SF books

[Synobun]

Space Roman Empire! My Romanophile friend will love this news.

 

[Ajidica]

Just be aware that some of the modern reprints have THE WORST COVER ART EVER PRINTE; but the seventies reprints have pretty good cover art.



Also, another series like the Stainless Steel Rate is the James Retief series by Keith Laumer (he also did the Bolo series). The books are a satirization of the authors time in the US Diplomatic Service and are genuinely quite funny.

 

[Cutlass]

Before switching to punny fantasy, Piers Anthony did some interesting scifi. Can't even find it any longer.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Before switching to punny fantasy, Piers Anthony did some interesting scifi. Can't even find it any longer.

His "Cluster" series is exactly that!

 

[Takhisis]

Good question. I'm not 100% sure which one; my friend picked it up in audiobook format for my ride back up to Canada last month. I played no part in its selection and so do not know the name or author. The one where Tanis and Flynt meet and they're chased by people (goblins? orcs?) through the woods and across a lake, yada yada yada. Except it took 4-5 hours to get to that point. That's a given since it was an audiobook, but it definitely felt like it took far too long compared to what had happened thus far.

Oh no. If I'm right, you've been given one of those from the very early times (btw it's Flint with an I, Flint Ironforge) when you could practically hear the dice rolling and the entire plot and roster of characters was an ongoing D&D adventure.
I shudder to think what it must be like to actually listen to somebody reading it out loud.

btw if you get far enough into Dragonlance you'll start finding my name a lot.

 

[Ferocitus]

For Lem I would recommend Solaris.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Eden, The Invincible were nowhere near as good as
those we've mentioned so far.

The Futurological Congress and Star Diaries are well worth a try. Episodic stories
rather than novels, so good for a night-time read.

I used to read until I got so tired that I could only see out of one eye. When
that eye got "tired" I'd try with the other one. Eventually, vision in both eyes
was blurred and sleep was necessary. My partner is the only other person I know
that did that.
Anyone else?

 

[onejayhawk]

Poul Anderson wrote The High Crusade and the Hoka stories among many others. He's a great option for lighter reading.

If you want space opera, consider Ryk Spoor's Grand Central Arena books and Gordon Dickson's Dorsai saga (aka the Childe Cycle) and Dragon Errant (The Dragon and the George etc.)

For light fantasy (though technically SF) Christopher Stasheff's Wizard in Rhyme series.

I have been criminally remiss in not mentioning Stevan Brust's Vlad Taltos series.

J

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Been reading Science Fiction since Going to the Moon was Sci-Fi, not History, so here are some older entries...

Randall Garrett's Too Many Magicians - came out in the same year as Dune, so Nobody Noticed, but it has Alternate History, a Locked Room
Murder Mystery, spies, a Sherlock Holmesian main character, and Forensic Sorcery, a concept which by itself should have gotten him a Hugo.

Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts - and almost any of the short stories also featuring Nicholas van Rijn - Space Opera with a very slippery protagonist.

H. Beam Piper's Lord Kalvin of Otherwhen - and his entire Paratime series of short stories and novellas: alternate history done right, with a rigorous background. Then, if you can find it, his short story The Man Who Walked Around the Horses, which is still one of my favorite short stories in any genre.

Eliot Pattison's only Sci-Fi novel: Ashes of the Earth - a post-apocalyptic story with one of the most stunning opening lines ever written. Because he also writes a fantastic mystery series, his idiot publisher marketed it as a mystery, which it isn't.

And Frank Herbert did write something else almost as good as Dune, and very different: Dragon in the Sea (also released as Under Pressure) - future submarine warfare in which the pressure of the deep is on the individual men as well as the boat.

And last but far from least, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light - science fiction based on religion - sort of, maybe, but fiendishly good.

 

[Takhisis]

Has anybody suggested Slan by A.E. van Vogt yet?

 

[Ferocitus]

Has anybody suggested Slan by A.E. van Vogt yet?

No. I suggested his Null-A series for its historical significance.

 

[Birdjaguar]

And last but far from least, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light - science fiction based on religion - sort of, maybe, but fiendishly good.

