this is the thread for recent sci-fi recommendations

And I'd second the recommendation for China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (which I loved and spent a whole weekend reading rather than spending time with loved ones).

someone recommend me a sci-fi book

i like:

iain m. banks
china mieville
philip k dick
arthur c clarke

a bunch of other people

Something recent? I've no idea... Something old? Have you read Slan by A.E. Van Vogt?

Good Science Fiction of the last 20 to 30 years

i have not read slan!

i guess recent? no real pref either way, just looking for something new to me. i tend to like "big" (banks-style) epic stuff. alastair reynolds has sort of scratched that itch lately but i dont really LOVE what he does.

you know i finally read "the stars my destination" sometime this summer and while it was pretty dece it was like nowhere NEAR as earth-shattering as i'd been lead to believe..

John Brunner classics like Sheep Look Up, Stand On Zanzibar, Jagged Orbit, and Shockwave Rider are still good fun - just based on who ya like s1ocki

the war against the rull by a.e. van vogt is awesome

'the forever war' by joe haldeman is not recent but maybe one of the top five sci fi books i've read.

Gear, your current screenname has opened up a wormhole in ILX.

It would make my decade if Ridley Scott makes that Forever War film.

'the forever war' by joe haldeman is not recent but maybe one of the top five sci fi books i've read.

― jØrdån (omar little), Saturday, October 24, 2009 9:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i thought this was pretty good! like "stars my destinaysh" it didnt quite blow my mind, but it was a great idea, pretty well-executed.

you know what i LOVED recently was that sci-fi academy all-star anthology or whatever it was called, that famous antho of classic sci-fi. i loved those stories that pointed in weird directions that sci-fi COULD have gone in but didn't, like scanners live in vain

You talking about this, s1ocki? Best Story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 (Unabridged Version)

yes!

scanners live in vain

recs?

Get the James Tiptree, Jr. collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. The Cordwainer Smith stuff comes in two formats, either When The People Fell plus We The Underpeople from Baen Books or The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith plus Norstrilia from the NESFA Press. Of course, none of this is "recent" as per the thread title.

Hm. Looks like there is even a paper comparing those two: Painwise in Space: The Psychology of Isolation in Cordwainer Smith and James P. Tiptree, Jr.
Elms, Alan C. in: Westfahl, Gary, ed. Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. pp.131-142.

May have mentioned these on the other thread, but...

Peter Watts: Blindsight

Stephen Baxter: Flood (plus the 4 he wrote with Clarke's name on the front, 'Time's Eye', 'Destiny's Children' and so on)

Paul McAuley: The Quiet War

Ian Macdonald: Chindi

I was recommended Charles Stross recently and I'm reading Accelerando which I like a lot.

I also dug M. John Harrison's Light. The follow up to that story, Nova Swing, not as much.

thumbs up on the Brunner books.

blindsight looks kinda cool...

It is--lots of clever biology/cognition stuff, exciting drama, very grim, very clever

Think I'm going to have to check that one out too.

I also dug M. John Harrison's Light. The follow up to that story, Nova Swing, not as much.

Peter Watts is great, especially the Rifters trilogy (all are available as free online ebooks, don't let that put you off). Charlie Stross is also very good, not many will writers take you step by step through the singularity.

If I want to read those John Brunner novels, can I just get going The Sheep Look Up or is it better to start with Stand On Zanzibar?

I couldn't make it past the first 20 pages of Stand On Zanzibar

i remember enjoying light but also having little to no idea what was going on

You should get the big Viriconium book, Jordan, it's a little more straightforward.

what version of the forever war did you read, s1ocki? did it include the "you can't go home again" section? anyway i second the paul mcauley recommendation, everything i've read by him is quite good.

im not sure, what is that section?

mandella goes back home after his first tour of duty and he's aged a few months while his family has aged, i dunno, thirty or forty years, and the world has changed drastically and everything is kinda fucked up and everyone he knows who is still alive is unrecognizable to him. so he just decides to re-enlist. it kinda adds another melancholy edge to the story, though there are a few nice satirical touches too. (i was wrong btw, the section is called 'You Can Never Go Back'.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJ_z_vaU6eU

Is there any newish SF along the lines of Ted Chiang (the "newest" SF author I remember liking)
Also not new, but how is Texas-Israeli War?

