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Post by Deleted on Sept 28, 2014 9:09:13 GMT -5
Heinlein's 'juveniles' (so called because of the audience he was writing for, not because of any deficiencies in the books) are terrific. Have Spacesuit Will Travel is one of 2 books that got me hooked on science fiction, and I'd give Podkayne of Mars to anybody, young or old, just getting into the field. That said, I also love some of his later work. I've read Number of the Beast and Time Enough for Love 4 times each. Number is a fast, entertaining romp, told mostly in dialogue (w/4 highly intelligent, highly competent protagonists) who visit Oz and Barsoom. And Time is one of my favorite books, period. I've teared up at the end, all four times. The characters tend toward the supremely self-confident, which can come across as smug. Didn't bother me, but YMMV.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 28, 2014 10:42:25 GMT -5
The characters tend toward the supremely self-confident, which can come across as smug. Didn't bother me, but YMMV. Yeah -- I've learned that that drives me up the wall, & not just with Robert A. (for "Ayn-Rand-in-Drag," unfortunately) Heinlein. Alfred Bester, a writer I normally love, centered his later novel The Computer Connection on such a character, & I wound up dropping in disgust about halfway through. I recall being similarly put off around the same time by the protagonist of Wyman Guin's The Standing Joy, but that one I managed to finish. Give me Phil Dick's neurotic, bizarrely flawed, monstrously self-doubting characters any day, please. |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 28, 2014 17:55:48 GMT -5
Yeah, much as I loved The Stars My Destination, I couldn't get through The Computer Connection either. And while I haven't read a lot of Dick books, I've enjoyed what I have read. Eye in the Sky is a lot of fun, and The Man in the High Castle is a classic.
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Post by Ish Kabbible on Sept 28, 2014 18:25:41 GMT -5
Some other, what I consider, essential SF novels
Ursula Leguin-Left Hand Of Darkness
Walter Miller-A Canticle For Liebowitz
Ward Moore-Bring On The Jubilee
James Morrow-This Is The Way The World Ends
Larry Niven-Ringworld
Robert Silverberg-Nightwings
Clifford Simak-Way Station
Theodore Sturgeon-More Than Human
Wilson Tucker-Lincoln Hunters
Kurt Vonnegut-Breakfast Of Champions
A list of authors who's Best Of.. story collections would be rather long
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Post by berkley on Sept 28, 2014 18:55:29 GMT -5
The characters tend toward the supremely self-confident, which can come across as smug. Didn't bother me, but YMMV. Yeah -- I've learned that that drives me up the wall, & not just with Robert A. (for "Ayn-Rand-in-Drag," unfortunately) Heinlein. Alfred Bester, a writer I normally love, centered his later novel The Computer Connection on such a character, & I wound up dropping in disgust about halfway through. I recall being similarly put off around the same time by the protagonist of Wyman Guin's The Standing Joy, but that one I managed to finish. Give me Phil Dick's neurotic, bizarrely flawed, monstrously self-doubting characters any day, please. Somewhere here a while back, in regard to similar protagonists in hard-boiled fiction, I was saying that it's really hard to pull off that kind of character without making them come across to me in the negative way Dan is talking about, especially when the story is told in first-person narration by that protagonist himself. Even ERB's John Carter novels, which I love, suffer a little from this problem in my eyes. Among detective writers, I mentioned Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout as two examples of writers who managed it with great skill. In SF, Roger Zelazny comes to mind. It's interesting to look at how different writers solve or try to solve the problem. For sxample, I think that one thing a lot of the successful ones have in common is that the ultra-confidence/competence, while important, isn't the most interesting thing about the character. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 29, 2014 11:02:40 GMT -5
Started Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I'm slowly starting to read some more contemporary SF. For me contemporary means anything past about 1986, which is when I stopped keeping up with then current SF.
