Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Arts and Entertainment => Topic started by: Vince on 11 September, 2013, 01:48:17 pm
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OK, I seem to have completely bipassed science fiction as a genre and I'm thinking I should rectify this. So please can I have some suggestions of good books for a novice of this area?
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Depends on your taste. What fiction non-sci-fi have you read and enjoyed?
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There’s all sorts of stuff to suggest –
Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series is definitely worth a look.
Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ – there are sequels but the later ones are co-written and I’m not a fan. He also writes female very, very poorly in my view.
Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ novels tend to divide opinion with a love/hate even within the SF community/. For me I love the original but find the successive novels an exercise in diminishing returns. Avoid the ones co-written by his son and another author.
For more modern SF Iain M Bank’s SF (mostly set within the universe of The Culture) is definitely worth a read in fact I would recommend ‘The Player of Games’ as a great first SF read.
Bob Shaw’s ‘The Ragged Astronauts’ is an enjoyable read, as is the sequel (part of a sadly incomplete trilogy).
I’m a big fan of ‘Lord Valentine’s Castle’ by Robert Silverberg.
Jeff Noon is interesting, if a little cold – try either ‘Vurt’ or ‘Pollen’.
Neal Stephenson’s early books are very readable, especially ‘The Diamond Age’ and ‘Snowcrash’.
I’m a big fan of ‘The Forever War’ by Joe Haldeman too.
Loads more out there!
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Depends on your taste. What fiction non-sci-fi have you read and enjoyed?
Mostly crime or thrillers.
Loads more out there!
Yeah, thats the problem!
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Depends on your taste. What fiction non-sci-fi have you read and enjoyed?
Mostly crime or thrillers.
Then definitely try ‘Snowcrash’ by Neal Stephenson. Also try ‘Altered Carbon’ by Richard Morgan and ‘Hardwired’ by Walter Jon Williams.
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I'm not a sci-fi buff at all, but am really enjoying working my way through Iain M Banks's oeuvre, as much if not more than his M-less "straight" novels.
Thoroughly recommended.
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The Wool Trilogy by Hugh Howey. Starts with Wool, then prequel Shift and ends with Dust.
For short SF, Asimov's Nightfall collection. Foundation Series as mentioned and also his Robot novels and short stories.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God - by Arthur C Clarke
Various by Greg Bear particularly Blood Music and Moving Mars.
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Depends on your taste. What fiction non-sci-fi have you read and enjoyed?
Mostly crime or thrillers.
Loads more out there!
Yeah, thats the problem!
Try Peter Hamilton - Greg Mandel series
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindstar-Rising-Greg-Mandel-1/dp/0330537741/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1378905742&sr=8-14&keywords=Peter+F.+Hamilton (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindstar-Rising-Greg-Mandel-1/dp/0330537741/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1378905742&sr=8-14&keywords=Peter+F.+Hamilton)
'Player of Games' and 'Use of Weapons' are also excellent starters.
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Get a copy of Ready Player One (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline/dp/0099560437) and work your way through the authors that the protagonist namechecks, starting off with their most popular stuff:
- Douglas Adams
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Neil Stevenson
- Cory Doctorow
- Richard K. Morgan
- Stephen King
- Orson Scott Card
- Terry Pratchett
- Terry Brooks
- Alfred Bester
- Ray Bradbury
- Joe Halderman
- Robert A. Heinlein
- J.R.R. Tolkein
- Jack Vance
- William Gibson
- Neil Gaiman
- Bruce Sterling
- Michael Moorcock
- John Scalzi
- Roger Zelazny
Ready Player One is definitely one of the best SF books I've read recently - and it's like a who's who of SF, popular culture and internet memes.
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Charlotte's post leads me to a question: are we talking Hard S.F. or Fantasy?
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All those are good, but for some obscure reason, one is missing that really really shouldn't be.
Philip K Dick
Oh, and if you fancy an SF laugh - Harry Harrison
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Where's Arthur C Clarke?
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Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ novels tend to divide opinion with a love/hate even within the SF community/. For me I love the original but find the successive novels an exercise in diminishing returns. Avoid the ones co-written by his son and another author.
Kevin J. Anderson is the other author.
Author existence failure is a tricky issue for multi-book series, Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai sequence being another example.
Props for mentioning Hardwired, which someone really should have the balls to make into a film or a miniseries - the use of the present tense makes the book read like a screenplay. I'm also quite fond of Voice Of The Whirlwind, which is a sequel of sorts (or at least, set in the same universe, decades later).
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I didn't like Wascally Weasel's list ( but I agree on Jeff Noon and Neal Stephenson) so here's mine
A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Outcasts of Heavens Belt Joan D Vinge
The Word for World Is Forest Ursula K. Le Guin ( I like a lot of her stuff )
The Drowned World JG Ballard
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Phillip K. Dick ( in fact almost all of PKD's novels are fabulous, the other favourite is "Martian Time Slip")
The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger
The Shape of Things to Come HG Wells
The Ballad of Halo Jones Alan Moore
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..and 'Use of Weapons' are also excellent starters.
I read 'Use of Weapons' recently and found it to be piss poor. Apparently this was Mr Bank's first, unpublished novel that was later published when he became famous
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+1 for Altered Carbon
and obviously Philip K Dick
+ HG Wells and John Wyndham
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There’s all sorts of stuff to suggest –
Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series is definitely worth a look.
Seconded, though the first three are the best, and Asimov writes females pretty badly in all of them (but worse in the later books where he's making a conscious effort to include female characters and doing it so very, very badly).
There's always the Stainless Steel Rat and various other books by Harry Harrison which are fun, although many of them are Sci Fi Parody.
If you like short stories which verge on poetry, then Ray Bradbury, although some of his longer works (The Martian Chronicles (aka The Silver Locusts in some editions) and Fahrenheit 451 are definitive of the genre.
Also definitely John Wyndham (apart from Web, which is awful) and Halo Jones.
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Harry Harrison
Gods, yes - the Stainless Steel Rat books are a hoot, though I'd stop at The Stainless Steel Rat for President - some of the more recent ones were somewhat inferior.