"both are amazing, using the conventions of fantasy and at the same time subverting them, but not in some kind of offputting, po-mo way (unless the reader is thomp)."

haha wait what?

how 'bout this Kim Stanley Robinson guy? Any good?

I think so! the Mars books and the most recent climate change trilogy are the best places to start.

mandella goes back home after his first tour of duty and he's aged a few months while his family has aged, i dunno, thirty or forty years, and the world has changed drastically and everything is kinda fucked up and everyone he knows who is still alive is unrecognizable to him. so he just decides to re-enlist. it kinda adds another melancholy edge to the story, though there are a few nice satirical touches too. (i was wrong btw, the section is called 'You Can Never Go Back'.)

― jØrdån (omar little), Friday, October 30, 2009 1:12 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is that the end or...? cuz the one i read had a sort of fake-feeling happy ending

I'm in the middle of Light, thanks to this thread. It's making my head spin. Engrossing bus reading.

it's in the middle of the novel. the happy ending is the original ending and is awesome imo, because it's still a little absurd in keeping with the overall absurdity of the story. didn't feel fake to me, it kind of felt earned.

I'm in the middle of Light, thanks to this thread.
Over the years, I started not paying too much attention to the recommendations of other ILX0rs, but for some reason on these sci-fi threads I keep thinking: "Oh, I gotta read THAT one!"

I couldn't get more than 100 pages into KSR's climate-change trilogy, but Red/Green/Blue Mars are fantastic. And I really really loved his Orange County Trilogy.

I gotta read those Mars books too. Got the first one as a freebie ebook- they give them away sometimes to get you hooked on the series.

Ooh, where from? Got new sony reader so keen on getting freebies!

Sorry, it's a Kindle. Mrs. Redd got me one as a present back in 2008.

(unless the reader is thomp).

still waiting for an explanation of this ~

OK, sorry it was based on one post of yours on another thread. Let me find it. Here it is:
The girls are out flaunting their Summer plumage but you're stuck inside, reading. What?

aha

i was annoyed at nova swing being a bit lame, i think. i dunno, i have a weird relationship with fantasy fiction & New Wave i have probably gone on about before. i'm actually reading a lottt of 'fantasy conventions but not' type stuff right now, i think i might have undervalued those two. it's been a while.

has anyone read 'the centauri device'? i think i was lumping the first two viriconium books in mentally with that and thomas disch's 'the genocides' - you know, "it's the titanic struggle to save the earth from being wiped out oh wait we lost earth got wiped out ha ha" - "if we don't do this thing the universe gets blown up oh ha the universe just got blown up" - mentally i had pastel city/storm of wings as "we have to go get the magic artifact and save fantasyland oh wait fantasyland is screwed"

Just ordered a copy of The Centauri Device, will let you know when I get round to reading it.

That German sci-fi comp somebody mentioned on another thread, The Black Mirror, seems like it might be pretty good. Guy who put it together has apparently done some other compilations of some interesting stuff.

Loved the years of rice and salt by KSR.

Much prefer The Centauri Device to Light.

Really enjoyed Centauri Device, though it's pretty pulpy. Apparently Harrison hates it now.

Just picked up Jeff Vandermeer's new one, Finch, and expect to be immersed in fungal craziness for the next week or so.

Harrison hates The Centauri Device? No wonder it's not in print in the US.

Without giving anything away, The Centauri Device contains a nasty caricature of Burroughs. Which is rather ungrateful on Harrison's part, considering:

Could give no other information than wind walking in a rubbish heap to the sky - Solid shadow turned off the white film of noon heat - Exploded deep in the alley tortured metal Oz - Look anywhere, Dead hand - Phosphorescent bones -

--Nova Express

The sky was green and gray, luminous with radio-decay products. Wind walking in a rubbish heap; dead lights and water

--The Centauri Device

What's Burroughs' SF like? I've been tempted, but then I pick it up and read a page, and get the hives.

Should I bother with anything Harrison if I prefer my SF ultra-hard?

I would say no. Harrison is very far from hard SF.

I was getting that impression, after reading a Lightextract -
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/light.htm

Not that I'm completely against somewhat less than mathematically rigourous flights of fancy, but I think I prefer things to be one or the other. If you don't care about mathematical rigour then don't make it seem like hard SF on the surface, and if you do want to write hard SF then please try and make it sound plausible. Even if it's still all made up in the end.

