Science fiction discussion

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Rodeo Roadrunner dijo:
Supremely underrated. "The Stars My Destination" is actually my favorite scifi novel ever: short enough to read in a day, blistering pace that reminds me of a thriller, highly focused on a few specific scifi concepts and explores them to their limits, intriguing main character, great plot and side characters, and brilliant ending.
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I love it too - I agree that it stands up to re-reading, but what a thrill reading it the first time! If anyone here doesn't already know it, it's set in a future where humans can teleport at will. Bester takes that to fascinating conclusions (for example, how do you build a prison when your prisoners can teleport away?), but it's also an epic-scale adventure with unforgettable characters.
Rodeo Roadrunner dijo:
Has anyone read any of Hannu Rajaniemi?
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I read The Quantum Thief years ago and enjoyed it - it's a dense idea-packed book that makes you sit and puzzle over every page, but it's worth it. Summerland sounds intriguing. I've been bogged down in van Vogt's The Weapon Makers - it's not a bad book, I'm just not feeling any momentum to finish it. I'll look into Summerland.
 
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This cover is a damn lie.

Maybe it's just me, but I thought I was getting some based hardcore metal shit, and instead I got 700 pages of some angry manlet's origin story. I swear a good 600 pages takes place on some backwater planet where the protagonist just wanders around doing random busy work. It's like if the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy was entirely about Peter in high school just dicking around and wasting time until just before the end credits in the final movie he hails a cab to take him to Oscorp.
 
Quarterback Rex Grossman dijo:
This cover is a damn lie.

Maybe it's just me, but I thought I was getting some based hardcore metal shit, and instead I got 700 pages of some angry manlet's origin story. I swear a good 600 pages takes place on some backwater planet where the protagonist just wanders around doing random busy work. It's like if the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy was entirely about Peter in high school just dicking around and wasting time until just before the end credits in the final movie he hails a cab to take him to Oscorp.
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Haven't read it. For some reason I looked it up few days ago, and noticed on Goodreads there is a massive spergout how it's just a ripoff of The Name of the Wind, and Dune.
 
After reading through Ian Banks's Sci-Fi qua shaggy dog story fetish qua existentialist rumination that is The Culture series, the works of Alastair Reynolds are unnervingly straightforward: Reynolds is dropping breadcrumbs... And they're being dutifully followed, each into an encounter, an elucidation, an important plot point? He's setting up objectives... And they're not being unceremoniously derailed? I'm more relieved than I am disappointed, but there is some disappointment nonetheless.

Apart for my distaste for the characterization in Surface Detail, I'm still impressed with how well Ian used the backdrop of materialist utopia to accentuate rather than damper his protagonists' existential torments. I'm also impressed with how well Ian toyed with protagonist and reader expectations for his plots: half of his books are human characters being led by the nose to God knows where, with me having to remind myself that things aren't going to go how I feel they will because I know Ian is only making this plot direction look plausible to fuck with me and also make me empathize more with the character who also believes their life is on the same trajectory as Ian has led me to think because otherwise why would they be willingly going down that path - and then they get duped, or killed, or it will turn out they really weren't important at all, and really all anyone got out of it was the character development along the way - or you get characters like Zakalwe or Quilan, where there's hardly even an illusion that the plot is the point for their stories, the plot is just there to get a good look at their psychological torments.
 
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crowabunga dijo:
After reading through Ian Banks's Sci-Fi qua shaggy dog story fetish qua existentialist rumination that is The Culture series, the works of Alastair Reynolds are unnervingly straightforward: Reynolds is dropping breadcrumbs... And they're being dutifully followed, each into an encounter, an elucidation, an important plot point? He's setting up objectives... And they're not being unceremoniously derailed? I'm more relieved than I am disappointed, but there is some disappointment nonetheless.

Apart for my distaste for the characterization in Surface Detail, I'm still impressed with how well Ian used the backdrop of materialist utopia to accentuate rather than damper his protagonists' existential torments. I'm also impressed with how well Ian toyed with protagonist and reader expectations for his plots: half of his books are human characters being led by the nose to God knows where, with me having to remind myself that things aren't going to go how I feel they will because I know Ian is only making this plot direction look plausible to fuck with me and also make me empathize more with the character who also believes their life is on the same trajectory as Ian has led me to think because otherwise why would they be willingly going down that path - and then they get duped, or killed, or it will turn out they really weren't important at all, and really all anyone got out of it was the character development along the way - or you get characters like Zakalwe or Quilan, where there's hardly even an illusion that the plot is the point for their stories, the plot is just there to get a good look at their psychological torments.
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I haven't read all of The Culture series, but I do recall 'The Player of Games' and 'The Use of Weapons' quite fondly. Those were quite good.
 
crowabunga dijo:
After reading through Ian Banks's Sci-Fi qua shaggy dog story fetish qua existentialist rumination that is The Culture series, the works of Alastair Reynolds are unnervingly straightforward: Reynolds is dropping breadcrumbs... And they're being dutifully followed, each into an encounter, an elucidation, an important plot point? He's setting up objectives... And they're not being unceremoniously derailed? I'm more relieved than I am disappointed, but there is some disappointment nonetheless.