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Where's Arthur C Clarke?
Sri Lanka. He died there in 2008 and was buried
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<hands coat to vorsprung>
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For an easy start I would look at Anne McCaffery's early work (The Ship Who Sang especially) and then go onto the Pern books. the first few come across as Fantasy books with hints of Sci-Fi, but by the time you get to The Dolphins of Pern, the inhabitants have managed to get some of the tech working and the becomes very much a cross-over.
For my money I find "Feersum Injuns" (SP?) the best if IMB's books.
Asimov wrote a number of short stories which are quick to read and lead you into more detailed, longer Sci-Fi, or not, if you can't get on with them.
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I thought the Pern books were great when I was 10. Not sure they really work for many adults.
The Crystal Singer books are the other way round.
Julian May's Galactic Milieu series is good but you have to start with 'The Intervention'.
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Also, what do you mean by "Sci Fi"? Do you want rockets and robots and televisor screens? Asimov/Bradbury. Do you want the 1950s England destroyed by monsters? Wyndham's Triffids. Near-Future dystopia? Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy. Post-nuclear apocalyptic dystopian future*? Wyndham's Chrysalids.
*Growing up in the 1980s/1990s, practically almost all my childhood reading was post-nuclear apocalyptic - Nicholas Fisk, Ann Halam's Inland trilogy, Louise Lawrence's Children of the Dust, Robert Westall's Futuretrack 5, Robert C O'Brien's Z for Zachariah, Robert Swindells' Brother in the Land... The school library was pretty much a "how-to" guide for coping with nuclear fall-out!
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I like (already mentioned)
Ursula Le Guin
Asimov's Foundation stuff
John Wyndham
Dune (but agree with WW about sequels)
Julian May
Margaret Atwood
Not yet mentioned
Larry Niven (and his collaborations with Pournelle & Barnes)
and when I was littler
Heinlein.
However. Some of them are shite, and I know it's shite- poor characterisation, immense plot holes, etc etc but I like them anyway.
Why do you think you're missing something?
I've read hardly any Westerns (unless you count Cormac McCarthy) or War Things (unless you count Hemingway or HE Bates) and y'know, I can carry on my whole life like that.
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I thought the Pern books were great when I was 10. Not sure they really work for many adults.
The Crystal Singer books are the other way round.
Julian May's Galactic Milieu series is good but you have to start with 'The Intervention'.
It must be my inner 10 yr old that likes them, then :)
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Also, what do you mean by "Sci Fi"?
That's a rather deep rabbit hole in which to jump: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceFiction
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Kim Stanley Robinson is very good.
The Mars Trilogy are great hard SF with lots of sociology and politics thrown in for good measure.
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Can I point out the Harry Harrison also wrote some excellent serious Sci-Fi too.
Try One Step from Earth and his Discworld series (I think that's what the trilogy is called - the individual novels are Starworld, Wheelword and Homeworld I think) - I thought they were good.
His best parody for me was Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers which is a real pisstake of Space Opera but I did last read it when I was about 12 so I dunno if it's any good for adults.
Many people find C. Clarke and Azimov very dry - which is kind of fair comment really.
I though Arthur C. Clarke's best book was Childhood's End - brilliant stuff! Rendevous with Rama is a decent second although its sequels (as mentioned) suck big time - particularly the later ones.
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Incidentally, you might want to think about what you might like in Sci-Fi as it covers a range of styles broadly described as
Hard Sci-Fi - this is the driest stuff generally, Azimov and Clarke were big authors here - this focuses on real science and what might actually be possible in the future. Can still be very good though - I certainly like it.
Soft Sci-Fi. Star Trek is a good example. Lots of sciency stuff but really a lot of it is fantasy. "How does the intertial dampner work mister Roddenberry?" - "Very well thankyou". Makes for some cracking stories though :-)
Space Opera- essentially Swords and Scorcery Fantasy set in space with laser guns and big fuck-off ships. Think Star Wars. It gets me a bit that people even classify this as Sci-Fi really. Being in space doesn't really make things 'scientific'. Can also be excellent though of course :-)
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Yes, knowing what scifi is seems to be part of my problem. In my yoof I read Triffids and the Midwitch Cuckoos, and others such as the Death of Grass, but I had not considered them as science fiction, probably because they are set on Earth and didn't have robots that said 'bleep'. I don't consider Hitchhiker's Guide as scifi either.
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Incidentally, you might want to think about what you might like in Sci-Fi as it covers a range of styles broadly described as
Hard Sci-Fi - this is the driest stuff generally, Azimov and Clarke were big authors here - this focuses on real science and what might actually be possible in the future. Can still be very good though - I certainly like it.
Soft Sci-Fi. Star Trek is a good example. Lots of sciency stuff but really a lot of it is fantasy. "How does the intertial dampner work mister Roddenberry?" - "Very well thankyou". Makes for some cracking stories though :-)
Space Opera- essentially Swords and Scorcery Fantasy set in space with laser guns and big fuck-off ships. Think Star Wars. It gets me a bit that people even classify this as Sci-Fi really. Being in space doesn't really make things 'scientific'. Can also be excellent though of course :-)
Cyberpunk - set in the near future but the topic is really the present. About technology that is soft and that sticks to the skin
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I knew someone would come in with Cyberpunk after my post :thumbsup: - yes there are many subgenres.
I like Neal Stephenson's Diamond age - it pretended to be Cyberpunk and then transformed into true Hard Sci-Fi.
Triffids and that are definitely Sci-Fi for me. John Wyndham's stuff is certainly good and kind of hard to judge as Sci fi at times but I think they count.
If you want a classic - try Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or Orwell's 1984.
It's all is dramatically different from one author to the next it's impossible to gauge it all.
Douglas Adam's stuff is basically comedy Space Opera I'd say.
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It's worth mentioning that SF as a genre is one where the short story can really work well, and is probably a very good starting point.
