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The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

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Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#121

Post by lobster_johnson »

BillSaysThis wrote: post #100

This 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 n…

> Personally, though, I wouldn't put Dune or any Gene Wolfe on my Top 100 SF novels. Could never get past the first pages.

Try Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus and see if you might change your mind. It's very readable, and it's pleasantly short. It's half Borges, half Sturgeon, with a pinch of Ray Bradbury.

Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#122

Post by jockc »

zavulon wrote: post #77
subwindow wrote: post #71

Obviously 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.

My favorites are The Invincible and Fiasco

Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#123

Post by FilterJoe »

jerf wrote: post #93
jonnathanson wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I loved the miniseries (after hating the first film - a travesty). After watching the miniseries, thousands of people chanting "Muad'Dib" came into my dreams and I still remember it today, years later (as luck would have it, my son attends a Jewish school whose day begins with a "Modani" ceremony - guess what that makes me thing of . . .).

The theatrical tricks of this miniseries obviously worked very well on me.

Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#124

Post by Alex3917 »

jerf wrote: post #107
Alex3917 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While an interesting thesis, and I would never claim Japan has completely failed to influence the US, none of your examples strike me as evidence of Japan -> US influence rather than either convergent evolution, or things that just flat out come from different sources. High stakes testing is a result of the bureaucracy; the bureaucracy requires something to test and measure, and it will create it even if it's impossi…

"either convergent evolution, or things that just flat out come from different sources"

I more or less agree with this. At the same time, when you look at Japan everything just looks better -- even though it isn't. So while I think much of it is convergent evolution or things that come from different sources, just having Japan being the way it is vaguely over there seems to be giving US leaders more self confidence to make these sorts of reforms.

Part of it also though is that Japan has a history of taking ideas from other cultures and then perfecting them. E.g. germany invents scientific management, Henry Ford popularizes and commercializes it, and then 60 years later it's getting shipped back to us as TQM and Kanban. So yeah it's definitely all tangled up, all I'm saying is that we're becoming more like Japan currently is, regardless of why we're becoming that way or why Japan is that way.

Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#127

Post by jwallaceparker »

latch wrote: post #36
pragmatic wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re Stranger in a Strange land I think it's a book like Catching in the Rye. Our (American) culture has changed so much that modern readers think "what's the big deal with this". The drugs/orgies etc in Stranger in a Strange Land have much less of an impact on a generation that grew up with easy access to hard core drugs and hard core porn.

both to you and jobu: That's probably it. I remember watching Deer Hunter...maybe in '99 and I just couldn't believe how bad a movie it was. Obviously, to people still in touch with Vietnam (in 78), the impact was...greater.

Deer Hunter is an incredibly good movie and I have no connection to Vietnam. I was born in 1977.

Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#128

Post by drtse4 »

sp332 wrote: post #32

I 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…

Glad to see that this time someone else is recommending this too, full of interesting ideas and overall a good hard sci-fi novel. We need more novels about these themes.

Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#129

Post by eavc »

dtbx wrote: post #73

The 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.

>In science fiction, the sole purpose of God is to be mocked, criticized or denied.

As a normative statement, that would be debatable.

Re: The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

#130

Post by hesdeadjim »

I have two give two huge thumbs up to a few books on that list:

* A Fire Upon the Deep - This book manages to capture both galaxy wide conflict and intense personal narrative in a manner that kept me riveted to the end. That and an extremely unique type of alien life form that gains its personality based upon a telepathic summation of individual consciousness of it's members, made for some really interesting reading.

* The Forever War - Take one part Starship Troopers (the book), add a dash of conscription and another of superluminal travel with full time dilation effects, and you end up with this superb novel. I've read it a few times already because it's so damned good and concise.

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