There were a few 'everything by X' comments that got massive upvotes (Philip K Dick comes to mind) that aren't really represented here. The authors appear, but only 1 or 2 of their works. It's worth keeping in mind that this wasn't just a list of books, but of authors as well.
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is really good book. The movie is also nice, but it is almost independent masterpiece in itself. These dresses of Rachel, these rainy streets. Never mind.
PKD has written so many great books its not surprising everyone has their own favourites. I personally prefer Man in the High Castle, Ubik, Time out of joint and Martian time-slip to Electric Sheep and Scanner. I'm surprised none of these managed it onto the list :(
The most depressing thing about A Scanner Darkly is the author's note about how the novel is mostly auto-biographic, as well as the list of his friends and their punishment. It hit me rather hard at the time.
Agreed, I spent the entirety of the list going "Yes, this is a good book, but where's Gene Wolfe?" Anyone who loves literature is doing themselves a disservice by not reading it.
Agreed about Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is also much better (in literary terms) writer than most of the entries in the list, and New Sun ranks much higher than Dune in my opinion.
I'm a big fan of Iain Banks since reading Excession (which still remains my favourite). Also loved Dune, but haven't read any of the sequels yet. I'd also recommend Catherine Asaro's saga of the Skolian Empire to anyone that is into physics/maths.
Personally, I thought Teg was a great character..and the transformation of the Bene Gesserit was welcome. The entire Honored Matre sex thing was just out of place and weird though.
It took me two or three tries, but now I put 2-6 up there with the first book.
I think the reason people have trouble with 2-6 is that they're ultimately a reversal or deconstruction of the Hero myth. The first book is a fairly typical "Rise of the Superhuman Hero" tale, and that's why it's accessible. Book 2-6 explore the dark side of this myth, which is why they're unique, somewhat inaccessible, and really interesting.
I thought they suffered too much from "scope creep". The scope of the first book was nicely limited, but the later books made the story's consequences so far-reaching I couldn't take them seriously.
As regards deconstruction, I think Gene Wolfe does it so much better than Herbert that I don't really consider it a selling point that Herbert tries to do it.
They are absolutely horrible..though they do get better over time. I've read all 16 or so books in the series, and I have two major problems with the (pre|se)quels Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson wrote.
First, rather than just telling a masterful story with compelling characters, they over-explain and lean heavily on disturbing scenes. For example, in the originals, Gurney Halleck was simply (or not so depending on how you look at it) a very loyal and honorable person..it was that simple and beautiful. The prequels go out of the way to explain that the loyalty comes from being tortured and having his sister raped by the Harkonnen's. It's like the stupid Midi-chlorians.
Secondly, every book comes off as though they are trying to make you buy all their other books. Forget about reading their "conclusion" to the original series (book 7 and 8) without reading their Legends of Dune series. They go out of their way to make references to their other books, even when it isn't necessary.
Dune is great..in fact, the original 6, except maybe God Emperor, are all great.
Hyperion is a good book, as is the 2nd in the series The Fall of Hyperion. However, the two last books are really quite bad. Personally, i found Ilium+Olympos to be his best work.
I found the Culture novels disappointing. Except for Consider Phlebas and maybe Excession, you quickly realize that they are pretty much gods and that there's absolutely 100% no risk...it makes it all quite dull/pointless.
I hated Stranger in a Strange land..maybe I should re-read it. All I remember (and it's been about 10 years)..was that I liked the start, an then it turned really weird...all about drugs and sex and cults.
I read Stranger in a Strange land for a literature course in college, and what really helped my understand the book was when the prof explained some of the political and cultural climate that influenced the book.
re Stranger in a Strange land
I think it's a book like Catching in the Rye.
Our (American) culture has changed so much that modern readers think "what's the big deal with this".
The drugs/orgies etc in Stranger in a Strange Land have much less of an impact on a generation that grew up with easy access to hard core drugs and hard core porn.
That's probably it. I remember watching Deer Hunter...maybe in '99 and I just couldn't believe how bad a movie it was. Obviously, to people still in touch with Vietnam (in 78), the impact was...greater.
The Deer Hunter is a very strong movie that still stands on its study of how relationships change under stress of war. It's not really about Vietnam specifically, or its time. Perhaps you were too young when you saw it? (Born in 79 FWIW.)
God Emperor is difficult to get into, but worth sticking with. Actually love the opening sequence of that book more than any other, which describes some thieves being chased through a forest by a pack of guard wolves, as Herbert moves expertly from the thoughts of one thief to another as they are gradually caught by the wolves, starting from the slowest runner at the back. Fantastic writing.
Indeed, God Emperor is by far the best of the Dune series. I've re-read it many times and it never fails to deliver.
Goes to show different people like different things? Apparently, I'm more into the psychology and exploration of large-scale social patterns. People who like the other Dune books are presumably more into "action" sci-fi. Nothing wrong with that.
