Sci-fi must-reads and must-views

Sci-fi is to literature as the bad one night stand is to sex, it leaves you unfulfilled but totally sure of what you need to do next time.

Great ones I remember are Snowcrash and The Time Machine, I've read tons but I think the reason why it's current like that in theory etc is cos it's just tropes. I'm being malignant just to kick off cos I know loads of people are well into it here, but I've never read a sci-fi book that changed my life aside from Snowcrash, and the only one that terrified me was the Time Machine.

mistersloane said:

Sci-fi is to literature as the bad one night stand is to sex

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funny but not entirely accurate all of the time is it...

i recommend Ballard: nothing short of an entirely new way of imagining the world IMHO. start with the short stories, there are many good collections.

midwich cuckoos/triffids/valis/ubik/dune/
and does anyone know the name of the arthur c clarke that has a city that is in stasis except for the one person essigned to be a jester or something. i really enjoyed that.

planet of the apes/soylent green/the one about the infectious disease/stalker/

Charles Stross has written some good short stories - Missile Gap being a favourite - and full-bore near future singularity fiction like Accelerando. And a bunch of other stuff, he's very prolific.

Got to second the Wyndham recommendations, adding The Kraken Wakes. Cosy catatrophe, but also readable period drama. The Chrysalids is one of his best I think.

Cormac McCarthy - The Road. Arguably science fiction, unarguably powerful in the way it describes how the contents of language would gradually wither and die in a post-holocaust world with diminishing supplies of food and objects, everything becoming dust in the bitter cold.

Valis is one of the most headfucking books ever. Take any of it at face value and you could do yourself a mental injury. Has anyone read any of his Exegesis writing? Does it even exist?

A couple of lesser known early sci-fi pieces:

EM Forster's short story 'The Machine Stops' from 1909. In full here:

http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/prajlich/forster.html

'The Night Land' by William Hope Hodgson, is set several million years in the future, after the 'death' of the sun. Written in 1912:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Land

Three sci-fi classics: William Gibson's 'Neuromancer', Tarkovsky's 'Solaris', C Clarke's 'Ubik'.

A couple of apocalypse pieces that could fall into the realm of sci-fi:

Michael Haneke's 'Time of the Wolf', Paul Auster's 'In the country of last things'

And one of my favourite short stories ever, Borges' 'The Library of Babel', is arguably a work of science-fiction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel

k dick done ubik. you probably knew that but just to avoid confusion. yeah time of the wolf is fantastic. one of my favourite films. you can read bits of the exegesis in one or two colectctions of dicks writing. the novels are better.

Also not exactly a big sci-fi buff but...
I really enjoyed Snow Crash - at least the first two thirds of it, I think it ran out of steam a bit by the end.
Neuromancer and the other ones in the same series were good when I read them. Likewise John Wyndham.
Does Burroughs count as sci-fi? Obviously he's not new to you anyway but probably deserves a mention.
A Voyage to Arcturus is meant to be good and it's in my pile here so I could probably give you a better update in a week or two.
The Space Trilogy by CS Lewis seems to be name checked often but I've never got round to it.
A late 19th Century one (I think) is L'Eve Future by Villiers d'Isle Adam about building a perfect woman. Think that this book popularised (though didn't invent) the word android. Similarly there is Supermale by Jarry which is sort of sci-fi.
I've read some Machen that was pretty good. Not actually sci-fi as such now I think about it but apparently a huge influence on L*vecr*ft.
The Philip K Dick one that was made into a (good) film a year or so ago and is called, er, A Scanner Darkly. That's good.
HG Wells the Time Machine is another obvious one. In fact these are all obvious (anyone mentioned Jules Verne?) sorry. Um, The Island of Dr Moreau though it's a very long time since I read that. Which reminds me of The Invention of Morel by Casares which is inspired at least in title by the Wells book and in turn inspired Last Year at Marienbad I understand


As for films, well, I'm just about to watch Zeta One and will report back afterwards.

machen more satisfying than lovecraft i think. but wouldn't classify it as sci-fi.
ive got a few collections. not convinced by gibson but i think count zero is the best one.

HMGovt said:

Valis is one of the most headfucking books ever. Take any of it at face value and you could do yourself a mental injury. Has anyone read any of his Exegesis writing? Does it even exist?

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Parts of it are in a compilation of Horselover's miscellaneous writings. I;ll try to remember the title and post it here...

