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What Is Your Favorite Sifi Book?
- Thread starter AriLea
- Start date
Uhhhh what? I've read your post 3 or 4 times before it started making sense. I'm wondering if I want to ask if what I figured out is what you meant.
So I'll just move along and mark it as something to file in the back cells.
The was just on the SyFi channel about two weeks ago (Childhood's End); they did a made for TV multi part mini series of it.
Thanks Brower, I will have to get 3 more books to read.
Rob Croson
Elio Addict
I am an avid reader, and have been my whole life. I've read a lot of good stuff, and a lot of crap. Hard to remember most of them, regardless of on which side of the line they fall. However, there are some that are memorable.
As someone else mentioned, David Weber is very good, if you're into military fiction. The Honor Harrington novels are exceptional. I prefer some of the older ones, though the latest one shows a lot of promise for a new direction.
And, really, a mention of military fiction wouldn't be proper without mentioning David Drake and Hammer's Slammers. Great tales that are not just military scifi stories, but stories about the people.
I have liked most of Heinlein's stuff, but Starship Troopers is the best, IMO. The fire fight in that opening chapter is incredible. ("I'm a 30 second bomb! 30 ... 29 ... 28 ...") I think that I played through the audiobook version of that chapter three times in a row! The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was great.
And speaking of good first chapters, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is an excellent book. The opening chapters about The Deliverator are a great read. (If you listen to the audiobook version, the narrator does an incredible job on this book.) The first two chapters are excerpted here: https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcrash.html
William Gibson wrote a great short story: Burning Chrome. This cyberpunk story is the origination of the word "cyberspace". (The audiobook narrator for this one has an outstanding performance as well.) Oddly enough, I don't think I've read any more of his stuff...
The Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold is also very exceptional. The character building is top-notch, and the action scenes great. She also incorporates great humor in every book, most of which will have you laughing out loud. It's a very long series, so you have lots of time to get attached to the characters. Toward the end of the seres when one of the characters dies, it really hits you. If you like her scifi, you should also check out her various fantasy series, too.
Tad Williams wrote the excellent Otherland series of four books about virtual reality, and people getting trapped in a new, more potent version of it. The one thing I didn't like about it was one of the characters relating his African tribal legends, which seemed to just drag on, slow the whole story down. Williams' first fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn was also very good.
Another classic author someone mentioned: Arthur C. Clarke. He had some really visionary stuff. Great hard scifi. Rendezvous With Rama is amazing. Unfortunately, the three follow-on books were actually written by another author (Gentry Lee), and Clarke only only reviewed and commented on them. Rama II was still pretty good even with some of the implausible assumptions made in it, but the third and fourth books just suck.
Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye is another amazing classic.
Andy Weir's first novel The Martian was very good. Haven't seen the movie, though, just read the book. Great science, and laugh-out-loud funny in places.
For an alternative to traditional novels, there's a great scifi webcomic that I've been following for a LONG time now: Schlock Mercenary. http://schlockmercenary.com It has updated daily, without fail, for the last 15 1/2 years. (Since June 12, 2000!) Really good science fiction, great characters, deep story, and really long overarching plot line split up into convenient chunks. You can read the whole thing online for free. The beginning artwork is really bad, which the author admits, but the jokes/story are great, and the art gets better fairly quickly. You can also buy the "dead tree" editions, which include bonus stories and extra artwork/annotations.
There's doubtless many others that I've read over the years, that I just can't remember.
As someone else mentioned, David Weber is very good, if you're into military fiction. The Honor Harrington novels are exceptional. I prefer some of the older ones, though the latest one shows a lot of promise for a new direction.
And, really, a mention of military fiction wouldn't be proper without mentioning David Drake and Hammer's Slammers. Great tales that are not just military scifi stories, but stories about the people.
I have liked most of Heinlein's stuff, but Starship Troopers is the best, IMO. The fire fight in that opening chapter is incredible. ("I'm a 30 second bomb! 30 ... 29 ... 28 ...") I think that I played through the audiobook version of that chapter three times in a row! The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was great.