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I've been on an early science fiction kick of late. Jules Verne, HG Wells, that sort of thing. The stuff that created the genres I grew up with, but never actually got round to reading. I'm finding it fascinating from a sociological and history of science viewpoint (the conceived propulsion system of the Nautilus says an awful lot about the state of electrical engineering in the 1860s, for example, and the book in general is practically a homage to the Victorian classification-is-all approach to biology).
In that vein, how about M. P. Shiel's The Purple Mist. One of the defining works of the post-apocalyptic genre.
Top tip: Older hard SF is always best appreciated with googlepedia on standby to translate the wacky units and archaic chemical names into something that makes sense.
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It's worth mentioning that SF as a genre is one where the short story can really work well, and is probably a very good starting point.
Very much this.
Colin Kapp's Unorthodox Engineers stories are quite good. As well as the usual Clarke, etc.
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I'd say that space opera is more a question of scale than of scientific hardness - some space fantasy is also space opera, but not all space opera is space fantasy.
Star Wars qualifies as space fantasy for the wizardry (i.e. the Force, and the Jedi and Sith orders of force adepts), not to mention the fantasy/folk story tropes invoked throughout, but the galactic-scale setting and technology (can we say Kardashev Scale here?) also puts it in the space opera sub-genre as well.
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It's not Sci Fi by the way. It's SF.
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Gibson
Banks
Alistair Reynolds
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Not Syfy then? ;)
Although I brought up Soft, Hard etc. I do prefer not to delve too deeply into genre classifaction - that way one treads the dangerous path from Geekdom to Nerd-dom and one does not want to go to far down that path. :-*
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Depends on your taste. What fiction non-sci-fi have you read and enjoyed?
Mostly crime or thrillers.
the first 3 William Gibson books (Neuromancer ... ) are definitely SF but they're also my favourite thrillers! Great if you love a bit of noir (they owe rather a lot to Chandler).
(the later ones are great too)
It's not Sci Fi by the way. It's SF.
I've been reading the stuff since (er.... )before 1980, and I'm happy with either term. You call it what you want :)
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Tau Zero by Poul Anderson.
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Depends on your taste. What fiction non-sci-fi have you read and enjoyed?
Mostly crime or thrillers.
the first 3 William Gibson books (Neuromancer ... ) are definitely SF but they're also my favourite thrillers! Great if you love a bit of noir (they owe rather a lot to Chandler).
I was about to say William Gibson was a pretty good bridge, Charles Stross Rule 34 / Halting State too. I'm not much of one for the spaceships sort of SciFi though.
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I did a similar thing about 2 years ago. What I did was did a "100 greatest Sci-Fi books" search on google and then looked down them to see what sounded interesting plots. I also stumbled across a couple of books via Amazon recommends and friends recommending I look at some titles.
In the end, three books that have stuck with me are:
Jeff Noon - Vurt
Phillip K. Dick - Ubik
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
I've read a few others over the past 18 months or so. Some Sci-Fi is interesting. Some is twaddle. But they generally have an interesting idea buried in them.
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Wunja, I apologise for coming late to this discussion and allowing so many people to distract you with their "opinions" on SF. OMG.
Nobody has mentioned A.E. van Vogt. His work, "Voyage of the Space Beagle" is the place to start.
After that you can listen to everyone else.
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Hieros Journey, Sterling E Lanier = magic.
The original Dune Saga is also extremely well written.
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If you'll forgive me:
Douglas Adam's stuff is basically comedy Space Opera I'd say.
Slightly OT this ... but a friend once told me he'd never read/listened/watched HHGTTG cos
"I don't like Science Fiction"
I felt this was like avoiding Blackadder cos of its costume drama content.
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Alan Dean Foster :facepalm:
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Stand on Zanzibar & The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. M John H
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Bloody Tapatalk!
M John Harrison's Light and its sequels, his Viruconium fantasy stuff is good as well.
Most stuff by Gibson, Banks, Reynolds & Stross. Ken McLeod is good as well.
Lots more, but my battery is dying.
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Blindsight by Peter Watts is an excellent first contact novel, available to download free. Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Noon is near future SF written from the perspective of an autistic savant.
Ursula le Guin is worth reading. Thoughtful stuff where shooting or blowing shit up is not usually on the menu.
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Bloody hell ! I forgot China Mieville !
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Bloody hell ! I forgot China Mieville !
Yes, indeed.
A totally bonkers imagination. Wonderful stuff.
Coincidentally, I finished Railsea 5 minutes ago.
Even creepier - I've just switched the tele on and Who Do You Think You Are are talking about salvage! (You need to read the book).
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Depends on your taste. What fiction non-sci-fi have you read and enjoyed?
Mostly crime or thrillers.
Then definitely try ‘Snowcrash’ by Neal Stephenson. Also try ‘Altered Carbon’ by Richard Morgan and ‘Hardwired’ by Walter Jon Williams.
I have not read Hardwired, but I've lost count on how many times I've read the 2 others.
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Incidentally, Frank Herbert's Dune got rather undersold earlier I thought.
It's quite simply one of the best books I've read - utterly brilliant.
Its sequels do, as mentioned slowly disappear up the author's butthole though. Particularly from God Emperor (book 4) onwards - 2 and 3 are still pretty good. Chapter House Dune is almost undreadable pretentious drivel. For some reason I've read it twice and still don't understand it.
The modern ones bear no resemblance to the original series save they are set in the same universe. They don't even possess the 'cleverness' of the originals -they're just bollocks. I had a read of one once and decided I wouldn't bother after a couple of pages.
It was like The Stainless Steel rat meets sandworms with none of the charm of either series.
Dune though - just wow. Never think it's anything like that awful Sting film. It's a completely unfilmable book if ever there was one.
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Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon is near future SF written from the perspective of an autistic savant.
I've bought two copies of that book. Both times lent them to people and they've never come back.
I don't think much of her other sf, but speed of dark is brilliant. Much much better than 'dog in the bloody nightime'.
Elizabeth Moon has a severely autistic son, I believe.
