science fiction (no gibson or dick)
 

can anyone recommend some good sci fi that isn't william gibson or phillip k dick?


thanks in advance!

Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress!

my favorite book ever.

Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles are good too.

Thomas Disch's The Genocides or Camp Concentration.

J.G. Ballard's High-Rise.

Brian Aldiss' Barefoot in the Head.

Joe Haldeman's The Forever War.

Michael Moorecock's Final Programme.

Alan Moore's The Ballad of Halo Jones.

the dune saga is quite quite enthralling. there are something like 9 books and a lot of them are kind of crappy but it's hard to put down. i read it while stationed in some remote tropical location.

i also like the asimov gaia books, the ones about predicting history through math, what was it? oh-- foundation. perhaps a bit too pompous by today's standards but highly entertaining when i read it years ago.

now robinstigator is going to come & recommend greg bear, i haven't read him but he swears by him.

oh i also like jack vance. very fucking great short stories. not sure if it's easy to find i think he's kind of obscure.

french science fiction is kind of peculiar too, i don't have names, i've read short stories that were mind blowing but i've lost track... it's been years...

If you want Gibson without having to get Gibson (if that makes any sense at all) then Rob Sterling's Schismatrix is good.

Iian M. Banks' stuff is also nice if you like the more epic stuff. Consider Phlebus is superb.


Would be interested in knowing more about the French sci-fi stuff.

If you haven't read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley you need to.

My girlfriend bought me Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. Haven't started it yet but my friend told me it's one of the best novels he has ever read.

That'd be good to read alongside Huxley's Island, which is a utopian response to Brave new World.

!@#$% yeah yeah bastard!


Greg Bear! I recommend the novels
BLOOD MUSIC (what is single celled organisms gained sentience? It takes it ALLLLL the way to it's logical conclusion! accelerated evolution. get this one FIRST!)
Forge of God (galactic conflict)
Moving Mars
Queen of Angels (deals with consciousness)
Darwin's Radio (accelerated evolution)


I ama huge fan of "hard" sci fi. I like it all but that is my fave.

I love Isaac Asimov's short stories. They are amazing. find a collection of them. all these books you can find at used bookstores CHEAP


I like crazy shit too, like Rudy Rucker
he wrote and writes cyberpunk tales with humor and hard science.
My faves are
Software
Wetware
Freeware
Realware
These are a series but each book is individual.

One of his best is not sci fi though. It is called AS ABOVE SO BELOW: a NOVEL OF PIETER BRUEGEL, which gives an account of the famous dutch painter's life and day to day living. very very very cool if you are interested in Bruegel, art, history, european stuff.

im going to look for blood music next time i go to the bookstore

that's a lot of stuff!


that brueghel book sounds ineresting though.

thjanks for all the recommendations folks, keep 'em coming.

forgot to say, foundation is a trilogy, i forget the names of the other 2 books but i suspect you might be able to find them in a single volume. this is also related to i robot, but i didn't read that. perhaps you could add it.

totally agree with Rob above re Rudy Rucker

Richard K Morgans Altered Carbon is friggin awesome, if you haven't read this you should go get it today. You'll thank me. The followups are quite tasty as well.

Schismatrix is by BRUCE STERLING and it was a mindfuck in 1990 when I first read it...whores grafting genital tissue to the back of their throats so they can get off when giving head etc

John Shirley is a living master of scifi his new one The Other End is supposed to be out this month and looks to be killer. Silicon Embrace by him is one of the weirdest coolest novels.

I don't read as much scifi anymore, lately I've been into hardboiled mysteries,i.e., Charlie Huston, lee Child, Andrew Vacchss, Simon Kesnick...scifi has gotten too "literary" - more worried about "developing character" than ideas.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is pretty essential dystopian fiction.

another vote for rudy rucker. very highly readable stuff. and the guy's a mathematician.

Probably predictable, but look up Neal Stephenson's Snowcrash. You shan't be disappointed.

andrew Vacchs is fucking amazing! His short stories are so sharp, so evil deadly. I found a comic book that was adapted from his short stories and in between weere actual short stories so I started reading all I could find. brutal brutal shit.

whoa man

ROB

while you here

my library has moving mars, darwin radio & the forge of god, but not blood music--- where to start?

hmmmmm, I suggest you get Forge of God. check that shit out.

great, thanks!

I know it's a bit late BUT:
Ray Bradbury: "Fahrenheit 451"
OR
"Top Science Fiction" where the best Sci-Fi authors pick their best short stories. I highly recommend "Labyrinths" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

good call!

by the way, farenheit 451 was made into a wonderful wonderful movie by francois truffaut, in england, featuring the german guy from jules et jim and the lovely julie christie. a perfect movie.

---

also, i discovered today thanks to this thread that cyberpunk author tom maddox has all of his work put online, including a short story from the mirrorshades anthology, a novel, and 2 screenplays for the x-files, here.

