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?

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))