Must read books

[Frank]

"Tief-tief!"

I totally forgot about the Retief series 'til you mentioned it!

All of Phillip K. Dick is excellent and pretty much required reading too, the man was the master of the mindfuck. 8)

Yeah.

I started reading Jhereg, and I like it a lot so far. I think I'm going to read all of them. I was sold when I read Steven's commentary on his own books, especially of "Dragon" on his site.

Btw, he looks a lot like me on the picture on his site, when I was about thirty (except for the mustache). I'm a bit older and about twenty pounds over my best weight now. You know how it goes.

 

[Geo]

Just heard Brust is having eye problems and either is in or recently let go from the hospital for it. Think good thots at him. I saw him go by at Mini-con a couple months ago, but I was up to my eyebrows in blood donors at the time, and he was surrounded by fans, so I didn't get a chance to say 'hey'.

 

[Frank]

Just heard Brust is having eye problems and either is in or recently let go from the hospital for it. Think good thots at him. I saw him go by at Mini-con a couple months ago, but I was up to my eyebrows in blood donors at the time, and he was surrounded by fans, so I didn't get a chance to say 'hey'.

Creepy. I just went to the hospital to have my right eye examined a few weeks ago. Seems I've developed a small dark spot because of an accident I had when I was 16. But it will probably not get worse.

I wish him all the best!

 

[BlackAngus]

This is my list of good sci fi books.(Various types of Sci fi here)
The Dosadi Experiment - Frank Herbert
Dune Series - Frank Herbert
Enders Game Trilogy - O.S Card
Childhoods End - A C Clarke
Rama Series - A C Clarke
Robot Series - Isaac Asimov
Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov
A Canticle for Lebowitz - Walter M Miller, Jr. (his only novel, very good)
Sundiver Series - David Brin
A Mote in Gods Eye and its sequel - Jerry Pornel And Larry Niven
Anvil of the Stars - Greg Bear
Hammer of the Gods - Greg Bear
Eon - Greg Bear
Dragon Riders of Pern - Ann McAffrey
Ringworld series - Larry Niven
Hmm.... Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy!
All things by William Gibson

That would be my recommended list =-)

 

[banksie]

Excession - Ian M. Banks (his very best)

It is good, but then I like most of Iain's stuff. I still think 'Use of Weapons' is the best Culture book, with 'Player of Games' following hot behind.

The Gap series - Stephen Donaldson (his sf is really good, don't bother with the rest)

Quite brilliant, especially the way each book twisted around and usually made the previous books' villian a sympathetic and understandable character. Angus Thermoplye's character arc is quite fun - he really is a rat bastard.

A few suggestions :-

'Revealation Space' by Alistair Reynolds. One of a set of four books in his Inhibitor series. He does hard science fiction with flair and after some shakey character the story really gets going and leaves you dying to find out more about what is going on. All four books do tell the complete tale of humanities encounter with the Inhibitors but it seems he got pushed by an editor to give closure at the end of the fourth book to the tale as a whole. I'd have liked one more story in the series rather than an epilogue chapter...

Honour Harrington series by David Weber. This is Horatio Hornblower in space and while it strikes very predictable character notes what it does really well is fleet tactics and order of battle. He invents his engine tech and then everything else flows from that design to determining how battle is performed and the ways in which weapon technology evolves. He freely admits this is all based on English Naval history but it makes for fun reading.

'Vast' by Linda Nagata. A surprise find in a cheap sell off pile, hard science fiction done pretty well. Humanity is caught in the crossfire of some long standing war that the crew of the starship 'Null Boundary' are desperately trying to survive and understand.

 

[MasterBaiter]

Oh, and the whole "Myth" series by Robert Asprin will slay you if you want something easy and fun.

Definitely! They started to get a bit tedious in the end but that was after about hmm.... 6,7,8 books??? :?

 

[Mariner]

Oh, and if you want to reach back for some "old school" along those lines, shorter and quicker reads (because publishers required shorter books then), give Alistair MacLean a go. Some of those are really, really good. He's usually best known for three that became movies, Ice Station Zebra, The Guns of Navarrone, and Where Eagles Dare, but in my opinion those aren't his best (but at this late date I'd have to go look to remind myself which titles I had in mind).

HMS Ulysses was a very good read when I was a teenager.

 

[rotten]

try them...

Steven Pressfield:
Last of the Amazons
Gates of Fire
Tides of War

Sun Tzu:
The Art of War

John Grisham:
The Pelican Brief

Robert Ludlum:
The Bourne Series (Identity, Supremacy, Ultimatum)
The Janson Directive

Arturo Perez Reverte:
The Dumas Club

Umberto Eco:
Foucault's Pendulum (can't believe nobody mentioned that)
The Name of the Rose

Thomas Harris:
Hannibal Series

Trudi Canavan:
The Black Magician Trilogy (for popcorn reading)

Clive Barker:
The Books of Blood (sick and twisted small stories)

Percy Withers:
Friends in Solitude

and finally anything by Philip K. Dick, Aesop, Homer, Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare

 

[Squeak]

Mika Waltari - The Egyptian
Written in 1944 in Finland at the end of WW2, on a diet of insomnia and vodka. Absolutely unforgettable.

John Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
and The Stones of Venice (1853)
Never has truer words been put to paper on aesthetics, architecture and society as a whole.

Arthur C. Clarke - The City and the Stars
My favourite Clarke book, and not only one of the best SF books ever written, but one of the best books at all.

 

[mcsven]

Surprised that no-one has mentioned Heinlein. Starship Troopers is a great book, and Stranger in a Strange Land is also pretty interesting.

P.G. Wodehouse is probably the funniest author ever if you want a laugh. Virtually any of his books will do, but the Jeeves stories are my favourites.

