School Me On Some Sci-Fi My Astral Brothers And Sisters!

Harlan Ellison is a great short story writer. I think "Angry Candy" is the most consistent collection and my favorite. Ellison really knows how to pace a short story.

Richard Matheson's "I Am Legend" is a classic that many people haven't read. If you like dystopian tales, this novel was the basis of both "Omegaman" starring Charlton Heston and "The Last Man on Earth" starring Vincent Price. I would bet a soda that this novel will be made into a movie once again, probably this time as I am Legend.

JG Ballard's short stories are also fantastic and are more science fiction than his later novels.

Mick Farren and Robert Anton Wilson also can get as bizarre as PK Dick. I've enjoyed what I have read from both.

Arthur Clarke's "Songs of Distant Earth" and "Childhood's End" are classics that still hold up.

Some of Frank Herbert's non Dune novels and short stories are also pretty good like the two Jorg X McKie novels "Whipping Star" and "Dosadi Experiment". Herbert's novel "The White Plague" which is about a scientist who gets revenge on a terrorist who kills his family by unleashing a plague upon the world is very prescient and definitely plays into current fears.

Red Planet and other "young adult" works by Heinlein (my introduction to sci-fi).
Gun, With Occasional Music by Lethem.
The Callahan series, by Spider Robinson (short stories, pun-filled, set in a really odd bar) and the companion series about Callahan's s/o who runs an interesting brothel (Lady Slings the Booze, etc.). Of course, Douglas Adam's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

On the more serious/deeper end of things:
Stephenson's Snow Crash, Mieville's Perdido Street Station, Clarke's Rama and Songs of Distant Earth, Asimov's I, Robot ... actually, I'm just seconding and thirding on above recommendations - they all look excellent to me.

Start at the beginning with Consider Phlebas and work your way through.

My friend who reads, writes and knows most about science fiction esteems Banks above all others. I need to read some.

Following up on my earlier mention of Octavia E. Butler, I've just this week read the first two books of her Xenogenesis trilogy (Dawn and Adulthood Rites) and let me reiterate the recommendation. She really isn't like anyone else I've read. Her stories grapple with "big issues" (race, human nature, biological determinism), but in a completely character-driven way. I guess it's a cliche to say that she writes like a woman (and a black woman at that), but if you read the books without knowing the author was a woman you'd probably guess it. Pretty fascinating stuff. And fairly uncomfortable, too -- her books are full of ambiguous morality.

I was kind of stunned that I hadn't heard of him before, after checking at Amazon, it looks like most of his SF writing isn't in print in the US.

A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)
By WALTER M. MILLER JR.

All you need to know about my youth is that I was taught this subversive exegesis of man's religious impulse, wrapped within a story about a post-nuclear future, in the 7th grade, the same year I was studying for my bar mitzvah.

Cat's Cradle (1963)
By KURT VONNEGUT

The perfect, Platonic balance of science and fiction, one that still finds room for merciless satire and a moral that resonates to the present day: that self-destruction is mankind's one true calling.

A Clockwork Orange (1962)
By ANTHONY BURGESS

A lovely little tale of behavioral modification therapy and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so punk-rock that Burgess spent the rest of his life denying that the book had inspired the punk-rock movment.

The Crying of Lot 49 (1965)
By THOMAS PYNCHON

Due to space limitations, I can't offer my complete explanation of why this is a science-fiction book, so for the sake of efficiency let me simply say to anyone who disagrees with my classification of it as such: You're wrong.

Gun, With Occasional Music: A Novel (1994)
By JONATHAN LETHEM

I think this Lethem kid could be a big deal if he'd just give up his highfalutin literary ambitions and embrace his inner sci-fi geek. Hope it all works out for him.

Looking for Jake (2005)
By CHINA MIÉVILLE

I don't pretend to be completely versed in Miéville's work, but what I've read of it so far I find utterly fascinating. At age 33, he is already a master of gothic storytelling.

The Man in the High Castle (1962)
By PHILIP K. DICK

My personal favorite from Dick's paranoid catalog, an unnerving alternate history of victorious Nazis and the I Ching that seems to be reading you at the same time you're reading it.

R is for Rocket (1962)
By RAY BRADBURY

Most readers' introduction to Bradbury usually comes via "The Illustrated Man," but this was the book that taught me all I needed to know about sci-fi. Such as: don't go back in time and step on a butterfly.

