OT, but it seems that in Canada all of the Foundation series is available as ebooks (on Amazon, Google, etc) except for the very first one... very annoying.
The Culture series is one of the most uplifting series I've read. When I'm reading it, I'm just smiling thinking "yeah, that's exactly how humans should develop". Also, ships named Well, it works for me.
I've read most of them now and the highlights for me are Look To Windward, Player of Games and Fearsum Endjinn (stick with that one). I also rate Excession and Matter though I know a lot of other people think they're weaker.
Atlas Shrugged has been called the 'second most influential book in America' so I can understand why it gets mentioned a lot. I found it an unimaginative, tacky bore. It's at least three times the length it should be, the characters speak in diatribes and are impossible to empathise with. At best it's interesting as a thought experiment and it did affect my outlook on life but, really, I read it because I thought I should, not because I wanted to.
I also found Red Mars a bit of a struggle in this way too. It seemed similarly ideological to Atlas Shrugged but from the other direction. It was worth reading for the sheer attention to detail and imagination though.
I find it amazing that there still hasn't been a film or TV adaptation of Iain M Banks. Not that such a thing would be necessary or a validation of his writing; but I'd love to see it imagined and realized visually. It's a vision of perhaps the best possible case for the human future - if we don't fuck up.
I would add "The End of Eternity". The ending of that book was by far the best I've ever read. Everything in the book is brought together and everything that matters to the main character is put on the line in one decision which is resolved in a fun and unexpected way.
Dune was an amazing read. I'd recommend reading it if you haven't. The setting is unique and mindblowing in scale.
However, if you're planning on going through the entire series I'd suggest stopping at God Emperor. The books afterwards seem to lose their direction, the plot starts to feel a bit contrived. The focus shifts from action to endless discussions between characters that could've been used to develop character and story, but seem to tread the same ground. At the same time details that were mentioned in a sentence suddenly balloon into massive plot points, and bizarre deus ex machinae pop up all over the place.
YMMV, of course. I stopped after finishing the original series, and read the Wikipedia synopses of the rest of the books in order to get some sort of closure.
While it gets weirder towards the end of the six books, I found the philosophy and generally strange quotes and philosophy to be more interesting and worthwhile, even if the plot got exceptionally less so. To me, I think the gap in readability was in books two and three - maybe.
Yeah, I find Heretics of Dune to be much better than Children of Dune, for instance, both in characterizations and the ideas it explores.
I'll break ranks, though, and say I actually enjoy the plot after God Emperor of Dune quite a lot. I didn't really the first time I read the books, so that may have some bearing, but it helped to read a piece discussing the books, where they claimed that the Dune books are two separate trilogies, with God Emperor as the transitional book.
Unfortunately, Frank Herbert didn't get to complete the second trilogy, but the first two books of it -- when thought of as a mostly separate set of stories from the first Dune books -- becomes much more interesting, rather than just "why is he introducing all this new stuff into this universe?"
As for those other "Dune" books written by Frank Herbert's son and Kevin Anderson, they are total trash, and not worth any more of your time than, say, your average bottom-of-the-barrel Star Wars EU novel (it's telling that it took Frank Herbert nearly 30 years to write his six Dune novels, and it took them less than 5 years to write their first six). If you're curious about them, do yourself a favor by reading their synopses on wikipedia, feeling sad that they even exist, then forgetting that they do.
That actually sounds like a pretty good rationale behind the completely different approach for the later books. (I'm still not sure I'd still agree with that approach, of course.)
> but it helped to read a piece discussing the books
I loved the first book, and hated the rest. I got as far as half-way through Heretics of Dune when I suddenly asked myself, "Why are you still reading this?" and stopped.
I've since re-read Dune three or four times (most recently by way of an excellent audio-book version).
I don't remember seeing anyone recommend Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger[1] in these kinds of list. Not sure if it counts as sci-fi, and it's at least 25 years since I read it, but I recall it being worth reading.
There's a great little animation inspired by "The Mysterious Stranger",[0] which is apparently part of a film called "The Adventures of Mark Twain".[1]
Was going to ask "Which Mysterious Stranger?" but then I noticed you'd linked straight to text. :)
Ooo, checking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger there was apparently one version I didn't know about. (I've read the one you posted ("1916 publication"), "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger", and "Schoolhouse Hill".)
I've been reading more science fiction from "classic" authors lately - everyone knows that Jules Verne wrote science fiction but what about Edgar Allan Poe? I'm currently reading "The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin English Library)" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140431063/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...)
I read all Jules Verne novels I could get my hands on when I was 14-16 years old (for those who have not read Verne, they are very dry and detailed books).
Recently I discovered yet another, his dystopian novel: Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863, first published 1994) and it totally blew my mind how interestingly prophetic some of his predictions for 100 ahead years were (and some of the predictions still might become true).
If you enjoy prophetic scifi, you might be interested in a 1909 story called "The Machine Stops"[0][1], a short story by E. M. Forster, which predicted the internet, internet addiction, video conferencing, and other later technologies and scifi tropes.
Just my two cents, but if I were to make a sci-fi novel list of length 1, the only entry would be Hyperion by Dan Simmons. It's the Canterbury Tales in space, but the thing they're pilgrimaging towards is a nightmarish god of death.
another hyperion devotee here. my favorite since reading the hyperion and olympos books was Anathem by N. Stephenson, if you haven't read that one I bet you'll like it too!
Hyperion and Chasm City (2nd book of Revelation Space) are two of my favorite books I've read in the last few years.
The whole Revelation Space series is fantastic. It's written by a former ESA astronomer, so it definitely falls more toward the "hard sci-fi" side of the spectrum than Hyperion. It takes a few scientific liberties, but all of them are significant to the setting. Interstellar human civilizations without FTL are a pretty cool place for a story.
I read Hyperion when I was a teen, it informed my choice of online nick the moment I finished it. It's a truly fantastic book, the entire cantos is worth reading.
