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

What are your favourite sci-fi books?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 110 posts

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#71

Post by akkartik »

moomin wrote: post #69

You realize not a single person has mentioned a female author? Let's fix that: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis Among Others by Jo Walton Feed by Mira Grant The Hunger Games! The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin Grass by Sheri S Tepper Gate of Ivrael and Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh And the fabulous space opera: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

Several people including myself mentioned Ursula Le Guin, who should be #1 on any list of women authors.

Also, mentioning Mira Grant and Hunger Games on this thread strikes me as blasphemous.

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#72

Post by JoachimS »

JoachimS wrote: post #70
everyone wrote: post #6

I have strong opinions about this. My criteria for a book being science fiction and not fantasy is that is must be based on scientific thinking. The author must have done some work to determine whether whats happening in his book is at least plausible according to real science, and then work out the details of how it would actually function. So I regard most "science fiction" books and almost all "science fiction" fi…

Your opinion is very good. The "and then something magic happens" solution in fantasy is what really turns me off. But in SF it is sometimes hard to distinct magic from plausible albeit far fetched science. Is FTL possible given the science of tomorrow, or magic? If you want to have (imho) really, really good SF, chec out Ted Chiang. Very low production, but he takes science in SF very seriosly. His collection of sho…

Also, a fun fact. Ted Chiang writes manuals for Microsoft products. Here is a good interview with Chiang (which I think has made it onto HN before):

https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/ted-chiang-s...

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#73

Post by Bzomak »

Some which I have re-read recently and still enjoyed:

  William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy

  Frank Herbert's Dune series

  Isaac Asimov's Foundation series

  Frederik Pohl's "Gateway"

  Robert Heinlein's "The Moon is a harsh Mistress"
Some which I remember liking when I read them many years ago as a teenager:

  E.E. Doc Smith's Lensman series

  David Brin's Uplift series

  Peter F. Hamilton's Greg Mandel trilogy and The Night's
Dawn trilogy

  Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game"

  George R. Dickson's "Dorsai!"

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#74

Post by maxerickson »

macmac wrote: post #57
dghf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Note to Hollywood: can we please have a Culture movie?] The only one I can think of where they might be able to stay more or less true to the source is Consider Phlebas, wherein the 'hero' fights for a monotheistic alien race against a bunch of godless communists. Plus I would dearly love to see the Clear Air Turbulence 's escape from the depths of that GSV rendered on the big screen.

Caveat regarding note to Hollywood: Please only allow Nolan to direct, otherwise we are not interested.

He's really bad at sci fi.

Inception doesn't make any sense (sense in terms of being sci fi, it's good entertainment).

Nor do the climactic action scenes in the Batman movies: a mega powerful microwave device that only affects the water inside of far away pipes and a portable, self sustaining fusion reactor that blows up when its battery dies.

The Joker's speed with setting up explosives is also a little bit ridiculous, but that's less of an offense against possibility than the above.

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#75

Post by aaronem »

Peter Watts's Blindsight - easily the best SF novel I've read in the last decade. I haven't got round to Echopraxia yet, but I doubt it'll fail to live up to its predecessor.

Also, while I have no use whatsoever for Stross's "Singularity" stuff, his Laundry Files series excels, especially for an inveterate old Lovecraft fan such as myself. If you want a taste, there are some shorts available online -- "Overtime" and "Funny Farm" are good places to start; "Equoid" is the most recent, but it's not representative, and it's also the weakest entry in the series as a whole due to its poor characterization and reliance on shock and gruesomeness rather than the more insidious sort of horror in which the rest of the series specializes.

I'm sort of surprised to see that no one has yet mentioned Heinlein; I know he's a politically divisive figure in the fandom, to say the least, but he's also the great granddaddy of the modern field, and such prominence deserves recognition. (Hell, he was pushing the Rapture of the Nerds before any of its modern adherents was even born!) Granted that his later works tend to bog down in self-referentiality and author tracts on the evils of Communism and the benefits of casual nudism; in his prime, though, he was an author and storyteller practically beyond compare.

In particular, his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress remains a classic among classics; The Puppet Masters even more so, to the extent of spawning practically a whole subgenre of second-rate imitations; and, for a lighter entry, his oft-overlooked The Door into Summer is a sweet story in which all's well that ends well and the importance of feline companionship in a well-rounded life is not overlooked.

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#76

Post by crazychrome »

For 22+ years I believed Foundation series by Issac Asimov was unparalleled, since first read when I was 10. It changed after the Three Body Problem, especially the 2nd and 3rd installments, The dark forest, The forever death. I don't expect to add more to the list in my life span.

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#77

Post by aaronem »

mbrochh wrote: post #36
boryas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How big of an expert on deserts do you have to be that Dune stops being interesting? Unless you still find it valuable emotionally or philosophically and just reject is as 'science fiction' I think it's a bit sad to just flat out get rid of such an interesting book!

Interesting that you mention Dune here. I have a similarly strict approach to classifying works as sci-fi for myself as OP and Dune is the worst offender of everything I consider sci-fi. To me, Dune is some new-age mumbo jumbo. It's fanatasy in space. Or it is contemporary social criticism (the whole thing is a metaphor for the oil industry, no?), but it's definitely not sci-fi. By the way, I loved the first half of…

Pretty much the defining space opera, yeah -- I mean, it's set in the year ten thousand, what else can you fairly expect it to be? While I quite like it (and can't abide its sequels), I do concede it takes a peculiar taste to appreciate it on its merits.

the whole thing is a metaphor for the oil industry, no?

No, not really, or at least I think not deliberately; it's much more Lawrence of Arabia in space.

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#78

Post by akkartik »

aaronem wrote: post #75

Peter Watts's Blindsight - easily the best SF novel I've read in the last decade. I haven't got round to Echopraxia yet, but I doubt it'll fail to live up to its predecessor. Also, while I have no use whatsoever for Stross's "Singularity" stuff, his Laundry Files series excels, especially for an inveterate old Lovecraft fan such as myself. If you want a taste, there are some shorts available online -- "Overtime" and…

You better doubt it, Echopraxia fails to live up to Blindsight. Aren't sequels that match the original the exception rather than the rule?

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#79

Post by dghf »

arethuza wrote: post #68
macmac wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caveat regarding note to Hollywood: Please only allow Nolan to direct, otherwise we are not interested.

Actually, I always wanted to see Luc Besson (Fifth Element) direct a movie of Consider Phlebas . Edit: On the subject of Banks movies - one scene I would love to see (in addition to the CAT escaping from The Ends of Invention) is the scene with the Ethnarch and Zakalwe in UoW, might make a splendid cold open. "I," said the man, "am called Cheradine Zakalwe." He leveled the gun at Ethnarch's nose. "You are called dead…

If that means we get Jean Reno as Bora Horza Gobuchul, I'm in.

Re: What are your favourite sci-fi books?

#80

Post by exar0815 »

I got hooked on SciFi with David Webers Harrington-Series which I found after enjoying the old Hornblower Series. Since then I enjoyed much omthe Kantaki-Cycle of Andreas Eschbach and the Collector/Justifier Series by Markus Heitz, even though they are what I would call typical german SciFi: Humans as nuisance in a peaceful and orderly Galaxy.
Post reply on HN