Finally, for spy-story fans the Smiley-Karla trilogy from Le Carre is difficult to beat ("Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "The Honourable Schoolboy" and "Smiley's People").

 

[green.pixel]

Bump.

Wilhelm Reich - Mass Psychology of Fascism

Highly recommended.

 

[Grall]

While on the topic of fasism (well, close but not quite), there's Fatherland, by Robert Harris. Pretty Damn Awesome as a movie as I recall (starring Rutger Hauer), even better as a novel. The story is set in 1960s Nazi Germany, so ooo-OOO-ooo, spooky dystopian alternative reality stuff! It's 1968 as I recall, Hitler is about to turn 80 and Germany is about to sign a peace treaty with the US, which is led by Prez Kennedy. No, not THAT Kennedy; his dad. ...And then a young man is found murdered. The book thus starts out a murder mystery, and then broadens into a bigger conspiracy type of thing plot. When I read the book many years ago now I wanted the story to just go on and on and never end, the world and the story itself was so fascinating and well crafted and scary at the same time.

 

[green.pixel]

Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share is a thought-provoking work in humanities, worth a read.

 

[Davros]

Playboy women of walmart

 

[Babel-17]

While on the topic of fasism (well, close but not quite), there's Fatherland, by Robert Harris. Pretty Damn Awesome as a movie as I recall (starring Rutger Hauer), even better as a novel. The story is set in 1960s Nazi Germany, so ooo-OOO-ooo, spooky dystopian alternative reality stuff! It's 1968 as I recall, Hitler is about to turn 80 and Germany is about to sign a peace treaty with the US, which is led by Prez Kennedy. No, not THAT Kennedy; his dad. ...And then a young man is found murdered. The book thus starts out a murder mystery, and then broadens into a bigger conspiracy type of thing plot. When I read the book many years ago now I wanted the story to just go on and on and never end, the world and the story itself was so fascinating and well crafted and scary at the same time.

I read that book. A sad thing about time going by is how dystopic fiction stays relevant.

Spoiler

Horrific crimes getting covered up so as not to disturb the people, and future generations. Speaking of great books, that was a minor scene in an Iain M. Banks novel. A Culture ship (was it the Meat Fucker?) decided to get creative with the General of an alien race who was trying to cover up a genocide.

I allude to a spoiler though I don't think it would ruin the experience of the book. Maybe Grall can rule on that. But, yeah, purists should skip that if they are going to read or watch it.
P.S. Trashy but it transcends itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Solution A world so sad and seedy you'll want to cry.

Gavriel David Rosenfeld, in his book The World Hitler Never Made (2005), suggests that Norden might have been inspired to write his novel by a ten-day-long interview he conducted with Albert Speer, which was published in the June 1971 edition of Playboy. During the interview, Speer commented to Norden, "If the Nazis had won, [people] ... would be living in a nightmare". Rosenfeld sees Norden's novel as a morally informed critique of the 1970s "Hitler Wave" of renewed interest in Nazism which followed the publication of Speer's Inside the Third Reich.[2]

 

[Grall]

I allude to a spoiler though I don't think it would ruin the experience of the book.

It's somewhat of a spoiler I'd say, in an indirect way, but still, it gives away part of the plot, so...well done.

Didn't we have a comic thread as well once? I think so. I'm lazy though, so I'm not going to bother looking for it, and this isn't just ANY comic. (It's a graphic novel, lol....)

Recommended for mature, stable-of-mind (and soul) readers only: (Seriously!)
"From Inside", by John Birgin. It was apparantly made into an indie movie a couple years ago as well, but I haven't seen it.

It's the tale of a young, pregnant woman travelling alone on a train through a landscape of horror and despair. It's really, really freaky. And thought provoking. And it's a good, imaginative tale, like a well-told ghost story in a way. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in grownup comics.

It's a bunch of years old so might be hard to get hold of, although apparantly available on Amazon, if you want to support an evil corporation which is destroying the fabric of our society and run by a sociopath with your money...

 

[green.pixel]

Not a book but worth checking out.

Industrial Society and Its Future

 

[Davros]

Just started reading
Nick Mason - Inside Out A Personal History of Pink Floyd

 

[London Geezer]

I love books I just can't put down from the first few pages.
I might have mentioned him already, maybe on this thread as it looks like an old one, but I would wholeheartedly recommend Robert J Sawyer's work. I read all his books and you really won't be disappointed if you like a more earth-bound, human science fiction. I wouldn't even know where to start, but really have a look at Flashforward, Mindscan, Rollback, the WWW trilogy. Terminal Experiment! Factoring Humanity! So many amazing stories. I could go on and on.
Also Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, it's a trilogy and although the sequels weren't as good, the first one alone is worth it, and the third book does get much better.
I loved The Forge of God too, by Greg Bear.

 

[Babel-17]

Walter Jon Williams novels tend to pull me along. The first time I started Aristoi was an exception to that, eventually I picked it up again and it just flowed. I'm pretty fond of his Drake Maijstraal series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Maijstral

The Long Run, and The Last Dancer, by Daniel Keys Moran really linger in memory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Keys_Moran
His adventures in getting credit for his work from the Star Trek franchise are pretty amazing.

Problems with Paramount

• An episode of Star Trek:Voyager titled Ex Post Facto was very similar to a story idea that Daniel Keys Moran pitched to Paramount, yet which Paramount did not accept. Daniel describes the incident as he saw it, and how it was resolved.
  
• DKM also made available the original pitches (in the fiction archive) of the story idea mentioned above. This ultimately became the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine titled Hard Time.

http://www.kithrup.com/dkm/dkmnonfic/#TSURIS

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708545/ A great episode.