Hyperion and the follow-up The Fall of Hyperion are great novels. I was however disappointed with the 3rd and 4th novels in the series - Endymion and Rise of Endymion. It seemed to me that the characters went through too many near-death experiences back-to-back. The reason I mention the Endymion series because of its version of space travel. The resurrection crush combined with incredible acceleration and deceleration (which kills the occupants every trip) was an interesting (fictional) concept.
Agreed. It was nice to wrap up the series but the last two were nowhere near as good as the first 2.
I finally broke down after many years and am working through the Ilium series by Simmons. Its not what I was expecting, in a good way. I'm halfway through the 2nd book and it's safe to say in book 1 you aren't told much, but rather get to piece the world together as various characters experience it.
Contrary opinion here: I thought the Hyperion Cantos was pretty mediocre. It was full of too much mysticism and hogwash, and even minus those things, wasn't a particularly interesting or thought-provoking story.
I guess I was mostly put off by all the mysticism. You know, the stuff with crosses and crucifixion and ancient religious orders and super spooky all-powerful enemies. It wasn't mentally engaging. I didn't find myself asking "what if" like I usually do with sci-fi.
I loved Fire Upon The Deep! Why did you choose to compare that to Hyperion? I don't see many similarities.
hmm I would rate Accelerando as the least good book Stross have written. I would say that all his other books are much much better written and have better structure but that is of cause my own opinion.
Funny thing, I agree that Accelerando is his least good book, but still it is the book that should be on such a list. It is just a lot more influential than Halting State or the Laundry series.
You might (or might not) be surprised to learn that I agree. Reason: Accelerando is really a fix-up of nine novelettes, previously published separately in Asimov's SF Magazine. So it is, to say the least, episodic ...
It is definitely thought-provoking on the subject of computation and human culture; it's also really enjoyable. It's available for free under a Creative Commons license:
I agree that the structure and pacing is odd if taken as a single corpus (which is hard not to do in its book form!) I wasn't surprised to learn after reading it that it was published serially over the course of three years. I suspect that the sequence was not mapped out fully.
Edit: Heh. When I refreshed I didn't see the response from the author confirming this.
Good novels. As a meta note I'd suggest splitting hard and soft sci fi... someone who likes KSR's mars trilogy (which needs to be on the list) is possibly not going to like ultra super soft stuff like stranger in a strange land and vice versa. Then there's the in between stuff like moon is a harsh mistress.
Its sort of like a religious books list. Its quite possible that a lot of devout followers aren't going to be amused by reading the competition, and if you want a survey textbook, just buy a textbook.
I read just about every Heinlein story I could get my hands on as a teenager. The funny thing is that the one's I thought were sort of stupid - e.g. Have Space Suit Will Travel and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - because they were only about the solar system, I've found to be among my favorites as an adult.
Then again, I couldn't get through Friday back then, but found the description of the role that big data would play in the future prescient a few years ago. Likewise, understanding Stranger in a Strange Land in the context of Heinlien's relationship with Hubbard was beyond me in high-school [Hubbard's BattleField Earth is worth a read or at least a try, even if the movie isn't. He was a talented writer among other things].
I still have almost every story and book he has written. I especially enjoyed "Grumbles from the Grave" where talks about pushing the envelope to see what he could get away with. It made some of his more extreme viewpoints in the later books make more sense. He was trolling people.
Moon is a Harsh Mistress is my favorite of his, because it is a fun multi layered story. And we are almost at the day that Adam Selene could exist. I saw a Simon Jester reference the other day, made me laugh. I have read BattleField Earth a couple times, it is a massive book. L. Ron writes in the introduction that he wrote the book for himself, that he let his imagination run wild. L. Ron has quite an imagination (see Xenu), and the book is a long fast roller-coaster.
Has anyone else noticed the similarity between DD Harriman (The man who sold the moon) and Elon Musk?
Also he had a version of the internet thought out in 1938 "For us the living" which relied on an intercontinental series of tubes. Maybe Ted Stevens got his information from that. That book has many of his major plot lines jammed into one book. Not the best, but interesting to see the V1.0 of what became the Future History ideas. I read it right after the banking problems in 2008, so it was timely to read Heinlein rant about banking in the book (he disliked fractional reserve banking)
One sci-fi author that I really found refreshing was Karl Schroeder.
His first book has been made available for anyone to read, and if you like nano bots, micro payments, discussions on what it means to be human, I'd highly recommend checking his works out.
I second Karl Schroeder as a worthwhile SF author! His novels can be challenging but his ideas are unique and worth the price of admission:
* Ventus, his first novel, is about a world that turns accidentally alive (think Gaia) via nanotechnology.
* Lady of Mazes turns around how we could use (very advanced) technology to preserve cultures instead of undermining them.
* Permanence is about a star-faring civilization so advanced it doesn't need technology, it is technology, having perfectly evolved itself to its niche.
* The Virga series is set in a wonderfully imaginative zero-gee bubble-of-gas world, heated by an artificial sun --think of it as space with air!
Besides being an SF author, Schroeder is also a professional futurist. I recommend his OSCON 2009 talk,The Rewilding: A Metaphor, as a good introduction to his thinking.
The authors are overwhelmingly male (90%), and the titles are overwhelmingly old.
That's not to say that they're bad (though at least one is objectively bad). Just old and male.
Here's three for diversity:
- Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Character-driven space opera, with side-trips into mystery, thriller, and (gasp) romance. Start with the short story collection _Borders of Infinity_ to get a taste for it.
- Elizabeth Bear -- lots of variety, but _Carnival_ and _Dust_ are excellent. Respectively, they are an espionage/police procedural and a political thriller on a doomed starship.
- Linda Nagata -- she's best known for the epic nanotech series (The Bohr-Maker, Limit of Vision, Tech Heaven...) but recently started a near-future series about the impact of cybernetics, prosthetics and early AI (First Light).
I was half expecting you'd suggest some Far East sci-fi, which I'd love to get acquainted with.