Off the top of my head:

Recently read Robert Silverberg's "Dying Inside", a character study/autobiog of a middle aged post-hippy guy in 70s New York who's started to lose his ability to read minds. He doesn't know where this gift comes from, but he's terrified of losing something he's enjoyed his whole life (impotence metaphors abound). The writing is a bit flowery and angsty at times, but it's a fascinating premise and actually kinda moving.

Iain M Banks' "The Player Of Games" is a detailed and creepy depiction of a ultra-fascist alien society, deffo recommended.

I think Gibson's "Virtual Light" is underrated, his 90s stuff set in the near future is just as good as his sprawl stuff, imo. (Are they meant to be set in the same timeline?)

Philip K Dick's "Man In The High Castle" is the daddy of alternate history sf, not as trippy as his later stuff, but there are a few surreal moments in there.

Dune seconded with true fanboy gusto.

I remember really enjoying 2001/2010 as well - classics of the genre, but deservedly so. Someone mentioned Snow Crash I think, which I mean to read at some point - Stephenson is great, although I've not read any of his novels that are actually futuristic but even his 17th/18th century novels are so packed full of science and mathematics (in the best kind of way) that they are in a sense 'sci-fi'. Cryptonomicon (set in WW2/present day) is probably better, though.

And don't let the idea that Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy are "kids' books" put you off, they're really not and they're fantastic. Includes the best Catholicism-bashing this side of (ahem) Dan Brown.

I quite enjoyed Will Self's foray into the genre, The Book Of Dave, though it's arguable whether the book counts as sci-fi just because some portions of it are set in the future (England as a post-eco-pocalypse mediaeval theocracy).

Also, this thread reminds me of something a mate of mine asked me the other day, which was "Do you read any non-sci-fi?" Yeah, because why would a scientist be interested in that obscure niche genre, non-sci-fi?

canticle for leibovitz
we done this thread before
but im happy to do it again though

one of the problems i have with gibson and snow crash is their idea of 'cool'
same with the matrix
mirror shades and leather jackets and skateboards
not very cool is it
i like the matrix though
its one of the best films of all time and keanu gives a fantastic performance.

luka said:

one of the problems i have with gibson and snow crash is their idea of 'cool'

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I couldn't finish Snow Crash because because of this, just trying waaay too hard. Wasn't the main character is some sort of "cyber-grunge" band or something? lol

I know what you mean with Gibson, but I think he writes about "cool" (how it evolves, how it's marketed) rather than trying to give you the impression that he's like that himself.

There was a while, at the start of all this cyberpunk stuff, when I contemplated dressing up like that, getting a foot tall blue mohawk or something. When people go to a reading to see a cyberpunk author, they expect to see him come running in out of the rain and whip the sweat out of his mohawk and start signing books. Actually, one time I was in New York signing books, there was this godawful huge roar outside the bookstore, and these two huge motorcycles screeched up to the curb, and these two huge guys covered in leather and studs and chains and shit got off, and came into the store. When they got a good look at me in my loafers and buttondown shirt their faces just fell, you know? One of them pulled out this copy of one of my books and said, "Well, I guess you can sign it anyway.

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luka said:

mirror shades and leather jackets and skateboards
not very cool is it

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What's not cool about mirror shades and skateboards? Throw in a cut-off denim jacket with a back patch and you're there.

Mohawks may look ridiculous, but they're infinitely preferable to manky white-person cod-dreads with bits of fucking blue plastic braided into them. Saw some earlier today.

Edit: actually, under certain circumstances mohawks *can* be pretty cool -

luka said:

one of the problems i have with gibson and snow crash is their idea of 'cool'

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Jeff Noon is the king of cringe-making down-with-the-kids future-cool. Which is a shame, because he's got some pretty good ideas otherwise...

swears said:

Iain M Banks' "The Player Of Games" is a detailed and creepy depiction of a ultra-fascist alien society, deffo recommended.

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I enjoyed this a lot, especially the 'night out on the town' chapter, where he goes underground clubbing with the Culture's ambassador. Improbably realistic account of going out and getting wasted and into trouble.

swears said:

Philip K Dick's "Man In The High Castle" is the daddy of alternate history sf, not as trippy as his later stuff, but there are a few surreal moments in there.

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He was working on a sequel to that, there's an unpublished opening chapter in one of the PKD collections.

There's a lot of hype surrounding the upcoming Ridley Scott movie of the Haldeman novel 'The Forever War', http://www.boingboing.net/2008/10/13/ridley-scott-to-adap.html

Never read it, but I have a pdf of it somewhere.

if you were to type '13130 torrent' into google you might find the mother lode of sci fi.

probably need one of those flash e-paper reader things to make the most of it though.