The science fiction/fantasy novels thread

[greg]

OK, so as promised, I'll start this topic off to discuss SF/Fantasy novels. The most recent book I completed (which was last summer, I'm ashamed to admit) was A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. I really enjoyed this space opera book. People may complain about its deus ex machina ending, but any reader who is paying attention would anticipate it anyway. I wrote a spoiler-free review for this book on my homepage. This book separates the galaxy into "zones of thought," in which the galactic core is the "Unthinking Depths" in which ships never return, the "Slow Zone" in which Old Earth is located, the "Transcend" which lies in the outer rim of the galaxy, and the "Beyond" in which individuals transcend. Not only do these zones affect IQ, but also space travel, since the further away from the galactic core you go, the faster interstellar travel becomes possible. In the book, a catastrophe happens in a laboratory on a lifeless rock of a planet, unleashing an ancient evil upon the galaxy that can command the will of entire planets to its perverse will. Survivors from the incident crash land on a medieval planet on the very edge of the Transcend, leaving only a boy and his sister who are taken and separated by two warring factions of the planet's native life forms. A rescue attempt is launched, and its a race against time to reach the two surviving children with the ancient Perversion hot in pursuit. Any slight miscalculation in astrogation and the rescue ship would get caught in the Slow Zone, and the children would grow old and die before the rescue ship ever arrives. To make it more difficult, there is an ebb and flow of these Zones of Thought, like an ocean, and it's very possible for a ship to get caught in a wave of Slowness. The book really challenges your view of the galaxy, and it doesn't really take time to explain things. So, some time is necessary to wrap your brain around the story. About a third of the way in, everything fell into place and it sped up from there.

I am currently reading The January Dancer by Michael Flynn. I started this in late September, poked through it for a few months, lost track of it, and I'm currently trying to restart it and I've past the part I stopped at. I really like how this book is written in such a "matter of fact" way of narration, as if to say, "Dude, this is the way it is." It's certainly space opera. Space is navigable via electrical currents that connect stars, causing interstellar traffic to be funneled into space routes between stars. Mankind has certainly terraformed much of the galaxy, and the only traces of any other life in the galaxy are the remains of ruins left by some mysterious, ancient alien civilization. The book may never explain where these ancient beings ever went, but that's not the point. The point is just dealing with the way this galaxy is established. So far, I've learned that there is some Confederacy that lies beyond the Rift, an expanse of open space between spiral arms of the galaxy. What protects the side of the galaxy the protagonists live in from this unfriendly Confederation is this huge open rift of dead space, and trying to navigate the very few thin strands that cross this rift is like trying to tightrope walk at warp speed. Furthermore, there is no "ansible" or galactic communication, such as in A Fire Upon the Deep, or the Star Trek and Star Wars universes. News can only travel as fast as ships can between stars. All I've read so far is that January is the captain of a trader ship, and he and his crew stumble upon an ruined city built by the ancient Prehuman race, buried below the crust of a worthless planet on the space lane. Their ship broke down after an astrogation error caused a hard yank on the fabric of spacetime, so they were mining the planet for materials for replacement parts to be fabricated. January discovers an interesting artifact in there, which he calls the "Dancer."

I'm not really sure what is going to happen in this book, but so far I am really liking it. I'm always fascinated with the premise of galactic archaeology. A friend of mine really enjoyed reading The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt, which from what I've read also deals with discovering ancient, long gone alien races. Growing up in Arizona, there are plenty of Anasazi ruins, and the legend is that this ancient tribe of Native Americans disappeared. (The truth is that they eventually became the Hopi and Navajo tribes once they abandoned their cliffside dwellings, and they've known this the whole time.) Anyhow, before my dad's Hopi friend told us this, I'd grown up being fascinated by that sort of thing. Playing the old DOS game Starflight was a lot like this, discovering ancient alien ruins scattered across the galaxy.

