Your Science Fiction recommendations

[Loren Pechtel]

For years I've been trying to find a short story I read in my early teens. It was in a collection by either Heinlen, Asimov, Niven, Clark, Bradbury, or another of the old greats.

I want to call the author Ben Bova. I know the story, I can't think of the title.

Ehh... Lemme look at his collections. No. It was definitely a short story, and I don't remember those collections. I'm leaning towards Asimov or Clarke, but I think I had a collection by Heinlein as well. I'll dig through them.

Ahah, I had "Reach for Tomorrow" by Clarke. Read it a bunch of times. Anyway... the story is called Rescue Party. Still love the last lines of it, although I got a lot of the story wrong:

Clarke would have been my second guess. That's definitely it.

 

[doubleplusgoodks]

I just read "Under the Skin" by Michel Faber and enjoyed it. A movie based on the novel with Scarlet Johanson was recently releases. It is very different from the novel but I enjoyed both in different ways.

 

[Mageth]

I would read some Ian M. Banks before getting into the revelation space series, I've read both and consider Banks to be superior. Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games are a pretty good place to start but my favourites are Look to Windward and Use of Weapons. Though the authorial games mentioned by a poster above play a part in the latter.

I think possibly his best SF book though is The Algebraist. It is a stand alone novel rather than the above which are part of the same future history universe.

Just curious, why do you consider Iain Banks' writing to be superior to Alastair Reynolds' ?

Note that I've read Reynolds, but not Banks. At least not any Banks that I remember. I've been meaning to get around to him though.

A follow-up on this...

Based on Narapoia's recommendation, I've dived into Banks. Started out with The Algebraist, went on to The Wasp Factory (a great book), the first two Culture books, and am currently reading his last book, The Quarry. It's fiction (not sci fi) along the lines of The Wasp Factory. Great bookends for his career.

I think my favorite sci fi book by him that I've read so far is The Player of Games.

So I love Banks now, and he'll keep me busy and entertained for a while. Big thanks to Narapoia for the recommendation, which I strongly second. Banks was a very good if not great author of fiction. It was a shame to lose him so young.

Oh, and I've also read Christopher Priest's Islanders (look it up, It's well worth reading, Priest is good as always with the twists that draw you in and keep you interested) and the first two books in Alastair Reynolds' new series, Blue Remembered Earth and On The Steel Breeze, which are good hard sci-fi but not quite as intense or inventive or interesting as his Revelation Space series, IMHO.

 

[bigfield]

Update

Among my favorites are Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers both by Robert A. Heinlein. Stranger in a Strange Land involves a human who was born on Mars, and comes back to Earth with powers that make people regard him as a god. It is a fascinating novel that explores religion, and how the protagonist handles being regarded as a deity. Starship Troopers bears only passing resemblance to the movie, so whether you liked the movie or not, the novel is a much different experience. The first part of the novel deals with the extreme training the soldiers go through, and the rest deals with the two wars humans are fighting involving two entirely different alien species, and the tactics used to fight them.

I now see what you mean by the difference between the Starship Troopers movie and book. I loved both but consider them to be two entirely different stories, each with their very different merits. Heinlein's Mobile Infantry is awesome.

I'm on Stranger at the moment and will be reading the rest of your recommendations.

Try Margaret Atwood's trilogy, 'Oryx and Crake', 'After the Flood', and 'Maddaddam'. Set in a dystopian future where a bio-hacker (Crake) has both created a new race of humans (with gigantic blue dicks) and unleashed a plague that has wiped out most of the 'normals'. Groups duking out out in the ruins include God's Gardeners, Painballers, rogue gene spliced animals like Pigoons (very dangerous, have human cortex material - smart, fast, and hungry!) and more benevolent types, or at least harmless, Chickynobs, headless chickens bred for meat.

Oryx and Crake was enjoyable. Jimmy, Oryx and Crake's story was excellent - Atwood has some superb ideas regarding transgenics - but Snowman annoyed me:

Show

I would have preferred a more resourceful and intrepid protagonist. From start to finish, Snowman does very little.

I started Year of the Flood (got the trilogy for my birthday) but will probably leave it till another time.

