51–60 of 291 posts
Also no HG Wells, Verne, Silverberg or Bob Shaw books on the list? Certainly would have War of the Worlds and A Time of Changes on mine.
Dune 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…
Dune 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…
I feel Vernor Vinge has a good talent at this too. Apropos A Fire Upon The Deep (superb read) exposition is sparse and when required neatly woven into the story so that you almost never realize it's happening when it is.
I highly recommend it over his other Revelation Space books--it's truly a brilliant, self-contained space opera in every sense of the word. It was the first book of his I read and I haven't since read something so brightly imaginative.
I was pleasantly surprised to see two Neal Stephenson books on the list, but why did the second have to be Anathem? I thought Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle were much better books. Anathem's plot seemed like book-nerd wish fulfillment. Of course I still read all thousand pages of Anathem in, like, four days. :)
Probably the most surprising thing about this list is that whoever made it didn't insert Amazon affiliate links into it. Anyway, these lists always raise the question of what does "good" mean exactly? Inevitably they're dominated by books that were, in their time, incredibly significant. You see the same things in computing books. Someone will always recommend "Design Patterns" but (IMHO) it is the dullest, driest bo…
>the most surprising thing about this list is that whoever made it didn't insert Amazon affiliate links into it. They did, you just didn't notice them.
Missing: Eon by Greg Bear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eon_(novel)
Missing: Eon by Greg Bear http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eon_(novel)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the most surprising thing about this list is that whoever made it didn't insert Amazon affiliate links into it. They did, you just didn't notice them.
That's pretty clever then, what are they doing? Is it the _1-20 at the end?