On the GP's call for female authors, I'd add Joan Slonczewski, who's also a microbiology book author and professor, and draws on that knowledge for her classic A Door Into Ocean which is also feminist sci-fi.
It looks like that a lot of russian sci-fi is hard to get english translations of. For example a search for "Kir Bulychov" on amazon.co.uk doesnt return anything of the childrens sci-fi he wrote, which you would expect to still sell well.
The Anglophone trade fiction industry has serious structural issues when it comes to publishing translated works from other languages. Firstly, a lot of readers (and store book buyers) have a "not invented here" problem with foreign authors. Secondly, names that are unfamiliar: difficult. Names that are hard to pronounce: also difficult. (I know one Serbian author who uses a pseudonym specifically because her surname is hard for Americans and Brits to pronounce.) Thirdly: before an editor can decide to acquire and push a title out to marketing they have to read it; this entails at a minimum a bilingual editor in the language in question, or a budget to pay a translator for a three chapter extract and synopsis. Then, if they go with the book, they have the added overhead of commissioning a full translation and, hopefully, getting someone else who's fluent in the source language to sanity-check it. All in all, this costs thousands of dollars -- and there's so much adequate material already available in the vernacular that most editors don't bother. It takes someone with a real sense of mission to put the effort in -- or an author who's willing to pay a translator up-front on spec in hope of selling.
Little-known fact: Finnish SF author Hannu Rajaniemi writes in English. Indeed, his novel "The Quantum Thief" was translated into Finnish by someone else (and made it to #2 in the "foreign translated fiction" bestseller charts in Helsinki).
That is really unfortunate. Especially considering english is second language of choice of so much of the world. It would be helpful for more great works to be translated.
Agreed. I have a collection of five SF novels - translated to Portuguese - by authors from the Soviet Union (including by the Strugasky brothers, but also by Genrich Altshuller and his wife, and a few others) and as a whole they're easily better than many of the list.
A great advantage of being able to read in a few different languages is that it greatly increases the probability that you can read any specific work.
The Vorkosigan Saga is pretty run-of-the-mill space opera stuff, as far as I've seen. It's got a sort of an interesting premise, but it definitely smells of your early 1900s central European cultural setup (at least initially). In space. I don't regret reading it.
I think I will still prefer good books no mater age or gender of the author.
I guess the idea of the diversity being good just because of diversity comes from some old male too.
I don't really pay attention to the gender of the author of a book, and I'm not sure why someone putting together a list of what they consider to be good science fiction should have to either.
That said, people are obviously going to have a lot of their own opinions about what books would go on a list of must-reads. Personally, I'd never include Ayn Rand on any list, except maybe one that gives a list of authors that aren't worth reading.
In the science fiction I've read and enjoyed, most of it is written by men, but I'd rank books by both Connie Willis and Ursula K. Le Guin highly.
And, of course, in terms of enjoyment, I've loved much of what both Margaret Weis and Anne McCaffrey have written, even if their writing isn't exactly award winning.
How about The Sparrow from Mary Doria Russell. An amazingly deep and personal tale about humanity's first encounter with alien life. Sci-fi in the way that "Never Let Me Go" is sci-fi - the backdrop to a literary exploration of what it is to be human.
> The authors are overwhelmingly male (90%), and the titles are overwhelmingly old.
So what? I'm going now through the Vorkosigan Saga in internal chronological order (a couple more hours and I'll finish reading "Memory") and after Banks' Culture series and Simmons' Hyperion Cantos this is little more than properly edited average fan-fiction. Entertaining and enjoyable, but fundamentally flawed by Bujold's lack of depth and her much too transparent projections.
I conclusion, diversity can go out an air lock. Give me quality instead.
PSA: for contemporary, entertaining, thought-provoking novels relating to sci-fi, my short list of must-reads includes these gems:
* The Gone-Away World (Harkaway) [1]
* Ready Player One (Cline) [2] and
* The Martian (Weir) [3]
each of which is impossible to put down. Actually Harkaway's entire oevre is terrific. The steampunk Angelmaker [4] was a ton of fun.
Also, many of Iain M Banks' Culture novels (The Player of Games [5] is at the top of my personal list; they can be read in any order) and The Wind-up Girl (Bacigalupi) [6] are must-reads too.
This is not meant as criticism of the OP, rather as fodder for commenters referencing other longer and more contemporary lists.
Oh and a final, related tangent: if, like me, you really enjoy G.R.R. Martin but generally avoid straight-up fantasy [it seems to me the genre is awash in mediocre Tolkien rip-offs] please give The Name of the Wind (Rothfuss) [7] a chance. You'll be glad you did. :)
Yeah, I've heard that audiobook was great. I had a period of lengthy commuting when I listed to a ton of audiobooks, and found that Banks' Culture novels -- narrated by Peter Kenny in paricular -- were excellent. Kenny's performances really brought the works to life. A bad narrator can kill a good audiobook, and even a terrific one can't salvage a bad read. But pair an outstanding author with first-rate narration, and it's transformative. Highly recommended! :)
It's interesting how opinions about Ready Player One can be so polarized. As someone who spent their formative years living through the 80s, this book was a non-stop cringe-fest of embarrassment for me, made even worse by Wil Wheaton's over-the-top voice acting.
While I did quite enjoy the author's vision of futuristic VR, all the 80s camp and nostalgia ruined it for me.
I wanted to like it but couldn't get past the first couple of chapters. The reason? It's just so poorly written; the author never shows when he can just tell. It reads more like a description of a novel than an actual novel.
I finally got around to reading it. It was mildly enjoyable in the way decent fast food can be enjoyable, but I don't understand how people can claim this immature one dimensional story and okay writing constitutes a great book.
I enjoyed it because I'm a nerd who grew up in the 80's, but it's bubblegum entertainment with the depth of puddle.
I love SF, but the lack of distinction (by both fans and critics) between entertaining stories and good literature kinda turns me off and stops me from reading more. I constantly get disappointed when some highly praised SF book turns out to be nothing more than nerd equivalent of chick-lit.