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If we provide too many more examples, Wunja will be back to square one (but that's not going to stop me).
I guess one thing to consider Wunja is whether you want to ease yourself in to Science Fiction, or are you looking for 'classics' of the genre, looking for what possibilities it has to offer etc.
To ease yourself in from more familiar literature I would recommend The Dispossessed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed) by Ursula Le Guin. It's an accessible read but is literate by non-genre standards and contains some thought provoking political ideas. One of my favourite books of any genre.
Many (but by no means all) of the classics of Science Fiction originate from cold-war era American writers. As others have said, Ray Bradbury, Philip K Dick and Robert Heinlein among others have produced some of the classics of that period and are worth reading if that is what you are after. Personally, while Fahrenheit 451 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farenheit_451) (Bradbury) and Stranger in A Strange Land (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_in_a_Strange_Land) (Heinlein) are both regarded as classics of the genre, I personally found both to be a little overrated. Reading them now may not be the best introduction to what the genre can offer. On the other hand I think Philip K Dick has produced some masterworks. As an introduction I'd consider Time Out of Joint (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Out_Of_Joint) or Ubik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubik) as typical of his mid-period stuff. If you like it, definitely consider his some of his later and more ambitious works such as A Scanner Darkly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scanner_Darkly), VALIS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS), and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transmigration_of_Timothy_Archer).
As for more modern SciFi SF that uses the genre to explore form of writing among its themes, I'd second the suggestion of Feersum Endjinn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn) by Ian M Banks. While a quarter of the book is written in phonetic English (as the title), it is surprisingly readable and a good introduction to Banks' science fiction work.
I am no expert in SciFi SF (case in point) and generally find 'difficult' literature, well, er, difficult. But one of the problems with it as a genre is the huge volume of trash. For example, while I loved Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books when I was 14, in my view they are just that - books for 14 year olds (hiding behind a respectable veneer of pastiche).
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Wunja, you may have noticed Philip K Dick getting quite a few mentions, there's a reason for that. If you haven't read SF, you may not have been familiar with his work. Actually, you are.
The well known films from his work include:
Minority Report (a short story originally)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? turned into Bladerunner
We Can Remember it for you Wholesale turned into Total Recall
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Incidentally, Frank Herbert's Dune got rather undersold earlier I thought.
It's quite simply one of the best books I've read - utterly brilliant.
Its sequels do, as mentioned slowly disappear up the author's butthole though. Particularly from God Emperor (book 4) onwards - 2 and 3 are still pretty good. Chapter House Dune is almost undreadable pretentious drivel. For some reason I've read it twice and still don't understand it.
The modern ones bear no resemblance to the original series save they are set in the same universe. They don't even possess the 'cleverness' of the originals -they're just bollocks. I had a read of one once and decided I wouldn't bother after a couple of pages.
It was like The Stainless Steel rat meets sandworms with none of the charm of either series.
Dune though - just wow. Never think it's anything like that awful Sting film. It's a completely unfilmable book if ever there was one.
It's worth web-searching for the abortive Alexandro Jodorowsky Dune film project, which got as far as having concept artwork produced by Chris Foss H. R. Giger and Jean "Moebius" Giraud. It would have been an epic production, and probably an even bigger mess than the Lynch version - Salvador Dali as the Emperor Shaddam, anyone? ;D
Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune were turned into two mini-series for the Sci-Fi Channel, and were quite well received at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert%27s_Dune
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert%27s_Children_of_Dune
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Yes I saw those, they were not bad actually but as always a pale shadow of the books. They didn't invent crap like 'weirding modules' like Lynch's film which was to their credit. Certainly they were a valiant attempt at it :thumbsup:
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It's not Sci Fi by the way. It's SF.
Or are they different things? Or different ways of looking at the same thing? One of my cousins (who is a real clever scientist) used to be president (or chairman or lord high commander or whatever) of the British Speculative Fiction Society - so for them it was very much about exploring technological possibilities.
I've never thought of myself as liking S(cience) F(iction) but Kathy's post earlier makes me wonder. I enjoyed reading Oryx and Crake and the Handmaiden's Tale, and when I was a child I thought Peter Dickinson's Changes Trilogy (http://peterdickinson.com/category/childrens-books/the-changes/) was great (post-apocalyptic near future, non-nuclear, all on earth, no technologies, with a wizard - who is a drug addict - but no elves or dragons, all the characters are human) so perhaps I should just say I don't enjoy stories focusing on things beyond the present, human world.
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Harry Harrison was one of the authors that I read almost anything by in my early teens. He wrote some more ‘serious’ SF and of those I would recommend ‘Captive Universe’.
He also wrote ‘Make Room, Make Room’ which was filmed as ‘Soylent Green’. It’s arguably a good book but it is very depressing.
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The most depressing reads I've had have been Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant but that's straying into pure fantasy. But they are proper grim when it comes to the dark side stuff. Of what I've read only Tolkein and him make the dark/evil characters really proper nasty and not cool in any way.
I'm reliably informed that Donaldson had also written some very darkly depressing Science Fiction too but as I haven't read it, nor remember what it even is, I wouldn't recommend it.
(Thomas Covenant books are excellent by the way, provided you can cope with reading about genocidal bad guys and a papist 'hero')
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(Thomas Covenant books are excellent by the way, provided you can cope with reading about genocidal bad guys and a papist 'hero')
Was that brought to us via the magic of autocorrect or did I miss a major theme in the books?
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;D ;D ;D :facepalm:
I would correct it but it is such a good mis-type I'm proud of it! (why is there no rofl smiley around here?)
It's up there with a 'Hey Preston!' I once typed elsewhere - meaning Hey Presto! obviously ;)
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The most depressing reads I've had have been Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant but that's straying into pure fantasy. But they are proper grim when it comes to the dark side stuff. Of what I've read only Tolkein and him make the dark/evil characters really proper nasty and not cool in any way.
I'm reliably informed that Donaldson had also written some very darkly depressing Science Fiction too but as I haven't read it, nor remember what it even is, I wouldn't recommend it.
