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My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

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Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#111

Post by specialist »

tetris11 wrote: post #27
mritchie712 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm with you. My favorite sci-fi is something like Project Hail Mary, which is radically different from fantasy.

I do not understand the praise that PHM or Andy Weir get in general. I hate the way he writes. Characters are all interchangeable and quirky because he says so. The science is tacked on like a chemistry teacher putting their kids to bed. SciFi: Read Larry Niven and James Blish if you like feats of engineering, read Ann Leckie and Nancy Kress if you like characters defined by their actions. Don’t tell me to be excited…

That's not entirely fair. The Martian is the most fantastical technical manual I've ever read.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#112

Post by AlotOfReading »

bondarchuk wrote: post #84
triMichael wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible. And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which ca…

If the criterion is that it's to some extent imaginary, we already have a word for that: Fiction.

Fiction is a huge, unwieldy word that's mostly useful as the converse of non-fiction. It communicates virtually nothing useful to a potential reader, which is the entire purpose of genre categorizations.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#115

Post by frm88 »

DigitalHookworm wrote: post #114

Blown / Image of The Beast by Philip Jose Farmer More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer Norstrillia by Cordwainer Smith

Norstrilia I absultely second. Actually, all of Cordwainer Smith is worth a read, but stories set in The Instrumentality of Mankind certainly are.

The culture novels by Iain M. Banks are also amazing, ship names in particular, but also themes.

And then there is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or is this too recent) another fine example of exploring the absurdity of mankind.

I often find that older works deal more with ideas and philosophy than the modern works, which tend to be more formulaic with some notable exceptions, like K. J. Parker and Adrian Tchaikovsky - there are less niche works - or so I feel.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#116

Post by frm88 »

bwb wrote: post #2

Anyone got some favs to share? I need to read the new Peter Hamilton book (book 2 due out soon). And I am ashamed to admit I haven't read any Greg Egan yet, need to get on that :)

On A Red Station Drifting - Aliette de Bodard: a wild mixture of a station, run by a failing AI and strict Vietnamese behavioural rules.

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel, plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Station_Eleven

Nine Fox Gambit: Yoon Ha Lee: disgraced officer of space fleet must capture fortress protected by complex mathematics.

Theatre of the Gods and Hunters and Collectors by Matt Suddain. Both defy a one line plot description, look them up. Theatre was one of the best books I have ever read.

This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal el Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Two opposing generals mess with time to gain a personal meeting.

Sea of Rust - C. Robert Cargill: the story of a scavenger robot

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#117

Post by zem »

bwb wrote: post #2

Anyone got some favs to share? I need to read the new Peter Hamilton book (book 2 due out soon). And I am ashamed to admit I haven't read any Greg Egan yet, need to get on that :)

"an alien light" (nancy kress) and "windhaven" (lisa tuttle and george martin) are two underrated gems. windhaven has long been my go-to recommendation for sf/f fans looking for good books they might not have encountered; the nancy kress is a more recent discovery, one of her early books that i feel has quite undeservedly not gotten as popular as some of her later stuff.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#118

Post by vidarh »

noir_lord wrote: post #78
georgefrowny wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both Gollancz (SF Masterworks) and Orbit (most Banks books) are ultimately owned by Lagardère/Hachette. Presumably they could wrangle the rights if they really wanted. I suppose they just don't see any need to republish Banks books, most of which are quite recent, continue to be popular and are mostly still in print under Orbit as part of an already unified series.

Perhaps but if adding it to the list costs them little then to do a print run I don't get why they wouldn't and just have two printings concurrently, if they did say Consider Phlebas with the first edition cover I'd pick up a second copy just for that cover. Though I'm carefully not going to look on AbeBooks to see what the first editions currently go for since I don't need to spend that kind of money (want to yes, n…

What annoys me with SF Masterworks is that they changed the style (and checking now, it seems they might have changed it again from last time I bought any). I don't see any point in continue buying the series as opposed to individual versions if they're not going to stick to a cohesive style anyway. I might just finish buying the original numbered style (up to number 74 or something)

But anyway, they've "only" published about 200 novels, mostly older, so it's not that weird that Banks hasn't been added yet. It makes sense if they focus on works that have not been republished as recently until they get through the many obvious candidates.

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#119

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

ck425 wrote: post #101
MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never find it helpful when people say they aren't that different from each other. Sure there may be some similarities if you want to take an analytical view of the genres, but there's an awful lot of people who like one but not the other.

The problem is once you look at the definitions it's actually quite hard to exactly define what's Fantasy vs Sci-fi. It's more a venn diagram, than strictly separate genres and everyone has their own definition of which is which. So when someone likes one but not the other, it's hard to discuss books because what one person considers sci-fi, another may consider fantasy pretending to be sci-fi, thus the complaints of…

There are definitely things that blur the line and cross genres, or things that may meet one person's definition but not another's.

I do agree it would be impossible to provide an entirely objective division that everyone would go along with.

Even so, I'd love it if all the "medieval dragon witch ghost magic spirit quest" stories could be placed on a different shelf of the bookshop to the "black hole generation ship dark forest faster than light" ones :)

Re: My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

#120

Post by slightwinder »

bondarchuk wrote: post #84
triMichael wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really aren't all that different from each other. One is imaginary things that might one day be possible, and the other is imaginary things that won't ever be possible. And even then, that can swap between the genres. Scifi often contains FTL tech, which from what we know is almost certainly impossible so it's actually more like fantastical magic. Meanwhile, fantasy can have hard rules for its magic, in which ca…

If the criterion is that it's to some extent imaginary, we already have a word for that: Fiction.

Fiction is the superset of definitions here. Science Fiction and Fantasy are genres in that pool, with many other genres.
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