If you don't care about mathematical rigour then don't make it seem like hard SF on the surface

(hi dere Peter F Hamilton)

What's Burroughs' SF like? I've been tempted, but then I pick it up and read a page, and get the hives.

Burroughs' stuff is mostly hallucinatory exaggerations of the drug addict experience rather than SF. If you want a sample, go to Google Books, Naked Lunch restored text, the chapter called "The Black Meat." None of the rest is any more pleasant.

I liked 'a junkie's xmas' which is kind of SF:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLAboW9-Uss

Halfway into 'Finch', the new Vandermeer - damn, this one is bleak. Any trace of the whimsy that was present in the early Abmergris stories is gone, the fungoid 'grays' are running things, and they've matured into truly Lovecraftian nasties. It's a hardboiled detective story with lots of squishy Burroughs/Cronenberg technology.

Sounds good. Something has kept me from getting really into Vandermeer, and whimsy might be it. He comes off so nice and enthusiastic about everything he loves, and I want to root for the guy/like his stories more.

Is the first Ambergris book City Of Saints and Madmen?

btw, I really liked Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem. I think it got a mixed reception on the Stephenson thread.

xpost aren't two of his books called City of Saints and Madmen? I read (most of) the one that's a comp of already published stuff.

Now I remember that City of Saints and Madmen was automatically recommended to me because I was a customer who bought Viriconium. At the same time they also recommended something called The Etched City, by K.J. Bishop.

"I really liked Neal Stephenson's latest, Anathem. I think it got a mixed reception on the Stephenson thread."

I think Stephenson (like David Foster Wallace) is much better as an essayist writing directly in the first person than getting across ideas through a character's mouth.
This is really excellent, and has as much idea-density as Anathem:
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml

Loved Anathem, my favourite Stephenson so far (out of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and er The Big U).

xpost: City Of Saints and Madmen, in it's myriad of different editions, collects the first Ambergris stories. A lot of this stuff exists as chapbooks, and there are loads of appendices and footnotes. Shriek: An Afterword comes next, is much more of a cohesive novel. Finch takes up the story a century later.

Shriek is distinctly darker than City, set in the middle of a brutal civil war, and seems to me to be about the siege of Sarajevo in some way. Finch is darker still, and takes place in an Ambergris taken under totalitarian control by the fungoid Grays in the aftermath of a disastrous war with the Kalif. (Draw your own conclusions.) I'm still only half-way through, but there's a great sense that threads left hanging very early in the series are about to be drawn up.

Jeff does indeed seem like a lovely bloke, but his last couple of novels suggest that the everyday horror of current events is getting to him in ways that actually makes me question the routines I've developed to insulate myself from outrage. Also worth checking out: The Situation, a novella of office politics and paranoia that perfectly melds Burroughs, Lovecraft and Ligotti. Beautiful limited hardcover form PS.

Etched City was pretty good IIRC, a gritty swashbuckler in the Jack Vance mould. I randomly happened to meet Bishop's partner, and I think there was supposed to be another novel coming, but I haven't heard anything about it.

Copy I have of City Of Saints And Madmen has really cheesy intro by Michael Moorcock.

Looks like The Centauri Device I ordered has arrived already, all the way from the UK. All the way from Gloucester. I guess I should finish reading Course Of the Heart and the second half of the Viriconium omnibus first before I start.

OK, I can see why you people like The C D but I can also see why the author might refer to it as "he crappiest thing I ever wrote."

am reading the iain banks gaming book and am endlessly amused by the funny names for the ships.
any other SF comedy to look out for?

Finished Finch. The style is very much late-Elroy, hard-boiled telegraphese, and the resolution plays out in a serious of bloody encounters which, again, are very much Elroy. Great Lovecraft/Burroughsian monsters throughout, batshit-crazy plotting almost on a Van Vogt level - so what's to complain about? Well, it's so much more conventional than City or Shriek. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I'm hoping this is something Jeff is just trying on for a while, and he'll move on to something else. I don't need a shelf of this.

Going back a bit more than 10 years:Hary Harrison 'The Hammer and the Cross', alternate-history trilogy. Excellent.
If one reads it a sentence at a time ( probably the way it was written): Thomas Pynchon 'Against The Day', fine retro-SciFi, not genre-ghetto, though.
I thought the idea of 'The Years Of Rice And Salt' was wonderful, the execution, pc and trite. He's a bit too determined to write to a college-age audience, mostly female.
For space opera: Walter Jon Williams 'Dread Empire's Fall' series

Started to get back into sci fi books recently, and having a grand old time finding cheap ones at car boot sales (got asimovs Robots & Empire and Robots of Dawn, both in hardback, for 50 pence!)

