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

[NAHTMMM]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]A few months ago, there was a thread (I think in the Fivers forum) in which several Star Trek books got dumped on pretty heavily. (And rightfully so! :smile But anyway, I thought it would be nice to have a thread for the other end of the spectrum. So I'm wondering, what are your favorite Star Trek/Star Wars/other sci-fi books? Which authors do you think should be nominated for a Hugo or Pulitzer? Feel free to tell us what we're missing out on. Please.


My favorite Star Trek novels are [iost_uid0]How Much For Just the Planet?[/iost_uid0] by John Ford, [iost_uid0]The Wounded Sky[/iost_uid0] and [iost_uid0]My Enemy, My Ally[/iost_uid0] by Diane Duane, and [iost_uid0]Infiltrator[/iost_uid0] by I think Wesley Thompson. All of these books are well-written, the plots are solid, the characters are fleshed out, and all the novels (particularly Ford's) are very funny. They're always fun to read.[/colorost_uid0]

[Derek]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]I used to read [iost_uid0]Star Trek[/iost_uid0] books back when I was a Trek fan the first time. I know I read a lot of TOS, TNG, and DS9 episodes from back then and some I enjoyed and others I didn't.

I remember liking [iost_uid0]Reunion[/iost_uid0] by MJF and [iost_uid0]Imzadi[/iost_uid0] by PD. I'm currently reading [iost_uid0]Imzadi II[/iost_uid0], but it's not doing as much for me. There were a few other novels that I liked from back then but I don't quite remember them. One was [iost_uid0]Metamorphosis[/iost_uid0], another was [iost_uid0]Vendetta[/iost_uid0], and another was something about Q....

Outside of ST, but within scifi, I read Tolkein (though I suppose that's fantasy), Lewis (all of Lewis, fiction and non-fiction), parodies ([iost_uid0]Bored of the Rings[/iost_uid0], [iost_uid0]Right Behind[/iost_uid0]), and random scifi books that are considered classics ([iost_uid0]1984[/iost_uid0], [iost_uid0]Fahrenheit 451[/iost_uid0], much of HG Wells, others that aren't springing to mind)[/colorost_uid0]

[PointyHairedJedi]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]For me it's gotta be [iost_uid0]Dune[/iost_uid0] for reasons too numerous to mention. The prequel trilogy is quite good too, though in a pretty different style to the oriiginal sextruplet. Other than that it's all sorts really - lots of Clarke, Asimov, that kind of thing. I also got a collected short stories of JG Ballard for my birthday recenly, some of which are pretty wierd I can tell you. I've never read any [iost_uid0]Trek[/iost_uid0] novels though - whenever I'm in a bookshop there's usually something else that catches my eye.

Coincidently if anyone is interested in the [iost_uid0]Doctor Who[/iost_uid0] novels they have several on the BBC Cult site - I've only had the time to read the one, but it was pretty good. I also recommend (especailly if you have broadband) the animated audio stories, though you need to have RealPlayer to view them.[/colorost_uid0]

[Nan]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Yeah, the [iost_uid0]Dune[/iost_uid0] series (haven't read the prequels yet) is quite good. Haven't read [iost_uid0]Heretics of Dune[/iost_uid0] or [iost_uid0]Chapterhouse: Dune[/iost_uid0] yet...

William Gibson is good. Cyberpunk. His collection, [iost_uid0]Burning Chrome[/iost_uid0] is good, as are his "series" books: [iost_uid0]All Tomorrow's Parties, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Neuromancer[/iost_uid0]... I heard the audiobook (tho' abridged) version of [iost_uid0]Idoru[/iost_uid0]. His latest, [iost_uid0]Pattern Recognition[/iost_uid0], is out this year I think.

Some of the anthologies are good too... Starlight 2, Northern Stars (SF from Canadian authors, often featuring Canada), this anthology of Australian sf that I can't remember the name of...

[iost_uid0]Analog[/iost_uid0] and [iost_uid0]Asimov's Science Fiction[/iost_uid0], both periodicals of short sf stories, are good too. [iost_uid0]Analog[/iost_uid0] is one of the last bastions of "hard" sf.

Asimov is great. [iost_uid0]The Gods Themselves[/iost_uid0] is quite good. Collections such as [iost_uid0]Nine Tomorrows[/iost_uid0] and the volumes of short stories are good too.