(Thomas Covenant books are excellent by the way, provided you can cope with reading about genocidal bad guys and a papist 'hero')
Yes indeed, Jeez - if you think Donaldson's Covenant books are dark, his Gap series is a whole other level.
The characters Angus Thermopyle and Nick Succorso are properly nasty, misogynistic and evil. They're a good read though - but quite hard work at times, in a typically Donaldson way.
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Wunja, you may have noticed Philip K Dick getting quite a few mentions, there's a reason for that. If you haven't read SF, you may not have been familiar with his work. Actually, you are.
The well known films from his work include:
Minority Report (a short story originally)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? turned into Bladerunner
We Can Remember it for you Wholesale turned into Total Recall
I've read all of those books and seen al the films.
The similarity between the books and films can be a bit tenuous at best.
I much preferred the films tbh.
2001 - A Space Odyssey. That's my recommendation.
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The most depressing reads I've had have been Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant but that's straying into pure fantasy. But they are proper grim when it comes to the dark side stuff. Of what I've read only Tolkein and him make the dark/evil characters really proper nasty and not cool in any way.
I'm reliably informed that Donaldson had also written some very darkly depressing Science Fiction too but as I haven't read it, nor remember what it even is, I wouldn't recommend it.
(Thomas Covenant books are excellent by the way, provided you can cope with reading about genocidal bad guys and a papist 'hero')
Yes indeed, Jeez - if you think Donaldson's Covenant books are dark, his Gap series is a whole other level.
The characters Angus Thermopyle and Nick Succorso are properly nasty, misogynistic and evil. They're a good read though - but quite hard work at times, in a typically Donaldson way.
Yep, those were the ones I was told about :thumbsup: They're more depressing than Covenant? - wow.
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The most depressing reads I've had have been Stephen Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant but that's straying into pure fantasy. But they are proper grim when it comes to the dark side stuff. Of what I've read only Tolkein and him make the dark/evil characters really proper nasty and not cool in any way.
I'm reliably informed that Donaldson had also written some very darkly depressing Science Fiction too but as I haven't read it, nor remember what it even is, I wouldn't recommend it.
(Thomas Covenant books are excellent by the way, provided you can cope with reading about genocidal bad guys and a papist 'hero')
Yes indeed, Jeez - if you think Donaldson's Covenant books are dark, his Gap series is a whole other level.
The characters Angus Thermopyle and Nick Succorso are properly nasty, misogynistic and evil. They're a good read though - but quite hard work at times, in a typically Donaldson way.
Yep, those were the ones I was told about :thumbsup: They're more depressing than Covenant? - wow.
Not so much depressing, but dark. Sexually dark. Perverse. Much much more rapey than Covenant.
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I've seen people refuse to read Covenant because he is a rapist.
Yeeeessss. But... it happens at the beginning and he spends like the next six books paying for it - big time. And he's hardly a 'hero' in the conventional sense anyway.
I doubt I'll read the Gap series to be honest although I do find the prospect intriguing. Some years ago now I bought the first book in the 3rd Chronicles of Covenant and I have never managed to actually bring myself to read it. The second chronicles managed to be even darker and nastier than the first so I'm not sure I should read it in a house that possesses razorblades.
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I'll agree with the recommendations for:
Iain M Banks
M John Harrison
Philip K Dick
Jeff Noon
and add:
David Brin - the Uplift trilogies & Existence
Jon Courtney Grimwood - Arabesk trilogy (probably more futuristic thriller than SF)
Dan Simmons - the Hyperion Cantos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos) or Illium/Olympos duology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilium/Olympos)
Ian McDonald - Brasyl and River of Gods/Cyberabad Days
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Wunja, you may have noticed Philip K Dick getting quite a few mentions, there's a reason for that. If you haven't read SF, you may not have been familiar with his work. Actually, you are.
The well known films from his work include:
Minority Report (a short story originally)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? turned into Bladerunner
We Can Remember it for you Wholesale turned into Total Recall
Another OT diversion: Dick has written 'straight' fiction. I read one - it was readable, odd, but a little dull. No surprise I can't remember the title ...
As for the film adaptations, i'd say they are good short stories, and the films are truly excellent examples of their genre.(well, MR is perhaps just average).
n.b. Bladerunner stole all of its style from Neuromancer, not the work of Dick.
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Films are about short story length to be fair - probably why they fit so well. A full length novel needs to be made into a very long film to do the book justice in my view.
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Films are about short story length to be fair - probably why they fit so well. A full length novel needs to be made into a very long film to do the book justice in my view.
+1
Also, you can just steal the basic idea and write a cinematic script round it. Cos noone reads shorts, you avoid too many fans whinging about what you missed out, how the hero is too short, or the hobbits have too many toes, and how - inexplicably - it just wasn't very much like the book ... ad nauseum ...
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I realise this is veering OT, but by coincidence I've just read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption today as I was interested to see what they'd changed to make the film. The answer is very little. Those changes they did make were all for the better - the book has several prison governors; big bad warden hardly features; there is no elaborate bookkeeping sting, and Red isn't Morgan Freeman. Most of Red's narration is lifted straight out of the book and the characterisation pretty similar (although it is very hard not to see Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman when reading it). I guess Stephen King knows how to write cinemticgraphically, but the film was just about the perfect book adaptation.
Back to slightly nearer the topic, I think by far the most faithful PKD film adaptation is A Scanner Darkly. While a short story typically has about the right amount of plot for a film and SF especially is ripe for good filmic plots, a full novel allows a greater depth of characterisation and narrative style. PKD's mid to later works certainly had that speed-fuelled paranoic quality to them, captured perfectly in A Scanner Darkly.
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Matt, Bladerunner was released while Neuromancer was being written.
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Matt, Bladerunner was released while Neuromancer was being written.
really? Thanks. I am contrite :-[
(Anyway, the style of the film certainly didn't come from Dick's story, IMHO - and Harrison Ford wasn't in it. I'll try to dig out the relevant quote from Mr Gibson at some point - it was a long time ago ... They are still amongst my favourite films/books respectively.)