Just finished Pushing Ice which was pretty good, got especially wild towards the latter half of the book.

About to read Torch of Honor, by Roger Macbride Allen, which was another car boot find that I have no idea on.

don't recommend Torch of Honor btw, started off okay but seemed to be extremely rushed towards the last two thirds.

Anyway, about to start on Pardoras Star by Hamilton, which I believe is the first in a series. Anyone read it/these?

/him, yes - well kinda. I started The Reality Dysfunction, got a bit bogged down in his depiction of a symbiotic relationship between humans and intelligent living spacecraft, and became extremely suspicious when his meticulously detailed description of the evolution of an alien species ended with them suddenly becoming non-corporeal justlikethat, no explanation or justification. So I leafed through the rest of it and discovered it was about the SOULS of the DEAD coming back to possess living humans and take over the galaxy. This was in a supposed hard sci-fi novel. Trilogy in fact. Each volume over 1000 pages.

iow my advice would be STAY AWAY FROM THIS MENTALIST

HEY stop telling people not to buy my books. Also I liked that trilogy but I was a sucker for the unspooling story/drama and not so fazed by the unlikeliness.

I don't necessarily want all my skiffy to be Greg Egan style 'consider getting a phd in quantum theory before reading', as long as the ideas are good or fun. I just thought it was a silly idea - or at best wildly out of place in a purported skiffy novel. Don't sucker me in with spaceships and then suddenly throw ghosts at me!

http://www.goldlabel.com/wp-content/themes/GoldLabel_1r4/images/product-categories/party-down/hard-sci-fi.jpg

personally i can do without anything to do with telephathy in my sci fi, i'm a basic space exploration type fan.

I really like his (UK-only?) releases that were more commercial, lighter going, about a psi-ops guy after his military service ended and he went back to civilian life (Greg Mandel, mind-reader?). They were more tightly plotted and read like conventional sci-fi. Obv he was trying to do something much more ambitions with the Reality Dysfunction trilogy and I thought, how bad can it be? and then people were dying all over the damn place and I just wanted to know what happened.

personally i can do without anything to do with telephathy in my sci fi, i'm a basic space exploration type fan.

Would usually agree, but that does mean you'd never read Robert Silverberg;s 'Dying Inside', which is a brilliant book, and a clever SF version of the Jewish-man-getting-old-and-becoming-impotent story (see Philip Roth, etc)

enjoying pandoras star so far, but i really must start rethinking my purchasing of 'huge books in paperback' which i can barely hold in my hands.

just ordered tau zero by poul anderson.

^ definitely a quintessential hard-skiffy novel. he tries to get a human interest story out of it but such attempts from hardcore science guys always strike me as a bit amateur hour - it's really the physics that is the compelling part. ending is a bit lol/fantasyland tbh but it's a great ride getting there.

might take a look, ta

currently on Dark side of the Sun, one of pratchetts early sci fi attempts. hard going.

^ definitely a quintessential hard-skiffy novel. he tries to get a human interest story out of it but such attempts from hardcore science guys always strike me as a bit amateur hour - it's really the physics that is the compelling part. ending is a bit lol/fantasyland tbh but it's a great ride getting there.

Even more so is Hal Clement's 'A Mission of Gravity', which doesn't have the fantasyland ending either, but is fascinatingly rigorous about its premise.

Might check it out, although it wasn't just the rigourousness of Tau Zero that appeals - relativistic physics and huge big massive incomprehensible distances and timescales push my buttons like nothing else.

The Clement is all about massive, crushing gravity and how life might evolve under those conditions, and how humans might be able to interact with such life.

Actually, there's a new anthology out called 'The Mammoth Book of Mind-Boggling SF' which is meant to be all relativistic physics and huge big massive incomprehensible distances and timescales and the like. Haven't read it yet, but it looks promising.

