SF books

[Leifmk]

Is anyone waiting for the final Honor Harrington book?

Nope.

I enjoyed the first few books when I read them back in the day, but then I ruined that whole "age of sail warfare but in space" subgenre for myself by going and reading Patrick O'Brian.

 

[gozpel]

Valka D'Ur: Tanith Lee links would be nice.

And I found the book I read so long time ago, It was The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson, also called The last redoubt. I read 4 chapters today, and my goodness what weird English he used. And it not 600 pages, only 584...lol

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10662?msg=welcome_stranger

 

[tjs282]

I read The Complete Robot, which comprises I, Robot, and some other short story collections, including The Bicentennial Man, and loved every bit of it. I must get round to reading the Foundation books at some point.

While I love Asimov's ideas (and his humanism), I find his writing-style fairly pedestrian, and not particularly inspiring in its own right.

The original Foundation trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) is a case in point. For all they're rightly lauded for their scale and vision, they're basically a slap-it-together-and-plaster-over-the-gaps patchup-job of various short stories and novellas which he wrote/published (in non-'chronological' order) over the preceding 5-10 years, and which I didn't think actually hung together all that well. So I was never much inclined to read the later-written sequels/prequels — though I do know that at some point he (or one of his collaborators?) tied the Foundation storiverse to the Daneel Olivaw character (from The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn), and hence the 'US Robots' stories.

Mini-rave:

I made an account at Project Gutenberg some years back, and already DL'd a substantial number of early SF/Fantasy titles (from before it was even called that!) by folks like L Frank Baum, Mary Shelley, RL Stephenson, Jules Verne, HG Wells; along with some older classics (e.g. Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Conan-Doyle, GK Chesterton, and Twain).

But after following @gozpel's link above, I just searched 'science fiction' out of idle curiosity, and found a bundle of early 20th-century (SF) authors I had no idea would even be there (though I really should have, given that many of the titles were published >50 years ago now). It looks like they've also got most/all of Burroughs' Barsoom books, Smith's Lensman series, and a number of PKDs I haven't read before; plus a few from Fritz Leiber, MZ Bradley, Clifford Simak, Andre Norton, James Blish, and Harry Harrison (I read and loved most of The Stainless Steel Rat books when I was 11 or 12), among others.

Which is great, because most of what I've been reading over the past couple of years has been stuff off my shelf that I've already read, sometimes 2 or 3 times (albeit over the course of 2 or 3 decades). So, I guess I know what I'll be doing this evening/ week...

 

[Arakhor]

Extra Credits recently did a series of short videos on Asimov. They concluded (amongst other things) that Asimov is notable for his revolutionary ideas and for inspiring many other writers, not because he was an amazing writer.

 

[gozpel]

What? Did this thread almost die?

Where are you peeps?

 

[CKS]

On his official site, David Weber has provided the first third of Uncompromising Honor for free download. http://www.davidweber.net/downloads/45-first-third-of-uh.html

J

Baen puts out a lot of ebooks for publicity. Besides their free library, they put promotional CDs full of ebooks in a bunch of hard-cover editions. You can get copies of the promotional CDs at http://ebooks.thefifthimperium.com/ - there are about 20 of them, each with many books, though some of them are duplicates.

 

[onejayhawk]

Baen puts out a lot of ebooks for publicity. Besides their free library, they put promotional CDs full of ebooks in a bunch of hard-cover editions. You can get copies of the promotional CDs at http://ebooks.thefifthimperium.com/ - there are about 20 of them, each with many books, though some of them are duplicates.

Not anymore. When Jim Baen died, that outreach stopped. If you go to that site, the links are live but the links to actual books are dead.

J

 

[Uberfrog]

As foreshadowed earlier in this thread, this week N K Jemisin became the first author to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three times in a row (for each part of her Broken Earth trilogy): http://www.thehugoawards.org/2018/08/2018-hugo-award-winners/

The full list of nominees might make for a good reading list. I've only read The Stone Sky, but as I'm on a sci-fi kick recently I plan to start making my way through some of them.