Peter David gets away with alot, which is why I like him as far as Trek novels go. Diane Duane and PD have written only only Trek novels I liked. I've read upwards of 100 Trek novels and have been almost uniformly disappointed. I don't know why Carey gets so much work. I don't her stuff, PARTICULARLY her "Equinox" adaptation. *shudder* Voyager novels just about all SUCK. DS9 novels are often disappointing, the only gripping on being... agh... the one with the weird holosuites that make you go nuts... TNG novels are pretty much MEH, unless done by PD or DD. TOS I've had better luck with. "How Much for Just the Planet?" is quite funny. New Frontier books aren't bad, of course, being PD's stuff. "Starfleet: Year One" was a huge disappointment.

As for other SF/sci-fi series:

Star Wars novels aren't bad, depending on the author. I prefer Timothy Zahn's work to just about everyone else's, though Stackpole's novels are good too.

X-Files novelizations and original novels are often MEH. "Skin" was boring. "Antibodies" was good, though. Kevin J. Anderson. He also did two others that I have. "Ruins" bored me, and the other one, which featured ghosts and radiation and stuff, wasn't as good as "Antibodies" either.

The X-Men novelization sucked cesspool water. NOTE TO POCKETBOOKS EDITING STAFF: ALBERTA IS NOT A CITY IN BRITISH COLUMBIA. PLEASE STOP COMING TO WORK DRUNK.

Hmmmmmmm...

I'll think of more later.

~Nan[/colorost_uid0]

[NAHTMMM]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]"Warped"? Yes, that's pretty good. But it's also quite dark...IMO, the best stand-alone DS9 novels (that I've read) are "Warchild", "The Long Night", and possibly "Warped".

I've seen several posts on TrekBBS that denigrate Carey. I generally enjoy her stuff, though I really disliked "Ship of the Line". But I enjoyed reading "The Great Starship Race", and "First Frontier" (which I've been rereading for a freelance fiver) is quite readable too, if you can get past (and comprehend) the twist that gets the plot going. I guess Carey might be kind of like Vonda McIntyre: there are many who really enjoy her work, and many who despise it. [iost_uid0]Spoilers->[/iost_uid0][color=whiteost_uid0](I'm sorry, but "Enterprise: the First Adventure" was baloney. As soon as that lady made the comment about "My one wish in the whole entire universe is blah blah..." it was pretty clear what was going to happen.)[/colorost_uid0][iost_uid0]<-Spoilers[/iost_uid0] But Diane Carey can really get me into the story. I mean, in "First Frontier" she [iost_uid0]Minor spoiler->[/iost_uid0][color=whiteost_uid0]turns an attempt to lean over and grab a pencil into a legitimately titanic, white-knuckled struggle![/colorost_uid0][iost_uid0]<-Minor spoiler[/iost_uid0] I haven't read her "Equinox". Wesley Thompson is another very good ST author. He wrote "Debtors' Planet" and the aforementioned "Infiltrator". Oh, another great TOS novel (if you can get ahold of it) is "Uhura's Song". My favorite stand-alone VOY novels are "The Murdered Sun" and "Incident at Arbuk".

The Zahn trilogy is the best-written of the Star Wars bunch, but the Corellian trilogy might be the most entertaining for me. But even it definitely has its deficiencies.


I haven't read any of the other series you've mentioned.
And it's all right to mention fantasy, let's just not get too deep there or I may go off on a ten-page spiel on why Brian Jacques is one of the best authors of all time... :lol: [/colorost_uid0]

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]A.C. Clarke is my hands-down all time favourite sf author (I'm willing to overlook the horrible star-mangled spanner pun). I just finished a mammoth tome of his collected short stories, going back to the 30s. It came to just under 1000 pages.

Asimov runs a close second. I'm kinda biased, though, 'cause he was a chemist.

The hack novels out today are just bloody awful. I started to read Book I of the New Earth series and threw it down in disgust.

Jerry Pournelle should have his fingers amputated before he can write again.

Stackpole and Aaron Allston are decent writers. Still, a lot of Trek, Wars and Battletech novels are not published for their quality. Stupid mass-marketing...

I found the Correllian Trilogy just readable enough to finish, but not enough to read a second time.

Harry Turtledove I read primarily for the alternate history. His dialogue is somewhat wooden at times, but not painful.

David Drake and S.M. Stirling write in more of a gritty, realistic military style, but there are generally sf themes in it.

And now I must go move my car.

Continued: If you pick up a book with John Vornholt's name on the cover, throw it as far away as possible and run in the opposite direction.