Something Dune accomplishes really well -- and which very few sci-fi books or movies have ever pulled off quite as effectively -- is weaving a lot of background, and culture, and esoteric terminology, into the story without disrupting the story's flow. There aren't lengthy, disjointed sidebars about what X means, or why Y exists. Instead, X and Y are woven into the narrative via context, allowing the reader to pick up quickly on what they are. (There's also a glossary at the back of the book, of course, which helps).
The book's most glaring weakness, however, is that many of its characters suffer from I'm-going-to-spell-out-precisely-what-I'm-about-to-do syndrome (Harkonnen, in particular, has a James Bond Villain-esque penchant for such speeches.)
Regardless, the book has been absolutely foundational to the genre. Nearly every convention of the modern space opera can be traced back to Dune.
It's a pity that no one's ever been able to crack the book's code on film. Understandable, though, as so much of the action is psychological and the drama internalized.
True. There's a kind of semi-comedic irony that can be read into his character. He's sort of like Wallace Shawn's character in "The Princess Bride" in that sense.
> There aren't lengthy, disjointed sidebars about what X means, or why Y exists. Instead, X and Y are woven into the narrative via context, allowing the reader to pick up quickly on what they are.
I feel Vernor Vinge has a good talent at this too. Apropos A Fire Upon The Deep (superb read) exposition is sparse and when required neatly woven into the story so that you almost never realize it's happening when it is.
I was actually surprised that A Deepness in the Sky didn't make it to the list when A Fire Upon the Deep did. Deepness had a lot of themes that satisfy hacker tastes (not just in terms of the technology but also the socio-political ramifications of it).
I'm so glad you mention it! I'm in the process of reading it right now. (Somewhere around 300 pages in; it's a bit heftier than Fire, but so far, well worth the read. I'm thoroughly impressed.)
The first time I read Deepness in the Sky, I felt like the middle was dragging on, because I wanted to get to the end.
Subsequent re-readings have revealed the middle is packed full of content and very good, no filler at all, it can just be a bit much to take in on one shot.
Loved Deepness in the Sky. It did make me cringe, though, every time some War on Terror policy was being discussed (in real life), I couldn't help thinking "Emergent" / "Emergency" :-(
I only read Dune last year (I'm in my thirties), and really disliked it. Your comment, however, emphasizes a virtue I did not sufficiently acknowledge at the time. It _is_ true that Dune was able to weave a lot of background into the story without resorting to technical infodumps. And at the time it was a rare and impressive achievement in SF, deserving of praise. But I don't think I'd agree that things haven't changed since; nowadays careful weaving of background isn't rare. The first two examples that pop into my mind are Banks' books (the Culture series or _Fearsum Enjinn_) in SF and Martin's _A Song of Ice and Fire_ novels in fantasy. It may be reasonable to say, however, that Dune has been foundational in teaching later authors the necessity of doing this.
(Ultimately, I just couldn't handle how bad the writing was. All the characters are utterly cardboard flat. Cliched tags follow them around the book. One character has an inkvine scar on his jaw that eventually ripples in any scene he's in... and then again in the next scene... and again... I felt like instituting a drinking game based on the rippling of the scar. The main hero's mind is filled with a _terrible purpose_ whenever the author feels the need to emphasize a clue or a plot point. And the author just can't handle the flow of information (who knows what how, and whether the reader also knows that and how). This leads to the I'm-going-to-spell-out-precisely-what-I'm-about-to-do syndrome you mention, but goes deeper than that, creating plot holes and distortions, and causing most of the characters to learn most of the important knowledge they need basically by staring into space and having a revelation).
Try again in a year or so. Dune is one of those books that takes a few tries. I think it was my 3rd attempt before I really got hooked and made it through (and savored every page from there on out).
It's kinda like Lord of the Rings in that respect. If you're in the right frame of mind, it's awesome. If not, it's the most boring piece of dullness you've ever seen in print. But once you're in, you're in for good.
Admittedly, the book is more a triumph of imagination than of craft. I won't argue there.
That said, I agree with the comment that it takes a few reads to really appreciate. The writing has its flaws, but it has its real charms. And those charms can be lost on a first read-through. Many of them were on me when I first plowed through the book. (It is not a book to be plowed through, I would later learn).
"Harkonnen, in particular, has a James Bond Villain-esque penchant for such speeches"
The Sci-Fi (pre-SyFy) miniseries runs with this and plays him as a flat-out monologuing villian, and I daresay it works pretty well.
I actually recommend the miniseries. It gets panned by a lot of people, but you need to understand it less as a television miniseries and more as a filming of a dramatic theater play. It heavily uses theatrical conventions, lighting, monologuing, pacing, even very theatrical special effects at some points. Given the low budget and topic material, I think this makes perfect sense, as theatrical conventions allow for more of the internal dialog to come out than standard cinema/movie conventions.