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The look and the plot of Bladerunner is lifted wholesale from Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
Bladerunner's better, though. And has sound.
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http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Masterworks
Wandering in a bookshop took me to Sarah Canary, from this list, most recently, which was a joy. Just order them all from amazon, stock your shelves and dig in!
I do like a William Gibson too, but it's tricky for him to be scarily cutting edge now as his stuff is so techno. Last ones have been a bit meh, but the early stuff is cracking,even now.
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Blimey, I am stunned as to how few of those I've read.
No Azimov at all.
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As a confirmed Star Wars hater (yes, I truly don't like any of the films at all, never have, it's just Lord of the Rings in Space ferchristssake) I'd say my favourite Sci-Fi films (sorry to steal the thread from books) are, in a rough order (that would change on a daily basis naturally), are
1 - 2001 - A Space Odyssey (I think this sums up Sci-Fi as a genre/concept perfectly)
2- Blade Runner - I think this film is prophetic. Give it just 100 years, just one human (?) lifetime.
3 - Alien/Aliens - Not prophetic, just rip-roaring yarns. Both brilliant in different ways
4 - The Terminator/T2 - Prophetic, not in the time-travel aspect, but in the autonomous/drone warfare predictions (we are closer than you think). Another 2 rip-roaring action films.
5 - Forbidden Planet - I absolutely love everything about this film. It's a thing of beauty.
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Oh come on! If we are veering off into the film space, there are only two worth watching:
1) Earth Girls are Easy
2) Mars Attacks
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Forbidden Planet :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:
Especially when you consider when it was made.
(Well it is Shakespeare in the end - it would be a good story ;) )
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I think I was 8 when I watched that. Didn't sleep well for about a week!
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Oh come on! If we are veering off into the film space, there are only two worth watching:
1) Earth Girls are Easy
2) Mars Attacks
..and Dark Star
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I tried to get the missus to see Dark Star a few months ago. She threatened to go to bed within about 15 minutes. Shame I hadn't seem it for donkey's years.
I have a major soft spot for Silent Running.
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I tried to get the missus to see Dark Star a few months ago. She threatened to go to bed within about 15 minutes. Shame I hadn't seem it for donkey's years.
I have a major soft spot for Silent Running.
I must have seen Silent Running and Dark Star within a few weeks of each other. Maybe they were on that Alex Cox series of cult films on the telly about 20 years ago.
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I have a major soft spot for Silent Running.
I'd try Grease, then ;)
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;D
Moviedrome! God I miss that.
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Odd comments:
As far as I know, 2001 is the only hard SF film so far in which the spaceships don't make a noise. That makes it pretty well the only hard SF film set in space.
The Fifth Element is one of my favourites, because it's highly entertaining. Ditto Independence Day, despite the occasional lapse into (really quite good) corn.
A great opportunity missed: Stephen Spielberg's whack at The War of the Worlds. Levering in the cheesy old father/son-conflict schtick was cheap, nasty and superfluous.
Alan Moore's War of the Worlds pastiche in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series would make a great film. So would Stephen Baxter's The Space Machine.
Forbidden Planet was a great idea well executed in its time. I would love to see a modern remake, provided it could be done with suitable reverence and without the likes of Cruise, Willis etc.
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Odd comments:
As far as I know, 2001 is the only hard SF film so far in which the spaceships don't make a noise. That makes it pretty well the only hard SF film set in space.
Alien franchise - ditto.
Firefly/Serenity
Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Solaris
Red Planet
Erm, those are the ones off the top of my head.
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Odd comments:
As far as I know, 2001 is the only hard SF film so far in which the spaceships don't make a noise. That makes it pretty well the only hard SF film set in space.
Alien franchise - ditto.
Firefly/Serenity
Battlestar Galactica TV series.
Solaris
Red Planet
Erm, those are the ones off the top of my head.
Russian Solaris or the Clooney one? Can't really remember what the spaceships did in either, they weren't there long. Think the Clooney one had music over. Can't remember even seeing a spaceship in the Russian one.
Hold it, though - Nostromo (Alien) rumbles. Firefly, & BG apart from the hokey 70s film, are TV productions (never seen 'em). In the Red Planet trailer the spaceship rumbles too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1o-LAANg3s0
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I'm rewatching Firefly at the moment, which is still enjoyable, but it's really a western. With spaceships.
I was persuaded to read those Gap series books. I did wade through them for some reason that now defies explanation. It wasn't just that they were dark and all the characters unlikable, nothing all much that seemed to happen, and what did, took a long time. It was the reading equivalent of a terminal illness.
SF, I think I ought to like, but I'm not sure that I do. The earlier Iain M Banks books aren't bad, but the latter ones got bogged down, and I'm sorry, I don't find the ship names hilarious. That said, I found Hitchhikers Guide rather tedious, so possibly it's the same strand of humour that I'm not wired for. Either that, or I'm just odd. I'm attempting to write my own SF novel, but as mentioned elsewhere, that was a bet so it's allowed to be awful. It has to be of Peter J. Hamilton length too. I'm only doing the one volume though and it's bonkers space opera with evisceration and robot children and huge spaceships. They probably make a noise in space (actually they don't). I did actually like the PJH books, but undoubtedly they go on a bit. I suppose by some measure that's value for money. I like the chop-socky space hokum kind of SF, I think, not the hard stuff. More Alien than Solaris.
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it would be trivial to concoct and justify some technology that allowed space-peoples to 'hear' nearby spaceships.
I care as much about this bit of 'bad science' as I care about how many toes the hobbits should have had. Do you people watch those "Great Movie Mistakes" programs too? Someone must, own up!
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it would be trivial to concoct and justify some technology that allowed space-peoples to 'hear' nearby spaceships.
I care as much about this bit of 'bad science' as I care about how many toes the hobbits should have had. Do you people watch those "Great Movie Mistakes" programs too? Someone must, own up!
I don't watch them but I do like the Movie Cliche web site.