Fuck, I even love SyFy channel's B-movie crap every once in a while, but at least I don't get duped into watching it thinking it is great cinema.
I would probably have enjoyed the book more if I had more realistic expectations.
I share your sentiments, in re expectations. Agreed RPO is a beach read, nostalgic fun for this child of the 80s, vs serious literature. Harkaway OTOH is a terrific writer and thinker per se, IMHO.
The Name of the Wind really is good. The second book of the series (The Wise Man's Fear) is also excellent.
Actually, just reading through the list, I was a little disappointed. Yes, there are some great classics, but Timeline" by Michael Crichton as the "time travel" sci-fi novel of reference. No, just no.
For time travel based sci-fi, Timescape by Gregory Benford is my pick of the lot. Bedford is actually an astrophysicist, so his version of time travel actually make sense. Plus, the characters in the books are scientists. It's a very thought provoking book. He has a second book along those lines, Cosm, which I loved as well, for it's portrayal of the lives of scientists.
Definitely good stuff. In terms of Orc-free pseudo-fantasy stuff, for those that liked Rothfuss and somewhat weird stuff (i.e. Ready Player One - though writing wasn't as good in that IMHO), Lev Grossman's Magicians series is possibly worth checking out. Anyway, I really liked it.
I really loved Name of the Wind, but actually felt a little let down by Wise Man's Fear. Dunno whether I was just expecting too much after an excellent first book, but I thought it should have been sub-titled "Kvothe gets laid and the plot goes nowhere".
Yeah that's true. I definitely enjoyed the book, I guess it's the old "I want more now" feeling coming into play. Which is usually a very good sign for any sort of entertainment, always leave them wanting more!
I've read the first book, and then decided to avoid the rest of the series. It was a boring life story of a flawless character who becomes a master in anything he partakes in, from acting to thievery to magic, and all before his teenage years... Totally ridiculous, in my opinion.
I had a similar reaction to "Assassin's Apprentice" by Robin Hobb; although not as perfect as Kvothe, her Fitz has all the possible talents in one place, from the Wit to the Skill etc. On the other hand, Hobb's Liveship Traders amazed me with the complexity of the story, as well as the beautifully designed characters (nearly none was a two-dimensional caricature but a real human being with feelings and motivations) -- it was like the reading a completely different author.
> It was a boring life story of a flawless character who becomes a master in anything he partakes in, from acting to thievery to magic, and all before his teenage years... Totally ridiculous, in my opinion.
The point is made many times that he is an unreliable narrator, and that this is a self-mythologising, which is part of why I like it.
With Assassin's Apprentice Fitz has all the possible talents in one place but seriously lacks in intelligence and in making rational choices. I spent all her books wishing I could slap Fitz until I just couldn't take it anymore.
Whilst I agree in some parts, the main character being exceptional is kinda the entire point of a heroic fantasy novel.
They are exceptional by design. If they weren't amazing swordsmen, or magic users, or highly intelligent, or highly determined, they'd be dying at the first hurdle in the story - which is equally ridiculous for a novel. The alternative for underpowered fantasy characters is either a non-perilous story or a lot of "deus ex machina" moments where the character survives by "random" chance. Neither of which are particularly interesting.
Narrative imperative does have some demands on story characters, but it's all down to the quality of the writing as to whether you can suspend your disbelief.
Well, being "exceptional" is one thing, but being flawless is something completely different. I agree that the best characters are exceptional, but flawless characters are difficult to take seriously, and tend to be quite boring.
Take Frodo Baggins, Thomas Covenant, Malta Vestrit, Jon Snow, Miles Vorkosigan, Sherlock Holmes or any of the countless prominent characters from fiction of any genre -- they are all quite exceptional, but also significantly flawed in one or many ways. I didn't see any prominent flaws in Kvothe, which made him really boring and uninteresting; now, as someone else mentioned, he is an unreliable narrator of his own life story, and it is quite possible that in later books it will turn out that a lot if it was a lie and his flaws will be revealed, but by then I have long lost my interest and I don't think I'll ever get that far. I do enjoy a good twist in the story, but the story up to that point needs to be interesting on its own; Usual Suspects wouldn't work at all if Verbal Kint was a flawless character.
I would think that Kvothe is every bit as flawed as Miles Vorkosigan. They both end up in sticky situations because they're more than just a little arrogant, which results in them biting off more than they can chew. Kvothe is not the best swordsman, he get's beaten up by a little girl. He is not the best Sympathist, again he get's beaten up when he thinks he is.
I just noticed though, as I'm writing this reply, that most of these flaws come out in the second book, not the first. Maybe you need to stick with the series a bit more before making up your mind.
Yeah, I think for me Kvothe's flawlessness was balanced by the unreliable narrator, who demonstrated that Kvothe in the present/future is not all-powerful anymore (if he ever was). The premise of the book thus appearing to be an inversion of the standard "weak hero becomes strong hero" plot, instead intriguing you from the start with wondering how a strong hero becomes so decrepit.
That's why I found it quite frustrating reading the 2nd book, as the present/future feels like where the "real" story lies, but it made absolutely no advancement in that direction. So I definitely agree with you there, the focus on the super-powered young Kvothe does detract from the main story as I see it.
I absolutely hated the Windup Girl fwiw. The science made no sense whatsoever & and the successive "lets rape the sex-bot again!" scenes made me question why I was reading the book at all. About the only thing is had going for it was atmosphere & once you peel back that surface there's nothing there that would ever make me want to read that book again.
I love that book. I have the audio version, and the narrator is excellent, so that lends to relistening easily.
The world it presents is very deep. It mixes a near future of more advanced technologies in some aspects with what a post-cheap energy future could be like.
I found the second book of Name of the Wind really badly written and juvenile sex fantasy. Let me recommend the Stormlight Archive instead, fantastically written and imaginative world: http://brandonsanderson.com/books/the-stormlight-archive/
The mix of stupidity, contradictions, overstretched scenery, cringe worthy glorifications, weird ideology, stupid characters and the unbelievably slow progress were just too much. I plan to finish it some day...when I'm already depressed maybe. I would like to understand what people see in this...thing.