I loved the miniseries (after hating the first film - a travesty). After watching the miniseries, thousands of people chanting "Muad'Dib" came into my dreams and I still remember it today, years later (as luck would have it, my son attends a Jewish school whose day begins with a "Modani" ceremony - guess what that makes me thing of . . .).
The theatrical tricks of this miniseries obviously worked very well on me.
And Chaucer is the Decameron, rewritten in English with English names and toponyms. And the Decameron is the 1001 Nights, rewritten in renaissance Italian. And let's not forget the 16th century "Cent Nouvelles nouvelles", which is obviously related by format and plot.
TL;DR: These are timeless tales, retold to fit the author's time.
Anvil of Stars also my favorite Greg Bear book. Nobody read my review of this book on Amazon, so perhaps this is a better place for it:
I've read hundreds of science fiction books where humans have military conflict with aliens (though not yet the Forge of God). In nearly all of them, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought an interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:
1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.
2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.
3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.
The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.
This is the only SF book I've read that envisions future military conflict this way, and for that I give the book 4 stars. In my mind, this clearly deserves a place among the top 10 science fiction books in the military SF genre.
However, I did not care for the characters and character development and dialog which occupied the sluggish first half of the book. It wasn't until they started exploring the killers home system that I had trouble putting the book down. I did enjoy the dialog about ethical considerations of what the human ship was going to do, and the aliens they joined forces with were an interesting twist to the story and well done.
Bottom Line - the key to this book for me was an exploration of military encounters in space that struck me as vastly more plausible than the typical SF novel. Rewrite the book to remove most of the first half - and it would have been 5 stars for me.
Good job on mentioning Eon. I just finished it a few days ago and I liked it quite a bit. I bought it a long time ago as part of Gollancz's space opera series. The whole series features awesome cover designs by Sanda Zahirovic http://bookcoverarchive.com/sanda_zahirovic
I highly recommend reading Tau Zero by Poul Anderson and Stone by Adam Roberts.
I'm surprised that there's only one mention. It is an engaging and very fascinating read which explores some of the fundamental aspects of transhumanism.
My problem with Stross is that while he has some absolutely fantastic ideas and world-building, his stories fall short of keeping me interested or entertained. It's like there's so much stuff crammed in that the story part just falls out of the equation.
MINOR SPOILERS for Accelerando
I thought Accelerando was great up to the part where it stopped making any sense (about the time they were fighting some alien invaders parasites that teleported from somewhere using communication channels). Maybe I'm just dumb, but I really couldn't keep up with the plot and it got very nonsensical so I stopped reading. Dealing with singularities, the divide between the physical and the abstract is always very fluid. While Stross dealt OK with the abstract reality, I thought his physical reality didn't make any sense to me. Hilarious extrapolations, and such.
Really, they could have tossed Pierre "Planet of the Apes" Boulle in there, if they knew the name.
Although my favorite Boulle story was "Les Jeux de l'esprit", where scientific rationality takes over the world, and, for entertainment, contests between physical and biological science teams are broadcast. They quickly progress to all out war ...
If you know of any (translated, given my lack of non-English speaking capability) non-English-origin sci-fi, I'd love pointers. I realize a lot is lost in translation, but I love the viewport into other cultures that fiction can provide.
Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, The Cyberiad) is amazing, and some of the English translations are so full of puns and clever turns of phrase it's hard to believe it was originally written in Polish.
Also German, and 50 years old this year (!): the Perry Rhodan series.[0] It was being translated into English but I'm not sure if it still is. The earlier 1960s American English publications were very popular, I believe.
Largely ignored in all these comments is the enormous legacy of Soviet SF. During all the years of SF's Golden Age and the decades after, the main ideological and technological competitor to the US was the Soviet Union.
We're so familiar with the tropes and concepts of US-centric SF, but imagine a whole new world of science fictional ideas - separated only by language! That's Soviet SF...
The finest series of translations was Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction in the 1980s. Some of the books are now very rare and expensive, but if you're a seeker of ideas, they're priceless (especially any stories by Genrikh Altov).
As an introduction, I particularly recommend World's Spring, edited by Vladimir Gakov. And one of the finest SF novels I've read is Self Discovery, by Vladimir Savchenko (freely available online here: http://lib.ru/RUFANT/SAWCHENKO/savchenko_selfdiscovery_ok-en...).
I have a copy of a collection of soviet stories, including two by Altov (and his wife). It's a Portuguese translation of a French translation, but it's still great (although I wonder how much was lost).
Agree, though the only non English science fiction book I've read (translated to English of-course) is Roadside Picnic, which probably would be in my list of the best Sci-Fi books of all time.
The Foundation series was a great read, I read it when I was young and it influenced a lot of how I viewed the world around me.
Having just reread it, I must say that it shows that Asimov did not really want to write the last parts of the series (i.e. Prelude to the Foundation and Forward the Foundation). Forward the Foundation especially is just trying to tie everything together by whatever means necessary. That being said, the original first four parts are awesome.
