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

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..

Hello, some great recommendations here but I shall add a few more.

Robert Charles Wilson: Canadian author of a very imaginative sort, my favourites being "Darwinia" involving some fantastic alternate history and "The Chronoliths."

"We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin - the original Russian dystopia.

Avram Davidson: visions of history and fantasy and awesomeness.

Yeah, Robert Charles Wilson is one of the best and more overlooked SF writers going at the moment. Read his 'The Divide' the other day, and it was really good. 'Darwinia', 'Spin', 'The Chronoliths', 'Bios', 'Blind Lake' or 'Mysterium' are all excellent intros to his work. There's also a free novella online here.

I snatch up collections of short stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Damon Knight that I haven't read whenever I find them. The two page long stories are often my favorites.

Has anyone read Roadside Picnic? I got about 50 pages into it a few months ago and I don't know why I stopped because it was really good!

Yes, I loved 'Roadside Picnic'. I'd like to read more by those brothers, but I don't think there's anything else in English (although I do have an old anthology of Soviet SF somewhere that was edited by Sturgeon, and I suspect they're in that). Also, if you liked 'Picnic', try Algis Budrys' 'Rogue Moon', which has something of the same atmosphere and thematic concerns.

haha i want a theodore sturgeon-edited SF anthology

It's good! Only the 10% are in it!

got a title for that one? i might go amazon market / abebooks hunting

It's called 'New Soviet Science Fiction', and the ISBN of the copy I have is 0025782207. ABE has copies from $3.50.

It looks like this:
http://pictures.abebooks.com/YARROW/882386633.jpg

Fancy gettin' me some of that but no uk sellers on abebooks... have to see what other Sturgeon they have. Might stock up on Dangerous Visions while I'm at it.

Come to think of it, back in the late 80s/early 90s, at the big library across the river, I found an old paperback of the Stugartsky/-ski bros' Hard To Be A God, think that's the right title, pretty close at least. Snowballing absurdist epic, awesome and "not" political, noooo--no telling when it came out; prob on Amazon for five cents or $50.00 or both. Anybody who's disappointed by Dhalgren, should check out his earlier stuff, esp. The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Triton, Spindrift (short stories), Heavenly Breakfast (his first memoir, I guess, re the 60s--*his* 1960s)

! i had never heard of 'heavenly breakfast' — in what ways is it i) similar ii) dissimilar to 'the motion of light in water'?

I learned yesterday that Osama Bin Laden may have named Al-Qa'ida after the Arabic title of "Foundation", a novel that features the collapse of a mighty empire.

I read "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky Brothers (after seeing Tarkovsky's "Stalker") and I loved it. Is any of there other stuff worth seeking out? "Dead Mountaineer's Hotel" sounds cool, but it doesn't look like anything is in print (judging from a quick glance at Amazon).

Yeah, I'd love to read more of them too.

Also, a recent SF book that I thought was fantastic: 'Blindsight' by Peter Watts: exciting exploration/nature of consciousness and sentience/biology's limits/cognition flaws/mind-boggling stuff in general.

Finished all 8 vols of Best SF of New Worlds. Pretty disappointing. Michael Moorcock keeps on going on in the introduction about how sci-fi is an inadequate term, New Worlds is also, or more, about experimental fiction. And he's right - unfortunately I just don't find experimental fiction, or NW's brand of it, very interesting. Ballard's probably the best of the bunch but his themes are opaque and his prose doesn't particularly grab me. It's interesting that virtually none of his stories printed here appear in his Collected Short Stories.

Of course this is judging from a distance. I daresay there were all sorts of cultural boundaries being broken and political issues flying around - indeed, as Moorcock says in the intro to one of the vols, one of the magazine issues was banned by WH Smiths and questions were asked in Parliament (*) - but tbh I'm not really interested in that, I just wanted some decent more-or-less traditional SF short stories, and across all 8 vols there are only about a dozen of those. The last vol is pretty much the best; it feels like Moorcock had given up in some way as there is no introduction and a full four of the stories are by Barrington Bayley, but those are all good or great stories, there are a couple of other decent ones, and the experimentation is toned right down.

(*) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1968/may/09/magazine-new-worlds-grants#S5CV0764P0_19680509_HOC_7

well, i applaud your tenacity i guess

Ehh 1-2 hours per book, not a great chore. And gems were unearthed.