Basically most/all Sci-Fi movies would be unwatchable if one were put off by bad science (and every movie ever made if exaggeration of real life upset you).
2001 - A Space Odyssey does at least try to deal with the lack of gravity to be found on Spaceships.
It also demonstrates that it's unlikely that 2 spaceships will ever meet each other in the same plane, as 2 boats would, facing each other.
Nobody ever got blown 20 feet through a shop window by a shot gun (Isaac Newton would have known that) but it looks good in Sam Peckinpah films.
Asteroids do however make a noise like a V8 engine, but only if they are huge enough to wipe out New York city.
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Nostromo rumbles when on board - but not in space, as far as I remember.
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Rumbling spaceships - it's all about context:
Obviously for interior shots, it's fine. I don't really mind if it's an exterior shot of a single ship (as long as the sound doesn't change as if you were hearing it pass), which is a bit like adding foley to telephoto footage in wildlife documentaries - you *know* it's bollocks, but it's an approximation of what you'd hear from the ship itself. Audible explosions, OTOH, are right out - even if you were hearing the explosion locally, it wouldn't sound like that.
What bugs me more is the complete disregard for how rocket-like engines are used on spacecraft. Running continuously when it doesn't make sense to do so (though continuous thrust from an ion drive or similar does get round some of the gravity issues, but then they orient the decks the wrong way), and spaceships generally pointing in the wrong direction when manoeuvring, and generally steering like fixed-wing aircraft. Other than 2001 and Babylon 5 (and then, only some of the time), I can't think of much that got it right.
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Apart from the blatantly made-up bits (eg "The Gap" - read hyperspace, so a "Gap Drive" is a hyperspace engine), a lot of the physics in Stephen Donaldson's Gap series "felt" quite believable and real.
Orienting a ship for deceleration so that occupants aren't turned to mush. Deceleration that takes days, that kind of thing.
Controlling the ships in the novels was mostly about writing scripts for the computers, rather than sitting at a joystick looking out of implausibly large windows. In fact, I don't recall there actually being any windows on the spaceships - at least, not the ones featured by pirates and freelancers, outside views were from cameras - and all completely silent of course.
Water was all recycled from waste and the air. Distances still "felt" huge.
If they weren't so grim and incredibly long, they'd probably make quite good films.
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Orienting a ship for deceleration so that occupants aren't turned to mush. Deceleration that takes days, that kind of thing.
That's why you need intertial dampeners innit ;D
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Or super-sized KERS
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Speaking as a lifelong fan (a word invented by SF people) I have stayed out of this to see where it goes. In answer to the OP, what you might like in SF all depends on what you like as a story. If into big tech and vastly wideranging theatre, then there are all sorts of things in the Space Opera area, where Emperors struggle against invading space barbarians (eh?) and so forth. There are also high-tech futures where the 'alien' is made as alien as possible, such as 'Mote in God's Eye' by Pournelle and Niven, or Vernor Vinge's 'Deep' stories.
If what is wanted is closer to reality, but still off-kilter, John Birmingham's WW2 books offer a much more realistic view of what happens when a 21st Century navy drops into WWII, and bites the bullets of the sexism, racism and homophobia that existed back then.
Classic works to consider are 'Earth Abides', the collected stories of Philip Dick and Theodore Sturgeon, and the works of the late Bob Shaw. Bob Heinlein produced a lot of good stuff, and the one that everyone either loves or hates is 'Starship Troopers', which carries a huge load of philosophy as well as a sneak punch against the reader's assumptions about the narrator. Pity about the film.
Donaldson I stopped reading partway through the second volume of the current 'Covenant' Runes of Earth set, as he has now taken his thesaurus and disappeared completely up his own arse. His writing is so unreadable that his story concepts get lost.
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Donaldson I stopped reading partway through the second volume of the current 'Covenant' Runes of Earth set, as he has now taken his thesaurus and disappeared completely up his own arse. His writing is so unreadable that his story concepts get lost.
Ah, is that called doing a 'Frank Herbert'? That's what happened to Dune. Although his thesauras was in fine form from the outset of course.
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Some cliches to help you out...
SPACE & VACUUM
Explosions in space make noise
Exposure to vacuum makes you horribly swell up and/or explode within seconds (ex. "Total Recall", "Outland")
There's a deep humming in space, no doubt about it.
Space is not Newtonian; spacecraft can't 'coast', but just stop dead if they run out of fuel or power.
Laser beams are visible in vacuum.
SPACESHIPS
Spaceships make noise!
Spaceships always fly perpendicular to the same axis. When two spacecraft encounter each other, they're always aligned on a plane and never approach at odd angles.
All spaceships, no matter how small, have internal artifical gravity and no matter how badly your ship gets pummeled by the evil aliens in the evil alien ship, no matter how many external panels get blown away, no matter how many sparks or how much smoke pours out of your control panels, the artificial gravity will always keep working.
There are tiny cameras mounted everywhere, on every panel, in your spaceship. No matter what happens anywhere int eh ship, you will always be able to ask the computer to replay the scene for you later (even if the computer went up in smoke) and unlike those blurry convenience store cameras, your tiny ship cameras always capture everyone's actions at eye-level with perfect lighting.
Warp or hyper-drive will always fail at critical moments.
Inertial dampers will always prevent passengers from being plastered against the walls during acceleration into warp speed, yet any explosion will send passengers reeling across the room.
In a spaceship battle scene, for a ship to fire a weapon at another, it must be in visual range. Even though the 20th century saw the advent of weapons that can be fired without visual contact, the people of the future have lost this technology.
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The bit about coasting... there is a dreadfully stupid scene in one of the Mars films that came out together, the one with Tom Hanks IIRC. He is trying to 'jet' across to a rescue/escape pod and he runs out of reaction matter ('fuel') so, of course, he stops dead...
And talking of testicular utterances, the totally shite film 'Stranded' has humans breathing out CO.