You'll have to run, 'cause the people who run the bookstore will call mall security when you start throwing books around.[/colorost_uid0]

[Things Are Good]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]ST books:

I liked Federation, Imzadi, and Q-Squared (it's important to note that I haven't read all that many of them).

SW books:

Zahn, Stackpole, and Allston are pretty good. Kevin J Anderson is an author who I always felt was inconsistent; he could write some really good stuff and then some unreadable stuff.

Other books:

Yes yes, the classics are good. I can read Ender's Game over and over. Gateway by Frederick Pohl is phenomenal. You can't go wrong with Harlan Ellison or Theodore Sturgeon. Sa'ar-I definitely have that nine hundred plus page "book" (if the word applies) as well as Heinlein's seven to eight hundred page collection. One of my favorite short story books is called "Masterpieces", edited by Orson Scott Card, and it's a book of short stories that are flat-out brilliant.

I think that's about it.[/colorost_uid0]

[Nan]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0="NAHTMMM"]"Warped"? Yes, that's pretty good. But it's also quite dark...IMO, the best stand-alone DS9 novels (that I've read) are "Warchild", "The Long Night", and possibly "Warped".[/quoteost_uid0]

Warped, yes, that's it. Warchild and the Long Night have a somewhat similar style... though I saw the "twist" coming in Warchild from the beginning, sadly.

[quoteost_uid0]I've seen several posts on TrekBBS that denigrate Carey. I generally enjoy her stuff, though I really disliked "Ship of the Line". But I enjoyed reading "The Great Starship Race", and "First Frontier" (which I've been rereading for a freelance fiver) is quite readable too, if you can get past (and comprehend) the twist that gets the plot going. I guess Carey might be kind of like Vonda McIntyre: there are many who really enjoy her work, and many who despise it.[/quoteost_uid0]

I don't really mind her OTHER stuff, but I don't like the style she uses in Trek. The whole "explain things continually to the reader" style really bugs me! It's used really often, particularly in Trek. I prefer the style wherein the author plunks you down in a universe and you understand things by absorbing and sorting things out yourself. 'Dr. "Bones" McCoy and Captain James T. Kirk were great friends, blah blah blah." You can figure that out yourself without disrupting the flow of the story and wasting page space.

[quoteost_uid0]I haven't read her "Equinox".[/quoteost_uid0]

Dear lord, DON'T. The novelization hacked out everything that made the episode worth watching for me. Actually, see the episode and then read the book. Then you'll understand.

The "Captain's Table" novel she did left me gagging simply from the lack of Janeway-consistent content. Mind, if anyone's been written really inconsistently it's been Janeway. Insert YABB here.

[quoteost_uid0]My favorite stand-alone VOY novels are "The Murdered Sun" and "Incident at Arbuk".[/quoteost_uid0]
Read "The Murdered Sun." Is "Incident at Arbuk" the one with the really arguementative people?

[quoteost_uid0]The Zahn trilogy is the best-written of the Star Wars bunch, but the Corellian trilogy might be the most entertaining for me. But even it definitely has its deficiencies.[/quoteost_uid0]

*splutters*
D-d-d-deficiencies...? That series hurt my brain.

[quoteost_uid0]I haven't read any of the other series you've mentioned. [/quoteost_uid0]

Stay AWAY from the X-Men novelization! It should be burned for the public good!

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention (shame on me) the [iost_uid0]Stargate[/iost_uid0] novelization by whasiface and whassisname. I thought it wasn't bad. I'm not sure if the novel came before or after the film, but it doesn't suffer too many of the usual failings of a book "based on the screenplay by so and so."

Oh YEAH! CLARKE! What the hell is wrong with my brain?

I have most of the 2001 series, but I haven't read them yet. Also have "Cradle." Looks promising.

C'mon, Sa'ar, the star-mangled spanner thing was GREAT.

I read a bunch of stories from an anthology of his, but I had to bring it back to the library before I could finish. I like that he works his science out really carefully. Unlike certain OTHER people, no names mentioned due to the sheer number. Insert YABB here. Insert venom spitting to many other people here.

Niven's [iost_uid0]Ringworld[/iost_uid0] is supposed to be good. Anyone read it?

There's a book I've seen in my library (I work in it, as a page AKA book stacker) that about a sort of afterlife, and one of the characters is Alice Lidell. Liddell. Liddel. The inspiratrix for Carroll's Alice of "Alice in Wonderland." I think it's the Riverworld series. Anyone read it?

