Sci-Fi novels

[francesco]

The last Houellebecq book, La possibilitè d'une ile is the best SF fiction I have read of contemporary writers. His better book yet. It's two fiction biographies, one of Daniel, who live in ours sad times, one of Daniel 24, his 24th clone, who is not human anymore.,but is not yet a "Future". And yes, is about the misery of humanity as a concept and actually as a life, and the necessity of extinction due to the disgust.

This is for K-Punk about the joy about having children, roughly translated in English by me from my italian translation of the book:

"In me not only the legit disgust who every normal man have seeing a children, not only the truth that the children is only a cruel dwarf of innate cruelty, from which domestic animals are scared and stay away as far they can. There was especially an authentic horror, deep horror, about the never-ending Calvary that is the existence of man. If the newborn immediately manifest his presence to the word crying is because h naturally suffer, in an intolerable way, and he will spread this sadness to everyone, first his parents"

" in the same time appeared in California the first "childfree zones" for thirty-something who does not want to ear crying, mucous or smelling shit from little brat"

 

[k-punk]

 

[cortempond]

60's British New Wave Sci-Fi?

Being a Sci-Fi nut, I started off with the American Legends - Heinlein, Bradbury, Bova (Exiles Trilogy) E.E. Cummings (the Lensmen series) Harrison (Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld books, as well as Make Room, Make Room).

Then I discovered what was considered the New Wave of British Sci-Fi. - Aldiss, Brunner, Ballard and Moorcock.

These authors made a significant impact on my ideas and concepts of what Sci-Fi is and can be.

Moorcock - The complete Jerry Cornelius series was for a long time my favorite collection of books, especially A Cure For Cancer, which is deadly funny as well as brilliantly written. Too bad the Final Programme was made into a totally crap film (though Jon Finch did the best he could to create Jerry Cornelius). Also pissed that Buckaroo Bonzai was a complete rip-off of Jerry Cornelius.

Behold The Man - The best time travel story ever written?

Breakfast in the Ruins - powerful, distrubing and gripping.

Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar, The Shockwave Rider - The Father of Cyber-punk books, not Gibson's Necromancer.

Aldiss showed the impact of the the French New Novel (Robbe-Grillet, to be exact) with his brilliant Barefoot in the Head. His Non-Stop expanded on the concept broached by Heinlein's Orphans In The Sky. Crypotzic (sp). was a precursor to Jurassic Park.

Ballard created the world of Inner-Space, his disaster novels (Drowned World, The Drought, Wind From Nowhere and The Crystal World) dealt with science and nature as his characters dealt with insanity and the devolution of man to a primitive state, which was what the upper-middle class of High Rise reverted back to. He is without a doubt one of the most important writers of the 20th Century.

Re: PKD - Three Stigmata, Card Players of Titan, Now Wait For Next Year and Ubik, which is one of the 10 best Science Fiction books ever written.

Agree that Gibson's Pattern Recognition is his best in ages. To be made into a film, forgot who's directing.

Wish that Fincher would make Rendezvous With Rama - it's been his pet project for years. He would do a brilliant job, though a lot of that book's concepts have been ripped off for other films.

Nothing really new out there that's worth reading. It's all verging towards FantasyLand, which I can't stand.

 

[Melchior]

E.E. Cummings (the Lensmen series)

E. E. Smith?

 

[k-punk]

Too bad the Final Programme was made into a totally crap film (though Jon Finch did the best he could to create Jerry Cornelius).

Think you're being a little bit hasty there... the film is massively flawed, no doubt, but it did make a serious attempt to capture the Cornelius schtick... some quite impressive Rauschenbergian Pop Art sets as I recall... Amazing that a film like that could be made in retrospect...

 

[D84]

I just noticed (from an SF blog) that the good SF/Fantasy Masterworks people have released what I hope is an omnibus edition of Leigh Brackett's short fiction.

Another writer I'd heard of but never investigated, which will change very soon.

Here's Michael Moorcock bigging it up on the amazon site:

One of the greatest writers of science fantasy, August 3, 2005
Reviewer: Michael Moorcock from Paris, France
Leigh Brackett is well known as the main writer on Howard Hawks's classic Bogart movie THE BIG SLEEP. She also wrote RIO BRAVO and several more Hawks movies, as well as doing outstanding scripts for others. She wrote the first script for The Empire Strikes Back, considered a far superior piece of work than the version eventually filmed. But she was also one of the most influential science fantasy writers of the 40s and 50s, inspiring and eventually collaborating with the young Ray Bradbury. Her stories of Eric John Stark, some of which appear in this collection, are perhaps the best examples you can find in the sf pulps of her day, appearing in the likes of PLANET STORIES, STARTLING STORIES and THRILLING WONDER STORIES. I know they were a huge influence on my own early science fantasy tales. Through Bradbury, she also influenced J.G.Ballard in such sequences as his Vermilion Sands stories. As such she can be seen as a kind of godmother to the so-called 'New Wave'. These are fast-paced, evocative tales of a Mars where lone adventurers ride strange beasts over dead sea-bottoms, seeking the secrets of ancient races who may be largely forgotten but are not necessarily dead. For sheer exotic storytelling in prose which has something in common with Hammett and Chandler, you can't beat Leigh Brackett. If you like M.John Harrison's and China Mieville's science fantasy, you'll enjoy these stories just as much. I can't say how pleased I am to see Brackett back in print.​

