Space opera or soft sci-fi. Hard sci-fi in my experience spends a little too much time justifying what's happening and I don't think I've ever read a book in that genre that I liked.
So... no Cyteen.
I found this book fascinating, because every time I read it I find nuances I hadn't noticed before, and new things to think about. And there's some very good Cyteen fanfic around, some of it so good that Cherryh couldn't have done a better job herself.
You've mentioned Ben Bova before, or maybe I just remember you mentioning it to someone else, so that will likely be the first series I try out after I finish the Harry Potter books.
Hobbsyoyo and I both like the Grand Tour books, and Bova has written a lot of other SF books as well. When you do start, I suggest going with
Moonrise and
Moonwar. They introduce the rivalry between the Americans and Japanese to set up a working Moonbase, and bring in the issue of nanotechnology (its pros and cons; it can save a life or be used as a terrible weapon, depending on the intentions and morals of the people who use it). After that, I'd suggest the Mars trilogy, which is a straightforward adventure about a multinational group of scientists and astronauts going to Mars, setting up a base, and... what happens next. The protagonist is a Navajo geologist, so that provides an interesting perspective.
Accessibility, I suppose. A lot of the fantasy novels I have tried reading spend a lot of time describing everything, and I find that to be a bore. I don't visualize things in my head so it all ends up acting as filler instead of content for me. I specifically want the opposite of DragonLance, where the most minute aspect of every single scene is drawled on about for over a page at a time. I don't mind detail but there's a point where it's just noise because the descriptions mean nothing to someone who can't see them.
I recently got a book from Tor called City of Lies. High fantasy. Exact same issue. So much verbose description of everything. Saying there's a man in front of the character becomes a three paragraph affair. It drives me crazy.
The opposite of Dragonlance, but still fantasy? Can you give some other examples of what you like? I've got a lot of fantasy stuff around here but have no idea how much description is too much.
Or maybe you actually would like my Fighting Fantasy fanfiction, since I can't describe a sword fight to save my life. The hero swings here and hits, parries there, occasionally casts a spell, and eventually the monster ends up dead.
It was several Presidents ago. Cherryh was not the headliner for the convention. That was Ted Sturgeon, so he was still alive. Cyteen is an interesting thought experiment, but not her best work IMO. Downbelow Station is difficult to read. The villain is too realistic. We have an example of a similar mindset here in the forum.
Who do you consider the villain of
Downbelow Station? It would be obvious to say Conrad Mazian, but consider how the azi were presented in that novel. They were ten times creepier than the creepiest azi in Cyteen. Ariane Emory Senior was alive at that time, and she would scare anyone.
That said, it was the setting for the first question I asked, "Which came first, Captain Mallory or the Norway." Her answer was, basically, the company wars came first. That meant a fleet, a flagship, and a Commanding officer in that order.
In retrospect, this is the first time I encountered one of Cherryh's themes--men sexually used and abused by women. It's extensive in Cyteen.
J
Interesting.
I'm going to disagree with you on your last point, though, at least to an extent. Ari Senior uses and abuses men, yes. What she did to Justin Warrick (and indirectly to Grant) is disgusting and unforgivable.
But Ari II isn't like that. In fact she was used and abused by her uncles (not sexually, though it was extremely creepy and revolting that they were taping her in the bathroom with the excuse that it was part of "the Project" and they needed the data), but in other ways. In fact, once Ari II found out what her predecessor had done to Justin and Grant, she felt physically ill and did everything she could to mitigate the psychological damage, the years of damage done to their personal and professional reputations among their colleagues, and while she realized that she had the knowledge and power to abuse them as Ari Senior had, she had the integrity and honor not to do it. She made sure that they knew she was okay with them living their own lives, without interference from her and anyone else in Reseune.
The following paragraph in the post you quoted explains it pretty well, although maybe that's still too subjective to be useful. In the Tor book I'm reading, City of Lies, the main character enters a dockyard and a description of the place took up over 3 pages. A span of about 10-15 minutes in the story takes up over 15 pages and all that happened during it was entering the dockyard and stopping a fight. That's too much, for me. I need faster pacing.
