some slack, OK?) "... accepto onerem?" to which he replies, "honorem accepto." The abbot smiled and said, "You heard me badly. I said 'burden' not 'honor'."
These scenes come to mind every time I am presented with a challenge in my life: don't throw stones at it, and the difference between a burden and an honor often lies in where you place the emphasis.
Absolute favorite book: A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. One of the first and the the absolute best post-apocalypse novels ever written. Contains my favorite scene in all of literature:
A portion of the monastic order is going to be split off and sent into space to ensure the survival of the order in the face of an upcoming atomic war. A monk has to decide if he's going to accept the request to become the new abbot of this order. He agonizes in the monastery courtyard -- which is in the desert -- and finally looks up into the night sky and asks God to send a sign. Just then he hears something rustling in the bushes behind him. He remembers when one of the brothers killed a rattlesnake in the courtyard. The rustling gets closer. "Please, God, a sign really isn't necessary", and he wonders: would a sign from God ... slither?
Something touched his wrist. He jumped up with a shout and threw a stone at it. Nothing. He tossed another stone into the bush, and again, nothing. He looked up to the sky and said, "You knew I would throw a stone at it, didn't You?"
Later, during the ceremony to establish him as abbot, the current abbot asks him (in Latin -- and BTW, I'm doing this from memory so if I get the Latin wrong cut me some slack, OK?) "... accepto onerem?" to which he replies, "honorem accepto." The abbot smiled and said, "You heard me badly. I said 'burden' not 'honor'."
These scenes come to mind every time I am presented with a challenge in my life: don't throw stones at it, and the difference between a burden and an honor often lies in where you place the emphasis.