Favorite Sci-Fi Books - or "Why This Book Rocks"

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]I have most of the 2001 series, but I haven't read them yet. Also have "Cradle." Looks promising.
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For Bob's sake, don't read Cradle. Anything the Clarke wrote with Gentry Lee is horrible. Rendez-vous with Rama was good; everything subsequent to that was atrocious.

[quoteost_uid0]C'mon, Sa'ar, the star-mangled spanner thing was GREAT.[/quoteost_uid0]

Yeah, well, I told it to the girl who sits next to me in Astronomy and she rolled her eyes *snicker*

[quoteost_uid0]I like that he works his science out really carefully.[/quoteost_uid0]

Yes. Definite plus when the reader is a science major. I once saw a non-Clarke book where the acceleration due to gravity of a 'near-Earth' planet was given as 98m/s instead of 9.8m/s^2.

[quoteost_uid0]Niven's Ringworld is supposed to be good. Anyone read it?[/quoteost_uid0]

I've been working my way through the Man-Kzin Wars series, which is a bunch of guest writers setting up some background to Ringworld. The quality is pretty much hit-and-miss. Any story by Jerry Pournelle isn't worth reading. The last story of the first book (and its sequel) are good, though.

Edit: Although this isn't strictly sf, Terry Pratchett's Discworld is highly recommended. Apparently I had the chance to meet him last summer, but I missed him by a week. Curses. Oh well, I got to meet Canadian sf author Robert J. Sawyer. I recommend End of an Era, any of his Quintaglio books...hell, anything he's written. It's worth it just to read about events occurring in Canada. It's surreal to read about the TRIUMF facility at UBC, a place I have been to (sorta).

I have an autographed copy of End of an Era on my bookshelf, with a Robert J. Sawyer original sketch of a Jijaki.[/colorost_uid0]