Books, Movies, Music & Entertainment - SF Book Thread

This is my subjective list of some great SF books. Not
comprehensive, just some suggestions. Besides being
good reads, they are very well written and intellectually
stimulating.

Some of the usual suspects (Heinlein, Niven, etc.) I don't care
for. I've probably forgotten some greats, or have never read them.

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Banks, Iain M.:
Consider Phlebas
Use of Weapons
Look to Windward

Bester, Alfred:
The Demolished Man
The Stars My Destination

Dick, Phillip K.:
The Man in the High Castle
Ubik

Gibson, William:
Neuromancer

Harrison, M. John:
The Pastel City
A Storm of Wings

Le Guin, Ursula K.:
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Dispossessed

Leiber, Fritz:
The Big Time
You're All Alone

Robinson, Kin Stanley:
Red Mars

Smith, Cordwainer:
Norstrilia
The Rediscovery of Man

Stephenson, Neal:
The Diamond Age
Snow Crash

Vance, Jack:
The Dying Earth (Mazirian the Magician)
Emphyrio
The Last Castle

Vinge, Vernor:
A Fire Upon the Deep

Wolfe, Gene
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Shadow of the Torturer
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories

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Suggestions, criticisms?

I haven't been reading much Sci-Fi lately, but back in the day Phillip Dick and Harlan Ellison were two of my favorite authors.

Walter Miller, A Canticle for Liebowitz
Arthur C. Clarke, the Rama quadrilogy
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

I haven't been reading much Sci-Fi lately, but back in the day Phillip Dick and Harlan Ellison were two of my favorite authors.

Yes, time pressures and increasingly bad eyes have reduced my reading time.
Back in the day, I was the classic nerd/bookworm. Try to be as selective as
possible now.

Favorite Ellison stories: Shatterday and Jeffty is Five

Almost anything by Heinlein, except his last 5 or so Novels.

The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle. (Biggest disapointment the sequil, "The Gripping Hand").

The Cold Equations

The Ones who Walk away from Umalas (sp) - Le Guin

Nightfall - Asimov

I'll have to check the bookshelfs when I get home.

Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure and Demon Princes series are especially good. Not easy to find, though.

Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light, Jack of Shadows, Roadmarks, the Amber series in fact about 50% of his books are well worth the effort, the other 50% maybe not so much.

I have to recommend Stanislaw Lem. His most famous book is Solaris (theres an awful Soderbergh film, pretty good Tarkovsky version.) He writes some of the most intelligent, erudite, and artful prose for sci-fi. He masterfully blends "hard" high-brow sci-fi with beautiful prose. I also suggest His Master's Voice and Fiasco.

I have to recommend Stanislaw Lem. His most famous book is Solaris (theres an awful Soderbergh film, pretty good Tarkovsky version.) He writes some of the most intelligent, erudite, and artful prose for sci-fi. He masterfully blends "hard" high-brow sci-fi with beautiful prose. I also suggest His Master's Voice and Fiasco.

Lem is good. Have you read any of the Strugatsky (sp?) brothers? Roadside Picnic
was adapted by Tarkovsky (Stalkers)

Frank Herbert - Dune
A.E. Van Vogt - The Weapons Shops of Isher, The World of Null-A
Lewis Padgett - some short stories whose names I don't remember
James Blish - A Case of Conscience

Cordwainer Smith is my all-time favorite!

Just about all of the rest of Gibson's work is good. Philip K. Dick is really good, and so is Orson Scott Card.

Poppaspoke,

I haven't read Roadside Picnic, though I want to (Lem himself apparently likes it?). Have you read it? Is it good? I have also been meaning to see Stalker. I really liked Tarkovsky's Solaris, even if it wasn't so true to the book at the end.

Anything OSC... SF or historical fiction :beer:

wow, you forgot Ender's game! :P

i really enjoyed Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead...i just finished Xenocide and felt like it was almost 600 pages of filler leading up to 'aaaaand we're going to tell you what happens in the NEXT book' :(

also, Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' (blade runner) was incredible.

two of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke works are '2001' and 'Childhood's End' incredible reads, both of them.

Wow, don't you guys read anything new? Singularity scifi is big now, thanks to Vinge.

I just read one called Futureland. It's 9 short stories. I hate short stories but these are good and they are all connected. His vision of the future is a bit scary because it's not that far away from what we have now.

i really enjoyed Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead...i just finished Xenocide and felt like it was almost 600 pages of filler leading up to 'aaaaand we're going to tell you what happens in the NEXT book'

Just do yourself a favor and don't read any of the series where it's about bean and peter on Earth, they suck. And I don't think he is ever going to end the cliffhanger, he hasn't yet.

Wow, don't you guys read anything new? Nope. I really don't read sci-fi anymore. I got stuck in a time warp several decades ago. Snowcrash is the only recent one that I enjoyed.

wow, you forgot Ender's game! :P

i really enjoyed Ender's Game, and Speaker for the Dead...i just finished Xenocide and felt like it was almost 600 pages of filler leading up to 'aaaaand we're going to tell you what happens in the NEXT book' :(

also, Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' (blade runner) was incredible.

two of my favorite Arthur C. Clarke works are '2001' and 'Childhood's End' incredible reads, both of them.
Didn't forget... I covered it in the 'anything' clause.

I loved the Alvin series too. :D

Has anyone read the Two Space War? In most scifi you go into hyperspace(more dimensions) to travel in space. In this book you go to the second dimension. More dimensions add more travel time, less subtract travel time. The downside is that this form of travel compresses everything flat. Anything high tech gets squashed. So they have retroculture. Things like swords and breach loading muskets can move around, anything higher can't.

The book was written by a guy who trains special forces and swat teams on the effects of combat. He has a web site called killoligy.

Poppaspoke,

I haven't read Roadside Picnic, though I want to (Lem himself apparently likes it?). Have you read it? Is it good? I have also been meaning to see Stalker. I really liked Tarkovsky's Solaris, even if it wasn't so true to the book at the end.

I liked Roadside Picnic quite a bit. The Strugatskys' off-center view of the world
has held up very well over the years. It's available free as PDF file:
http://www.cca.org/cm/picnic.pdf

I guess that this particular book isn't Sci fi, but I'm about 300 pgs into Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash was a pretty well done piece of SF, in my opinion. The man definitely has his own style.