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Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

#41

Post by zeroonetwothree »

spapas82 wrote: post #37

I've read a lot of scifi but I'd recommend only one to make sure you get the point: The "remembrance of earth's past" trilogy ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Pas... ) which is more known as "the three body problem". All the books are great but my favourite by a large margin is "the dark forest" (part 2)

Conversely I think these are some of the worst books I’ve ever read (and I’ve read basically everything mentioned in this thread). The characters are uninteresting, the plot is haphazard and the ideas are derivative. I can see how it would be appealing if you don’t read much at all but once you’ve experience some higher quality stuff it’s just bad.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

#43

Post by atlasunshrugged »

My absolute favorite is Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, The Jagged Orbit was also excellent. Other than that, of course Snow Crash is a masterpiece, but I think my favorite Stephenson book is The Diamond Age. Another excellent one is Daemon by Daniel Suarez whose books are quite fascinating and look at generally pretty topical plotlines (I was just thinking I have to revisit his book Kill Decision about AI enabled killer drones).

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

#46

Post by atlasunshrugged »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #28
bergheim wrote: post #10

I read Snow Crash growing up. It is a wonderful weird cyberpunk novel that (metaverse aside, unfortunately) turned out to be kind of Nostradamusly. Easy read. Higly recommended!

With the recent advancements in LLM/AI, I've been thinking more and more about Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" (also titled "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer"). One of the major plot points is the development of a sophisticated interactive book that patiently individually educates and entertains one of the characters; greatly positively impacting her life. We're much closer to being able to build that now than we wer…

Yes, me too! Soon we might have real 'Ractives' -- of course with all the baggage that comes along with them, probably with developing world actors creating the custom content for the wealthiest

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

#47

Post by atlasunshrugged »

hunterjrj wrote: post #8

The Zones of Thought series by Vernor Vinge, and A Deepness in the Sky in particular. If you check the series out, and I highly recommend you do, read it in order. Which would mean starting with A Fire Upon the Deep, which is excellent.

Seconded

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

#49

Post by jmclnx »

Outside of some of the ones listed here, here are a couple of others:

* Alan Dean Foster -- Call to Arms, in this case the we are the strong ones.

* Hal Clement -- Nitrogen Fix, replace Nitrogen with CO2 in your head and this could be rather current :)

* An obscure one I liked, but I forgot the Author and Title --

Seems Interstellar Travel could be achieved with 15th Century Tech.

So Aliens landed on late 20th Century Earth with the goal of taking it over. But were easily defeated due to how advanced Earth Tech was compared to what they had. We analyzed their spacecraft and learned how easy it was to achieve interstellar travel. Was a rather interesting read IIRC.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite sci-fi books?

#50

Post by interfixus »

A few favourites off the top of my head:

The Difference Engine - William Gibson & Bruce Sterling Diaspora - Greg Egan Flashback - Dan Simmons Timescape - Gregory Benford Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke (but the "co"-authored sequels are too terrible for words)

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