Was just thinking that, no matter how George Lucas messes up Star Wars, it can never compare to the damage done to the original Foundation books by Asimov's ham-fisted tying together of everything.
I really love the foundation series. Even Foundation's Edge is really good, I think I read that the fastest of the four, although I haven't read the rest of the series.
I think the original three are so good because they are much less tainted by actual technology in the real world it seems, and it's sort of funny how Asimov, in some sense, describes Wikipedia and the utter importance of trade and consumption in ruling those around you, weaving in technology and concepts that even today sound like real science fiction; far fetched but attainable in the future. More importantly, Asimov does a good job in connecting you with the characters.
Foundation, the book, was absolutely brilliant. Brilliant concept, brilliant structure to the book, and even the sentence-to-sentence writing is better than Asimov's usual (I normally find the actual wordcrafting to not be Asimov's strong suit).
But ugh ugh ugh. Every single book thereafter gets worse and worse, and by the end it's so bad that I actually welcomed the blatant fanservice reappearance of you-know-who.
I was pleasantly surprised to see two Neal Stephenson books on the list, but why did the second have to be Anathem? I thought Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle were much better books. Anathem's plot seemed like book-nerd wish fulfillment.
Of course I still read all thousand pages of Anathem in, like, four days. :)
The first 100 pages or so of Anathem seemed like such a chore to get through, mainly because of the tons of exposition required to build the world. It was one of those books, however (Frank Norris' The Octopus being the other for me personally,) that really rewards the reader for taking the time to understand the world that is built. In both cases I read the last few hundred pages straight through to find out how it ended.
A pretty stellar list, except for Altered Carbon which I found cheap and utterly predictable. I'm really not a fan of Revelation Space/Alastair Reynolds, but that's more due to the flaws in the fiction writing, whereas the sci-fi aspect of that book and most of his subsequent books is truly impressive (save for Chasm City).
If you've dismissed any of these based on your reading as a kid, try re-reading. I read Tolkien at 12, loved the wizards and orcs, but as an adult remembered it as nonsense. When I re-read it (to be able to discuss with my 11 year old son), I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. Likewise the Dune books (all but the first are probably beyond any adolescent). Good fiction is complex, and readings fascinated with wizards and swords and knife-fights will miss a lot of thought-provoking stuff. Nothing wrong with a good wizard, but don't miss the rest.
That said, I'm sorry to say that the Zelazny books, especially the later ones, don't withstand re-reading. And I don't see how "Old Man's War" appeals to any one but a teen or an ideologue. (I share the ideology! but the writing is stale as yesterday's cornflakes, and the characters as unidimensional as Heinlein's laziest pulp, without the Heinlein all-transgressive idiosyncrasy.)
Last note: "Starship Troopers" and "Forever War" ought to be read in sequence. I can recall reading Haldeman at 15 and thinking "Hey! He's going after Rico's Roughnecks!" It was my first moment of literature as Great Conversation. And as I read some political philosophy, I could see Haldeman as a Chomsky / Rousseau "it's all socialization!" response to the Locke / Hobbes rationalism of Heinlein. It was an early experience of fiction as thought, and a suggestion of why philosophy alone won't do.
Now I gotta go read the stuff on the list that I've missed.
I don't get how Old Man's War makes all these best of lists either. It's simple, and not in a good way. It's the literary equivalent of Red Dawn—awesome to 14 year olds, but lacking in anything deeper than "Old man gets new body and has lots of sex."
Old Man's War is pulpy fun that manages to also explore some interesting aspects of what it would mean to be able to swap your consciousness into that of a wholly redesigned younger "you".
I must disagree about Zelazny. I find that it handles re-reading quite nicely, except the second Amber series, which didn't take that well to reading even the first time. Lord of Light is especially awesome, and especially awesome on subsequent reads. It's not really SF, of course, but it at least pretends (unlike Amber).
I would add Permutation City. It's about: what's it like to be a digital person in a virtual world? What are the psychological effects of knowing that you're virtual; how do you experience time passing; what are the social implications of changing your appearance at whim, etc.
And, how do different interpretations of data compete to become "real"? For example, if you look at it one way it's a city, another way it's a collection of data cells to be colonized, etc.
I don't remember enjoying Permutation City that much, but it for sure as hell has stuck in my mind for years (to this day, in fact) for the ideas it brings forth. I think I'm going to reread it.
Glad to see that this time someone else is recommending this too, full of interesting ideas and overall a good hard sci-fi novel. We need more novels about these themes.
Um, hard sci-fi? Some handwavy "upload person to computer" stuff and then "we'll just rearrange the universe over here, don't mind us". I did read it a long time ago, but I don't remember anything that specific in it.