The Twilight Zone Companion (1982)
By MARC SCOTT ZICREE

The book that showed me it's possible to take a critical stance on a work of science fiction and love it at the same time. Also, I memorized all of its plot synopses so I could pretend that I've seen every episode of the show.

Watchmen (1987)
By ALAN MOORE and DAVE GIBBONS

Want to start a fistfight in a hurry? Walk up to any salesperson at Forbidden Planet and tell them this extraordinary graphic novel about psychologically wounded superheroes in a hopelessly modern world was just another comic book.

As I said on that thread

The Crying of Lot 49 is a better novel than Dune, but no top ten all time SCI FI list should feature the former at the expense of the latter. Just screwy. And where the hell is The Left Hand of Darkness, Foundation, Ring World, The Forever War, The Stainless Steel Rat, Hyperion, The High Crusade, Illuminatus!, etc. . . . . . . . . . .

the 3rd foundation book!! OMG, it's like the "manchurian candidate" of golden-age scifi!

the "forever war" is good, but what about john steakley's "ARMOR"?!?! greatest sci-fi war novel ever! and let's not forget "ender's game"!!

The blogblæh has apparently been full of complaints about that Itzkoff list. As far as those things go, I don't think it's half bad. People new to the genre would come to some pretty damn good novels through it. I'm pretty sure "R is for Rocket" is one of the best places a kid could start with science fiction. Canticle for Leibowitz isn't a bad place to start for an adult.

I've never heard of Zicree!

ANyone here read McDonald's "River of Gods" yet? I believe that's been released in the US as well now. I really struggled with it for a while last year, liking it a lot, but for some reason having a -really- hard time getting through it. Ended up putting it aside in a hope that I wasj ust in the wrong mood and that I should go back to it.
Now in hindsight I'm wondering if my problem was with some of the sort of cyberpunky stuff (I've never liked a cyberpunk book in my life; nope, not even Snowcrash)
I need to go back to that soon.

Incidentally, I've asked the library to order me a copy of "Watchmen". I never liked those kinds of comics when growing up - not that they were in any way big here in Norway - but I've decided to try to give some of the biggies a chance now, with the library paying my way.
For the hell of it, I asked them to get me AE Van Vogt's "The World of Null-A" while they were at it. "Slan" is perhaps the most satisfying wreck of a novel I've read. What the hell was going on in Van Vogt's head? He seems to have no cred anymore, being one of those authors people look back on and laugh at, as evidence of what utter pulp garbage science fiction "used to be". Fleh, sez I!

(I've decided that I should start rambling more on ILB! Please tell me if it's the worst idea ever)

river of gods is on my "real immanent to read honest" list

I liked River of Gods, thought the setting really worked.

I am now reading Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith. It's a hoot! I really do like sci-fi in the summertime.

"Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner."

i picked up a paperback copy of this and i am a little bit daunted by it. it looks cool, but it's so huge and i am afraid it will get all pynchon-y on me and i won't be able to follow it.

i have a weird request. are there any sci-fi novels that don't have humans in them? or anything resembling a humanoid? i mean, like novels about intelligent plant life or amoeba-like things. has anyone done that? i ask, cuz one of the nebula award stories that i really liked was about shapeless, formless sentient entities and it was so cool! i just wondered if anyone had ever been gutsy enough to write a whole book without recognizable mammal-type things or robots that look like people.

there's a famous hal clement - 'mission of gravity' - where the central characters are armoured centipedes

the occasion of their narrative is their first contact with humans, but the humans are very much in the background

Yes, Mission of Gravity' is great. And don't be put off 'Zanzibar' - strong storytelling, and the multiple viewpoints thing doesn't detract from this at all.

There's an old John Brunner novel, whose name escapes me as it's been well over 20 years since I read it, that has no human characters whatsoever. It iirc is about the travails of an insectile civilisation whose planet suffers from various astronomically influenced disasters.

The majority of the characters in Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg and its sequel Starquake are ameoba-like creatures who have evolved on the surface of a neutron star.

i've got a 1952 story by james blish called "Surface Tension" that deals with diatoms and protozoa in a tidepool. it's really good if you can track it down. another hal clement story called "Proof" is about creatures that live on the sun and are kinda mini-suns themselves. i'll try to think of some more - i think i have some others.

i've been getting my sci-fi fix for years from old short-story anthologies, which are easy and cheap to find and invariably feature at least 3-5 great stories amongst others that are at worst merely entertaining.

following link from other thread, this thread looks already well covered but:

you can't go wrong with any J. G. Ballard / Philip Dick. My favorite H.G. Wells is Star-Begotten. favorite sci-fi Delany is Dhalgren. Lem's 'Solaris' is even better than Tarkovsky's film and I love that film.

Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy is grad-student fodder but great: http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/books/butler1.html

oh & Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites -- Lovecraft ripoff via 70's group therapyspeak -- gangbusters! totally paranoid and fun, even if it falls down at the end

i really like iain m banks' culture books, and i'd like recommendations for something similar. someone suggested alasdair reynolds to me, and i read a couple of books but they didn't really do it for me.

this is a great summertime thread - i need some sci-fi too right now

got some more stuff at the dump today. paperbacks.

In The Enclosure by Barry Malzberg

world's best science fiction 1969 (with vonnegut's welcome to the monkeyhouse included! and "the first u.s. publication of a new novella by samuel r. delaney". should prove to be a properly psychedelic volume.)

the hugo winners vol. 1 (all the winning stories and/or novellas from 1955 to 1961)

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm (never heard of her. looks good though. doomsday. sterility. clones.)

Short story anthologies - yes! Goddamnit I need some new ones (new old ones I mean). That Hugo winners vol sounds great. Mirrorshades = classic; In Dreams - a celebration of the 7-inch single in all original sf and horror fiction = total classic. Got three volumes of penguin scifi from the 60s edited by Brian Aldiss which are all good. Time for a trip to the 2nd hand bookshops.

Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm - yes, this is pretty good, although the apocalypse which happens early on is a little too much whimper, a little too little bang.

I just saw that Penguin is reprinting one of those Aldiss anthologies as a Modern Classic later this year. Nice to see SF getting some recognition as literature.

finished the cordwainer smith novel. craziness. ever read about his life?? even more craziness:

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

started the wilhelm book. yeah, she rushes through the end of the world stuff pretty fast, but the clones are holding my attention.

how about the Harlan Ellison-edited anthology Dangerous Visions? I read it at the peak of my JG Ballard phase and thoroughly dug most of it.

Try John Crowley - his early stuff, eg Beasts, Engine Summer is more SFnal, tho' the novel most people like best, Little, Big is closer to Fantasy. There's a great time travel novella, The Great Work of Time, too. It's in Novelties and Souvenirs, a collection of his shorter fiction (Londoners: currently available as a remainder in Judd Two books on Marchmont St.)
Nowadays he has a Historical-Fantastic-Literary thing of his own going on. Also, a livejournal.

a big otm on the forward books. he also had another involving mainly nonhuman lifeforms too, sea dwellers on a twin planet as i recall.

asimov's the gods themselves had lots of stuff with humans but also, i recall, was considered fairly groundbreaking for the huge sections that were purely alien. i don't think i'd dig it much now though.

dunno if calvino's cosmicomics would count, but why not, i guess?

as far as general sci fi, i read blish's cities in flight again a bit back and yowza, as far as old-school hard sci-fi worldbuilding and a whole spencerian meets individualist whatever outlook, the things are great.

fond memories, tho antiquated by now, of pohl's The World at The End Of Time along the big-payoff hardscifi books too, tho haven't read it in a very very long time.

pleasantly surprised by harrison's formulaic but decent homeworld trilogy that was a 1$ find the other week.

has anyone mentioned decamp in this thread? his funny stuff is very funny.

oh, and the practice effect which is brin back when he was tolerable.

still reading that old Hugo Winners collection (amongst other non-sci-fi stuff) and the big winners for me would be:

Exploration Team by Murray Leinster

and

The Big Front Yard by Clifford D. Simak (loved this story!)

I didn't much care for the Walter M. Miller, Jr story in the Hugo Winners book, but that won't stop me from reading A Canticle for Leibovitz when i finally find a copy, cuz i know how many people here love it.

Scott, I just read most of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (had to give it back to the library w/ 100 pages to go), and it was pretty amazing. Women w/ heads that are beautiful beetles, bizarre drugs, killer moths, and more besides.

so many people have great things to say about mieville. i will definitely read one someday.