One such book I really cannot recommend, however, is the much lauded Ringworld by Larry Niven. The thought put into the idea of a landmass ring the size of the Earth's orbit is extremely incredible, and it has a great premise of an expedition to go to this ringworld to discover who these ancient beings were, why did they construct this huge ring, and where did they disappear to. Unfortunately, the book falls a bit flat on its face, in my opinion, and only the two aliens of the expedition party are of any real value, since the two human characters are completely annoying. To make it worse, the book is filled with sex scenes that almost read like a 13 year old boy's masturbation fantasies. I wrote a review full of some minor spoilers on my site a couple of years ago. After having this book hyped to me by one guy who swore it was the best SF book he'd ever written, I was disappointed.

So to give some background, I am not the most avid reader, since I am a slow reader, but I do enjoy reading SF and fantasy books. I've read the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books, but I haven't read a whole lot of classic SF, apart form Philip K. Dick. I own several of classic SF books, like Asimov's Foundation, but the only Asimov I've read was his Norby Chronicles for kids when I was a child. I tried reading Clarke's 2001 when I was in the 4th or 5th grade, but it was a bit too heavy for me and I lost interest. I do intend to read it, and I own the book. I've never read Herbert's Dune, anything by Heinlein, and a whole bunch of big stuff. The truth is, I'd buy books faster than I can read them, just as I buy anime faster than I can watch it, and plastic models faster than I can build them. So, I'm a bit ignorant about a lot of what's out there.

So what do you like?

[Path]

A Fire Upon the Deep sounds interesting, will have to keep an eye out for it.

Yikes, where do I begin? The latest book I started (today, actually) was American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Just hanging along for the ride so far, no idea how anything is going to go, but I'm enjoying that aspect. I like books that keep me on my toes. I hear this might become an HBO series so no better time then now to read it.

I read obscene amounts of public domain books at work, but one that really caught my attention a few months back was The Forgotten Planet by Murray Leinster. His stuff tends to be either really good or really bad, but this one is a good one. Its a fix-up of a similarly named short story, The Mad Planet. Its about a forgotten planet, seeded for colonization by ships but after the insects were seeded they forgot about it. So all insects (and fungus) grow to ridiculous sizes. A ship of humans crashes there and is also forgotten. The book starts generations later and would make a damn fine movie in the right hands. I love the warped ecosystem and the pulpy action, though in a few ways the shorter version of the story is better. Its on Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41637 and I think Librivox has it too for the audiobook fans.

If anyone has any public domain recommendations, my ears are always open.

[greg]

I think I was told that Doc Smith's Lensman series is available for download as public domain. People say he's the father of the space opera genre.

[davemerrill]

I would recommend Lensman - start with GALACTIC PATROL. TRIPLANETARY was shoehorned into the "Lensman" universe after the fact and FIRST LENSMAN was written later as a "prequel". You can take or leave CHILDREN OF THE LENS. Keep in mind they were written in the 30s and 40s (with some 50s) and they really reflect pulp writing & cultural mores of the time.

I also recommend Smith's SKYLARK books - it's an earlier series that I believe was the first to feature people travelling to other star systems. The first book was written in the 1920s. Even pulpier, but lots of fun. Also good is SPACEHOUNDS OF IPC.

I've read most of what Robert Heinlein wrote and I can recommend most of it - even when it's nonsense, it's really readable nonsense. After 1965 or so his work goes downhill, I think. They basically quit editing him. My favorites are his juveniles HAVE SPACESUIT WILL TRAVEL and BETWEEN PLANETS, and his adult novels THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, THE PUPPET MASTERS, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, and more short stories than I can name.

Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION is the best science fiction book ever written; at least it's the only one I've ever read that lives up to the promise of SF in terms of telling a thoughtful and thought-provoking story that also works as slam-bang adventure. So much of what we take for granted in terms of SF comes from this book.

Hal Clements' MISSION OF GRAVITY is terrific both as a tale of humans and aliens working together and as an exploration of what life would be like on a super-heavy gravity planet. There's a lot of real science in the book and it's given to the reader naturally and painlessly.

Saberhagen's BERSERKER series is less 'science' and more 'fiction' but again, so much of what we've come to take for granted in our genre movies and TV comes from these books of civilization menaced by advanced machines programmed to wipe out all life. I think his short stories are more successful than his novels.