Found a "Mind Blowing" sf? With less than stellar reviews and was pretty disappointed by the last two contempary anthologies I bought.

okay, got a bunch of paperbacks for the store, but i want to take some home to read. haven't read any of them. ( they will all end up back here at the store once i've read them) which ones are definites to take home?

ben bova - voyagers

hammer's slammers - david drake (don't think i need to read this. but what do i know?)

heinlein - starship troopers (never read it! love the movie, obviously.)

asimov - the caves of steel

zelazny/thomas t. thomas - flare

dick/zelazny - deus irae

niven/pournelle - the mote in god's eye (should read this, right? uber-classic and all that.)

delany - the jewels of aptor

h.g. wells - when the sleeper wakes

larry niven - a gift from earth

david brin - startide rising (this is supposed to be great, but...dolphins?)

delany - nova

dick - a maze of death

leguin - the wind's twelve quarters

gordon dickson - time storm (this looks really cool)

asimov - magic (fantasy short story collection)

heinlein - farnham's freehold

heinlein - friday

delany - babel-17

arthur c. clarke - the other side of the sky (40's and 50's stories)

although i guess dick fans and delany fans will just tell me to read anything and everything by them. cuz they are like that.

sorry, this isn't "recent" sci-fi. didn't feel like reviving that other sci-fi thread i started a long time ago.

hammer's slammers - david drake

congrats to deej on the publication of hammer's slammers

never read him but would drop heinlein like a hot coal tbh. have read the previous brin in that series, was entertaining, good ideas, and yes dolphins. have read nova and delany's style doesn't really do it for me. have read the ringworlds, they're fun enough but not particularly keen to go back to niven.

I'm seduced by the LeGuin title and liked The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven, so I'd be going for that first. Generally find Asimov a bit boring (tho loved the first two Foundations when I read them as a teenage, and didn't mind the Robot short stories once in a while, Caves of Steel I'm not so sure about tho. Read it, don't remember it, got a bored feeling in my stomach when I read the title).

Never read any Ben Bova.

"got a bored feeling in my stomach when I read the title"

ha!

what's the deal with asimov and all the blurbs and accolades and GOAT quotes from other writers and yet i never meet actual people who love his work? did people just feel like they had to kiss his ass or something? or did people genuinely feel he was great, but his stuff hasn't aged well?

I think people felt he was great (iirc - was more heavily immersed in all this stuff years ago). He was extraordinarily prolific, across a lot of the popular science fiction magazines. His short stories had a good conceptual hook, which he'd drive into the ground (to wit the Robot stories), which is appealing in one way (easy to know what he's on about) but there's something dreadful dry about his stories. My teenage self didn't mind this (I was an abstract soulless little shit) but my adult, and (adopts love song DJ voice) I like to think more caring self (/) finds it leaves his stories feeling rather dull.

I'm sure if I went back to an Asimov anthology I'd find some great stuff, but I can't remember any of the titles off the top of my head.

would drop heinlein like a hot coal tbh

Ahh, poor Heinlein. (Have not read that one, have not read the ones that make people angry at his libertarianism, have not read that much of his output overall - but I will stan for his "The Door Into Summer", if only for the cats.)

I have read v. little of this list, and to be honest what I have read was some years ago and I don't remember it at all.

I loved Asimov as a kid but I really can't remember why. Revisiting his books reveals way too many tedious Platonic dialogues exploring tediously fine points of ethical dilemmas which as yet have never come close to existing, over and over again.

delany - babel-17 This is great fun!

Jewels of Aptor is his first novel and isn't great, but Nova and Babel-17 are excellent, especially Nova. Starship Troopers is very entertaining, but I remember Friday being repellent crap. I'm a big fan of early Niven and liked A Gift From Earth. The Mote in God's Eye is a great epic; I wish some aspiring David Lean could make a nice 3-hr movie version.

only ever read Ben Bovas Exile trilogy, and was not too bad.

Blish's Cities In Flight is a really awesome read. Ambitious hard sci-fi, which is also really about the hard sci-fi ethic -- all about pull yrself up by dint of hard work, lots of ideas drawn from the spencer school of sociology, etc.

On Dick, I always liked the short stories (the exit door leads in, second variety) and some of the late 50s novels -- Time Out Of Joint in particular.

Grisly otm about the delanys, except I thought Aptor was a good interesting read too. Also Mote in God's Eye I recall as great. The Brin is full of a lot of influential ideas.

Asimov I think has a better legacy of a popularizer of science than anything else -- lots of his essays remain very smart and generous on the history of knowledge.

i haven't read much dick, actually. mostly short stories. some of them worked for me and some didn't. i think some of his stuff works better in a "cool idea!" kind of way than as fiction. um, i mean that he basically had a lot of cool ideas and he executed some of them better than others as stories. but i definitely want to read more. i didn't know until i picked it up that he had co-written a novel with zelazny. looks good too.