It was a big book, so I put off starting it the first (and second) time I checked it out. But it only took a few paragraphs to hook me, and I didn't want to put it down. The man's a great storyteller. I also just finished his kids' book Un Lun Dun, which was okay and had a few "whoa!" moments, but not as griping as his grownup book.

vahid, yr crazy about Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, those two take the series to the next level, it's the best futuristic ecstasy dream ever!

there is a great short story i read about a world of bees. very hivemind! i can't remember the title off hand...

"Mission Of Gravity" was discussed in various places on this thread: science fiction..

i just read 'whole wide world' by paul mcauley, which was interesting. kind of a cyber-noir thriller set in a future which is just a couple of tweaks more advanced than ours. he loves to have his character talk about music while narrating the thing (very "rockist" taste it seems), and the mystery isn't much of one, but he's a very good writer and i read it quite swiftly.

(xp) I didn't read Descending, but I have before, and remember it fondly. I did read The Squirrel Cage which I thought was brill, also an extended metaphor on the human condition, this time about loneliness and solipsism - similar in a way to Wittgenstein's Mistress. Two other of his stories, though, were a let down.

Haven't read any McAuley, would be interested in trying some of his harder and further-future stuff.

this thread got me into thomas disch!!

Dischism

The unwitting intrusion of the author’s physical surroundings, or the author’s own mental state, into the text of the story. Authors who smoke or drink while writing often drown or choke their characters with an endless supply of booze and cigs. In subtler forms of the Dischism, the characters complain of their confusion and indecision — when this is actually the author’s condition at the moment of writing, not theirs within the story. “Dischism” is named after the critic who diagnosed this syndrome. (Attr. Thomas M. Disch)

Ooh, ooh, Paul McAuley's 'Cowboy Angels' is very good: 1960s US discovers travel to parallel histories, starts "liberating" them from Communism, complications ensue. More complex and politically subtle than I made it sound.

hoos, how? he doesn't seem to have been, um, mentioned much.

camp concentration was one of my favourite books for a while, others maybe less so. i did read echo round his bones lately and enjoy that: it's less ambitious, more a standard SF potboiler just done smart, and a very enjoyable one. one i did not like: the genocides.

ledge are these the ones?

http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/t70.htm#A1525
http://www.philsp.com/homeville/ISFAC/t71.htm#TOP

they do give kind of a jaundiced view of 60s SF, i guess. to some degree that's what it was for, i guess.

Aye them's the ones. Any other collections you'd recommend?

(Apart from the Aldiss/Penguin ones, and Hall of Fame vol 1, which I have, and The Hugo Winners, which I ordered and hasn't arrived, and Dangerous Visions, which I might order right now, and and...)

334 is incredible.

Disch was God.

what are ppl's thoughts on this list? http://thisrecording.com/today/2010/1/18/in-which-we-count-down-the-100-greatest-science-fiction-or-f.html

Nearly gave up in disgust circa Ayn Rand (I know a few people will see Ender's Game and Stranger In A Strange Land as libertarian nutjobbery too but I'm fairly happy with their inclusion in an SF list) but there are a few things I hadn't heard of there and would like to check out.

Not much modern stuff, which I can't really complain about as there isn't much on my shelves either. Not sure I'd pick several Dan Simmons books as pretty much my only representative of the 00s, though, but I've only read one of them.

Don't read the stuff anymore.

I'm as extreme a Gene Wolfe fan as there is, but An Evil Guest doesn't belong there. New Sun > Long Sun.

That appalling crap Flatland made it to 43?

No Sheckley, but his pla weak imitator Douglas Adams makes the list? With both of them gone, can't we sort this out finally?

Pale Fire is fantasy?

Just posted this on the comments for that list...

Interesting list and one that I mostly agree with (well except for Ayn Rand), but I'm actually shocked that neither Brunner's Stand On Zanzibar or The Shockwave Rider didn't make the cut. Both have aged remarkably well - if not better than some of the books that are on the list.

Since there isn't a single J.G. Ballard book on the list, I'll simply assume that the compiler is insane. The fact that I'm the first commenter to bring up both Brunner and Ballard makes me fear for the future.
January 18, 2010 | Chris Barrus

In SF Book Club, we have just been assigned Iain M Banks' "Use of Weapons"

For me the recent hits of SF Book Club have been Jules Verne's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" and China Mieville's "The Scar". Verne's ability to get drama and excitement without having enemies to fight against is very impressive. "The Scar", while not really SF, is an impressive imaginative work.