Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

blamcast.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 291 posts

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

#231

Post by icebraining »

j_col wrote: post #39
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know of any (translated, given my lack of non-English speaking capability) non-English-origin sci-fi, I'd love pointers. I realize a lot is lost in translation, but I love the viewport into other cultures that fiction can provide.

Jules Verne. I'm currently reading Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and it is fantastic. Originally written in French.

It's his best work, though, especially of the SF genre (I like Miguel Strogoff, but there's nothing speculative about it).

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

#232

Post by icebraining »

fractallyte wrote: post #190
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know of any (translated, given my lack of non-English speaking capability) non-English-origin sci-fi, I'd love pointers. I realize a lot is lost in translation, but I love the viewport into other cultures that fiction can provide.

Largely ignored in all these comments is the enormous legacy of Soviet SF. During all the years of SF's Golden Age and the decades after, the main ideological and technological competitor to the US was the Soviet Union. We're so familiar with the tropes and concepts of US-centric SF, but imagine a whole new world of science fictional ideas - separated only by language! That's Soviet SF... The finest series of transla…

I have a copy of a collection of soviet stories, including two by Altov (and his wife). It's a Portuguese translation of a French translation, but it's still great (although I wonder how much was lost).

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

#233

Post by barrkel »

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.

The Deer Hunter is a very strong movie that still stands on its study of how relationships change under stress of war. It's not really about Vietnam specifically, or its time. Perhaps you were too young when you saw it? (Born in 79 FWIW.)

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

#234

Post by icebraining »

schiptsov wrote: post #4

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep is really good book. The movie is also nice, but it is almost independent masterpiece in itself. These dresses of Rachel, these rainy streets. Never mind. Btw, A Scanner Darkly is also good novel by Philip K. Dick, but it never appear in any such ratings. It is almost that dark and depressive as Electric Sheep. ^_^ http://www.amazon.com/Scanner-Darkly-Philip-K-Dick/dp/067973... As…

The most depressing thing about A Scanner Darkly is the author's note about how the novel is mostly auto-biographic, as well as the list of his friends and their punishment. It hit me rather hard at the time.

http://www.american-buddha.com/scandark.authornote.htm

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

#235

Post by Eliezer »

jholman wrote: post #218
jvdh wrote: post #23

The Foundation series was a great read, I read it when I was young and it influenced a lot of how I viewed the world around me. Having just reread it, I must say that it shows that Asimov did not really want to write the last parts of the series (i.e. Prelude to the Foundation and Forward the Foundation). Forward the Foundation especially is just trying to tie everything together by whatever means necessary. That bei…

Foundation, the book, was absolutely brilliant. Brilliant concept, brilliant structure to the book, and even the sentence-to-sentence writing is better than Asimov's usual (I normally find the actual wordcrafting to not be Asimov's strong suit). But ugh ugh ugh. Every single book thereafter gets worse and worse, and by the end it's so bad that I actually welcomed the blatant fanservice reappearance of you-know-who.

Voldemort vs. the Foundation? Don't go giving me ideas.

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

#236

Post by icebraining »

eavc wrote: post #180
dtbx wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just try to imagine something so awful, so harmful to , and your horrible generalisation would make sense :) In particular, what happens when the genre is sci fi and the noun is god? Clearly, that noun is not to be adored. Religion is for that. Should sci fi say something nice about that noun? That He really exists, after all? Science is for that, and science until now... I really think that sci fi should take a clea…

God has yet to be disproved by science; it's unlikely that will ever happen, actually, no matter the fact of God's existence. There's also no general framework from science that makes God incompatible with known laws. So God, in the context of a sci fi book, belongs to the class of things that have yet to be discovered but which are still consistent as possible discoveries. Even aside from that, you can have concessi…

"God" will never be disproved by science since there's no real definition of God. Between the thousands of conceptions of God and the eternally moving goalposts (under which god will eventually be (or already is) defined as 'something impossible to test by science'), it's completely meaningless in an empirical pov.

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

#239

Post by psykotic »

alanfalcon wrote: post #185
sausagefeet wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a fan of Greg Egan (which is on there). Quarantine and Permutation City are really great books. Schildt's Ladder was good but a bit too hard for me to grok.

Quarantine had me running around in high school reading Quantum Physics books and mostly failing to understand them. Good book.

It's also his most tautly plotted novel because of the detective noir framework. Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan and the earlier Vlad Taltos books by Steven Brust also used detective noir conventions to great effect. It's a writer's crutch, but so many fantasy and science fiction writers suck at plotting and pacing that I'd prefer they lean on crutches occasionally rather than bore their readers to death.

Egan's two most recent books, Incandesence and The Clockwork Rocket, are great if you're a math and physics guy.

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

#240

Post by autarch »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #29
eru wrote: post #21

I'm a bit disappointed to only see English books on there.

If you know of any (translated, given my lack of non-English speaking capability) non-English-origin sci-fi, I'd love pointers. I realize a lot is lost in translation, but I love the viewport into other cultures that fiction can provide.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harper

The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach

Both are excellent.

Post reply on HN