 

[polystyle]

Aahh, missed this one till this AM , was away when it started but ...

Was well into Sci -Fi / SF / Science Fiction /cyberpunk for the longest time .

Like many , I got into Burroughs while a teenager , found Ballard was just right for me as 19 year old in NYC,
got excited by William Gibson's Neuromancer .
Dug quite alot of PKDick , Bruce Sterling's The Artificial Kid , Schismatrix (still a good rd) ,
Stephenson's Snowcrash was fine , but choked on Diamond Age and didn't go bk.
KW Jeter a fav then and still now , Dr. Adder for those who haven't been there (yet),
Farewell Horizontal and The Glass Hammer for those who already know and dig him

And found great stuff inside
John Brunner's Shockwave Rider, Stand On Zanzibar , The Sheep Look Up (also provided Fad Gadget with a nice title ) . Simply put , if Brunner had not written Zanzibar and W Gibson had not read it -then Neuromancer would have sounded a bit different and FMM , not as interesting .

John Varley's short story Press Enter

Agreed on Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Baron . Should have become a Movie as was mooted on old cover,
good double bill with Network . more a future fantasy then strictly Sci -Fi , but anyway

Greg Bear Blood Music .'A Childhood's End for the 1990's' the blurb rd . Properly dramatic and chilling,
a classic gray goo end- of- it -all , playable on nano -luddite placards .

Gibson I followed for years , but I steadily found the books since Mona Lisa Overdrive just not so compelling.
The Virtual Light series thin and well, based on stuff that was interesting when we gave it to him in 1989.
The recent stuff and my time spent on his former website just booged tho'
The "Johnny Mnemonic" experience prolly helped kill it , no doubt
But he did just write about .... U2's tour equipment . That's not Sci Fi that's a JOB

 

[jd_]

Thought I'd bump this thread back into action because I really liked the books I've read as a result of it (Dr Adder/Schismatrix/Concrete Jungle/Xenogenesis 3 + Clay's Ark/Camp Concentration). I want to check out that Vacuum Flowers now too, Schismatrix was pretty strange. Are Sterling's other books as good?

 

[carlos]

i've only read about half of sterling's books (the first half up to "the difference engine") and none of what i've read is as good as "Schismatrix"- though definitely worth reading. "islands in the net" is good- though it didn't stick with me like schismatrix did

he also wrote some short stories set in the same universe as "Schismatrix"- they were collected in "the crystal express" and may be collected elsewhere as well. the "shaper/mechanist" stories

i would urge you to get "Vacuum Flowers"

also, an earlier novel (can't remember if i mentioned it already) that reads like it could have been written as a bruce sterling in shaper/mechanist mode is John Varley's "Ophiuchi Hotline" (1977) - i can't really recommend Varley's other books but this one (though still flawed) explodes with strange outer-space ideas

 

[polystyle]

'Never born ...'

You got it Carlos & JD
Sterling had his moments (and they still go on in his Viridian guise),
Schis' and the Shaper Mech stories are classic ,
Islands In The Net -
all these are so close to me as we were working with the Bruce on occasion during that time .
Jeez , Islands' even has a character named Arbright , the short version of my last name I used to use bk in that day .
i think there's a version of Schismatrix that now includes the S/Mech stories all in one shot.
Difference' i found hard to concentrate on , lost his thread after ...
The Artificial Kid ('80) i remember as being good in it's time , but i did forget what went on in it !

Flowers I rd and used to own , it was ok

J Varley - there you go Carlos .
Again, his "Press Enter" ('84) short story was one of the earliest cyber -somethings , and creepy.

Don't miss those John Brunner's classics ...