So far I've only read the first story, Tower of Babylon, which one the Nebula for Best Novelette in 1991. Pretty good. Interesting cosmological thoughts in it.
Looks like a number of stories in the book were nominated for or won awards and the collection won the Locus Award for Best Collection in 2003.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 29, 2014 11:22:19 GMT -5
Some other, what I consider, essential SF novels Ursula Leguin-Left Hand Of Darkness Walter Miller-A Canticle For Liebowitz Ward Moore-Bring On The Jubilee James Morrow-This Is The Way The World Ends Larry Niven-Ringworld Robert Silverberg-Nightwings Clifford Simak-Way Station Theodore Sturgeon-More Than Human Wilson Tucker-Lincoln Hunters Kurt Vonnegut-Breakfast Of Champions A list of authors who's Best Of.. story collections would be rather long A solid list, of what I've read (i.e. not the Morrow, Silverberg or Niven titles listed). I'd take Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels & Tucker's Long, Loud Silence, Wild Talent or Time Masters over those you cited for them, though. For Silverberg -- Dying Inside, which I know Chris mentioned already. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 29, 2014 13:55:16 GMT -5
I've read more of the fantasy books then I have the sci-if. I liked Enders Game quite a bit. I own Old Mans War. Jurassic Park I know because of the movie. The other two I'm not familiar with at all. I read the first book in the Name of the Wind series and enjoyed it was the sequel good. As far as my reading goes I generally don't get into fantasy because they seems to never end and are made up of 7-who knows how many books. I've balked at starting the Dark Tower series for that very reason, although at least that series is complete. The Game of Thrones books are some of my favorite books of all time. And I hate to be one of those people but when is the next one going to come out? I just don't understand what is taking so long? Did Martin not know where he was going with the series from book to book or what? Both of the other two sci fi books are the 1st books of long series. 1632 is (IMO) the best done 'people out of time' type alternative history out there. It takes a modern West Virginia mining town (and all it's technology) and plops in in the middle of Germany in 1632 and goes forward from there. the 2nd book in the series is '1633' etc. it's also referred to as the 'Ring of Fire' series. There are now about 13 books that are split into a couple different plot lines. THere's also an extremely vibrant fan fiction community around the series, which has actually published several short story collections. On Basilisk Station is the beginning of the Honor Harrington series, which is basically a cross between whatever your favorite naval fiction series is and Star Trek. It's awesome, and it has that most rarely of creatures, a strong, independent female lead. |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 29, 2014 13:57:25 GMT -5
Haven't heard many people mention Friday as one of their favourite Heinleins before. I've kind of steered clear of his later stuff after trying and failing to get into The Number of the Beast when it was appearing in OMNI back in the day. I'll probably give Friday a try some time, though, and maybe even take another crack at NotB. Have you ever read a Stranger in a Strange Land? I picked it up recently, but haven't got a chance to peek into it yet and was wondering how it was. IF you go back a bit, we had a bit of a discussion about it in this thread... my wife read it not that long ago. Personally, I think it's too out there for my taste... like it can't decide whether to be satire or serious commentary. |
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JLU51306
Junior Member
Jack of all trades - Master of none
Posts: 59 
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Post by JLU51306 on Sept 29, 2014 19:30:43 GMT -5
Have you ever read a Stranger in a Strange Land? I picked it up recently, but haven't got a chance to peek into it yet and was wondering how it was. IF you go back a bit, we had a bit of a discussion about it in this thread... my wife read it not that long ago. Personally, I think it's too out there for my taste... like it can't decide whether to be satire or serious commentary. Thanks for the input!  |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Sept 30, 2014 22:26:44 GMT -5
 Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth HG Wells c. 1904 -My copy (above) strangely lists the copyright date as the mid-60s, which is really bizarre. I'd never heard of this before I picked it up, and was extremely interested when I read the back of the book. I had no idea it was satire. Pretty good satire too. It took me quite a while to get through it, though, alot of extra details in setting and naming random background characters, villagers, and the like. Then there's the fact that there's no ending, which I hate... I can clearly see why this is one of his lesser known stories (thought it did get a movie in the mid 70s, so wiki says.) |
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Post by berkley on Oct 1, 2014 10:22:30 GMT -5
Some other, what I consider, essential SF novels Ursula Leguin-Left Hand Of Darkness Walter Miller-A Canticle For Liebowitz Ward Moore-Bring On The Jubilee James Morrow-This Is The Way The World Ends Larry Niven-Ringworld Robert Silverberg-Nightwings Clifford Simak-Way Station Theodore Sturgeon-More Than Human Wilson Tucker-Lincoln Hunters Kurt Vonnegut-Breakfast Of Champions A list of authors who's Best Of.. story collections would be rather long This is useful for me personally because I've read little or nothing by most of those writers, apart from Vonnegut, Niven, and a couple things by LeGuin (but not LHoD). |
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Post by berkley on Oct 1, 2014 10:24:03 GMT -5
Started Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. I'm slowly starting to read some more contemporary SF. For me contemporary means anything past about 1986, which is when I stopped keeping up with then current SF. So far I've only read the first story, Tower of Babylon, which one the Nebula for Best Novelette in 1991. Pretty good. Interesting cosmological thoughts in it. Looks like a number of stories in the book were nominated for or won awards and the collection won the Locus Award for Best Collection in 2003. This one is near the top of my stack of modern SF to try. |
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Post by berkley on Oct 1, 2014 10:27:03 GMT -5
I'll throw a few in for now Assimov,Isaac-Foudation Trilogy,Naked Sun . . . . Heinlein,Robert-Past Through Tomorrow,Stranger In A Strange Land,Starship Troopers I only dabble SF/Fantasy when I need a break my norm (which is crime fiction) so feel free to ignore the following if contradicted by a greater authority. That said, I enjoyed Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge more than any one story in The Trilogy. Now “essential” may include historic significance as well as quality, so I may be out of line (though I seem to remember that Edge won the Hugo). In that same vein, Heinlein’s Friday is one of my all-time favorite novels. Again, admitting my preferences, it reads like a secret agent adventure set in the future. It’s much more than that of course, the definition of humanity and other Heinlein themes woven throughout. Just a couple of suggestions from the outside looking in. Just happened to see on Goodreads the other day that Charles Stross's Saturn's Children, which I haven't read, is supposed to be Stross's response to Heinlein's Friday. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 1, 2014 11:08:14 GMT -5
Never occurred to me to read it before, in part because I barely knew it existed (I don't exactly keep up with the best-seller lists now, & I certainly didn't 12 years ago), but an FB group I'm in that's devoted to horror novels happened to spotlight Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones a couple of weeks ago, & remembering how much I loved the movie, I went ahead & checked it out of the library. Not really my usual fare, starting with the fact that it was marketed as YA (though at most, IMHO, it's borderline)* but even so ...
Well, here's what I posted in the FB group after shortly after completing the book --
I pretty much knew what was up going in, of course, having seen the movie, though the differences between them were intriguing in their own right ... In any event, I know very well that i've finished other novels & said, right out loud. "Wow." I'm pretty sure I've said it twice, even. Not sure I've *ever* said it three times ... This morning, I did.
Remarkable, IMHO.
*Offhand, the most recent YA novel I read** -- other than a couple from childhood like Raymond F. Jones' The Year When Stardust Fell & Duane Decker's Rebel in Right Field, both of which I reread a few years ago -- was Penelope Farmer's Charlotte Sometimes back around 15 years ago, which of course captured my interest after I learned that it inspired the Cure's excellent song of the same name. (And Wikipedia just told me it's the 3rd of, pretty much, a trilogy. The first 2 just went on my want list.)
**Well, not including Phil Dick's Nick & the Glimmung. But course course that's a special case.
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