Finally got to read EARTH ABIDES by George Stewart - not the first 'survivors after the plague' story, but one of the best.

In that vein, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS isn't so much a story about killer plants as it is about surviving the collapse of civilization. The triffids just provide local color, really.

They're YA fiction, but I really enjoyed John Christopher's TRIPODS series. Actually I enjoy any sort of dystopian young-adult SF, including Hoover's THIS TIME OF DARKNESS and of course the anime series Future Boy Conan.

My favorite Philip K. Dick books are the short novels he banged out for Ace while under the influence of amphetamine and poverty, like THE UNTELEPORTED MAN and TIME OUT OF JOINT.

So much later SF I haven't gotten around to yet. I've been trying to work my way through the big names of the 50s and 60s, to be honest. A lot of SF is so driven by the concepts that the actual writing itself is sort of half-assedly awkward, and if I don't enjoy reading a book, if the language doesn't make me want to keep reading it, then it can have the most awesome ideas imaginable and still be unreadable.

Not a big fantasy reader. I did enjoy Saberhagen's 'Empire Of The East' trilogy, though.

[_D_]

Yeah, it's tough to read a lot of old SF since you know the truth about space travel now rather than what they speculated on "back when". Ditto with old time comics. Not even laughable..

I have gone back to reading old horror stories I never got around to like the "Silver John" stories by Manly Wade Wellman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly_Wade_Wellman

Pretty creepy stuff that never got filmed other than that one bad movie done in the early 70s and some TV show episodes. Really underrated stuff...but good!

[greg]

I would recommend Lensman - start with GALACTIC PATROL. TRIPLANETARY was shoehorned into the "Lensman" universe after the fact and FIRST LENSMAN was written later as a "prequel". You can take or leave CHILDREN OF THE LENS. Keep in mind they were written in the 30s and 40s (with some 50s) and they really reflect pulp writing & cultural mores of the time.

Well, nuts. The books I own and were going to read in order were Triplanetary and First Lensman. I thought I might want to read them in chronological order. There was a publishing company that published the original serialized version of Triplanetary, before the Lensman revisions, and on the cover it claimed to be the first book in the Lensman series. Soon after, the book disappeared from the publisher's online catalog. They were apparently embarrassed about their blunder and gave up on Doc Smith.

I've read most of what Robert Heinlein wrote and I can recommend most of it - even when it's nonsense, it's really readable nonsense. After 1965 or so his work goes downhill, I think. They basically quit editing him. My favorites are his juveniles HAVE SPACESUIT WILL TRAVEL and BETWEEN PLANETS, and his adult novels THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, THE PUPPET MASTERS, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, and more short stories than I can name.

The books I have are Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers. I haven't read them, yet. Just the first chapter or two of Stranger.

They're YA fiction, but I really enjoyed John Christopher's TRIPODS series. Actually I enjoy any sort of dystopian young-adult SF, including Hoover's THIS TIME OF DARKNESS and of course the anime series Future Boy Conan.

I can't remember by whom, but the opening credits of Conan say that it was based off some English-language young adult novel.

My favorite Philip K. Dick books are the short novels he banged out for Ace while under the influence of amphetamine and poverty, like THE UNTELEPORTED MAN and TIME OUT OF JOINT.

The first I read was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? because I am a huge Blade Runner fan. I actually prefer the overall story to Blade Runner more, though, because with the BR twist that Deckard is a Replicant basically out-Dicks PK Dick himself.

I had one book called Reel Future that was a collection of SF short stories that movies were based off of: The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke (2001), Who Goes There? by John Campbell (The Thing), We Can Remember It For You Wholesale by PK Dick (Total Recall), The Driver (Deathrace 2000), and so many other stories that were made into movies. I wish I hadn't gotten rid of the book before moving to Japan, because I didn't get around to finishing all of the stories. It was one of those books published by Barnes & Noble that I found on their clearance sale table over 15 years ago.

[davemerrill]

Conan is based on THE INCREDIBLE TIDE by Alexander Key; it's a lot more grounded and not nearly as much fun as the TV show. Also a lot shorter. Key also wrote ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, which the Disney film was based on.