And speaking of good first chapters, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is an excellent book. The opening chapters about The Deliverator are a great read. (If you listen to the audiobook version, the narrator does an incredible job on this book.) The first two chapters are excerpted here: https://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/omalley/120f02/victory/snowcrash.html
William Gibson wrote a great short story: Burning Chrome. This cyberpunk story is the origination of the word "cyberspace". (The audiobook narrator for this one has an outstanding performance as well.) Oddly enough, I don't think I've read any more of his stuff...
The Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold is also very exceptional. The character building is top-notch, and the action scenes great. She also incorporates great humor in every book, most of which will have you laughing out loud. It's a very long series, so you have lots of time to get attached to the characters. Toward the end of the seres when one of the characters dies, it really hits you. If you like her scifi, you should also check out her various fantasy series, too.
Tad Williams wrote the excellent Otherland series of four books about virtual reality, and people getting trapped in a new, more potent version of it. The one thing I didn't like about it was one of the characters relating his African tribal legends, which seemed to just drag on, slow the whole story down. Williams' first fantasy trilogy Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn was also very good.
Another classic author someone mentioned: Arthur C. Clarke. He had some really visionary stuff. Great hard scifi. Rendezvous With Rama is amazing. Unfortunately, the three follow-on books were actually written by another author (Gentry Lee), and Clarke only only reviewed and commented on them. Rama II was still pretty good even with some of the implausible assumptions made in it, but the third and fourth books just suck.
Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye is another amazing classic.
Andy Weir's first novel The Martian was very good. Haven't seen the movie, though, just read the book. Great science, and laugh-out-loud funny in places.
For an alternative to traditional novels, there's a great scifi webcomic that I've been following for a LONG time now: Schlock Mercenary. http://schlockmercenary.com It has updated daily, without fail, for the last 15 1/2 years. (Since June 12, 2000!) Really good science fiction, great characters, deep story, and really long overarching plot line split up into convenient chunks. You can read the whole thing online for free. The beginning artwork is really bad, which the author admits, but the jokes/story are great, and the art gets better fairly quickly. You can also buy the "dead tree" editions, which include bonus stories and extra artwork/annotations.
There's doubtless many others that I've read over the years, that I just can't remember.
Sethodine
Elio Addict
I think I'll have to check out some of those! I've read a couple of the Honor Harrington series and really enjoyed them.
Have you read "The Lost Fleet" series by Jack Campbell? He has a truely stunning vision concerning space combat, which makes watching Star Wars or Star Trek space battels feel like slugs dueling with muzzle-loaders. And he has a grasp of the sheer vastness of space that few sci-fi authors seem to understand.
For instance: a fleet will arrive in an enemy star system, analyze the enemy fleet knowing full well that the light reaching them is 4 hours old, then accellerate to an intercept. 8 hours later, they see the reaction of the enemy fleet to their appearance, and about 7 days later they do battle in a salvo of fire that lasts a fraction of a second as the two fleets careen past each other at a relative speed approaching 0.25 lightspeed.
Oh, and the story is good, too.
@Rob Croson, If you liked William Gibson, you should try to find a copy of "Count Zero Interrupt". It was one of the first of the cyberpunk novels and has some amazing ideas in it. It also has a line that expresses an idea that I've found very useful. This isn't an exact quote, but captures the meaning: "The truly dangerous man does not need to look dangerous."
I also enjoyed "Starship Troopers" but prefer "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". I've enjoyed trying to develop Heinlein's improvement on the traditional rebel cell structure and figure out how it could be practically implemented. I thought the movie adaptation of "Starship Troopers" was a good adaptation, considering that it was made 30 or 40 years after the book was written. The director, Paul Verhoeven, modeled many of the space battles after his memories of standing in his yard in Holland watching the dogfights. I think it shows. (Drifting into films, I remember when I first saw the 2nd Star Wars film [Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back] how the movements of the rebel army in preparing to defend their positions just seemed so REAL. It was only later I learned why when I read that the directors had arranged for the Norwegian Army to be in the film during their winter maneuvers training.)
A few years after "Mote" came out, Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel based in the same universe called "King David's Spaceship". Some of the incidents in "Mote" get mentioned; but this novel is about what happens after the Empire has collapsed, and all these colony worlds have spend several hundred years building nice little stable planetary societies. Now the new Empire, built on the ashes of the old Empire, is coming back, bringing peace and commerce and, oh by the way, you're going to be joining the new Empire, of course. But what if you don't want to join on their terms?
