Some others I'd recommend:
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Loved it.
Flatland. o.O
Isacc Asimov short stories collection (specially "Jokester" "The Golden Man" and "The Last Question")
The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
91–100 of 291 posts
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#92I liked the idea of outfitting Zeb Carter's Ford with a "continua" device in Heinlein's Number of the Beast and programming it so it would move through parallel universes via voice command to the onboard computer.
Can't tell you how many times I've sat in traffic and wished I could say "jump deety" and immediately be in the parking lot.
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#93Dune is great..in fact, the original 6, except maybe God Emperor, are all great. Hyperion is a good book, as is the 2nd in the series The Fall of Hyperion. However, the two last books are really quite bad. Personally, i found Ilium+Olympos to be his best work. I found the Culture novels disappointing. Except for Consider Phlebas and maybe Excession, you quickly realize that they are pretty much gods and that there's…
Something Dune accomplishes really well -- and which very few sci-fi books or movies have ever pulled off quite as effectively -- is weaving a lot of background, and culture, and esoteric terminology, into the story without disrupting the story's flow. There aren't lengthy, disjointed sidebars about what X means, or why Y exists. Instead, X and Y are woven into the narrative via context, allowing the reader to pick u…
"Harkonnen, in particular, has a James Bond Villain-esque penchant for such speeches"
The Sci-Fi (pre-SyFy) miniseries runs with this and plays him as a flat-out monologuing villian, and I daresay it works pretty well.
I actually recommend the miniseries. It gets panned by a lot of people, but you need to understand it less as a television miniseries and more as a filming of a dramatic theater play. It heavily uses theatrical conventions, lighting, monologuing, pacing, even very theatrical special effects at some points. Given the low budget and topic material, I think this makes perfect sense, as theatrical conventions allow for more of the internal dialog to come out than standard cinema/movie conventions.
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#94The first half of "Stranger in a Strange Land" is wonderful, but the second... God in that novel actually exists. For a truly atheist like me, sometimes I want to read a fanfiction of the Stranger, but without god and the religion bullshit. Centered in the economics and the power. In science fiction, the sole purpose of God is to be mocked, criticized or denied.
Do I understand you correctly that you cannot even stand the idea of someone talking positively about God?
I am trying to think of another context in which your sentence (In , the sole purpose of is to mocked, criticized, or denied.) would make any kind of sense whatsoever.
Is there a particular, articulable reason that this is anything more than running away from concepts that challenge your preexisting mindset?
For example, I disagree with slavery, but I also disagree that in modern art, the sole purpose of slavery is to be mocked, criticized, or denied.
I am a fan of Python and not so much of Java. Nevertheless, I would never agree that in web development, the sole purpose of Java is to be mocked, criticized, or denied.
I tend to disagree with the Republican party on a number of issues, but I would never say that in political discourse, the sole purpose of Republicans is to be mocked, criticized, or denied.
Finally, I spend all day, every day working against patent trolls. They make me frustrated and angry, and are, in my opinion, the symptoms of a broken system. Yet I seek out people who advocate for the current system so that I can understand it. I can't afford to have the patent literature I read circumscribed so that the sole purpose of patent trolls is to mocked, criticized, or denied.
Am I missing the point?
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#95If anyone is interested, here is the list of joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_joint_winners_of_the_Hu...
I always find this list tremendously useful when I don't know what to read next.
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#96I would add Permutation City. It's about: what's it like to be a digital person in a virtual world? What are the psychological effects of knowing that you're virtual; how do you experience time passing; what are the social implications of changing your appearance at whim, etc. And, how do different interpretations of data compete to become "real"? For example, if you look at it one way it's a city, another way it's a…
I don't remember enjoying Permutation City that much, but it for sure as hell has stuck in my mind for years (to this day, in fact) for the ideas it brings forth. I think I'm going to reread it.
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#97Obviously with any list there's going to be quite a lot of nits to pick... At any rate, here are mine. Sad to see Stanislaw Lem completely left out in favor of some obviously inferior books (Anathem!?). Also a curious choice for the obligatory Atwood novel. Surprised that Gravity's Rainbow was not on there- I'd put it near the top (maybe it wasn't "Sci-Fi" enough?) Good to see Canticle for Leibowitz as well as a fair…
Hear, hear. Any "Best of Sci-Fi" list that omits Solaris and includes Ender's Game is worthless.
Any "best sci-fi" list is like a selection of favorite candies. There's fleeting pleasure and some novelty to the experience, but it is what it is and in quantity it's bad for you.
If you want to read literature, choose something that will at least make you think better, not just dazzle you with future tech.
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you offer some examples? I was surprised by this statement.
So I think the fundamentalist christian thing is pretty self explanatory if you've been paying attention. In terms of Jewish culture, it's not really a secret that most of Hollywood, the media, and much of progressivism and culture in general is organized around liberal jewish values. I'm not really an expert on why this is, but from what I can see protestantism sort of hit its high water mark shortly after WWII. Aro…
I was responding to the Japanification statement as I hadn't thought about it before. I'm not calling BS, just wanted to see what you meant.
I think some of those examples are interesting points although the SF mentioned early seemed to predict an even stronger Japanese influence than what we see today.
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was actually surprised that A Deepness in the Sky didn't make it to the list when A Fire Upon the Deep did. Deepness had a lot of themes that satisfy hacker tastes (not just in terms of the technology but also the socio-political ramifications of it). I had first heard of it when DanielBMarkham highly praised it ( http://www.hn-books.com/Books/A-Deepness-In-The-Sky.htm , HN discussion here at http://news.ycombinato…
I'm so glad you mention it! I'm in the process of reading it right now. (Somewhere around 300 pages in; it's a bit heftier than Fire, but so far, well worth the read. I'm thoroughly impressed.)
The first time I read Deepness in the Sky, I felt like the middle was dragging on, because I wanted to get to the end.
Subsequent re-readings have revealed the middle is packed full of content and very good, no filler at all, it can just be a bit much to take in on one shot.
Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)
#100This thread points out the problem with Top 100 lists, of SF or other large bodies of things judged subjectively, which is that there are far too many good ones to stop at 100. In the real world of course one would hope to have the time to read far more than 100 SF novels; fortunately for me I've read several thousand over the past 40 years.
Personally, though, I wouldn't put Dune or any Gene Wolfe on my Top 100 SF novels. Could never get past the first pages. Banks, Stross, PFH, MacLeod, Rudy Rucker, Kage Baker, of the recent vintage, would all be there though ;)