Apart for my distaste for the characterization in Surface Detail, I'm still impressed with how well Ian used the backdrop of materialist utopia to accentuate rather than damper his protagonists' existential torments. I'm also impressed with how well Ian toyed with protagonist and reader expectations for his plots: half of his books are human characters being led by the nose to God knows where, with me having to remind myself that things aren't going to go how I feel they will because I know Ian is only making this plot direction look plausible to fuck with me and also make me empathize more with the character who also believes their life is on the same trajectory as Ian has led me to think because otherwise why would they be willingly going down that path - and then they get duped, or killed, or it will turn out they really weren't important at all, and really all anyone got out of it was the character development along the way - or you get characters like Zakalwe or Quilan, where there's hardly even an illusion that the plot is the point for their stories, the plot is just there to get a good look at their psychological torments.
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goddamnit quit making me want to add to my TBR list in my lifetime.

I'm intrigued by Banks and Alastair Reynolds but it'll be a while before I get to them.

in the meantime, anyone got thoughts on Robert Silverberg? I just got a copy of Phases of the Moon (his best short fiction selected by himself) and that '00s SFBC omnibus Other Dimensions, which has The Man in the Maze (1969); Nightwings (1969); Up the Line (1969); Dying Inside (1972). Also picked up The World Inside at a garage sale this week.

I did like some of his non-fiction and whatnot.
 
I'm starting to appreciate Alastair Reynolds for his restraint. He could have written page-turning thrillers, but all of his escalations that I've encountered so far crescendo at a tolerable level: there are monstrous villains and horrible events, but Alastair never dwells on them for the sake of creating urgency, nor does he indulge in drawn-out catastrophes.

For example, there's a part in Terminal World where zombie cyborgs escape containment on an airship. It gets resolved in less than a chapter, in a sensible manner, with a minimum of death. Or in House of Suns, when a robot is on death's door and in need of assistance by a transhuman superintelligence, the prognosis is portrayed as dire but there's no dirty tricks pulled to keep me flipping pages, no sense of a known ticking clock the protagonists can measure themselves against.

Now, if thrill and urgency is what you want, this is no good; go read A Fire Upon the Deep if you want well-written disaster cascades, episodes of nail-biting tension half a book long, and last-minute victories. But given how straightforward Alastair Reynolds is to read, I appreciate that, in what I've read of him, he doesn't try and produce cheap engrossment by drawing things out. It's the prose equivalent of putting on a classic Doctor Who serial, where the heart-stopping moments only last long enough to create a good episode cliffhanger, but otherwise things respectably plod along even when the world is at stake.

(Fittingly enough, Alastair has written a novel set in the classic Doctor Who continuity.)
 
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crowabunga dijo:
I'm starting to appreciate Alastair Reynolds for his restraint. He could have written page-turning thrillers, but all of his escalations that I've encountered so far crescendo at a tolerable level: there are monstrous villains and horrible events, but Alastair never dwells on them for the sake of creating urgency, nor does he indulge in drawn-out catastrophes.

For example, there's a part in Terminal World where zombie cyborgs escape containment on an airship. It gets resolved in less than a chapter, in a sensible manner, with a minimum of death. Or in House of Suns, when a robot is on death's door and in need of assistance by a transhuman superintelligence, the prognosis is portrayed as dire but there's no dirty tricks pulled to keep me flipping pages, no sense of a known ticking clock the protagonists can measure themselves against.

Now, if thrill and urgency is what you want, this is no good; go read A Fire Upon the Deep if you want well-written disaster cascades, episodes of nail-biting tension half a book long, and last-minute victories. But given how straightforward Alastair Reynolds is to read, I appreciate that, in what I've read of him, he doesn't try and produce cheap engrossment by drawing things out. It's the prose equivalent of putting on a classic Doctor Who serial, where the heart-stopping moments only last long enough to create a good episode cliffhanger, but otherwise things respectably plod along even when the world is at stake.

(Fittingly enough, Alastair has written a novel set in the classic Doctor Who continuity.)
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I used to read a lot of Reynolds but gave up at Revenger (2016) as it was verging on pozzed. Maybe I knee-jerked too much but I just couldn't get through it, and had just bounced off Peter F Hamilton's they/them rubbish if I recall correctly. That said, House of Suns and Pushing Ice are two of my all-time favourites.
edit: I see Revenger is "YA". That explains everything.
 
Alexander Thaut dijo:
I feel like Alfred Bester, Poul Anderson, and Roger Zelazny are underrated.
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what kind of drugs are you on to list some of the founding fathers of Sci-Fi as "underrated".

Any semi serious science fiction fan will have read and be familiar with all their works. Anderson is the father of hard sci-fi and Zalazny is the father of soft fantasy sci-fi.