Atlas Shrugged is many things, but it doesn't look or act like sci-fi by any measure. This choice stands out like sore thumb and compromises the integrity of the list for the obvious reasons.
I cringed most of the way through Atlas Shrugged when I first read it. Having encountered more than my share of bureaucrats , inept big corporations and NGO's since, I can say she did have some valid points. The world is full of people who survive by sucking the blood out of the doers.
It is nuts putting it on a sci-fi list, its more a political screed.
After reading Ringworld as a kid, Halo was a bit of a let down. For all those who grew up with Halo, I wonder if Ringworld stands up. I'd add the new Young Miles omnibus by Lois McMaster Bujold. Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon. Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones (read it again recently and the quantum computer is interesting). Moon of Three Rings and Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton.
Absolutely. I played and read Halo related material before Ringworld, and it's the reason I even bothered reading Ringworld in the first place. Definitely enjoyed both, though I felt the first Halo book trilogy was weak the first time I read it too, and I fear it won't hold up well at all.
Thats good news that you still enjoyed Ringworld. I was wondering if the orginality of the work was the main strength of it at the time. I still hear mixed things about the Halo books. Goodreads is still giving the first one a good rating, but the reviews are all over the place.
There are some great books on the list, however it should be a criminal offense to not include Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (first published as Tiger! Tiger!). It's best summed up as The Count of Monte Cristo, in space. Bester's novel is in many ways the forerunner of the cyberpunk genre.
I was just about to make the very same suggestion. Ignore the list and just read this book! The threading of the 'jaunting' concept was way ahead of its time in 1956 and the inspiration can be seen in many modern films.
But (for those of you who haven't read it) that summary really doesn't even hint at the novel's greatness. It just spills out cool ideas, hardly ever pausing to take a breath.
Bester's The Demolished Man is also well worth mentioning. Won the very first Hugo award, still stands up well today.
Something that amazes me about Bester's writing is that neither book feels dated. Then, you think about how visionary he was in the time they were written, and it blows you away.
Of course, the other thing about Bester that amazes me is that he's so obscure, despite as you point out winning the first Hugo and for writing notable early sci-fi. Someone's knowledge of Bester has become an informal litmus test for me to get a feel for how well read someone is in sci-fi.
Neat tidbit about Bester: he's also credited with writing the Green Lantern Oath.
'It is, as Bruce Sterling remarked to me on our first meeting, “a seamless pop artifact.” Few and far between, such artifacts; each one a complete anomaly.'
I can't see the list, but agree Bester should be there. Another perennially under-rated author of the same era is Algis Budrys, whose "Rogue Moon" is one of the most perfectly integrated works of fiction I've ever read. James Blish descried it as something like "a fully complete work of art".
It is one of the best depictions of science as a human enterprise you will find, and makes the point that the universe makes sense to us only because we have actively gone out and made sense of it. What we take for granted (falling kills you, say) was discovered, and when we encounter something completely new we have to discover all the new ways it can kill us (or do other things), thereby recapitulating the process the first humans must have engaged in as they came to not just inhabit but be aware of the world and the rules that govern it.
One character's description of the mysterious structure on the Moon at the centre of the story could just as well apply to our own world: "It's like Alice in Wonderland, with teeth. There are rules..."
I was thinking, "Atlas Shrugged, what the fuck?" but then I re-read the title of the article. As is [ironically with a sense that is lost upon them] common to admirers of Ayn Rand, the author feels compelled to "should" on their readers. I was warned.
I've read most everything on the list, though the dead horse of Animal Farm was first beaten for me in sixth grade...and that was long enough ago that Cold War MADness was a reality in the days when "PG" on a movie meant "tits" and Murray and Ramos could parody the US Army...if the list has talking animals, where is Watership Down?
What I found is that the list gives context to the novels...the line of telephones ringing are forgivable in 1985's Neuromancer in a way that they wouldn't be in a movie made today. The competence of the grunts in 1960's Starship Troopers is a reaction to the USMC in the Second World War and the experience of the US military during the shooting phase of the Korean War. 1998's Forever Peace shows how much computers changed the meanings of "combatant" and "battlefield" in the subsequent 40 years.
One of the other interesting themes of science fiction is the evolution of the post-apocalyptic world. The alien invasion of 1950's Day of the Triffids and the pandemic of 1949's Earth Abides [not a Hugo Novels] giving way to the nuclear wastelands of 1961's Canticle for Leibowitz's and 1966's This Immortal [when Zelzany's novel tied Herbert's Dune for the Hugo and rightly so].
By 1996's Diamond Age or 2010's Windup Girl the apocalypse is a slow moving tragedy of the commons brought on not by rash misunderstanding but by long term economic rationalizations...bringing us full circle, and you were warned.
Yeah, re Atlas Shrugged, that was exactly my first thought as I scrolled down. If you want a [nuts] libertarian fantasy, then Weapon Shops of Isher is slightly better written and at least entertainingly camp. And Animal Farm definitely doesn't belong on a scifi list, and I think hammers home the political sympathies of the post's author (yeah, why not Watership Down? Or Shardik even?).
Its a good list of classics, but dropping Doctorow in there seems a bit incongruous. I've never cared for his novels. They always strike me as little more than pandering spackling together of snappy glib dialogue with pop culture tropes and memes. They leave me feeling about as satisfied and intellectually stimulated as eating ice cream for lunch does for my nutritional needs. I say the same about Scalzi.
Rapture of the Nerds and Makers are both competent utopian/distopian novels respectively. Little Brother etc. are sound as teen fiction. If spackled memes aren't appropriate, then Orwell probably should not be on the list unless pandering to anti-communists in an English accent counts as gravitas.
At least Doctorow takes on the world wide media machine that is the Rat of Orlando.