To an extent, that brings up the SF--Skiffy (Sci-Fi) distinction. For die-hard Fans, Sci-Fi refers to things that have an SF atmosphere but are not SF, for example Flash Gordon, Star Trek, Star Wars and so on. What constitutes SF has always been a real bone of contention..
Speaking of Star Wars, Lucas allegedly tried to sue the makers of 'Battlestar...' for plagiarism, only to receive a call from a rep of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) professional body.
"Let us know how you get on, George"
"Why?"
"Well, if you win, we'll be suing you for the same thing"
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Thanks for all the input. Not a clear answer, but I didn't really expect that.
I've just started The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin on Jo's recommendation.
If that goes well, I'll give Dune a try, then something by Kurt Vonnegut as he was mentioned a lot in The Universe Verses Alex Woods.
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...
Speaking of Star Wars, Lucas allegedly tried to sue the makers of 'Battlestar...' for plagiarism, only to receive a call from a rep of the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) professional body.
"Let us know how you get on, George"
"Why?"
"Well, if you win, we'll be suing you for the same thing"
Reminds me of something I spotted on the io9 site recently, concerning all the sources that James Cameron ripped off "was inspired by" for his Avatar film. ;)
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Reminds me of something I spotted on the io9 site recently, concerning all the sources that James Cameron ripped off "was inspired by" for his Avatar film. ;)
Sources plural? I thought it was just the one:
(http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/130283/original.jpg)
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Reminds me of something I spotted on the io9 site recently, concerning all the sources that James Cameron ripped off "was inspired by" for his Avatar film. ;)
Sources plural? I thought it was just the one:
He also ripped off the landscape and appearance of the animals from Roger Dean's artwork.
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Reminds me of something I spotted on the io9 site recently, concerning all the sources that James Cameron ripped off "was inspired by" for his Avatar film. ;)
Sources plural? I thought it was just the one:
He also ripped off the landscape and appearance of the animals from Roger Dean's artwork.
Making Roger Dean the 8th known plaintiff accusing Cameron of plagarism:
http://io9.com/a-history-of-plagiarism-claims-against-james-cameron-690974718
Cameron himself has admitted that Avatar is Dances With Wolves... in Spaaaace!
http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/james-cameron-the-new-trek-rocks-but-transformers-is-gimcrackery/
Took a bit of searching (I'd flushed my interwebs history last night), but here's the article I referred to, which on a thematic level, suggests that Avatar was something of a SF pot-pourri of influences:
http://io9.com/5460954/the-complete-list-of-sources-avatars-accused-of-ripping-off
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Five pages and no one has mentioned Brian Aldiss yet? Poor.
Aldiss is very readable, a good storyteller and has some interesting ideas. Asimov ticks the interesting ideas box, and is clearly an important exponent of the genre for that reason, but his stuff is borderline unreadable.
As an aside, I hate the prissy quibbles over terminology you get whenever this subject comes up. Sci-fi, SF, syfy, whatever... Is it any good? That's all that matters.
Theodore Sturgeon
I was going to mention Kilgore Trout...
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Very fishy, now I think you are making these up!
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Very fishy, now I think you are making these up!
Theodore Sturgeon is real. Kilgore Trout (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilgore_Trout) is the fictional version of him created by Kurt Vonnegut, and a recurring character in Vonnegut novels.
I wouldn't call Vonnegut sci-fi but he uses sci-fi tropes for literary effect, eg in Slaughterhouse-Five, the Tralfamadoreans experience time in a non-linear way, but this is really a device to explore the psychological effects of the Dresden bombing on the novel's protagonist, Billy Pilgrim - his being "unstuck in time" is clearly a manifestation of what we would now recognise as PTSD.
So it goes.
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Talking of Vonnegut, in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, the eponymous Eliot Rosewater - trying to track down Kilgore Trout - attends a sci-fi conference where he stands up and makes this speech to the assembled sci-fi writers...
“I love you sons of bitches. You’re all I read any more. You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”
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As an aside, I hate the prissy quibbles over terminology you get whenever this subject comes up. Sci-fi, SF, syfy, whatever... Is it any good? That's all that matters.
yes, this :thumbsup:
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I don't care if they call it SF or SciFi or whatever but what does bug me is when the SF section in a bookshop is 99% vampire romance and swords and goblins.
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Well, I'm glad Steph recommends Starship Troopers- a fantastic read IMHO. I also like Space Cadets as it is a good yarn though more dated than Troopers.
I also recommend Arthur C Clarke's Deep Range, a story about an astronaut grounded by PTSD who enlists in a world Sea Patrol and becomes a submariner ranger. Another nice read.
Harry Harrison wrote the Deathworld trilogy, about a bloke with a particular skill set who is hired by the inhabitants of an offworld colony Pyrrah- high gravity so tough hombres sort of thing.
Embedded by Dan Abnett is about an embedded journalist in some future war scenario. The embedding is done via implanting his mind into the recipient soldier so that he is literally on scene. It goes a tad shonky and the story develops.
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I don't care if they call it SF or SciFi or whatever but what does bug me is when the SF section in a bookshop is 99% vampire romance and swords and goblins.
Well I love reading fantasy too - I think there is a heavy overlap of interest from readers which is why the book shops find it convenient to lump it all in as the Science Fiction/Fantasy section. Suits me right dandy frankly, sorry.
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Speaking of fantasy, Tim Powers is pretty good, especially The Anubis Gates.
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Speaking of fantasy, donn't bother. It's 99.999% shite :demon:
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Speaking of fantasy, donn't bother. It's 99.999% shite :demon:
An opinion that plenty of people don't subscribe to. Even those who read "Hard" science fiction.
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Try Robyn Hobb's The Farseer Trilogy. It doesn't get much grittier than this.
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Speaking of fantasy, donn't bother. It's 99.999% shite :demon:
It is all subjective.
Some folk think Shakespear is 99.999% shite.
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Many years ago I met Brian Aldiss and Bob Shaw, both lovely men.
Aldiss? 'Hothouse'
Shaw? 'Wooden Astronaits' or 'Slow Glass' stories (Light of other days)