Seriously stop with the meth son, it's not good for you.
 
Sweeter and Savoury dijo:
what kind of drugs are you on to list some of the founding fathers of Sci-Fi as "underrated".

Any semi serious science fiction fan will have read and be familiar with all their works. Anderson is the father of hard sci-fi and Zalazny is the father of soft fantasy sci-fi.

Seriously stop with the meth son, it's not good for you.
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The father of modern hard SF isn't Anderson per se. He's a major proponent, but you have plenty of candidates prior tp him entering the biz in the late '40s. Asimov, Clarke, even arguably Verne. Anderson pops up at the end of the '40s. Hard SF was already sort of a thing with Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and whatnot. Jules Verne's the original proponent of hard SF, historically. Is there something I'm not quite aware of here with Anderson and hard SF pioneering? I get it if you call him one of the major foundations of modern SF as we know it. Man was one of the few SF writers who earned a living doing it in the '50s, was the SFWA president, and seemed to be a hell of a guy. His work seems to be extremely widely available via second-hand market and kindle shop (lol Open Road Media). Hell, NESFA couldn't finish getting all his short works into their Collected Short Works series because it's absurdly lengthy. (It seems that his estate's a pain to work with).

I do see where you're coming from because shit like Tau Zero continues to hold up. But be familiar AND having read all of their works? Zelazny's one thing. He died before his time and didn't get made into an SFWA Grandmaster yet. Would you call Anderson a father of hard SF? Tau Zero's considered one of the big time classic hard SF works, but I've seen Anderson also well known for his fantasy, space operas, and "fantasy with rivets".

Zelazny, maybe. I just don't see people talk about him outside of This Immortal, Lord of Light, and the Amber books. His short work's beautiful and I'm never going to ever go back to reading Gaiman after reading Zelazny. Rose for Ecclesiastes is kino.

Zelazny's great. Liked This Immortal and Lord of Light.

I'm just sad that I don't hear much about them nowadays. I' picked them up as I got into this hobby again. Anderson's Tau Zero, Broken Sword, Three Hearts-Three Lions, and every thing else I've picked up is on my list to read. I love the High Crusade. I find Anderson to be an extremely well-rounded writer who practiced what he preached. He wrote to entertain, but was capable of writing gems like Broken Sword and Tau Zero that still seem to hold up.


I think there's a line between semi-serious SF fans of the older stuff and "modern SF" fans that I seem to encounter more often who are maybe familiar with only the dozen or so really really famous older names of Wells/Verne+Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein+PKD/Herbert/Vonnegut/le Guin/Silverberg/Ellison+ Butler and whatever's big in the modern "sphere". I'm aware that the old hands are still fairly read and enjoyed by plenty (I've met de Camp, Pohl, Williamson, and etc. fans on occasion).

It certainly does feel weird because you called me out on those two but not Alfred Bester being the grandfather of cyberpunk. But I also do think Bester's under-appreciated now and his SF bibliography is like 8 books.


That being said, any thoughts on Pohl or Brunner? I keep seeing their works pop up when I wind up going out to visit used bookstores.
 
I didn't know that the new Starship Troopers audiobook version by RC bray was out. I listened to a sample and he does a really good job. It's funny he kind of sounds like Sergeant Johnson from Halo for one of the characters. Gave it a download. Apparently it took so long to come out because he was getting throat surgery. I do wish Michael ironside would do audiobooks. He would be great and him doing ST would have been perfect
 
I got to thinking, there's a lotta discussion on SF novels in the 60s onwards, and in the Wells-Verne wave. But what are the best SF novels in the Golden Age of Science Fiction? Who are the best pure novelists? The Golden Age is widely considered to have started in '39 when Campbell takes editorship of Astounding. As for when it ends? Some people list the early 50s, others say it ends in the early 60s. Personally, I think you could say it ends in the mid-late 50s. Maybe with the last Heinlein juvenile (Have Space suit, will travel).

Now, the Golden Age of Science Fiction was more known for short forms. A lot of these were bundled into "fix-up novels" and anthologies or collections. A lot of the hardcover novels of SF at this time were pumped out by Gnome/Shasta/Fantasy presses or relatedly similar small presses. Doubleday also popped up with their science fiction line. And then there's the paperbacks and etc. Point is, the science fiction novel started rising to full prominence somewhere here. Yeah, you had Wells and Verne and others beforehand. But they're history by the Golden Age.
 
I'm back to give Alastair Reynolds even more credit: I'm starting the Revelation Space series, and I'm pleased that Reynolds at least somewhat respects the hard problem of consciousness and the teletransporter problem, but without ruminating too long on them, either: it's refreshing to see an AI backup of a dead guy just come out and essentially say, "yeah, that dead guy ain't me, I'm just a duplicate but I'm also the only one alive now so suck it, dead guy, I'll usurp your spot" instead of prattling on in tortured existential rumination.
 
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