science fiction.

anyway, the reason i bring in all the general necessary-narrowmindedness-of-hard-SF worldview stuff, is that the ending of the book goes all unambiguously thematic, with captain centipede wanting to bring in Progress to all the centipedes of the world. i.e. it's an argument For Science: and the ending, where the centipedes turn their ship into a hot-air balloon, is (honestly) quite an affecting conclusion, given how their ties to the ship and their several-hundred-gravities-enhanced fear of heights have been established. and it's this core (well, i'm calling it the core) of the novel that interests me, i guess.

also of note: i dropped my copy in the bath earlier, so cannot find quotes or anything, see.

in any event to each their own but i think it's a spurious argument implied or otherwise on the part of your author that, by tradition, character should be secondary in "real" sf. part of the initial appeal was guys like jules verne and hg wells being able to write as well as anyone, but about really trippy shit

actually if it is the same adam roberts that wrote this i might not order it:

Niven's Ringworld was fairly mindblowing because it was so simple on the surface but so over-the-top: take a planetary mass equal to Jupiter, turn it into a big ring with a radius of 1 AU, put it around a star similar to our sun, put walls at the edge of the ring to hold in atmosphere, spin at the proper rate, segmented inner ring to simulate night/day, voila. But who would have the audacity to spend the time needed to put that together, much less the ability? Of course that's part of the mystery. Niven came up with a lot of appealing characters in the book, and of course the plot writes itself: who did this? Let's find out. Niven also wrote several of my favorite short stories -- "The Fourth Profession," "The Long Night," "Convergent Series"... "The Long Night" is especially beautiful and sad. An astronaut is stranded on Pluto, no chance of rescue, knows he's going to die, so he goes out on the surface and quickly takes the helmet of his suit off. He dies, but at night it's so cold that his nervous system becomes a superconductor, and he's conscious even though his body's dead. So he spends eternity (or close enough) looking out at the stars, not able to move.

Joe Haldeman has written some really good future-warfare stuff — The Forever War sort of takes Heinlein's Starship Troopers as a starting point and adds the time dilation effect that faster-than-light travel would create, so from the main character's POV the novel covers a few years, but something like 10,000 years of human history. As the years went on, Haldeman (it seems to me) started using his fiction to exorcise his time in the Army in Vietnam, and there are some really unpleasant scenes in some of his books. Anyway, there's a lot of good Haldeman.

More recommendations later, maybe.

Oh, except one of the best plotless hard-sf novels ever is Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama. UFO enters solar system, we get a brief look at it (and inside it) before it leaves again, the end.

i'm curious how people like niven were received in the 70s: i worry about it being "hurrah finally we are safe from the evil modernist-feminist-homosexualist axis, people are writing about PLANETS again" - ok looking at wiki for ringworld i remember details like the playboy who spends his entire life teleporting to the next party - which makes me think i'd have liked it a whole lot more if bester or zelazny had written it. i mean i don't really understand how hard SF survived the 60s, given that surely any given SF idea could be used in, you know, a proper book.

ringworld is weird, actually, it's so frequently whimsical in conception but never in tone.

my !! upthread is in reply to both redd's story and paul's link, incidentally

Niven's light touch and self-awareness of his own isn't-that-neato geekiness makes him easier to read, for me, than what might be considered the seriouser hard stuff. His characters are always trying to figure out some weird science angle (How was he killed through an impenetrable hull? It must have been tidal forces!) which is a kind of hardness for hardness' sake that I can get behind. Much more so than science that pretends to be incidental and en route to some plot that clearly neither the author nor the reader cares about.

Both, I think-- she's part of the crew in the first book and ends up being the villain in the second, IIRC.

i have been putting off reading iain m. banks for ages.