Although these books have already been mentioned, they seriously deserve another mention:
Brave New World and Enders Game, by Aldous Huxley and Orson Scott Card, respectively. I read them both during a book project at school, and I even wrote a lenghty summary and analysis for both.
<!--quoteo(post=1585428:date=Dec 7 2006, 02:28 PM:name=lolfighter)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(lolfighter @ Dec 7 2006, 02:28 PM) [snapback]1585428[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> Doesn't really work with me. I mean, it's basically violenceporn so far. I'm asking whether there's anything ELSE there. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well, you have to at least read the second chapter. The chapters switch off between Caroline in cyberspace and Lawrence building Prime Intellect, and how it figures out how to extend the effect that allows its advanced hardware to function. From there, it quickly discovers how to affect matter at infinite distance instantly, and due to having Asimov's Three Laws built heavily into it, it decides to take over everything, keep every human alive forever, and to give them whatever they want.
Amazon.com's Best of 2001 When Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," she could have been talking about China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. The novel's publication met with a burst of extravagant praise from Big Name Authors and was almost instantly a multiaward finalist. You expect hyperbole in blurbs; and sometimes unworthy books win awards, so nominations don't necessarily mean much. But Perdido Street Station deserves the acclaim. It's ambitious and brilliant and--rarity of rarities--sui generis. Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's ######ensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.
Generous, gaudy, grand, grotesque, gigantic, grim, grimy, and glorious, Perdito Street Station is a bloody fascinating book. It's also so massive that you may begin to feel you're getting too much of a good thing; just slow down and enjoy.
Yes, but what is Perdido Street Station about? To oversimplify: the eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for flying things to study leads to verification of his controversial unified theory of the strange sciences of his world. It also brings him an odd, unknown grub stolen from a secret government experiment so perilous it is sold to a ruthless drug lord--the same crime boss who hired Lin. The grub emerges from its cocoon, becomes an extraordinarily dangerous monster, and escapes Isaac's lab to ravage New Crobuzon, even as his discovery becomes known to a hidden, powerful, and sinister intelligence. Lin disappears and Isaac finds himself pursued by the monster, the drug lord, the government and armies of New Crobuzon, and other, more bizarre factions, not all confined to his world. --Cynthia Ward
From Publishers Weekly King Rat (1999), Mi‚ville's much-praised first novel of urban fantasy/horror, was just a palate-teaser for this appetizing, if extravagant, stew of genre themes. Its setting, New Crobuzon, is an audaciously imagined milieu: a city with the dimensions of a world, home to a polyglot civilization of wildly varied species and overlapping and interpenetrating cultures. Seeking to prove his unified energy theory as it relates to organic and mechanical forms, rogue scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin tries to restore the power of flight to Yagharek, a member of the garuda race cruelly shorn of its wings. Isaac's lover, Lin, unconsciously mimics his scientific pursuits when she takes on the seemingly impossible commission of sculpting a patron whose body is a riot of grotesquely mutated and spliced appendages. Their social life is one huge, postgraduate bull session with friends and associates--until a nightmare-inducing grub escapes from Isaac's lab and transforms into a flying monster that imperils the city. This accident precipitates a political crisis, initiates an action-packed manhunt for Isaac and introduces hordes of vividly imagined beings who inhabit the twilight zone between science and sorcery. Mi‚ville's canvas is so breathtakingly broad that the details of individual subplots and characters sometime lose their definition. But it is also generous enough to accommodate large dollops of aesthetics, scientific discussion and quest fantasy in an impressive and ultimately pleasing epic. <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Amazon.com's Best of 2001 American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.
Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.
Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.
More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly Titans clash, but with more fuss than fury in this fantasy demi-epic from the author of Neverwhere. The intriguing premise of Gaiman's tale is that the gods of European yore, who came to North America with their immigrant believers, are squaring off for a rumble with new indigenous deities: "gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon." They all walk around in mufti, disguised as ordinary people, which causes no end of trouble for 32-year-old protagonist Shadow Moon, who can't turn around without bumping into a minor divinity. Released from prison the day after his beloved wife dies in a car accident, Shadow takes a job as emissary for Mr. Wednesday, avatar of the Norse god Grimnir, unaware that his boss's recruiting trip across the American heartland will subject him to repeat visits from the reanimated corpse of his dead wife and brutal roughing up by the goons of Wednesday's adversary, Mr. World. At last Shadow must reevaluate his own deeply held beliefs in order to determine his crucial role in the final showdown. Gaiman tries to keep the magical and the mundane evenly balanced, but he is clearly more interested in the activities of his human protagonists: Shadow's poignant personal moments and the tale's affectionate slices of smalltown life are much better developed than the aimless plot, which bounces Shadow from one episodic encounter to another in a design only the gods seem to know. Mere mortal readers will enjoy the tale's wit, but puzzle over its strained mythopoeia. (One-day laydown, June 19)Forecast: Even when he isn't in top form, Gaiman, creator of the acclaimed Sandman comics series, trumps many storytellers. Momentously titled, and allotted a dramatic one-day laydown with a 12-city author tour, his latest will appeal to fans and attract mainstream review coverage for better or for worse because of the rich possibilities of its premise.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Take note tho...they may be great but you don't wanna rush thru it. IF anyone wants a challenging good read, go for either of these. HIGHLY recommended!