Permutation City is definitely hard sci-fi, albeit less hard than most of Egan's work. Ignoring the "uploading" (it not being the central point of the story, and this not being the place to have that debate), his "dust theory" is very well grounded. That's not to say that I believe it (or that he does, see http://www.gregegan.net/PERMUTATION/FAQ/FAQ.html), but that doesn't automatically qualify it as "magic" either.
I'd re-read it, Greg Egan is perhaps the hardest Sci-Fi writer out there, everything is rigorously thought out. He used to be a software engineer and hacks on some of his more interesting flights of fancy - check out his website http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/ for some interesting stuff, Quantum Soccer anyone? http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BORDER/Soccer/Socce.... If NH should have an official Sci-Fi author it should be him ;)
Neal Stephenson really matures between Snow Crash and Diamond Age. I read snow crash after some of his later stuff and it's almost hard to believe it's the same author.
Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are great books but each has their own style and you would think it was a different author if you didn't know better.
That's why I like Stephenson so much. He takes a topic and researches it so much that he brings it to life.
Whether he's writing for Wired about expats in South East Asia (which dove tails nicely with Cryptonomicon) or extra dimensional aliens in Anathem, he makes the world come alive and the technology and methodologies clear.
He also makes me laugh out loud. Very few books have done that.
"Neal Stephenson really matures between Snow Crash and Diamond Age. I read snow crash after some of his later stuff and it's almost hard to believe it's the same author."
This happens with more writers (and other artists) than many people think. I read Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game and loved both: they're incredibly rich and detailed yet driven by plot; they have the action that a lot of unsophisticated readers crave and content that can still satisfy someone who's read 10,000 novels. Oh, and it made me laugh out loud.
U.S. publishers are now releasing his young adult novels. Two so far, two more to come. And they're terrible. Almost unreadable bad. No plot, cardboard characters, wild improbability poorly embedded in a paranormal universe. You can see flashes of his later skill, but his early stuff is lousy.
I said this in another comment, but I'll say it again here: I just started reading David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691133808/sr=8-1/qid=13150...), which is where Malcolm Gladwell stole / sourced his New Yorker article "Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity?" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...). Galenson says that there are two basic modes for artists to follow: the experimentalists who try many things over long periods of time and eventually reach fullness, and the "conceptual innovators" whose sudden insight into a field fuels their work, which is often done at a young age. Under your reading, Stephenson would be the "experimentalist."
I've enjoyed every Stephenson book apart from Anathem - obviously a lot of people love it but I couldn't see it all, a smattering of maths & philosophy mixed into an overlong and pretty boring 'students journey' plot. Why do people like it so much?
The first time I tried reading Anathem, I couldn't get into it and put it down for a year. Then, while travelling (read: lots of time on my hands), I picked it up again and couldn't put it down until I finished it. The richness of the world and the pacing of the plot (past page 300 or so) as the mystery is revealed is gripping. I didn't think it was an earth-shattering book, but it was certainly a great read. In the same vein, Ender's Game is just another book about a child prodigy/outcast who saves the day. It seemed far more profound when I was 13 than it did upon re-reading. Some books aren't revolutionary; they're just a good read.
I haven't read Snow Crash or Diamond Age, but I'm about a quarter of the way through Cryptonomicon right now and it's starting to get good. I find Stephensen's books tend to start off slowly then quickly pick up steam.
Agreed... I read Cryptonomicon first, then Diamond Age (my favorite from him) then Snow Crash, and I found the third book a lot less mature and dated (I read it in 2001, almost a decade after it was published).
Diamond Age painted a very deep and rich tapestry of future vision.
I found Cryptonomicon a painfully long slog. I enjoyed it overall, but only read it because of having read Snow Crash and Zodiac first. I love Stephenson's humor with technical issues. I suppose I should read some of his longer, er, later books.
Curious that Roert Silverberg's "Up The Line" did not make this cut. It was the inspiration for Back to the Future and is an entertaining time travel story.
I just finished the Commonwealth Saga + The Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton, loved it. Both set in the same universe, the first two in the relatively near future (about 300 years from now), the trilogy in the far future (about 1500 years from now).
The trilogy can get a bit abstract, verging on the fantasy genre at times, but in the end the author manages to give an explanation that "makes sense" for everything, which is the thing I really like about his stories. Highly entertaining.
It's a bit of a dubious explanation of The Void, to be honest (although the "Think of it as an 8-dimensional onion" kind of makes up for it), and the ending is a little weak, but overall I enjoyed the series a lot. The alternating of space opera/fantasy chapters is also done pretty well, and keeps things interesting.
This is a really interesting list! You've got the predictable ones, e.g. Snow Crash (man, did the conclusion of that one suck!) and juvenile SF, like Startship Troopers (an example of Heinlein's early phase), but really niche ones toward the end (not many would think Atwood as a SF writer).
Two gaping holes: Any SF list that doesn't include Stanislaw Lem (e.g. Cyberiad) is incomplete. Also missing is James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), who was Le Guin's mentor (read her Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death, it'll stay with you for weeks.)