Early Doctrow fiction is pretty good, he doesn't attempt to push his political beliefs as much. I actually don't disagree with a lot of the ideas he espouses, but his last two books were as subtle as a stomach pump.
Hmm I entirely agree with your description of Doctorow, but disagree about Scalzi. I've been enjoying most of his books quite a lot. I wasn't a big fan of Old Man's War and won't read any more of that series, but I still quite like his other books.
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Here are two better lists if you are after lesser known / more modern sci-fi gems:
http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/281se9
http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2014/08/scifi-reading-sugg...
I'm slowly chewing through them, there are some awesome books / new authors there.
Well stated! But I found 6 books that I haven't read yet, so that will keep me busy for a few weeks.
It's a great books sure, but sci-fi? Surely just contemporary fiction? Hell, half of it is historical fiction.
I would also like to add Greg Egan - Diaspora. I love it for how it takes post/transhumanism (among other things) to the extreme.
Greg Egan is amazing as well, and has fantastic short stories too.
I've read most of them now and the highlights for me are Look To Windward, Player of Games and Fearsum Endjinn (stick with that one). I also rate Excession and Matter though I know a lot of other people think they're weaker.
Atlas Shrugged has been called the 'second most influential book in America' so I can understand why it gets mentioned a lot. I found it an unimaginative, tacky bore. It's at least three times the length it should be, the characters speak in diatribes and are impossible to empathise with. At best it's interesting as a thought experiment and it did affect my outlook on life but, really, I read it because I thought I should, not because I wanted to.
I also found Red Mars a bit of a struggle in this way too. It seemed similarly ideological to Atlas Shrugged but from the other direction. It was worth reading for the sheer attention to detail and imagination though.
However, if you're planning on going through the entire series I'd suggest stopping at God Emperor. The books afterwards seem to lose their direction, the plot starts to feel a bit contrived. The focus shifts from action to endless discussions between characters that could've been used to develop character and story, but seem to tread the same ground. At the same time details that were mentioned in a sentence suddenly balloon into massive plot points, and bizarre deus ex machinae pop up all over the place.
YMMV, of course. I stopped after finishing the original series, and read the Wikipedia synopses of the rest of the books in order to get some sort of closure.
I'll break ranks, though, and say I actually enjoy the plot after God Emperor of Dune quite a lot. I didn't really the first time I read the books, so that may have some bearing, but it helped to read a piece discussing the books, where they claimed that the Dune books are two separate trilogies, with God Emperor as the transitional book.
Unfortunately, Frank Herbert didn't get to complete the second trilogy, but the first two books of it -- when thought of as a mostly separate set of stories from the first Dune books -- becomes much more interesting, rather than just "why is he introducing all this new stuff into this universe?"
As for those other "Dune" books written by Frank Herbert's son and Kevin Anderson, they are total trash, and not worth any more of your time than, say, your average bottom-of-the-barrel Star Wars EU novel (it's telling that it took Frank Herbert nearly 30 years to write his six Dune novels, and it took them less than 5 years to write their first six). If you're curious about them, do yourself a favor by reading their synopses on wikipedia, feeling sad that they even exist, then forgetting that they do.
> but it helped to read a piece discussing the books
Any chance you could link to that piece?
http://militaryprofessionalreadinglists.com/search?keywords=...
It's not on their most recent list, but Starship Troopers is.
I've since re-read Dune three or four times (most recently by way of an excellent audio-book version).
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3186/3186-h/3186-h.htm
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpaRouocBes
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Mark_Twain_%...
Ooo, checking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Stranger there was apparently one version I didn't know about. (I've read the one you posted ("1916 publication"), "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger", and "Schoolhouse Hill".)
Been following it for a few years now.
Recently I discovered yet another, his dystopian novel: Paris in the Twentieth Century (written in 1863, first published 1994) and it totally blew my mind how interestingly prophetic some of his predictions for 100 ahead years were (and some of the predictions still might become true).
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
[1] - http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
http://www.amazon.com/Hyperion-Cantos-Dan-Simmons/dp/0553283...
I'll go ahead and second your recommendation. A thoroughly enjoyable read with several really great concepts.
The whole Revelation Space series is fantastic. It's written by a former ESA astronomer, so it definitely falls more toward the "hard sci-fi" side of the spectrum than Hyperion. It takes a few scientific liberties, but all of them are significant to the setting. Interstellar human civilizations without FTL are a pretty cool place for a story.
I finally broke down after many years and am working through the Ilium series by Simmons. Its not what I was expecting, in a good way. I'm halfway through the 2nd book and it's safe to say in book 1 you aren't told much, but rather get to piece the world together as various characters experience it.
Not too bad so far.
Do you have a similar opinion about Fire Upon the Deep? Is there any soft sci-fi, particularly far-future, that you like?
I loved Fire Upon The Deep! Why did you choose to compare that to Hyperion? I don't see many similarities.
If someone is going to recommend just one book, it's kind of a bum deal recommending one that is just a build-up for the sequel.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
I agree that the structure and pacing is odd if taken as a single corpus (which is hard not to do in its book form!) I wasn't surprised to learn after reading it that it was published serially over the course of three years. I suspect that the sequence was not mapped out fully.
Edit: Heh. When I refreshed I didn't see the response from the author confirming this.
Its sort of like a religious books list. Its quite possible that a lot of devout followers aren't going to be amused by reading the competition, and if you want a survey textbook, just buy a textbook.
Then again, I couldn't get through Friday back then, but found the description of the role that big data would play in the future prescient a few years ago. Likewise, understanding Stranger in a Strange Land in the context of Heinlien's relationship with Hubbard was beyond me in high-school [Hubbard's BattleField Earth is worth a read or at least a try, even if the movie isn't. He was a talented writer among other things].
Moon is a Harsh Mistress is my favorite of his, because it is a fun multi layered story. And we are almost at the day that Adam Selene could exist. I saw a Simon Jester reference the other day, made me laugh. I have read BattleField Earth a couple times, it is a massive book. L. Ron writes in the introduction that he wrote the book for himself, that he let his imagination run wild. L. Ron has quite an imagination (see Xenu), and the book is a long fast roller-coaster.