(i contrast dick with someone like ray bradbury who i finally started reading, like, three years ago or so, and who i felt had this almost unlimited imagination and an endless supply of cool ideas, but who also knew how to craft satisfying stories like nobody's business. but like i said, i still have a lot of PKD to get to.)

Have Londoners checked the 2nd hand book store next to Henry Pordes and the load of old skool SF that came in about 1-2 months ago?

If there was a list published in a book site I'd c+p here so that people could recommend. I've found some that I really wanted to read for a while, others I just do not know a thing about.

I read Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon a few weeks ago. Fun cyberpunk noir stuff, which I haven't really dug much into, Gibson and one B. Sterling aside.

And just finished my third Kobo Abe, Inter Ice Age 4. Dude does not disappoint. The most SF of any of his I've read, but still very Abe; love those those serious oddball characters who try to deal so logically with the absurd.

how bout this Michael Swainwick guy? Good stuff?

I must read Inter Ace Age 4.

I just read a Swanwick short story which was surprisingly irritating: the fact that it made use of Janis Joplin as this major, revolutionary cultural figure meant that I was far from the ideal reader for it.

abe rules. i need more too.

Have Londoners checked the 2nd hand book store next to Henry Pordes and the load of old skool SF that came in about 1-2 months ago?

no but i will! used to very irregularly check the shops round there but pickings were always slim.

Yeah, might pop in at lunch - thanks for the tip off.

Hardly qualifies as recent - but any Barry Malzberg recs? I read Underlay years ago which is great (tho not SF obv) and shd probably read Overlay.

He doesn't seem to at all known in Britain, but thanks to the wonders of the internet I can buy freedom from such monolithic, tight-ass restraints.

delany - nova

have had this one in my pile to read for some weeks. I think it's next on the burner, i see it has mixed blessings on here.

great, stylish space opera; can't remember much about it other than that impression

i think i read it in one of my ten books a week and no sleep phases

Nova's very worth reading! Quick and cosmic. I do always have to do some mental re-adjusting to get used to his weird, detached tone. (I'd imagine his pornographic stuff is as unsettling for that as much as for the subject matter.)

Just noticed all the Cordwainer Smith love upthread. Any other recs for writers who deal with SPACE MADNESS?

I do always have to do some mental re-adjusting to get used to his weird, detached tone. (I'd imagine his pornographic stuff is as unsettling for that as much as for the subject matter.)

YES.

Are there any good 'series' books of sci fi, anyone can recommend?

what do you mean exactly?

as in not just one off novels, series of books that might be written using the same characters etc.

but not strictly reliant on the preceeding novels either, nothing like a LoTR triology. I guess similar to Pratchetts Discworld type work.

so not foundation then. of course yer 'same universe' kinda deals are all the rage these days. known space, revelation space, the culture...

canopus in argos

^ any good? always somewhat wary of 'serious' writers tackling scifi. perhaps unreasonably.

david brin's uplift series.

Foundation series sounds like something i could get on board with actually

i have only read one of the 'canopus in argos' books but it was very good indeed: worth noting that lessing went on record as saying 'actually, SF is pretty good', rather than 'of course it's not like i'm just writing regular SCIENCE FICTION likes the PROLES do'. the one i read would slot quite well on a bookcase between 'triton' and 'the fifth head of cerberus' mb

Pohl's Heechee books are good.

what do ppl think of dan simmons, if anything?

Ste: I was really fond of Iain M Banks's "Culture" series of books. They're of the "same universe" school, though quite varied. You might want to skip "Inversions" in the beginning - I'm pretty sure it makes little sense if you're not a: aware of it being a culture book, and b: know wtf that means.
Anyways, try "Use of Weapons", "Consider Phlebas" or "The Player of Games". I seem to recall those being the best. "Excession" was good too.

Re: Simmons. I've only tried to read "Hyperion", which I couldn't get into. I think I was still totally against anything that got too "fantasy"-ish or something. Or maybe I just didn't like it, who knows. I recall a buncha SF readers were angry about him having written some really xenophobic story a few years back. His general reputation is for writing two-book series where the first is great and the second totally ruins everything.

