Sci-Fi novels

Time out of Joint/Scanner darkly - P.K. dick
High Rise & Super Cannes - JG Ballard
Dr. Adder - K.W jeter
2001 Trilogy - Arthur C Clarke
Eclipse trilogy - John Shirley
Software trilogy - Rudy Rucker
The Shockwave Rider - john brunner

and recently Pattern Recognition - william Gibson (his best book by 10 miles)

The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks
The Dispossesed - Ursela LeGuin
I'm a big fan of Neal Stephenson, but haven't really read his earlier sci-fi stuff, morre his later wierd historical fiction stuff. Still, he's often classed as a sci fi author still.

I'm actually more of a fantasy person rather than a sci-fi person. Not sure why exactly.

Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

yeah Stephenson pretty much coalesced, refined and commercialised the ideas that Shirley and Gibson were plying many years earlier, still 'snow crash', 'diamond sea' are fine books in their own right. 'Cryptonomicon' was good, until it turned into some sorta Stephen King/spielberg bullshit climax-fest-blockbuster american fucken mainstream all-encompasing bullshit for the po-mo hipster set.

Haven't sussed out the historical punk books, but am curious, though it seem like all that 'steampunk/Ye Olde victorian sci-fi' stuff Jeter and gibson/sterling were playing with in the early 90s.

I am a science fiction nut. I really enjoy most of what the following writers have done:

Gene Wolfe esp. "The Book of the New Sun" series (omnibus from Fantasy Masterworks)
am I the only person I know who has read this?? awesome novel any way you slice it.

Jack Vance, esp. "The Dying Earth" (omnibus from Fantasy Masterworks)

Philip K Dick, eg. "A Scanner Darkly", "VALIS"

JG Ballard passim, short stories etc

Jerry Cornelius novels & stories by Michael Moorcock et al

"Last and First Men" by Olaf Stapledon

Thomas Disch esp. "Camp Concentration"

Kurt Vonnegut "Cats Cradle" (great style, I haven't read "Sirens.." yet)

Kingsley Amis' "Golden Age of Science Fiction" anthology of short stories is a good place to start even though his introduction has some objectionable opinions about the then present state of jazz and the New Wave of Science Fiction.

Those New Worlds anthologies in the 2nd hand shops a worth the couple of dollars you pay. But if you can find the original "New Worlds" anthology edited by Moorcock (apparently the new edition omits some stuff?) that's good too.

me too:
Rudy Rucker "Software" etc
Alfred Bester

on the To Read list:
Haldeman, Le Guin, John Brunner

I never really got into:
William Gibson
- I thought "Count Zero" was a bit too corporate obsessed which I guess was part of the shtick
Neal Stephenson "Cryptonomicon"
- how many advertorials could you pack into one book? bloated and overrated.
Arthur C. Clark "Rendevous with Rama"
- A bit too boy's own wonder story, which is cool, but just not very interesting: the characters only seemed to exist in order to discover the alien artefact.

D84 said:

Gene Wolfe esp. "The Book of the New Sun" series (omnibus from Fantasy Masterworks)
am I the only person I know who has read this?? awesome novel any way you slice it.

Click to expand...

i read the first batch of these but not the whole series- but yes they are really good. the writing and the vision of the future is really memorable

also read a lot of jack vance in my youth

I just realised that I haven't read any sci-fi in something like 5 years. It used to be the only thing I read so all the novels blur together. For example "Forever War", there are like 3 other novels that are pretty much the same book.

I absolutely love everything Gibson ever wrote. I have trouble remembering any other quality books at this point.

Some really overrated stuff in my opinion:

Orson Scott Card ("Ender's Game" and everything else he did). I HATE this guy's style.
Dan Simmons - "Hyperion". Don't even remember what it is about at this point.
Frank Herbert - "Dune". This is just so incredibly boring. I made it about 3 books into the series and just gave it up. Pretentious to boot.

Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth -- The Space Merchants (and about half a dozen other ones)

John Brunner -- Stand on Zanzibar and the sequel to it

Ballard -- oeuvre entier (well not sure about post-1982 actually)

Harry Harrison -- Make Room! Make Room!

Robert Sheckley -- short stories, hilarious novel whose title i forget

Alfred Bester -- Tiger, Tiger
and 'The Demolition Man'

Harlan Ellison short stories

John Wyndham's stuff has a certain British postwar tightlipped quality that is appealing

Brian Aldiss had some good ones, the one about future where infertility causes the population to age and wither was good... never read Barefoot in the Head

Michael Moorcock although i'm not sure i ever read the Jerry Cornelius ones

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special alternative history section (my favorite):

philip K. Dick -- the Man in the High Castle

Ward Moore -- Bring the Jubilee

Keith something -- Pavane

Norman Spinrad -- the one where hitler emigrated to america and became a science fiction writer and wrote crypto-fascist science fantasy epics

Harry Harrison -- A Translatlantic Tunnel Hooray


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special mini-section for literari slumming in the pulp zone:

kingsley amis, the alternation (if the Reformation had never happened) and (really bad this) book set in future soviet controlled Britain

anthony burgess - clockwork orange obviously but he did 1985, set in a future trade union controlled UK (ha!) and another one set in some kind of overpopulated future

jonathan lethem

russell hoban

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i've read literally hundreds and hundreds of sf novels but my memory isn't pulling up the titles, i seem to remember Robert Silverberg was good, Disch also...


s.f. godstars i have never read:
Frank Herbert
Asimov
Samuel Delany
Ursula LeGuin
many more

Olaf Stapleton - I've only read "Starmaker", not "Last and First Men". Awesome.

oh and Lem -- Solaris and Fiasco

couldn't believe how extensively the recent movie of Solaris sucked, if any book would justify an extravaganza of CGI that was it

the Jerry Cornelius novels are exellent (as far as I recall) and were an exellent calibrant for the young inquring mind who had yet to encounter L.A.N.G.U.A.G.U.E. poetry,Burroughs, Finnegans Wake etc.
One of the reasons I read a lot of Sci-Fi was that most UK provincial public librarys had shitloads(good stuff too)
JG Ballard was always very well represented-compare that to today's cursory copy of Empire of the Sun...

