Sci-Fi Recommendations - for the unenlightened

[Jay]

Anyone who like Huxley or Orwell, should check out Jack London's Iron Heel, as without doubt it heavily influenced both.

[Rane Longfox]

I am probably unique in not actually liking 1984. Though I read it with an English class, so thats never a good way to do it. Maybe I should try again some time...

[The Master™]

At school (many, many, many years ago), I was forced to read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham... Kind of put me off reading others of his...

Has anyone read:
The Chrysalids
The Midwich Cuckoos
The Day of the Triffids
The Kraken Wakes

[Stalker]

Stanislaw Lem
Solaris
Edem
Summa Technologia
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
Roadside Picnic
Beetle in the anthill
Inhabited Island
Hard to be a God
Alfred Bester
The Demolished Man
Tiger! Tiger!
Isaac Asimov
The Gods Themselves
Foundation
Robert A Heinlein
Starship Troopers
Stranger in a Strange Land:
Alfred van Vogt
The Voyage of the Space Beagle: A Harvest of Stars,
Poul Anderson
Time Patrol series
Frederick Pohl
Gateway
Beyond the Blue Event Horizon
Heechee Rendezvous
The Annals of the Heechee
Walter M Miller, Jr
A Canticle for Leibowitz
Philip K Dick
Ubik
The Man in the High Castle
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Francis Carsac
Robinsons of the Space
Escaping Earth
From nowhere
Larry Niven/Jerry Pournelle
The Mote in God's Eye
Hal Clement
Mission of Gravity
Daniel Keyes
Flowers for Algernon
David Brin
Startide rising
The Uplift War
Barry B. Longyear
Enemy Mine
John Wyndham
The day of the Trffids
Philip J. Farmer
River World
Still, the above list is far from being full.

[chaos]

And what about books of Erik F. Rassel?
imo, every his short story or novel is masterpiece of genre.
special for unenlightened

[SkepJ]

Douglas Adams:
I'm only in the third Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book at the moment, but so far I'd say the series is great. It's very very soft sci-fi meant to be, and is, very funny.


Larry Niven: Ringworld

[stencyl]

A few that I didnt see mentioned that I would add:

Nightfall--Asimov, Silverberg
Fahrenheit 451--Bradbury
Snow Crash--Stephenson
Schismatrix--Sterling
Slaughterhouse-Five--Vonnegut

A lot of great books mentioned so far!

[Brys]

Originally Posted by caladanbrood

I am probably unique in not actually liking 1984. Though I read it with an English class, so thats never a good way to do it. Maybe I should try again some time...

I liked it a bit, but I thought it was hugely overrated, and could have been done better.I think Animal Farm was a much better novel, and IMO, the other two well known dystopian novels, Farenheit 451 and Brave New World, are quite a lot better. (Especially Farenheit 451).

[asydhouse]

A worrying lack of modern authors in these lists!

Justina Robson Mappa Mundi one of the best sf novels I've ever read, and very modern, also her third book Natural History has some great altered human characters! A good book , but not as gripping as the first mentioned above.

Tricia Sullivan Maul brilliant black comedy, and Someone To Watch Over Me and Dreaming In Smoke (which won the Arthur C Clarke award about 4 years ago.)

Anything by Paul McAuley, a true modern master, and Gwyneth Jones, and Greg Egan, possibly the best sf author alive!

Steve Baxter's Timelike Infinity, Flux and Ring (a mindblowing sequence of books!)

And the coming Master of sf, Charles Stross, whose newest book Accelerando is the most important and truly new sfnal book published in 20 years! And that is saying something, considering there is more truly great sf being published these past 10 years than ever before!

Oh and this year's BSFA award winner Ian McDonald's River of Gods.

And by the way, I think 1984 is rubbish as sf... important at the time it was published because so many people were still naive about Stalin's Russia, but never a real sf book... it's not realistic even (which is why it's not good sf) as he has a situation which is so simplistic... real culture and real people are more complex... even in Stalin's time, not all Russians were automatons of the state!

[knivesout]

I've certainly enjoyed Justina Robson, Ian MacDonald and Baxter (although some of his stuff is a bit dry for me) - a lot of the other authors you mention haven't yet trickled down to this neck of the woods. A couple of newer writers I'd recommend pretty highly are Adam Roberts and Ken MacLeod.


You dismiss 1984 as good sf because it's 'not realistic even'. The same argument could, and has been by the Mundane SF crowd, applied to nearly any SF novel that involves FTL travel, extraterrestrial intelligence and other devices without which a large percentage of the SF we enjoy wouldn't even exist. Just like Orwell maybe exaggerates things to prove a point, nearly every SF author out there has has assumed a few unilkely developments so as to be able to tell a story at all. Just my 2c.

[asydhouse]

yeah but since Orwell's book is specifically social sf, ie not interested at all in the effects of technology, his lack of speculative rigour in addressing the central issues of his novel invalidates the very sf aspect of his novel that is his central concern... ie it's just a social satire, not sf... ftl and all that is usually at least given some credence as a future technology (wormholes are a part of modern science, if still speculative, and therefore fair game for use in sf), and in a novel concerned with space and politics I would expect a certain rigourous sfnal thought, or I would dismiss it also as bad sf. The work of Alaister Reynolds is a good example of real sf using the difficulties of Relativistic time drift to address genuinely sfnal (and bloody entertaining!) issues in a rigourously developed milieu. I just feel that Orwell is held up so often because of people's sense of insecurity over the literary respectability of sf... and as sf 1984 is piss poor on just about any sfnal criterion you care to look at, so we seem to be appealing for serious consideration by the snobs of the literary establishment on the basis of a poor example of sf, whereas we should be holding up examples of good sf which also meet the requirements of the literati, such as McDonald's River of Gods, or Mary Doria Russell's Sparrow, or so much of Brian Aldiss's works, or Bruce Sterling... all of whom have the sfnal virtue of being stimulating of thought, and liberating of the mind through interesting speculation... and fun to engage with! 1984 fails on all sfnal counts!

PS Ken MacLeod and Adam Roberts are also among my favourite modern authors! I agree that some of Baxter is dry, but the ones I mentioned (and Time from more recent times) are rollicking good reads, with mindblowing ideas (ie great sf!)

[cyborg_cinema]

Originally Posted by asydhouse

since Orwell's book is specifically social sf, ie not interested at all in the effects of technology, his lack of speculative rigour in addressing the central issues of his novel invalidates the very sf aspect of his novel that is his central concern...

...The "telescreen" did not display rockets circling planets, but it should be listed among the most notable speculative technologies found in science fiction. That device alone gets 1984 in the door. That eavesdropping chatterbox was Big Brother's full frontal technological assault on privacy—part of the reason why "Big Brother" is a household word today.

"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."—George Orwell, 1984

[sanityassassin]

how about Piers Anthonys Tarot trilogy really good sci-fi/fantasy cross over

[knivesout]

Cordwainer Smith. Hunt his short stories down. Read them. And then thank me.

[Jay]

Cordwainer Smith. Hunt his short stories down. Read them. And then thank me.

Just buy The Rediscovery of Man and be amazed.

Regardin a couple others mentioend baovue, I really enjoyed Macleod's recent Learning the World and looking forward to Robson's Living Next Door to the God of Love

For fans of the common dystopias I recommend reading Iron Heel by Jack London (forget about the blasted wolves and the cold)