If you're looking for grand scopes and the dozen or so sequels needed to tell the story, check out S. M. Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series (aka The Emberverse). It's main plotline is that for some unknown reason, a "damping field" has been put all over Earth at the same time: gunpowder won't explode, gasoline won't burn, you can't even get steam to drive pistons. In an instant, the entire world gets plunged into the Middle Ages. After the fires die out in the cities and a majority of the people die due to starvation and disease, what kind of society to you build and how do you build it?
Neal Stephenson also wrote an excellent book about money and cryptography called "Cryptonomicon". The story switches between WW2 and present day (i.e., 1999) that gradually links the actions of the two groups together. Part of it makes you appreciate how much technology has advanced in the past 20 years and the other part of it makes you realize just how bloody hard cryptography is, both the creation and the breaking of ciphers. I think the guy who invented Bitcoin must have studied this book carefully.
Finally, I firmly agree with you on Schlock Mercenary. I especially love his Mercenary Maxims: "That which does not kill you has made a tactical error." "The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less." (Something our government needs to remember more often.) "Everything is air-droppable at least once."
I also enjoyed "Starship Troopers" but prefer "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress". I've enjoyed trying to develop Heinlein's improvement on the traditional rebel cell structure and figure out how it could be practically implemented. I thought the movie adaptation of "Starship Troopers" was a good adaptation, considering that it was made 30 or 40 years after the book was written. The director, Paul Verhoeven, modeled many of the space battles after his memories of standing in his yard in Holland watching the dogfights. I think it shows. (Drifting into films, I remember when I first saw the 2nd Star Wars film [Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back] how the movements of the rebel army in preparing to defend their positions just seemed so REAL. It was only later I learned why when I read that the directors had arranged for the Norwegian Army to be in the film during their winter maneuvers training.)
A few years after "Mote" came out, Jerry Pournelle wrote a novel based in the same universe called "King David's Spaceship". Some of the incidents in "Mote" get mentioned; but this novel is about what happens after the Empire has collapsed, and all these colony worlds have spend several hundred years building nice little stable planetary societies. Now the new Empire, built on the ashes of the old Empire, is coming back, bringing peace and commerce and, oh by the way, you're going to be joining the new Empire, of course. But what if you don't want to join on their terms?
If you're looking for grand scopes and the dozen or so sequels needed to tell the story, check out S. M. Stirling's "Dies the Fire" series (aka The Emberverse). It's main plotline is that for some unknown reason, a "damping field" has been put all over Earth at the same time: gunpowder won't explode, gasoline won't burn, you can't even get steam to drive pistons. In an instant, the entire world gets plunged into the Middle Ages. After the fires die out in the cities and a majority of the people die due to starvation and disease, what kind of society to you build and how do you build it?
Neal Stephenson also wrote an excellent book about money and cryptography called "Cryptonomicon". The story switches between WW2 and present day (i.e., 1999) that gradually links the actions of the two groups together. Part of it makes you appreciate how much technology has advanced in the past 20 years and the other part of it makes you realize just how bloody hard cryptography is, both the creation and the breaking of ciphers. I think the guy who invented Bitcoin must have studied this book carefully.
Finally, I firmly agree with you on Schlock Mercenary. I especially love his Mercenary Maxims: "That which does not kill you has made a tactical error." "The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less." (Something our government needs to remember more often.) "Everything is air-droppable at least once."
"Everything is air-droppable at least once."
I'm going to have to remember that one
I'm going to have to remember that one
I forgot I have a fiction book in my collection to read. It is 2 years eight months and twenty eight days by Salman Rushdie. It is a signed copy by author when he was in Tulsa. I will have to check it out after I finish Bleak House and maybe "The Big Short"(sorry not fiction but painful truth).
Rob Croson
Elio Addict
Not yet. I'll bookmark that one for checking out in the future. The wikipedia summary of it looks very interesting.
There is that kind of feel to the Honor Harrington books as well.
Another good series along those lines, dealing with space combat at solar-system-spanning distances is the RCN Series (aka the Lt. Leary series) by David Drake. Those do get kind of repetitive toward the end. of the series, though.