Leigh Brackett's THE LONG TOMORROW isn't a YA, but it's a good post-civilization novel of an America that's abandoned technology.

Speaking of YA science fiction, L'Engle's WRINKLE IN TIME remains outstanding. Don't watch the TV movie they made of it.

I would love to read a pre-LENSMAN TRIPLANETARY, but I guess it'll have to wait until I pick up the Astounding pulps it first appeared in, or wherever. It's not a bad book, even in its Lensman incarnation, but it's got this whole 'set the universe up' world-building thing going on, whereas GALACTIC PATROL gets right to the slam-bang space war action. There is one segment in FIRST LENSMAN where one of the characters is working in a mine, and Smith's life experience really shows through in that sequence; he grew up in the Dakotas in the early part of the 20th century and worked a lot of physically demanding jobs before getting his degree.

Campbell edited Astounding Science Fiction in the 40s and was responsible for a lot of the tone and drive of the SF of that era, he edited Smith and Heinlein. He was also responsible for foisting Dianetics and Scientology on the world, so there's that. He didn't write a lot but his "Who Goes There" is a classic. I have a big anthology of Astounding shorts from the 30s and 40s, there's a lot of dreck, but a lot of gems too. I was not aware DEATH RACE 2000 was based on a short story... now I gotta find it!

One of my favorite short stories is Kuttner's "We Guard The Black Planet". It's about space valkyries, real mythic pulp space adventure stuff, clocks in at under 80 pages.

Harry Harrison's STAINLESS STEEL RAT books are breezy fun; if you like Lupin III it's the same sort of thing, a super thief living outside the bounds of society in the world of the future. That guy was a writing machine, dozens of novels on nearly every theme imaginable, from a tunnel under the Atlantic to a parody of "Starship Troopers" and a parody of "Lensman" and "Skylark." His DEATHWORLD books are worth a read also. The writers of the current Will Smith movie probably should have given it a read.

I haven't read STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND in years, but as I recall the one thing you'll be thinking to yourself as you read it is "Man, this was sure written in the 60s!"

[Armblessed]

A few years back I decided to try to read every winner for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Since they give out one a year and they've been doing it since 1953, there are quite a few. So far, I've read about half. I was hoping it would cause me to stumble on some really great books, but my favorites are still ones I'd read before, like "Starship Troopers", "Dune", and "Rendezvous with Rama". All three of which I would recommend, but more on "Starship Troopers" later.

The most recent Hugo winner I read was "Neuromancer". It was good, but I kept losing interest and it took me forever to get through it. The world it created was fantastic, but the pacing left something to be desired. Of the Hugo winners I've read recently, I'd say "Spin" by Robert Charles Wilson was my favorite. Its about a mysterious black membrane type thing suddenly appearing around the Earth and the who, what and whys that come with it.

As for Heinlein, I think "Stranger in a Strange Land", "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and the aforementioned "Starship Troopers" are great books. Though I would attach a caveat in that all of them deal with fairly strong (but differing) views on society and government. "Stranger" starts out fairly normal and then goes off on at a wild angle at one point, becoming almost a completely different and more radical book. I took me three times reading the book to finally roll with that punch and finish, but when I finally did, I ended up really liking it. "Starship Troopers" is pretty much the complete opposite of the movie (thankfully). It's about a young man joining the military and finding his place in it and the place of the military (and civil service in general) in the larger society. At least, that's what I thought it was about.

[davemerrill]

I read RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA and I liked it, though it seemed kind of, I dunno, a little dry. Great 'big idea' SF but the characters and situations seemed to be there simply to explain things to each other and/or gape in wonder at things. I haven't read much of Clarke, or Asimov for that matter, I recall Asimov's fiction being kind of similarly matter-of-fact. Asimov's nonfiction I found more entertaining, strangely enough.

The STARSHIP TROOPERS movie is off doing its own thing, and it almost succeeds; it's a film that can't decide if it's a parody or if it actually is the thing it's parodying, so it splits the difference, and never really works. But it's in there swinging.