Not a <i>single </i>mention of H. G. Wells? He was one of the fathers of science fiction. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/sad-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":(" border="0" alt="sad-fix.gif" />
His story <a href="http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/w45ws/index.html" target="_blank"><i>When the Sleeper Wakes</i></a> was my first exploration into science fiction, and became the hook that dragged me in. It's a sci fi take on the Rip van Winkle story, where a man sleeps for a few centuries and wakes up the richest man in the world thanks to compound interest (sounds silly, I know). The protagonist then goes on to explore the dystopian world which he now lives in, with all its flaws. A good read.
My other favorite of his was <i><a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine" target="_blank">The Time Machine</a></i>, recently butchered by a movie conversion. The Eloi and the Morlocks are a rather blatant social commentary, but if you get past the overt socialism in Well's stories they are both compelling and entertaining.
On the topic of the fathers of science fiction, I see Jules Verne wasn't mentioned either, but I was never a big fan of his. Just stick to Wells. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
<!--quoteo(post=1586053:date=Dec 9 2006, 12:24 PM:name=LockNLoaded)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(LockNLoaded @ Dec 9 2006, 12:24 PM) [snapback]1586053[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> 2 great reads you will want to add to that list:- <b>Perdido Street Station - <i>China Mieville</i></b> <b>American Gods -<i>Neil Gaiman</i></b> Take note tho...they may be great but you don't wanna rush thru it. IF anyone wants a challenging good read, go for either of these. HIGHLY recommended! <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Lad, I think those books would be more suited to the sister "Fantasy" thread.
My thanks for all the submissions. Keep 'em coming! Do you think it would be useful if I classified the novels into different sub-genres? I.e. Cyberpunk and so on.
<!--quoteo(post=1587040:date=Dec 11 2006, 07:48 AM:name=Xyth)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Xyth @ Dec 11 2006, 07:48 AM) [snapback]1587040[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> Did anybody say House Of Leaves yet? It's not science fiction but it's <i>really coooool.</i> <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think you're sort of missing the point. This list would be super long if we put every good book ever on it. This is for SciFi only.
QuaunautThe longest seven days in history...Join Date: 2003-03-21Member: 14759Members, Constellation, Reinforced - Shadow
These two are my favorite books of all time, and are just incredible.
Signal to Noise A Signal Shattered
Both by Eric S Nylund. Incredibly written, intelligent, forward thinking, and with just enough of everything that makes a good book. I'd give a less vague description, but its one of those book series that is just too hard to describe. Its got interspecies business, conspiracy theories, high tech wizardry(unconventionally done, too), backstabbing, and more than enough action. Its incredible. <3
<!--quoteo(post=1587070:date=Dec 12 2006, 01:37 AM:name=Quaunaut)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Quaunaut @ Dec 12 2006, 01:37 AM) [snapback]1587070[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> These two are my favorite books of all time, and are just incredible.
Signal to Noise A Signal Shattered
Both by Eric S Nylund. Incredibly written, intelligent, forward thinking, and with just enough of everything that makes a good book. I'd give a less vague description, but its one of those book series that is just too hard to describe. Its got interspecies business, conspiracy theories, high tech wizardry(unconventionally done, too), backstabbing, and more than enough action. Its incredible. <3 <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Sorry for the delay, lad. Updated. Also added a link to the sister thread.
Removed:
<b>"2061: Oddyssey Three"</b> by Arthur C. Clarke <b>"3001: The Final Oddyssey"</b> by Arthur C. Clarke
Comments
Brave New World and Enders Game, by Aldous Huxley and Orson Scott Card, respectively. I read them both during a book project at school, and I even wrote a lenghty summary and analysis for both.
Doesn't really work with me. I mean, it's basically violenceporn so far. I'm asking whether there's anything ELSE there.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Well, you have to at least read the second chapter. The chapters switch off between Caroline in cyberspace and Lawrence building Prime Intellect, and how it figures out how to extend the effect that allows its advanced hardware to function. From there, it quickly discovers how to affect matter at infinite distance instantly, and due to having Asimov's Three Laws built heavily into it, it decides to take over everything, keep every human alive forever, and to give them whatever they want.