But the Old Man's War series is more hard SF, and the humor is more sophisticated. Scalzi's been called The New Heinlein countless times, something I only partially agree with. His characters are Heinleinian, but his stories are more provincial (ie., less nudity and incest.) Scalzi's characters are intelligent reason-based, and pragmatically moral, which is so refreshing to me.

Absolutely loved Old Man's War. Outstanding writing, and very cool sci-fi concepts. I see what you mean by the reason-based characters, and it was refreshing for me as well. I also read Ghost Brigades and Last Colony, but they weren't quite as interesting.

 

[bigfield]

Also, I've read Altered Carbon. Great hardboiled detective story, awesome sci-fi premise, excellent characters.

 

[Underseer]

For years I've been trying to find a short story I read in my early teens. It was in a collection by either Heinlen, Asimov, Niven, Clark, Bradbury, or another of the old greats.

I want to call the author Ben Bova. I know the story, I can't think of the title.

Ehh... Lemme look at his collections. No. It was definitely a short story, and I don't remember those collections. I'm leaning towards Asimov or Clarke, but I think I had a collection by Heinlein as well. I'll dig through them.

Ahah, I had "Reach for Tomorrow" by Clarke. Read it a bunch of times. Anyway... the story is called Rescue Party. Still love the last lines of it, although I got a lot of the story wrong:

Clarke would have been my second guess. That's definitely it.

Bah. Clarke. Clarke is one of the ones I blame for the modern "science lite" science fiction. Humbug!

 

[Narapoia]

For years I've been trying to find a short story I read in my early teens. It was in a collection by either Heinlen, Asimov, Niven, Clark, Bradbury, or another of the old greats.

I want to call the author Ben Bova. I know the story, I can't think of the title.

Ehh... Lemme look at his collections. No. It was definitely a short story, and I don't remember those collections. I'm leaning towards Asimov or Clarke, but I think I had a collection by Heinlein as well. I'll dig through them.

Ahah, I had "Reach for Tomorrow" by Clarke. Read it a bunch of times. Anyway... the story is called Rescue Party. Still love the last lines of it, although I got a lot of the story wrong:

Clarke would have been my second guess. That's definitely it.

Bah. Clarke. Clarke is one of the ones I blame for the modern "science lite" science fiction. Humbug!

Arthur C? He had a fair mix of out there and hard science fiction. One would have thought there were other authors a bit more deserving of your blame?

 

[Potoooooooo]

If you like animals, this is a good series to check out
the Aldair series
https://www.goodreads.com/series/43354-aldair

"One of the strangest adventurers in the history of science fiction. It is millennia from now and mankind has vanished from the Earth, under mysterious circumstances...But he has left a legacy behind him: a host of intelligent species artificially enhanced by means of humanity's genetic science. Aldair is one such product, an intelligent, upright pig from a quasi-Byzantine culture (complete with a church), it also features intelligent lizards from a pseudo-Islamic civilization and bears with a viking-like society..Serious intriguing adventure, with some of the most carefully crafted settings I've read in years.Barrett seems to have surpassed himself in this series:' —SF Chronicle

 

[Underseer]

For years I've been trying to find a short story I read in my early teens. It was in a collection by either Heinlen, Asimov, Niven, Clark, Bradbury, or another of the old greats.

I want to call the author Ben Bova. I know the story, I can't think of the title.

Ehh... Lemme look at his collections. No. It was definitely a short story, and I don't remember those collections. I'm leaning towards Asimov or Clarke, but I think I had a collection by Heinlein as well. I'll dig through them.

Ahah, I had "Reach for Tomorrow" by Clarke. Read it a bunch of times. Anyway... the story is called Rescue Party. Still love the last lines of it, although I got a lot of the story wrong:

Clarke would have been my second guess. That's definitely it.

Bah. Clarke. Clarke is one of the ones I blame for the modern "science lite" science fiction. Humbug!

Arthur C? He had a fair mix of out there and hard science fiction. One would have thought there were other authors a bit more deserving of your blame?

He actively argued that story take precedence over scientific accuracy, which writers since have probably used as an excuse for not doing the kind of careful research required for hard sci-fi or even the fact that we now need a separate category called "hard" sci-fi to describe what used to be just sci-fi.