Also a series I really enjoyed is Chalker's Four Lords of the Diamond Series, very creative.
What I was saying is that most people wouldn't consider Atwood as a SF writer, like most of the others on that list. From Wikipedia
"Atwood was at one time offended at the suggestion that The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, insisting to The Guardian that they were speculative fiction instead: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."
Later she retracted from this position, but this shows that her understanding of SF is (or was) quite limited.
Indeed, I've been enjoying "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (an anthology of Tiptree's short stories). I'm short on free time lately, so the short story format makes them feel more accessible.
I loved that anthology and was so intrigued by her Wikipedia page that I bought and read her biography, which is excellent. Would have loved to meet her before she was undone by depression, what a woman!
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadBtw, A Scanner Darkly is also good novel by Philip K. Dick, but it never appear in any such ratings. It is almost that dark and depressive as Electric Sheep. ^_^ http://www.amazon.com/Scanner-Darkly-Philip-K-Dick/dp/067973...
As for Zelazny, A Night In Lonesome October is very nice read. http://www.amazon.com/Night-Lonesome-October-Roger-Zelazny/d...
http://www.american-buddha.com/scandark.authornote.htm
Pohl's "Gateway" and Gibson/Sterling's "The Difference Engine" would have been nice additions, too.
Otherwise, it's a nice starting point. There are a few titles I hadn't heard about that I'll be reading, if I can find the time.
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k70dh/whats_the_b...
I think the reason people have trouble with 2-6 is that they're ultimately a reversal or deconstruction of the Hero myth. The first book is a fairly typical "Rise of the Superhuman Hero" tale, and that's why it's accessible. Book 2-6 explore the dark side of this myth, which is why they're unique, somewhat inaccessible, and really interesting.
As regards deconstruction, I think Gene Wolfe does it so much better than Herbert that I don't really consider it a selling point that Herbert tries to do it.
First, rather than just telling a masterful story with compelling characters, they over-explain and lean heavily on disturbing scenes. For example, in the originals, Gurney Halleck was simply (or not so depending on how you look at it) a very loyal and honorable person..it was that simple and beautiful. The prequels go out of the way to explain that the loyalty comes from being tortured and having his sister raped by the Harkonnen's. It's like the stupid Midi-chlorians.
Secondly, every book comes off as though they are trying to make you buy all their other books. Forget about reading their "conclusion" to the original series (book 7 and 8) without reading their Legends of Dune series. They go out of their way to make references to their other books, even when it isn't necessary.
Argg...sorry I got upset there.
Hyperion is a good book, as is the 2nd in the series The Fall of Hyperion. However, the two last books are really quite bad. Personally, i found Ilium+Olympos to be his best work.
I found the Culture novels disappointing. Except for Consider Phlebas and maybe Excession, you quickly realize that they are pretty much gods and that there's absolutely 100% no risk...it makes it all quite dull/pointless.
I hated Stranger in a Strange land..maybe I should re-read it. All I remember (and it's been about 10 years)..was that I liked the start, an then it turned really weird...all about drugs and sex and cults.
Our (American) culture has changed so much that modern readers think "what's the big deal with this".
The drugs/orgies etc in Stranger in a Strange Land have much less of an impact on a generation that grew up with easy access to hard core drugs and hard core porn.
That's probably it. I remember watching Deer Hunter...maybe in '99 and I just couldn't believe how bad a movie it was. Obviously, to people still in touch with Vietnam (in 78), the impact was...greater.
Goes to show different people like different things? Apparently, I'm more into the psychology and exploration of large-scale social patterns. People who like the other Dune books are presumably more into "action" sci-fi. Nothing wrong with that.
The book's most glaring weakness, however, is that many of its characters suffer from I'm-going-to-spell-out-precisely-what-I'm-about-to-do syndrome (Harkonnen, in particular, has a James Bond Villain-esque penchant for such speeches.)
Regardless, the book has been absolutely foundational to the genre. Nearly every convention of the modern space opera can be traced back to Dune.
It's a pity that no one's ever been able to crack the book's code on film. Understandable, though, as so much of the action is psychological and the drama internalized.
I feel Vernor Vinge has a good talent at this too. Apropos A Fire Upon The Deep (superb read) exposition is sparse and when required neatly woven into the story so that you almost never realize it's happening when it is.
I had first heard of it when DanielBMarkham highly praised it (http://www.hn-books.com/Books/A-Deepness-In-The-Sky.htm, HN discussion here at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170579) and it's definitely one of the best sci-fi books I've read in years.
Subsequent re-readings have revealed the middle is packed full of content and very good, no filler at all, it can just be a bit much to take in on one shot.
Vice Podmaster, indeed.
