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sci-fi recommendation?

HI :)

First, let me state that I too love sci.-fi novels and stuff like that :)

However, since mostly male writers have been mentioned I would like to
point your all in the direction of these outstanding female writers:

Ursula K. Le Guin --- she's not just the author of the fantasy books about
Get, the wizard of Earthsea. (IIRC, the wizard and magick of the series are more to demonstrate and prove a point about people living in a different society than our)

Ms. Guin's books are not so much about technology. She is more interesting in describing various societies and the relationships between the people in these societies.

Doris Lessing --

and some others I unfortunately have forgotten.
 
Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about John Carter of Mars.

A New Dawn: The Complete Don A. Stuart Stories (This has his story "Who Goes There?" that the Carpenter's "The Thing" is based on)

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake (gothic fantasy)

The Worm Ouroboros by Eric Rucker Eddison

Logan's Run by William F. Nolan

Stuff by H. G. Wells

Stuff by Ray Bradbury

Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky brothers and some other stuff

It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids by John Wyndham

The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner

The Crow Road by Iain Banks and other stuff by him

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Stuff by Roger Zelazny

Stuff by Stanislaw Lem

Mikhail Bulgakov also wrote some sci-fi like Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog
 
Melbourne author Max Barry's Jennifer Government is a good read.

Here's his wikipedia entry.

From amazon.com:

In the horrifying, satirical near future of Max Barry's Jennifer Government, American corporations literally rule the world. Everyone takes his employer's name as his last name; once-autonomous nations as far-flung as Australia belong to the USA; and the National Rifle Association is not just a worldwide corporation, it's a hot, publicly traded stock. Hack Nike, a hapless employee seeking advancement, signs a multipage contract and then reads it. He discovers he's agreed to assassinate kids purchasing Nike's new line of athletic shoes, a stealth marketing maneuver designed to increase sales. And the dreaded government agent Jennifer Government is after him.
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The book's been optioned by Section 8 Films.

And finally, the author has created a "nation simulation" game based on this book.
 
LaPalida beat me to it, but i would recommend anything by the Strugatsky Brothers; "Roadside Picnic" was the, shall we say, inspiration for the film "Stalker". Novels that are very definitely Russian, and different.
"Guzliar Wonders" is a collection of short stories by another Russian author whose name escapes me, but is frequently very funny.
"The Master and Margarita" is Mikhail Bulgakov's best-known work, not really sci-fi, not really sure what to call it. "The Fatal Eggs" is very dark comedy.
 
Some books which I still remember from my childhood (less 'Timeline'):


Asimov The End of Eternity

A. E. van Vogt The Weapon Store of Isher and The Weapon Makers

Herbert Franke The Orchid Cage

Gerard Klein The Overlords of War

M. Crichton Timeline


Classical but good.
 
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metacristi said:
A. E. van Vogt The Weapon Store of Isher and The Weapon Makers
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If anyone is in the Elyria, Ohio area, you can find a whole shelf of A. E. van Vogt paperbacks at the video and used book store called "Bookseller", near Big Lots. If I remember correctly, many of them are first editions and cost less than a dollar each.
 
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William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (And a few other books) is one of the main reasons why there was nothing new in a movie like "The Matrix". It was a very important book in the mid 80's, but suffered what all good, 'cutting edge' suffers from in this world, devoid of bohemias, a wicked short shelf-life. The whole cyberpunk 'genre' was gone hardly before it even got here. The prefix 'cyber' has gone the way of the prefix 'electro' from the 50's. ( I don't think that 'cyber' even lasted half as long)

I find it interesteing to reread it now.... a book where the main character hardly even exists in the story. He's a total void in the tale.

"Pattern Recognition", Gibson's latest book is amazing!!

Frank Herbert's "The White Plague"... Dated, but wonderful. Blows all of his Dune tripe outa the water (I'll grant "Dune"... The only one he really wanted to write... The sequels he only wrote because they backed a dump-truck fulla money up to his door... And the less said about that coat-tail riding spew his kid is publishing, the better))

"Bimbos Of The Death Sun" is a MUST read for all walks of "Geek-life". A murder mystery at a Sci-fi convention! You'll see everybody you know in that book! LOL

"Splinter Of The Mind's Eye" by Alan Dean Foster... The BEST book if its ilk by a country mile.

It's not 'fiction' but Marshall T. Savage's "The Millennial Project" is a MUST read for anyone interested in the future of the human race. I wish more than 10 people had ever read it.