 

[carlos]

The Artificial Kid ('80) i remember as being good in it's time , but i did forget what went on in it !

i have that around here somewhere- i remember that the setting is close to the shaper/mechanist future- but also can't remember much beyond that

 

[Slothrop]

Gibson best for me is not Neuromancer, which is anyway it's best novel by far, but all the brief stories collected in "Burning Chrome", that's a masterpiece, that sadly Gibson and his generation never equaled or bettered

Burning Chrome is fantastic - I think a lot of sci fi / fantasy authors seem to shine in short story format where the dubious characterisation and style sometimes associated with the genre don't have time to get annoying, and the Ideas can be shown off. The best I've read from Jeff Noon (who I quite like, tbh, although bits of his selfconsciously down-with-the-kids style make me cringe) is his collection, Pixel Juice - quite a few of the stories are misses, but there are some truly fantastic ones too. I guess the ultimate extension of this principle is Borges realising that an idea that sounds good in principle might not work dragged out to the length of a novel, and finding smart ways to get out the idea without writing it down at all.

On another note (and this would also be fodder for the Booker discussion in the 'novels you've read recently...' thread), does David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas count?

 

[arcaNa]

I'm not sure how it ranks amongst SF classics but I thought "And Still The Earth" by Loyola Brandao was really great. Did any of you read it ever?

It's from the early 80s and set in a future Brazil where multinational corporations have bought up most of the land and turned what's left into almost uninhabitable polluted slums full of garbage melting in the intense heat where people live of government subsidized synthetic food (and where there are mandatory consumption quotas for all citizens). The main character's a pretty Kafka like office worker (I think his job is to verify the numbers from a machine that never makes mistakes) who keeps going on with his mindless tasks and routines until a persistant itch slowly transforms into a perfect circle cut straight though his hand. There's some real awesome Metamorphosis type stuff as he tries to ignore and then accept this bizarre hole which ultimately jars him out of denial (with some added harsh PKD action thrown in with his wife) and the book becomes him wandering around this ultra capitalist wasteland driven by memories of swimming pools and the smell of lawn clippings. It's mega bleak and one of the ones that really stayed with me anyway.

...i tried very hard to find this one, but it seems to be only available in Portugese?

my local librarian (who has to be the most hardcore SF geek i've ever enountered) had never heard of it either!

 

[jd_]

...i tried very hard to find this one, but it seems to be only available in Portugese?

my local librarian (who has to be the most hardcore SF geek i've ever enountered) had never heard of it either!

Oh, I didn't know it was so obscure, I just came across it and liked the cover. I did a check on amazon and found a few of them there if it helps:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0380898748/ref=dp_olp_2/002-4252107-0328055?_encoding=UTF8

 

[michael]

Haha, this little piss-take article made me laugh:

Science-Fiction Novel Posits Future Where Characters Are Hastily Sketched

 

[droid]

I like Eco a lot. Read Foucault's Pendulum three times without being able to read the last five pages. Just stoped, didn't want or need to know the end.

Was going to mention this book in relation to the various conspiracy threads - but for god sake Meme!!

READ THE END!

Its the best bit of the whole book.

 

[Tweak Head]

Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz -- really good novel about post-nuclear return to the Dark Ages, monks keeping science alive (without understanding it) by doing illuminated manuscripts of circuit diagrams, and so forth

Yes! A Canticle for Liebowitz is an amazing book: moving and thought-provoking. I read it because I had been reading about Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban (another one in my top 3 SF), and A Canticle for Liebowitz was cited as an influence. The same theme addressed in very different ways.

Riddley Walker is also a must-read IMHO. It takes a while to get used to the vocabulary but it is well, well worth it. Haven't really been taken with any of Hoban's other stuff though ...

David Mtchell has a go at this post-apocalyptic theme in one of the sections of Cloud Atlas. It's a transparent rip-off of Riddley Walker.

My other top SF is Neuromancer. It's just such an exciting read. The other two in the trilogy are OK but Neuromancer is the one to read. Idoru is OK.

Some bits of Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson are brilliant, but there's too much stuff in thebook that just weighs it down.

 

[polystyle]

Lem Rip

The Lems' men has passed away ...
Stanislaw Lem RIP last week , i believe .

 

[Slothrop]

Riddley Walker is also a must-read IMHO. It takes a while to get used to the vocabulary but it is well, well worth it. Haven't really been taken with any of Hoban's other stuff though ...

David Mtchell has a go at this post-apocalyptic theme in one of the sections of Cloud Atlas. It's a transparent rip-off of Riddley Walker.

He's pretty open about it, though, in interviews and the like. And I've not read the original, but it fits into the structure and themes of Mitchell's book so well that if it is a direct ripoff, it's an absolutely inspired one.

What about Jack Womack? I've only read Going Going Gone, which is late and apparently not his best, but it's still pretty entertaining. I keep meaning to read some more, but his stuff seems to be fairly hard to come by.

 

[polystyle]

'My rights or I bite'

Womack's Ambient is pretty cool !

Some cityscapes in there are a bit of a US version of the blasted scapes of' ol Riddley Walker,
an inspired book all in all