Player of Games is fucking great

Yeah, go with the Culture books!

yeah i'm a huge culture stan tbh.

cheers guys, i'll check the culture books out too.

The 50th Anniversary anthology of Fantasy and Science Fiction is almost as good as it damn well should be. (Blanking on exact title but F&SF mag editor Gordan Van Gelder put it together.) A couple soft selections, but only true dud is "Harrison Bergeron", which I've always found churlishy maudlin. Scott, Farnham's Freehold is about a family having a bridge party, who suddenly have to wait out a nuclear war in their Colorado mountain fallout shelter. It's near a bunch of major targets (Heinlein lived on Colorado Springs, also home of the Air Force Academy, for inst), and they get nuked x years into the future. Since our white-dominated Hemisphere has been de-populated by Mutually Assured Destruction (true name of the Cold War foundational doctrine), a Third World Isalmic-based regime has taken over, somewhat fundamentalist and patriarchal, but mainly fat 'n' happy like a medieval/mythical/early 60s House of Saud, complete with harems, hookahs and eunuchs. Farnham lectures his churlish son on racism, ditto his former houseboy, now an adopted Prince. This is around the time H. was working for Goldwater's presidential campaing, and was controversial for pre-Tea Party, Paul family-type blend of tendencies, although really it was more about Geezer Power, or seemed so at the time, to middle school me.

great post dow, even if i don't agree w/ you abt 'Harrison Begeron', or maybe i just have a higher tolerance for the churlishly mauldin. have loved that story since i read it many years ago in this anthology, still my single fave sf collection:

http://www.jgballard.ca/images/decade60s250.jpg

apart from the vonnegut, it also includes 'The assasination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a downhill motor race' by JG Ballard, 'The Electric Ant' by PKD, primo stories by ppl like Disch, Moorcock, Silverberg, Pohl, Sprinrad, even Kingsley Amis.

the v. first issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction i bought was an all Harlan Ellison issue that included 'Jeffty Is Five', which def. deserves to be in any all-time-great-best-of-collec

i read that and moorcock's 'the new SF' at around the same time and i think finally burned myself out on the new wave

oh er ed. langdon jones with a preface by moorcock

the only things in these that came to me with the clarity of discoveries were the pamela zoline stories. those were good.

amis's book on SF is worth a read.

The one I had in mind was actually The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: *Sixtieth* Anniversary Edition, sorry. Here's Contents:
Of Time and Third Avenue Alfred Bester*
All Summer In A Day Ray Bradbury
One Ordinary Day, With Peanuts Shirley Jackson
Westward Ho! William Tenn*
Flowers For Algernon Daniel Keyes
Harrison Bergeron Kurt Vonnegut*
This Moment of the Storm Roger Zelasny
The Deathbird Harlan Ellison
The Women Men Don't See James Tiptree,Jr.
I See You Damon Knight
The Gunslinger Stephen King
The Dark Karen Joy Fowler
Buffalo John Kessler
Solitude Ursula K. Le Guin
Mother Grasshopper Michael Swanwick
macs Terry Bisson
Creation Jeffrey Ford
Other People Neil Gaiman
Journey Into The Kingdom M.Rickert
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate Ted Chiang
*Coulda picked better ones by these authors (and mebbe Zelasny, Knight, Gaiman Fowler, King. although this may be as good as King gets). Also, Algernon again? Though it'll be new to enough younger readers, prob. Otherwise...yeah. (faves so far: Bradbury, Jackson,Ellison, Tiptree,Le Guin, Swanwick, Rickert, Chiang)

Just getting through Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

Liking it, it reads (to me anyway) like a Chuck Palahniuk novel. I think this is something to do with how I'm seeing the main character, like he's kind of self destructive but somehow everythings going his way, and everythings basically a bit bleak. dunno. anyone else read it?

I read it and I totally loved it, but then again I liked the one Palahniuk I read (Lullaby)

Not a connection I would have made, but it actually makes a lot of sense (also have only read the one Palahniuk).

i've only read lullaby and i swear he struck me as some sort of updated clive barker. great imagination for novel grossness. army men in the feet was so books of blood.

and i mean that as a compliment. i used to dig clive.

till i read weaveworld.

i really dug weaveworld. i was 15 at the time.

I was quite young when I read it. I ghave up when the main character was raped by a mad old crone on page 20 or thereabouts.