:-)
 
ClintonHammond said:
William Gibson's "Neuromancer" (And a few other books) is one of the main reasons why there was nothing new in a movie like "The Matrix".
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It's probably also the reason why The Matrix sucks so much.

Good gods, how that book SUCKS.

Frank Herbert's "The White Plague"... Dated, but wonderful. Blows all of his Dune tripe outa the water
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O RLY?
Haven't read it, but I'm a bit skeptical of a claim like that. ;)

(I'll grant "Dune"... The only one he really wanted to write... The sequels he only wrote because they backed a dump-truck fulla money up to his door...
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To quote Claus... "Evidence?"
Personally I find that the last two he wrote were some of his best, at least on par with the first novel.
 
The Matrix was a damn good movie. (If it was 10 years too late) It earned critical acclaim, financial success, it seemed to 'do' everything it set out to 'do' as a story. It's sequels sure didn't do it any favours at all... I seem to recall reading somewhere that they'd stole the script for the first.... but wrote the 2nd and 3rd themselves which was proposed as a reason why they were so bad!

"how that book SUCKS"
50 million Elvis Presly fans can't be all wrong. It is held up as the seminal cyberpunk book by an awful lot of people who seem to have devoted large chunks of their lives to becoming educated in just how to discern such things. You may not have LIKED it, and that's fine and jim-dandy. (Nothing is liked by everyone) But let us not confuse Like & Dislike with Good & Bad eh. :-)

It changed my life when I read it brand new, in the same way that the Star Destroyer, rumbling over my head in that theatre seat in 1977 changed my life. It's unfortunate that cyberpunk didn't survive HALF as long.

I will endeavour to source the anecdote regarding Herbert and Dune.... It may have been talked about on "Prisoners Of Gravity" a LONG time ago....
 
People have been known to like bad thing.

No matter how "influential" Neuromancer has been, the fact remains that it's shoddily written, has a minimal plot that just plods along and poorly defined characters with no personality. And if it influenced crap like The Matrix, well, goes to show it -was- garbage to begin with...
 
Another vote for fellow Scotsman Iain "Macallan" Banks. His Culture series is epic, thoughtful, character driven space opera. It's a difficult book, but since reading it, "Use of Weapons" is the one just that won't leave me; it deals with humanity, evil, repentance, regret... lots of human emotions that I can identify with.

Greg Bear is a great writer, try "The Forge of God / The Anvil of Stars".

Apologies if anyone has already mentioned this, but don't miss Peter Hamilton. Pick up the massive Night's Dawn trilogy for a damn good read.
 
ClintonHammond said:
The Matrix was a damn good movie. (If it was 10 years too late) It earned critical acclaim, financial success, it seemed to 'do' everything it set out to 'do' as a story. It's sequels sure didn't do it any favours at all... I seem to recall reading somewhere that they'd stole the script for the first.... but wrote the 2nd and 3rd themselves which was proposed as a reason why they were so bad!
...
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I always thought it was a ripoff of The Wonderland Gambit trilogy, by Jack Chalker. The whole VR box, Alice in Wonderland analogy, "nothing you see is real" all came from that.
 
"shoddily written, has a minimal plot that just plods along and poorly defined characters with no personality"
According to whom? You? I guess you're entitled to think so, but there seems to be a weight against you.
 
On the subject of the Matrix totally ripping off William Gibson, Second Life totally ripped off Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

By which I mean "was inspired by".

It also had a very cool pizza delivery business model.
 
I used to play a table-top game called "Car Wars" that had a quarterly magazine devoted to it, called "Autoduel Quarterly".

One of the best pieces of fiction ever included in that mag was a story of a pizza delivery dude. :-)

Why no pizza delivery dude movie yet??? Mad Max meets The Noid!?!?! LOL

"Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson."
What a fantastic 4/5ths of a book. That guy can't write an ending to save his life! What about his "Cryptonomicon"? I have a ton of chums who dig the hell outa that book, but I donno... I just don't grok....
 
Parsman said:
Anything by Orson Scott Card - his Ender's Game books or my own favourite "Wyrms" which isn't the book you think it is at the start
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Enders Game was good short story that Card managed to make into a good novel. Personally I cannot stand anything else he wrote.

As for "Wyrms" - not sure if we are talking about the same book but the book "Wyrm" (no "s") by Mark Fabi is excellent reading.

I love Niven's work one of the few to manage to addd some humor to Sci Fi. Ben Bova has some good stuff too.
 
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