Has anyone else noticed the similarity between DD Harriman (The man who sold the moon) and Elon Musk?
Also he had a version of the internet thought out in 1938 "For us the living" which relied on an intercontinental series of tubes. Maybe Ted Stevens got his information from that. That book has many of his major plot lines jammed into one book. Not the best, but interesting to see the V1.0 of what became the Future History ideas. I read it right after the banking problems in 2008, so it was timely to read Heinlein rant about banking in the book (he disliked fractional reserve banking)
/fanboyoff now.
http://www.kschroeder.com/my-books/ventus/free-ebook-version
* Ventus, his first novel, is about a world that turns accidentally alive (think Gaia) via nanotechnology.
* Lady of Mazes turns around how we could use (very advanced) technology to preserve cultures instead of undermining them.
* Permanence is about a star-faring civilization so advanced it doesn't need technology, it is technology, having perfectly evolved itself to its niche.
* The Virga series is set in a wonderfully imaginative zero-gee bubble-of-gas world, heated by an artificial sun --think of it as space with air!
Besides being an SF author, Schroeder is also a professional futurist. I recommend his OSCON 2009 talk,The Rewilding: A Metaphor, as a good introduction to his thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb7pkohj6wE
That's not to say that they're bad (though at least one is objectively bad). Just old and male.
Here's three for diversity:
- Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Character-driven space opera, with side-trips into mystery, thriller, and (gasp) romance. Start with the short story collection _Borders of Infinity_ to get a taste for it.
- Elizabeth Bear -- lots of variety, but _Carnival_ and _Dust_ are excellent. Respectively, they are an espionage/police procedural and a political thriller on a doomed starship.
- Linda Nagata -- she's best known for the epic nanotech series (The Bohr-Maker, Limit of Vision, Tech Heaven...) but recently started a near-future series about the impact of cybernetics, prosthetics and early AI (First Light).
There's a lot more diversity missed out on due to not having say Lem and the Strugasky brothers than on old and male imo.
Eastern European sci-fi is well worth spending some time on.
On the GP's call for female authors, I'd add Joan Slonczewski, who's also a microbiology book author and professor, and draws on that knowledge for her classic A Door Into Ocean which is also feminist sci-fi.
Little-known fact: Finnish SF author Hannu Rajaniemi writes in English. Indeed, his novel "The Quantum Thief" was translated into Finnish by someone else (and made it to #2 in the "foreign translated fiction" bestseller charts in Helsinki).
http://www.amazon.com/The-Quantum-Thief-Jean-Flambeur-ebook/...
A great advantage of being able to read in a few different languages is that it greatly increases the probability that you can read any specific work.
That said, people are obviously going to have a lot of their own opinions about what books would go on a list of must-reads. Personally, I'd never include Ayn Rand on any list, except maybe one that gives a list of authors that aren't worth reading.
In the science fiction I've read and enjoyed, most of it is written by men, but I'd rank books by both Connie Willis and Ursula K. Le Guin highly.
And, of course, in terms of enjoyment, I've loved much of what both Margaret Weis and Anne McCaffrey have written, even if their writing isn't exactly award winning.
http://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Science-Fiction/books/1627...
(not saying good, mind you. For example "military sci fi")
So what? I'm going now through the Vorkosigan Saga in internal chronological order (a couple more hours and I'll finish reading "Memory") and after Banks' Culture series and Simmons' Hyperion Cantos this is little more than properly edited average fan-fiction. Entertaining and enjoyable, but fundamentally flawed by Bujold's lack of depth and her much too transparent projections.
I conclusion, diversity can go out an air lock. Give me quality instead.
* The Gone-Away World (Harkaway) [1]
* Ready Player One (Cline) [2] and
* The Martian (Weir) [3]
each of which is impossible to put down. Actually Harkaway's entire oevre is terrific. The steampunk Angelmaker [4] was a ton of fun.
Also, many of Iain M Banks' Culture novels (The Player of Games [5] is at the top of my personal list; they can be read in any order) and The Wind-up Girl (Bacigalupi) [6] are must-reads too.
This is not meant as criticism of the OP, rather as fodder for commenters referencing other longer and more contemporary lists.
Oh and a final, related tangent: if, like me, you really enjoy G.R.R. Martin but generally avoid straight-up fantasy [it seems to me the genre is awash in mediocre Tolkien rip-offs] please give The Name of the Wind (Rothfuss) [7] a chance. You'll be glad you did. :)
[1] http://smile.amazon.com/Gone-Away-World-Nick-Harkaway-ebook/...
[2] http://smile.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-Ernest-Cline-ebook/...
[3] http://smile.amazon.com/Martian-Novel-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00...
[4] http://smile.amazon.com/Angelmaker-Nick-Harkaway-ebook/dp/B0...
[5] http://smile.amazon.com/Player-Games-Culture-Novel-Book-eboo...
[6] http://smile.amazon.com/Windup-Girl-Paolo-Bacigalupi-ebook/d...
[7] http://smile.amazon.com/Name-Wind-Kingkiller-Chronicle-Day-e...
While I did quite enjoy the author's vision of futuristic VR, all the 80s camp and nostalgia ruined it for me.
I enjoyed it because I'm a nerd who grew up in the 80's, but it's bubblegum entertainment with the depth of puddle.
I love SF, but the lack of distinction (by both fans and critics) between entertaining stories and good literature kinda turns me off and stops me from reading more. I constantly get disappointed when some highly praised SF book turns out to be nothing more than nerd equivalent of chick-lit.
Fuck, I even love SyFy channel's B-movie crap every once in a while, but at least I don't get duped into watching it thinking it is great cinema.
I would probably have enjoyed the book more if I had more realistic expectations.
Actually, just reading through the list, I was a little disappointed. Yes, there are some great classics, but Timeline" by Michael Crichton as the "time travel" sci-fi novel of reference. No, just no.