POST AMAZON SEARCH: The Riverworld series is based on the concept that all humans from the beginning of time are reincarnated after death in Riverworld, a place with a river ten million miles long. No one knows who made Riverworld or why they are there. The books are:

To Your Scattered Bodies Go
The Fabulous Riverboat
Quest to Riverworld
The Magic Labyrinth

[iost_uid0]From AudioFile
Philip Jose Farmer wrote fantasies that appealed primarily to imaginative male adolescents of the last mid-century. In this one humanity wakes, naked, to an every-man-for-himself afterlife. A tribe forms, consisting of, among others, daredevil explorer Richard F. Burton, Alice Liddel (the inspiration for ALICE IN WONDERLAND), a space alien, a Neanderthal, and a twenty-first century anthropologist.[/iost_uid0]

I dunno. I don't have the time to read it, but it sounds cool.

~Nan[/colorost_uid0]

[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.
[/quoteost_uid0]

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]

[Things Are Good]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Oh, I've read Ringworld. It's good.[/colorost_uid0]

[NAHTMMM]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0="Nan"][quoteost_uid0="NAHTMMM"]"Warped"? Yes, that's pretty good. But it's also quite dark...IMO, the best stand-alone DS9 novels (that I've read) are "Warchild", "The Long Night", and possibly "Warped".[/quoteost_uid0]

Warped, yes, that's it. Warchild and the Long Night have a somewhat similar style... though I saw the "twist" coming in Warchild from the beginning, sadly.[/quoteost_uid0]
Well, I didn't. If you go to just a little trouble to disguise your twists and don't use any old cliches I'm overly familiar with, I'm usually pretty easy to fool. :smile: But if I catch you out, well...it's probably bordering on awful if even I notice it, so you probably deserve whatever happens next. :O

[quoteost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]I've seen several posts on TrekBBS that denigrate Carey. I generally enjoy her stuff, though I really disliked "Ship of the Line". But I enjoyed reading "The Great Starship Race", and "First Frontier" (which I've been rereading for a freelance fiver) is quite readable too, if you can get past (and comprehend) the twist that gets the plot going. I guess Carey might be kind of like Vonda McIntyre: there are many who really enjoy her work, and many who despise it.[/quoteost_uid0]

I don't really mind her OTHER stuff, but I don't like the style she uses in Trek. The whole "explain things continually to the reader" style really bugs me! It's used really often, particularly in Trek. I prefer the style wherein the author plunks you down in a universe and you understand things by absorbing and sorting things out yourself. 'Dr. "Bones" McCoy and Captain James T. Kirk were great friends, blah blah blah." You can figure that out yourself without disrupting the flow of the story and wasting page space.[/quoteost_uid0]
I agree. That can be quite annoying. But I haven't really noticed that tendency with her. She does tend to heighten the tension by a similar process, I think.

[quoteost_uid0]Read "The Murdered Sun." Is "Incident at Arbuk" the one with the really arguementative people?[/quoteost_uid0]

[iost_uid0]Spoiler->[/iost_uid0] [color=whiteost_uid0]Yes.[/colorost_uid0] [iost_uid0]<-Spoiler[/iost_uid0]


Somebody's maligning Heinlein in the movies thread , so I'll add that I really like most of his short stories I've read. (We have a collection of them downstairs that is entitled "The Past Through Tomorrow".) He has an expository style of writing, and it could easily come off as irritating, but it works for me.

While we're on short stories, anyone else read any of the Cameroi (Camaroi?) satire? The two I've read are quite funny. [/colorost_uid0]

[PointyHairedJedi]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Oh, has anyone seen the film ersion of [iost_uid0]2010: Odyssey Two[/iost_uid0]? I though it was really rather good. I do have the book (and the one after), but I've yet to get round to reading them. I also like the four B's whom I should have mentioned before - Benford, Bova, Baxter and Bear. A bit of Silverberg is always good too. Oh, and if you want somethin a bit different, you should definitely go for Ian Banks - his style of writing takes some getting used to, but believe me, it's worth it.

Pratchett is good! Very very good! He has actually written two SF novels - [iost_uid0]Strata[/iost_uid0] and [iost_uid0]Dark Side of the Sun[/iost_uid0] - that are pretty good.