[Path]

I would recommend Lensman - start with GALACTIC PATROL. TRIPLANETARY was shoehorned into the "Lensman" universe after the fact and FIRST LENSMAN was written later as a "prequel". You can take or leave CHILDREN OF THE LENS. Keep in mind they were written in the 30s and 40s (with some 50s) and they really reflect pulp writing & cultural mores of the time.

I also recommend Smith's SKYLARK books - it's an earlier series that I believe was the first to feature people travelling to other star systems. The first book was written in the 1920s. Even pulpier, but lots of fun. Also good is SPACEHOUNDS OF IPC.

I've read most of what Robert Heinlein wrote and I can recommend most of it - even when it's nonsense, it's really readable nonsense. After 1965 or so his work goes downhill, I think. They basically quit editing him. My favorites are his juveniles HAVE SPACESUIT WILL TRAVEL and BETWEEN PLANETS, and his adult novels THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS, THE PUPPET MASTERS, THE DOOR INTO SUMMER, and more short stories than I can name.

Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION is the best science fiction book ever written; at least it's the only one I've ever read that lives up to the promise of SF in terms of telling a thoughtful and thought-provoking story that also works as slam-bang adventure. So much of what we take for granted in terms of SF comes from this book.

Hal Clements' MISSION OF GRAVITY is terrific both as a tale of humans and aliens working together and as an exploration of what life would be like on a super-heavy gravity planet. There's a lot of real science in the book and it's given to the reader naturally and painlessly.

Saberhagen's BERSERKER series is less 'science' and more 'fiction' but again, so much of what we've come to take for granted in our genre movies and TV comes from these books of civilization menaced by advanced machines programmed to wipe out all life. I think his short stories are more successful than his novels.

Finally got to read EARTH ABIDES by George Stewart - not the first 'survivors after the plague' story, but one of the best.

In that vein, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS isn't so much a story about killer plants as it is about surviving the collapse of civilization. The triffids just provide local color, really.

They're YA fiction, but I really enjoyed John Christopher's TRIPODS series. Actually I enjoy any sort of dystopian young-adult SF, including Hoover's THIS TIME OF DARKNESS and of course the anime series Future Boy Conan.

My favorite Philip K. Dick books are the short novels he banged out for Ace while under the influence of amphetamine and poverty, like THE UNTELEPORTED MAN and TIME OUT OF JOINT.

So much later SF I haven't gotten around to yet. I've been trying to work my way through the big names of the 50s and 60s, to be honest. A lot of SF is so driven by the concepts that the actual writing itself is sort of half-assedly awkward, and if I don't enjoy reading a book, if the language doesn't make me want to keep reading it, then it can have the most awesome ideas imaginable and still be unreadable.

Not a big fantasy reader. I did enjoy Saberhagen's 'Empire Of The East' trilogy, though.

Lensman: I read the first one of the series, Triplanetary. It was okay, but didn't really grab me as great. Maybe the next one in the series is better.

Heinlein: I've read all of the above mentioned except Puppet Master (in my pile over here). I remember being extremely fascinated by the society in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If only it would work in reality.

The Stars My Destination: I read this ages past and remember not liking it. Exactly what it was about (and why I didn't like it) I don't even remember.

Mission of Gravity: That book was amazing. I loved the dialogue between the humans and aliens, plus the unpredictable way things happened. Been looking for the other two books since.

Philip K Dick: I've read all available short stories online. My search for a secondhand copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep continues to elude me. I might have to break down and buy it new.

Armblessed, I'm glad I'm not the only one that found Neuromancer not living up to its reputation. I read that one during my own Hugo/Nebula binge.

The best book I probably discovered during above mentioned binge was More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon. Google it, its very hard to describe the premise of it but it was the first book in many years that left me shaking by the end of it. It had a profound effect on me that few other stories matched.

Other scifi/fantasy books I'd recommend people:

Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle
The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren
Inherit the Stars by James P Hogan
Odd John & Sirus by Olaf Stapledon
Martian Odyssey by Stanley Weinbaum