The Crystal World is my favorite Ballard book I think. Not read all that many of them though. CW's really incredible I thought, clumps of crystals found there way into my imagination after that. I can see things choked up with them and encased in them which is never something I'd ever thought of at all outside of once seeing a wasp in some amber when I was really young (something I had forgotten about until reading the book too).

labrat said:

the Jerry Cornelius novels are exellent (as far as I recall) and were an exellent calibrant for the young inquring mind who had yet to encounter L.A.N.G.U.A.G.U.E. poetry,Burroughs, Finnegans Wake etc.
One of the reasons I read a lot of Sci-Fi was that most UK provincial public librarys had shitloads(good stuff too)
JG Ballard was always very well represented-compare that to today's cursory copy of Empire of the Sun...

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spot on -- i was down berkhamstead local two or three times a week. in the end though i exhausted their very decent supply and had to resort to the inter-library loan system!

and buying them -- Penguin had a particularly attractive looking series of s.f. paperbacks in the mid-70s, with Bester, Ballard, Pohl & Kornbluth etc,

D84 said:

Gene Wolfe esp. "The Book of the New Sun" series (omnibus from Fantasy Masterworks)
am I the only person I know who has read this?? awesome novel any way you slice it.

Click to expand...

Yes!! I love that series. Really great. Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun are also pretty good, but not quite as mindblowing as New Sun.

Also highly recommend Greg Egan. Permutation City is probably his best, but also good are Diaspora, Distress and any of his short story collections. One of the really great "idea men" in SF, imho.

Others:
Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, and in the alternative history category, The Years of Rice and Salt (World history if the black death had wiped out essentially all of europe--yay!)
Ursula K LeGuin - The Dispossesed, The Left Hand of Darkness
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451

also:
I really liked hyperion, and dune (the first book that is, not the whole series)! And asimov for that matter, though no one has badmouthed him yet. He gets mad points for being so consistently optimistic, which is rather rare in SF to say the least!

also also:
the "B"'s: David Brin, Ben Bova, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford. Consitently high-quality hard SF.

hmmm, and a lot more, I'm sure.

oh! Jerry Cornelius quartet excellent- the mix of tres 60s polymorphousness and Moorcock's more Edwardian preoccupations v entertaining...I have a few New Worlds issues about, including a 1959 (or so) one with a profile of a very svelte (well actually somewhat Nicolas Cage-resembling) JG Ballard...

on the subject of which, a lot of post 1982 stuff, when you come to terms with the stylistic conservatism, is excellent- The Kindness of Women in particular, a wonderfully nasty/tender anti-memoir.

i confess tho to a total lack of interest in any recent SF- is this an oversight, does anyone think?

(unless Victor Pelevin counts)

Surely that should be SF not Sci-Fi? (An ugly ugly neologism if ever there was one)

Cornelius is brilliant but become the series becomes increasingly dense and difficult ... more accessible and satisfying are the Oswald Bastable novels, which I once described as SteamProg... brilliantly drawn evocations of an alternative near-past....

Wells is surely a major omission from the list thus far ... The Time Machine is astonishingly nihilistic, a totally bleak conclusion ... the image of a parched earth populated only by crustaceans one that remained with Burroughs for one... War of the Worlds a fabulous anti-imperialist polemic, ultra-vivid hi-res home counties setting... Island of Dr Moreau, chillingly macabre (and according to Aldiss an anti-theistic allegory)....

Bradbury another classic worth a mention surely...

My favourite PKD is Flow MY Tears the Policeman Said... (made all the more uncanny by the bizarre coincidences Dick writes about in his reflections on it ... connections between the names of the characters and the early Christian church... specific incidents which only happened AFTER he had written the book)... and the fact that it provides the first line on the first Tubeway Army LP .... 'Flow my tears/ the new/ police song...'

Much of the SF I read was in those anthology series you used to be able to buy in supermarkets in the 70s for 35p....

k-punk said:

Bradbury another classic worth a mention surely...

Much of the SF I read was in those anthology series you used to be able to buy in supermarkets in the 70s for 35p....

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yeah bradbury did some good short stories.... one about a guy who gets arrested for going for a walk, everyone in his neighbourhood is indoors glazed in front of the goggle box, their washed out faces blue from the cathode rays -- all part of that admass culture/TV-phobic postwar thing (see also F 451 obviously)

anthologies, that was the prime format

anyone old enough to recall the pavlovian libidinal rush generated by the bright yellow dust jackets on those Gollancz sf hardbacks

For a more recent entry, try Ray Lorriga's TOKYO DOESN'T LOVE US ANYMORE. A sci-fi novel for the 'chemical generation' and not rubbish like Jeff noon's ouvre.

ah Ballard... one of the most original, disciplined and prophetic imaginations of the 20th C ... he truly reaches into the essence of our times... in terms of his generation as well as humanity's stay on earth.

Lethem I have very little use for. 2 decent ideas in a pile of over worked pretension.

Jeff Noon was just dull. everything about Vurt I should have liked, the premise is great... but I was bored SHITLESS. nothing. zilch. couldn't finish it.