Oh, and has anyone here read Kim Stanley Robinsons' [iost_uid0]Mars[/iost_uid0] trilogy? I'd like to know what you think of it if you have.[/colorost_uid0]

[Derek]

[quoteost_uid0="NAHTMMM"][color=#000000ost_uid0]Somebody's maligning Heinlein in the movies thread [/colorost_uid0][/quoteost_uid0]
[color=#000000ost_uid0]Yeah, that'd be me. [iost_uid0]I Will Fear No Evil[/iost_uid0] was a really, really awful book. I don't really know why I forced myself to finish it (wasn't an assignment or anything). Other Heinlein stuff has just never clicked for me. Even when the premise is good, his style is bad.

But I've noticed that my SF literary tastes are most agreeable with books published between 1930-1960. A lot of the negative utopia style books like [iost_uid0]Fahrenheit 451[/iost_uid0], [iost_uid0]1984[/iost_uid0], [iost_uid0]Brave New World[/iost_uid0], as well as Tolkein, Lewis, some Asimov, and a lot of the other early stuff as scifi was just getting off the ground.[/colorost_uid0]

[Zeke]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]You can't beat Ray Bradbury for written sf. John Wyndham is also good, and I do like Heinlein, though some of the social elements are rather outdated (the way women are treated in [iost_uid0]Orphans of the Sky[/iost_uid0] and [iost_uid0]Double Star[/iost_uid0], for example). Another, somewhat underrated sf author is C. S. Lewis, not for the Narnia books (which aren't underrated) but for the so-called Cosmic Trilogy starting with [iost_uid0]Out of the Silent Planet[/iost_uid0].

As for Trek novels, one word: [iost_uid0]Millennium[/iost_uid0].[/colorost_uid0]

[Derek]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0="Zeke"]the so-called Cosmic Trilogy starting with [iost_uid0]Out of the Silent Planet[/iost_uid0].[/quoteost_uid0]
I've also heard it called The Space Trilogy and The Ransom Adventures. I wish Lewis had written more scifi novels like this. He had a number of good short stories, and in a book of his unfinished works, he had started an interesting addition to the trilogy called [iost_uid0]The Dark Tower[/iost_uid0], which dealt more with time than space.

Then again I'm a CS Lewis gusher. He has written very few things that I have not found extremely profound, insightful, and enjoyable. His outlook and perspective on things is very accesible to me. I wish I could have known him. (I'd settle for being able to listen in to converstions between him and Tolkien as they develop their respective works.)[/colorost_uid0]

[PointyHairedJedi]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]John Wyndham is also good..[/quoteost_uid0]

You like John Wyndham too? Fantastic. I've been a fan of his books for a long time - no-one does the ole' apocolyptic story better than him, [iost_uid0]Day of the Triffids[/iost_uid0] of course being the most famous. Peter Dickinson's [iost_uid0]Changes Trilogy[/iost_uid0] is pretty good too if you like that kind of thing, though it's more like fantasy than SF.[/colorost_uid0]

[Nan]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Ray Bradbury's stuff is a little softer than Clarke's, but there's no denying he's a master.


A little OT, being a movie, but what did you all think of "A.I." in the speculative fiction genre?


~Nan, who liked Bicentennial Man (the story)[/colorost_uid0]

[Sa'ar Chasm]

[color=#000000ost_uid0][quoteost_uid0]Oh, and has anyone here read Kim Stanley Robinsons' Mars trilogy? I'd like to know what you think of it if you have.[/quoteost_uid0]

Bloody awful. I managed to struggle through all three weighty tomes (in the wrong order: Green, Red, Blue) because the various technological gizmos and scientific wizardry held my interest.

[quoteost_uid0]some of the social elements are rather outdated [/quoteost_uid0]

A lot of the golden age stories make references to closing circuits or contacts and tripping relays, rather that hitting buttons or flipping switches. Computing seems to be a rather labourious process too, involving city-block sized banks of vaccuum tubes and several hours to figure out a simple orbital problem. These days a desktop computer could work that hour very quickly. It's always interesting to see what people in 1950 thought 2000 would be like.[/colorost_uid0]

[Nan]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]MULTIVAC!

Woo! Repr'[iost_uid0]sent[/iost_uid0], yo.

All the Troubles of the World
The Last Question
etc...

Nan[/colorost_uid0]

[PointyHairedJedi]

[color=#000000ost_uid0]Well, not everything was outdated. [iost_uid0]2001[/iost_uid0] was pretty modern in that respect, which is surprising considering when it was written. HAL was certainly a bit more advanced than vacuum tubes.[/colorost_uid0]