(Ultimately, I just couldn't handle how bad the writing was. All the characters are utterly cardboard flat. Cliched tags follow them around the book. One character has an inkvine scar on his jaw that eventually ripples in any scene he's in... and then again in the next scene... and again... I felt like instituting a drinking game based on the rippling of the scar. The main hero's mind is filled with a _terrible purpose_ whenever the author feels the need to emphasize a clue or a plot point. And the author just can't handle the flow of information (who knows what how, and whether the reader also knows that and how). This leads to the I'm-going-to-spell-out-precisely-what-I'm-about-to-do syndrome you mention, but goes deeper than that, creating plot holes and distortions, and causing most of the characters to learn most of the important knowledge they need basically by staring into space and having a revelation).
It's kinda like Lord of the Rings in that respect. If you're in the right frame of mind, it's awesome. If not, it's the most boring piece of dullness you've ever seen in print. But once you're in, you're in for good.
That said, I agree with the comment that it takes a few reads to really appreciate. The writing has its flaws, but it has its real charms. And those charms can be lost on a first read-through. Many of them were on me when I first plowed through the book. (It is not a book to be plowed through, I would later learn).
The Sci-Fi (pre-SyFy) miniseries runs with this and plays him as a flat-out monologuing villian, and I daresay it works pretty well.
I actually recommend the miniseries. It gets panned by a lot of people, but you need to understand it less as a television miniseries and more as a filming of a dramatic theater play. It heavily uses theatrical conventions, lighting, monologuing, pacing, even very theatrical special effects at some points. Given the low budget and topic material, I think this makes perfect sense, as theatrical conventions allow for more of the internal dialog to come out than standard cinema/movie conventions.
The theatrical tricks of this miniseries obviously worked very well on me.
Personally, I found the first and fourth Hyperion books to be my favorites, and the middle two less so, and nearly a separate story altogether.
TL;DR: These are timeless tales, retold to fit the author's time.
I've read hundreds of science fiction books where humans have military conflict with aliens (though not yet the Forge of God). In nearly all of them, there are World-War-II-Naval-like space battles with weapons/ships/shields at near parity. I have always thought this to be highly implausible, and I thought an interesting aspect of this book was to consider three possible battle situations in space:
1) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly higher tech level. If they detect you before you detect them, you are dead. Period. Your only possibility to win such a battle is to detect them first and destroy them instantly - and your chances of being able to do that are slim.
2) Your ship encounters a ship at a vastly lower tech level. Using the logic above, all that matters is you being able to detect them before they detect you. The technologies of stealth, electronic counter measures, detection, etc. are therefore all extremely vital in order to never be defeated by aliens with a lower tech level.
3) There is a possibility that you encounter an enemy close enough to your own tech level that the battle could last more than a split second. It is only in these instances that all the other things often written in other science fiction stories might matter - amount and type of shielding, weapons systems, quality of personnel, etc. But such battles are very unlikely, because technological progress is so fast. Consider what it would be like for any of today's industrialized nations with a substantial military to combat the most powerful nation on earth from 200 years ago - there would be no contest at all. The universe has been around for billions of years, so the chance of two races encountering each other that are within a few hundred years of each others' technology level is very low.
The above logic also applies to planetary defense as well, though with even more emphasis on not being detected.
This is the only SF book I've read that envisions future military conflict this way, and for that I give the book 4 stars. In my mind, this clearly deserves a place among the top 10 science fiction books in the military SF genre.
However, I did not care for the characters and character development and dialog which occupied the sluggish first half of the book. It wasn't until they started exploring the killers home system that I had trouble putting the book down. I did enjoy the dialog about ethical considerations of what the human ship was going to do, and the aliens they joined forces with were an interesting twist to the story and well done.
Bottom Line - the key to this book for me was an exploration of military encounters in space that struck me as vastly more plausible than the typical SF novel. Rewrite the book to remove most of the first half - and it would have been 5 stars for me.
I highly recommend reading Tau Zero by Poul Anderson and Stone by Adam Roberts.
For those of you interested, it's available as a free ebook here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
MINOR SPOILERS for Accelerando
I thought Accelerando was great up to the part where it stopped making any sense (about the time they were fighting some alien invaders parasites that teleported from somewhere using communication channels). Maybe I'm just dumb, but I really couldn't keep up with the plot and it got very nonsensical so I stopped reading. Dealing with singularities, the divide between the physical and the abstract is always very fluid. While Stross dealt OK with the abstract reality, I thought his physical reality didn't make any sense to me. Hilarious extrapolations, and such.
Although my favorite Boulle story was "Les Jeux de l'esprit", where scientific rationality takes over the world, and, for entertainment, contests between physical and biological science teams are broadcast. They quickly progress to all out war ...
Anyway, who cares, de gustibus something something.
Also German, and 50 years old this year (!): the Perry Rhodan series.[0] It was being translated into English but I'm not sure if it still is. The earlier 1960s American English publications were very popular, I believe.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Rhodan
We're so familiar with the tropes and concepts of US-centric SF, but imagine a whole new world of science fictional ideas - separated only by language! That's Soviet SF...