I went to that bookshop next to Henry Pordes. The door was being kept open right in the way of the skiffy shelf and I couldn't spot anything that took my fancy but didn't want to leave empty handed so got a random anthology, probly be rubbish.

Ok I give up, no more buying random antologies on spec. "Star Fourteen" is supposedly 14 of the best stories from eight years of a yearly anthology "representing some of the best in SF writing" of the 1950s, and with one singular exception (Bixby's It's a Good Life), they range from dull-as-ditchwater to truly dreadful. From the woefully unimaginative and lacking in foresight (a doctor who has to don a diving suit to diagnose a giant space-cow from the inside because "you couldn't x-ray a mass of flesh like this - not with any equipment he had ever seen, even in the best equipped office") to the unreadably experimental, I seriously struggle to imagine how most of these got published, let alone collected into a best-of.

Who was the editor?

frederick pohl.

Nova is pretty fine, would read more of his stuff.

now starting the Culture books, enjoyed Consider Phlebas whilst spending most of the day on trains yesterday.

Oooo, just re-read Howard Waldrop's "The Ugly Chickens" (orig in Terry Carr's Universe 10, later in Wollheim's so-far inferior The 1981 Annual Best SF) Such a bluesoid, high Beat Generation lowball (in the sense that Paul Goodman said William Faulkner was beat, and also the original beatitude/"Man, I'm beat" earthy moony unity). Dodos in the South Pacific and Mississippi too, quite plausibly. A tone pome of the bone orchard, but with high hopes and exploratory vitality, enough to give mortality and deadpan humor another stirring round. Mulch fiction yall. Anybody read a whole book of his?

Just finished Consider Phlebas. I enjoyed it, but won't discuss it since I don't want to spoil anything for anyone. Started Player of Games now...

I love the mad scale of some of the stuff in Phlebas, like the VERY BIG BOAT.

Highly recommend Jeff Noon's 'vurt', 'pollen' and 'nymphomation', one of my absolute favourite authors. V. unique take on cyberpunk with a v. interesting and highly readable prose style.

if early-mid 2000's is recent.

Awwww I have an old hardcover copy of Vurt, I remember loving it! Haven't re-read in prob a decade tho. I remember that they took drugs with feathers! You tickle the back of your throat with the feather iirc, to get the effect.

That's the one! I'm in the middle of his latest book, 'falling out of cars' just now. Also v. good, there's a sickness in reality itself - kinda rubbish way of putting it is that the noise to signal ratio has increased to the point where reality itself isn't really discernible and the narrative is v. loose and fragmented - apparently, oh noes, it doesn't have a proper ending which pisses off people on amazon. Still v. much a noon book but it doesn't have his constant iterative / remixed neologisms which i really miss.

Still on my Le Guin kick, just finished The Dispossessed. Didn't enjoy it half as much as The Left Hand of Darkness, despite the plot similarities. Too much psychological, sociological, and political analysis, too didactic. Had something of the dry and dusty nature of one of the planets on which it was set.

btw if anyone fancies some spoilerific Banks discussion, feel free to bump one of his old threads. (I'm not currently reading but always happy to chat about him.)

i'm not yet up to the point where i can discuss spoiling banks, but will happily join in once i've read more. (would just like to say how yuk the Eating chapter was tho)

gosh, has noon not written a book since falling out of cars?

he was sort of my favourite author at seventeen or so. whether i like him now i don't even know.

You know when you're really enjoying a book, but you also hope nobody is reading over your shoulder, because you know anyone reading the same prose out of context would be rolling their eyes pretty hard? Vurt did that to me.

Not necessarily bad, because PKD does too and I love PKD. I should read some more Noon and see which way it goes.

I really liked China Mieville's The City And The City, though maybe that is fantasy rather than SF.

not recent (are we just using this thread for sci fi overall?) but just read Flight of the Dragonfly.

Anyone read these books? Heavily laden with science (to the point where there are diagrams of solar systems and craft blue prints in the back of the book) but I found FotD quite charming and made a change from everyone getting blasted and killed in space.

dang, 'house of suns' by reynolds is so epic and next-level great imo

shit, gotta catch up on my reynolds. what, it's in a whole new universe? damnit i still have three 'revelation space' ones to go!

there's been at least one more since house of suns (the one about the tower, which i didn't like, not enough space)

(Terminal World. also the Zima Blue short story collection (english edition anyway, had been out elsewhere))