For time travel based sci-fi, Timescape by Gregory Benford is my pick of the lot. Bedford is actually an astrophysicist, so his version of time travel actually make sense. Plus, the characters in the books are scientists. It's a very thought provoking book. He has a second book along those lines, Cosm, which I loved as well, for it's portrayal of the lives of scientists.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Magicians-Novel-Trilogy/dp/0670020...
I had a similar reaction to "Assassin's Apprentice" by Robin Hobb; although not as perfect as Kvothe, her Fitz has all the possible talents in one place, from the Wit to the Skill etc. On the other hand, Hobb's Liveship Traders amazed me with the complexity of the story, as well as the beautifully designed characters (nearly none was a two-dimensional caricature but a real human being with feelings and motivations) -- it was like the reading a completely different author.
The point is made many times that he is an unreliable narrator, and that this is a self-mythologising, which is part of why I like it.
I will have to try Liveship traders
They are exceptional by design. If they weren't amazing swordsmen, or magic users, or highly intelligent, or highly determined, they'd be dying at the first hurdle in the story - which is equally ridiculous for a novel. The alternative for underpowered fantasy characters is either a non-perilous story or a lot of "deus ex machina" moments where the character survives by "random" chance. Neither of which are particularly interesting.
Narrative imperative does have some demands on story characters, but it's all down to the quality of the writing as to whether you can suspend your disbelief.
Take Frodo Baggins, Thomas Covenant, Malta Vestrit, Jon Snow, Miles Vorkosigan, Sherlock Holmes or any of the countless prominent characters from fiction of any genre -- they are all quite exceptional, but also significantly flawed in one or many ways. I didn't see any prominent flaws in Kvothe, which made him really boring and uninteresting; now, as someone else mentioned, he is an unreliable narrator of his own life story, and it is quite possible that in later books it will turn out that a lot if it was a lie and his flaws will be revealed, but by then I have long lost my interest and I don't think I'll ever get that far. I do enjoy a good twist in the story, but the story up to that point needs to be interesting on its own; Usual Suspects wouldn't work at all if Verbal Kint was a flawless character.
I just noticed though, as I'm writing this reply, that most of these flaws come out in the second book, not the first. Maybe you need to stick with the series a bit more before making up your mind.
That's why I found it quite frustrating reading the 2nd book, as the present/future feels like where the "real" story lies, but it made absolutely no advancement in that direction. So I definitely agree with you there, the focus on the super-powered young Kvothe does detract from the main story as I see it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_%28Grimwood_novel%29
The world it presents is very deep. It mixes a near future of more advanced technologies in some aspects with what a post-cheap energy future could be like.
Yes, just like a certain goat-URLed website that used to feature a man "stretching his boundary" farther than seemed possible...
The mix of stupidity, contradictions, overstretched scenery, cringe worthy glorifications, weird ideology, stupid characters and the unbelievably slow progress were just too much. I plan to finish it some day...when I'm already depressed maybe. I would like to understand what people see in this...thing.
It is nuts putting it on a sci-fi list, its more a political screed.
Bester's The Demolished Man is also well worth mentioning. Won the very first Hugo award, still stands up well today.
Something that amazes me about Bester's writing is that neither book feels dated. Then, you think about how visionary he was in the time they were written, and it blows you away.
Of course, the other thing about Bester that amazes me is that he's so obscure, despite as you point out winning the first Hugo and for writing notable early sci-fi. Someone's knowledge of Bester has become an informal litmus test for me to get a feel for how well read someone is in sci-fi.
Neat tidbit about Bester: he's also credited with writing the Green Lantern Oath.
edit: to be specific, Silver Age Green Lantern.
http://www.loa.org/sciencefiction/appreciation/gibson.jsp
'It is, as Bruce Sterling remarked to me on our first meeting, “a seamless pop artifact.” Few and far between, such artifacts; each one a complete anomaly.'
Really worth mentioning Bester's short stories, too. "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed", "Fondly Fahrenheit", "5,271,009"...
It is one of the best depictions of science as a human enterprise you will find, and makes the point that the universe makes sense to us only because we have actively gone out and made sense of it. What we take for granted (falling kills you, say) was discovered, and when we encounter something completely new we have to discover all the new ways it can kill us (or do other things), thereby recapitulating the process the first humans must have engaged in as they came to not just inhabit but be aware of the world and the rules that govern it.
One character's description of the mysterious structure on the Moon at the centre of the story could just as well apply to our own world: "It's like Alice in Wonderland, with teeth. There are rules..."
I've read most everything on the list, though the dead horse of Animal Farm was first beaten for me in sixth grade...and that was long enough ago that Cold War MADness was a reality in the days when "PG" on a movie meant "tits" and Murray and Ramos could parody the US Army...if the list has talking animals, where is Watership Down?
But I digress...
A few years ago, I came back to science fiction and started reading the Hugo Award novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel#Winne...
What I found is that the list gives context to the novels...the line of telephones ringing are forgivable in 1985's Neuromancer in a way that they wouldn't be in a movie made today. The competence of the grunts in 1960's Starship Troopers is a reaction to the USMC in the Second World War and the experience of the US military during the shooting phase of the Korean War. 1998's Forever Peace shows how much computers changed the meanings of "combatant" and "battlefield" in the subsequent 40 years.
One of the other interesting themes of science fiction is the evolution of the post-apocalyptic world. The alien invasion of 1950's Day of the Triffids and the pandemic of 1949's Earth Abides [not a Hugo Novels] giving way to the nuclear wastelands of 1961's Canticle for Leibowitz's and 1966's This Immortal [when Zelzany's novel tied Herbert's Dune for the Hugo and rightly so].
By 1996's Diamond Age or 2010's Windup Girl the apocalypse is a slow moving tragedy of the commons brought on not by rash misunderstanding but by long term economic rationalizations...bringing us full circle, and you were warned.
At least Doctorow takes on the world wide media machine that is the Rat of Orlando.