The finest series of translations was Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction in the 1980s. Some of the books are now very rare and expensive, but if you're a seeker of ideas, they're priceless (especially any stories by Genrikh Altov).
As an introduction, I particularly recommend World's Spring, edited by Vladimir Gakov. And one of the finest SF novels I've read is Self Discovery, by Vladimir Savchenko (freely available online here: http://lib.ru/RUFANT/SAWCHENKO/savchenko_selfdiscovery_ok-en...).
The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach
Both are excellent.
Having just reread it, I must say that it shows that Asimov did not really want to write the last parts of the series (i.e. Prelude to the Foundation and Forward the Foundation). Forward the Foundation especially is just trying to tie everything together by whatever means necessary. That being said, the original first four parts are awesome.
I think the original three are so good because they are much less tainted by actual technology in the real world it seems, and it's sort of funny how Asimov, in some sense, describes Wikipedia and the utter importance of trade and consumption in ruling those around you, weaving in technology and concepts that even today sound like real science fiction; far fetched but attainable in the future. More importantly, Asimov does a good job in connecting you with the characters.
But ugh ugh ugh. Every single book thereafter gets worse and worse, and by the end it's so bad that I actually welcomed the blatant fanservice reappearance of you-know-who.
Of course I still read all thousand pages of Anathem in, like, four days. :)
That said, I'm sorry to say that the Zelazny books, especially the later ones, don't withstand re-reading. And I don't see how "Old Man's War" appeals to any one but a teen or an ideologue. (I share the ideology! but the writing is stale as yesterday's cornflakes, and the characters as unidimensional as Heinlein's laziest pulp, without the Heinlein all-transgressive idiosyncrasy.)
Last note: "Starship Troopers" and "Forever War" ought to be read in sequence. I can recall reading Haldeman at 15 and thinking "Hey! He's going after Rico's Roughnecks!" It was my first moment of literature as Great Conversation. And as I read some political philosophy, I could see Haldeman as a Chomsky / Rousseau "it's all socialization!" response to the Locke / Hobbes rationalism of Heinlein. It was an early experience of fiction as thought, and a suggestion of why philosophy alone won't do.
Now I gotta go read the stuff on the list that I've missed.
And, how do different interpretations of data compete to become "real"? For example, if you look at it one way it's a city, another way it's a collection of data cells to be colonized, etc.
Some really have staying power and some really don't hold up. I found Foundation and Mote in God's Eye rather disappointing.
Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon are great books but each has their own style and you would think it was a different author if you didn't know better.
That's why I like Stephenson so much. He takes a topic and researches it so much that he brings it to life.
Whether he's writing for Wired about expats in South East Asia (which dove tails nicely with Cryptonomicon) or extra dimensional aliens in Anathem, he makes the world come alive and the technology and methodologies clear.
He also makes me laugh out loud. Very few books have done that.
This happens with more writers (and other artists) than many people think. I read Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game and loved both: they're incredibly rich and detailed yet driven by plot; they have the action that a lot of unsophisticated readers crave and content that can still satisfy someone who's read 10,000 novels. Oh, and it made me laugh out loud.
U.S. publishers are now releasing his young adult novels. Two so far, two more to come. And they're terrible. Almost unreadable bad. No plot, cardboard characters, wild improbability poorly embedded in a paranormal universe. You can see flashes of his later skill, but his early stuff is lousy.
I said this in another comment, but I'll say it again here: I just started reading David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691133808/sr=8-1/qid=13150...), which is where Malcolm Gladwell stole / sourced his New Yorker article "Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity?" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...). Galenson says that there are two basic modes for artists to follow: the experimentalists who try many things over long periods of time and eventually reach fullness, and the "conceptual innovators" whose sudden insight into a field fuels their work, which is often done at a young age. Under your reading, Stephenson would be the "experimentalist."
I haven't read Snow Crash or Diamond Age, but I'm about a quarter of the way through Cryptonomicon right now and it's starting to get good. I find Stephensen's books tend to start off slowly then quickly pick up steam.
Diamond Age painted a very deep and rich tapestry of future vision.
The trilogy can get a bit abstract, verging on the fantasy genre at times, but in the end the author manages to give an explanation that "makes sense" for everything, which is the thing I really like about his stories. Highly entertaining.
Two gaping holes: Any SF list that doesn't include Stanislaw Lem (e.g. Cyberiad) is incomplete. Also missing is James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), who was Le Guin's mentor (read her Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death, it'll stay with you for weeks.)
Also a series I really enjoyed is Chalker's Four Lords of the Diamond Series, very creative.
"Atwood was at one time offended at the suggestion that The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx and Crake were science fiction, insisting to The Guardian that they were speculative fiction instead: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen."
Later she retracted from this position, but this shows that her understanding of SF is (or was) quite limited.