Yes! I just have to watch that movie, although I've read that book so many times I have a picture of it right in my head just by myself.
Thanks for the link and hope you enjoy!

"Nine Billion Names of God", that's an awesome story, it is somewhere in my father's massive sci-fi collection.
Another one: "Way Station" by Clifford D. Simak. This is a novel.

i mentioned the highly original jack vance in a previous post; this here is a good primer website:

http://www.jackvance.com/

it includes links to his archive:

http://www.integralarchive.org/

where you can find first chapters of many of his books.

http://www.integralarchive.org/samp-chap.htm

If you like Star Wars, then check out Timothy Zahn's "Heir to the Empire Trilogy." It starts off right where Jedi left off.....it's actually pretty fun to read.

how many star wars books start off at the end of return of the jedi? i've read the truce at bakura and that starts there too

Jack Womack - "Ambient"

a wonderful book

Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey, (& not as much...) Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama
Frank Herbert - Dune (& not as much)...Dune Messiah & the rest of the Dune books
Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson - Hunters of Dune and others written after Herbert's Death...this first one was okay...

star wars (selected works copied & pasted from wiki's list at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_books)

Han Solo at Stars' End by Brian Daley
one of the good early ones

Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina edited by Kevin J. Anderson
one of the good later ones

The Truce at Bakura by Kathy Tyers
this was a good one

The Thrawn Trilogy
feat. Luke, Mara Jade, Admiral Thrawn

• Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (9 ABY)
• Dark Force Rising by Timothy Zahn (9 ABY)
• The Last Command by Timothy Zahn

X-Wing/Rogue Squadron series
feat. Corran Horn
Rogue Squadron by Michael A. Stackpole (1996)
Wedge's Gamble by Michael A. Stackpole (1996)
The Krytos Trap by Michael A. Stackpole (1996)
The Bacta War by Michael A. Stackpole

I <3 Timothy Zahn

good call.

You must spread some FORCE around before giving it to atari 2600 again.

feat. Luke, Mara Jade, Han & Leia and their twins, Admiral Thrawn

These books ("Thrawn Trilogy" by Zahn) should be episodes 7 (maybe throw in some Truce at bukura elements too), 8 and 9 if Lucas ever decides to make them. Maybe one of his adopted children or something will make them one day...

after Lucas dubbed the original Star Wars "A New Hope" and made it Episode IV, he remarked that ep I would be mostly C-3PO and R2-D2 and that the last Episode IX would be the end adventures of C-3PO and R2-D2...
In the end, there were some "Droids" comics and cartoons.
Somewhere along the line (probably due to the sagely advice from Joseph Campbell before Empire) he decided to make Vader Luke's father, Anakin.

I think I've read about 50 of those Star Wars books....I'm such a geek...but damn if they aren't good.

On the subject of geekdom, the same geek that got me into playing X-Wing vs. T.I.E. Fighter got me into reading the books. I never bought the Zahn books. Most of the others you see that I listed I bought after reading those ones first.

I just go to the used book store. They are EXTRA-LIGHT reading so I burn through them really fast.

most of those Star Wars books are really well written though (With Zahn, Anderson and Stackpole really being the best).

the earlier stuff by Alan Dean Foster is pretty good too, although because it was written before Empire Strikes Back and RoJ, it kind of goes against canon, and that bothered my OCD_anal side.

this book holds the most sentimentality for me, since I read it back when I was 8:

Well, that's the first one I ever read too (after the movie's book). It was the first Star Wars book besides the movie's book. I cannot really remember, but I think it isn't any good. I was in grade school at the time and I got it from one of those scholastic monthlies the teacher would hand out and then you'd take it home for your parents to buy you books out of it.

Greg Bear also wrote a star wars book called ROGUE PLANET

I found it again (at a used book store) and was so happy I almost peed myself. Foster is a good writer, but I think that because he was forced to make stuff up (other than relying on Lucas), it feels out of place. these days Lucas has to sign off on EVERYTHING.

Foster wrote lots of movie-to-novel stories....including The Last Starfighter and Krull.

his picture on Wiki makes him look like he's gone Taliban. :p

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

I used to LOVE this book too:

Once you've read the Thrawn Trilogy, well Zahn also wrote the Hand of Thrawn Duology, ("Specter of the Past" and "Vision of the Future") which deals heavily in politics (the first one) and human relationships (the second) Zahn-style.
After that you have the New Jedi Order Series, by various authors, but I'd just recommend "Vector Prime" by R.A. Salvatore, and "Traitor" by Matthew Stover.
Just for traveling light on summer evenings.

so yesterday i got a bunch of books from the library or was it wednesday?

anyway i started reading "gobalhead" by bruce sterling. i just read 1 short story, "our neural chernobyl", and it was great, because he pulls a borges-- i mean instead of telling a long long story he simply reviews an imaginary book where that story is told.

brilliant, and of course it's been done in science fiction since the days of the "encyclopaedia galactica", but it's a really nice short story.

i am not fond of star trek or star wars books & stuff like that though.