I shall also attempt to compile a "Must Read" list here that shall be frequently updated.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
2 great reads you will want to add to that list:-
<b>Perdido Street Station - <i>China Mieville</i></b>
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> Amazon.com
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
When Mae West said, "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful," she could have been talking about China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. The novel's publication met with a burst of extravagant praise from Big Name Authors and was almost instantly a multiaward finalist. You expect hyperbole in blurbs; and sometimes unworthy books win awards, so nominations don't necessarily mean much. But Perdido Street Station deserves the acclaim. It's ambitious and brilliant and--rarity of rarities--sui generis. Its clearest influences are Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy and M. John Harrison's Viriconium books, but it isn't much like them. It's ######ensian in scope, but fast-paced and modern. It's a love song for cities, and it packs a world into its strange, sprawling, steam-punky city of New Crobuzon. It can be read with equal validity as fantasy, science fiction, horror, or slipstream. It's got love, loss, crime, sex, riots, mad scientists, drugs, art, corruption, demons, dreams, obsession, magic, aliens, subversion, torture, dirigibles, romantic outlaws, artificial intelligence, and dangerous cults.
Generous, gaudy, grand, grotesque, gigantic, grim, grimy, and glorious, Perdito Street Station is a bloody fascinating book. It's also so massive that you may begin to feel you're getting too much of a good thing; just slow down and enjoy.
Yes, but what is Perdido Street Station about? To oversimplify: the eccentric scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin is hired to restore the power of flight to a cruelly de-winged birdman. Isaac's secret lover is Lin, an artist of the khepri, a humano-insectoid race; theirs is a forbidden relationship. Lin is hired (rather against her will) by a mysterious crime boss to capture his horrifying likeness in the unique khepri art form. Isaac's quest for flying things to study leads to verification of his controversial unified theory of the strange sciences of his world. It also brings him an odd, unknown grub stolen from a secret government experiment so perilous it is sold to a ruthless drug lord--the same crime boss who hired Lin. The grub emerges from its cocoon, becomes an extraordinarily dangerous monster, and escapes Isaac's lab to ravage New Crobuzon, even as his discovery becomes known to a hidden, powerful, and sinister intelligence. Lin disappears and Isaac finds himself pursued by the monster, the drug lord, the government and armies of New Crobuzon, and other, more bizarre factions, not all confined to his world. --Cynthia Ward
____________________________________________________
From Publishers Weekly
King Rat (1999), Mi‚ville's much-praised first novel of urban fantasy/horror, was just a palate-teaser for this appetizing, if extravagant, stew of genre themes. Its setting, New Crobuzon, is an audaciously imagined milieu: a city with the dimensions of a world, home to a polyglot civilization of wildly varied species and overlapping and interpenetrating cultures. Seeking to prove his unified energy theory as it relates to organic and mechanical forms, rogue scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin tries to restore the power of flight to Yagharek, a member of the garuda race cruelly shorn of its wings. Isaac's lover, Lin, unconsciously mimics his scientific pursuits when she takes on the seemingly impossible commission of sculpting a patron whose body is a riot of grotesquely mutated and spliced appendages. Their social life is one huge, postgraduate bull session with friends and associates--until a nightmare-inducing grub escapes from Isaac's lab and transforms into a flying monster that imperils the city. This accident precipitates a political crisis, initiates an action-packed manhunt for Isaac and introduces hordes of vividly imagined beings who inhabit the twilight zone between science and sorcery. Mi‚ville's canvas is so breathtakingly broad that the details of individual subplots and characters sometime lose their definition. But it is also generous enough to accommodate large dollops of aesthetics, scientific discussion and quest fantasy in an impressive and ultimately pleasing epic.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<b>American Gods -<i>Neil Gaiman</i></b>
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> Amazon
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
American Gods is Neil Gaiman's best and most ambitious novel yet, a scary, strange, and hallucinogenic road-trip story wrapped around a deep examination of the American spirit. Gaiman tackles everything from the onslaught of the information age to the meaning of death, but he doesn't sacrifice the razor-sharp plotting and narrative style he's been delivering since his Sandman days.
Shadow gets out of prison early when his wife is killed in a car crash. At a loss, he takes up with a mysterious character called Wednesday, who is much more than he appears. In fact, Wednesday is an old god, once known as Odin the All-father, who is roaming America rounding up his forgotten fellows in preparation for an epic battle against the upstart deities of the Internet, credit cards, television, and all that is wired. Shadow agrees to help Wednesday, and they whirl through a psycho-spiritual storm that becomes all too real in its manifestations. For instance, Shadow's dead wife Laura keeps showing up, and not just as a ghost--the difficulty of their continuing relationship is by turns grim and darkly funny, just like the rest of the book.
Armed only with some coin tricks and a sense of purpose, Shadow travels through, around, and underneath the visible surface of things, digging up all the powerful myths Americans brought with them in their journeys to this land as well as the ones that were already here. Shadow's road story is the heart of the novel, and it's here that Gaiman offers up the details that make this such a cinematic book--the distinctly American foods and diversions, the bizarre roadside attractions, the decrepit gods reduced to shell games and prostitution. "This is a bad land for Gods," says Shadow.
More than a tourist in America, but not a native, Neil Gaiman offers an outside-in and inside-out perspective on the soul and spirituality of the country--our obsessions with money and power, our jumbled religious heritage and its societal outcomes, and the millennial decisions we face about what's real and what's not. --Therese Littleton
____________________________________________________________
From Publishers Weekly
Titans clash, but with more fuss than fury in this fantasy demi-epic from the author of Neverwhere. The intriguing premise of Gaiman's tale is that the gods of European yore, who came to North America with their immigrant believers, are squaring off for a rumble with new indigenous deities: "gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon." They all walk around in mufti, disguised as ordinary people, which causes no end of trouble for 32-year-old protagonist Shadow Moon, who can't turn around without bumping into a minor divinity. Released from prison the day after his beloved wife dies in a car accident, Shadow takes a job as emissary for Mr. Wednesday, avatar of the Norse god Grimnir, unaware that his boss's recruiting trip across the American heartland will subject him to repeat visits from the reanimated corpse of his dead wife and brutal roughing up by the goons of Wednesday's adversary, Mr. World. At last Shadow must reevaluate his own deeply held beliefs in order to determine his crucial role in the final showdown. Gaiman tries to keep the magical and the mundane evenly balanced, but he is clearly more interested in the activities of his human protagonists: Shadow's poignant personal moments and the tale's affectionate slices of smalltown life are much better developed than the aimless plot, which bounces Shadow from one episodic encounter to another in a design only the gods seem to know. Mere mortal readers will enjoy the tale's wit, but puzzle over its strained mythopoeia. (One-day laydown, June 19)Forecast: Even when he isn't in top form, Gaiman, creator of the acclaimed Sandman comics series, trumps many storytellers. Momentously titled, and allotted a dramatic one-day laydown with a 12-city author tour, his latest will appeal to fans and attract mainstream review coverage for better or for worse because of the rich possibilities of its premise.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Take note tho...they may be great but you don't wanna rush thru it. IF anyone wants a challenging good read, go for either of these. HIGHLY recommended!
His story <a href="http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/wells/hg/w45ws/index.html" target="_blank"><i>When the Sleeper Wakes</i></a> was my first exploration into science fiction, and became the hook that dragged me in. It's a sci fi take on the Rip van Winkle story, where a man sleeps for a few centuries and wakes up the richest man in the world thanks to compound interest (sounds silly, I know). The protagonist then goes on to explore the dystopian world which he now lives in, with all its flaws. A good read.
My other favorite of his was <i><a href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine" target="_blank">The Time Machine</a></i>, recently butchered by a movie conversion. The Eloi and the Morlocks are a rather blatant social commentary, but if you get past the overt socialism in Well's stories they are both compelling and entertaining.
On the topic of the fathers of science fiction, I see Jules Verne wasn't mentioned either, but I was never a big fan of his. Just stick to Wells. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
The Culture books by Iain Banks.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
YES
2 great reads you will want to add to that list:-
<b>Perdido Street Station - <i>China Mieville</i></b>
<b>American Gods -<i>Neil Gaiman</i></b>
Take note tho...they may be great but you don't wanna rush thru it. IF anyone wants a challenging good read, go for either of these. HIGHLY recommended!
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Lad, I think those books would be more suited to the sister "Fantasy" thread.
My thanks for all the submissions. Keep 'em coming! Do you think it would be useful if I classified the novels into different sub-genres? I.e. Cyberpunk and so on.
Did anybody say House Of Leaves yet? It's not science fiction but it's <i>really coooool.</i>
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I think you're sort of missing the point. This list would be super long if we put every good book ever on it. This is for SciFi only.
Signal to Noise
A Signal Shattered
Both by Eric S Nylund. Incredibly written, intelligent, forward thinking, and with just enough of everything that makes a good book. I'd give a less vague description, but its one of those book series that is just too hard to describe. Its got interspecies business, conspiracy theories, high tech wizardry(unconventionally done, too), backstabbing, and more than enough action. Its incredible. <3
These two are my favorite books of all time, and are just incredible.
Signal to Noise
A Signal Shattered
Both by Eric S Nylund. Incredibly written, intelligent, forward thinking, and with just enough of everything that makes a good book. I'd give a less vague description, but its one of those book series that is just too hard to describe. Its got interspecies business, conspiracy theories, high tech wizardry(unconventionally done, too), backstabbing, and more than enough action. Its incredible. <3
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Sorry for the delay, lad. Updated. Also added a link to the sister thread.
Removed:
<b>"2061: Oddyssey Three"</b> by Arthur C. Clarke
<b>"3001: The Final Oddyssey"</b> by Arthur C. Clarke