Certainly excellent!! And from the same era Macroscope by Piers Anthony and another Zelazny book: Jack of shadows.

 

[Ferocitus]

Really? Do you have a citation?

I hope you don't mind if I qualify the connection I gave between The Cyberiad
and the first version of Civilization...

Influence can be a very nebulous term when applied to games and literature and
it's easy to overstate, or overfit, some points that are unintentional.
A case in point...

A long, long time ago my partner and I decided we'd like to try cobbling
together various images for a music video. The urge passed until we were
watching Lost one night (well before the execrable final season).
In that episode I saw some pictures that had been cut out and stuck to the wall
of a room and, being somewhere to one end of the spectrum that dares not speak
its name on CFC, I remembered a song with many words, phrases and concepts
that I had seen in Lost.

"Parthenogenesis", "centaurs and monkeys", "priests and cannibals", "the dead
come home". What are the odds that the song, with all those words, was not an
influence on the (horrid) J.J. Abrams and his best-forgotten pal?
"Let's drive fans mad", I cackled, and 24 hours later we had our video.

Sim City was influenced by The Cyberiad, according to one of the programmers,
Will Wright, but it's still a bit of a stretch to say that Civilization directly
benefited from concepts in the stories. Sid Meier is a smart guy - maybe he hit
upon the ideas for Civ independently of the book and it's me who is shoe-horning
a hypothesis to fit what looks like bleeding obvious facts. I'd be far more
confident if there was a direct quote from those involved in creating Civ.

 

[Leifmk]

Ilium and Olympos are both fantastic

I beg to differ; the point at which Simmons lost his freaking mind is clearly identifiable as being in the middle of writing that duology.

 

[Leifmk]

Has anyone mentioned Peter Watts' Blindsight yet? No? Then I must.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Does it spend all its time trying to convince you it's realistic? If not, I'm open to it.

So you prefer unrealistic science fiction?

Again, this is a bit vague, since different people have different ideas of what they consider realistic.

Cyteen takes place in the late 24th/early 25th centuries. While parts of it seem realistic to me, the overall setting has elements that I can't fathom at all.

I'm not trying to be difficult. But you're asking someone who has been into science fiction for over 40 years, fantasy for a bit less than that, and has read a wide variety of subgenres. Even the subgenres can be further broken down.

Ah, jeez, now you're putting me on the spot. I'm not sure. I am not great at remembering names, I had to look up all the author names in my original post. 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.

Which following paragraph?

Okay, you'd hate my Fighting Fantasy fanfic, then. It's taken two Camp NaNoWriMo sessions just for my character to visit a friend and run a few errands in the marketplace, and he's not done yet (still needs to pick up the cheese his friend's wife ordered, plus one or two other things). But that's first draft stuff, and I'm going into this level of detail to create my version of Stonebridge, not Ian Livingston's version. His version is full of dour dwarves who do nothing but drink and fight but at this point they're all hopelessly depressed and unmotivated to fight the hill trolls menacing their city because the King's warhammer was stolen (it's the protagonist's mission to find it). I found myself rolling my eyes at that, and decided to figure out something that isn't so silly.

If that's actually a thriving city and community, it needs some common sense fleshing out, with merchants, entertainers, explaining where the food supply comes from, the King's household and government, and ordinary people that include women and children. Subsequent drafts won't need so much detail, since I'll have a better idea in my own mind what the place and people are like. But at this point some of the extra-detailed descriptions have led to creating new characters, some of whom I'd like to learn more about.

Livingston wrote a game, but I'm taking the source material and expanding it into a story. Kinda like Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman did with Dragonlance (the first trilogy was based on a series of 12 AD&D modules featuring 12 dragons). Of course I won't be able to publish this since it's fanfiction and it might be entertaining only to myself and a few people over on the Fighting Fantazine forum. But I'm still happy with the results of my first draft of novelizing Caverns of the Snow Witch, and the more recent stuff has been original material bridging the gap between Caverns of the Snow Witch and Forest of Doom. A few questions needed answering, so I'm answering them.

We could team up.

That's a considerate offer. How familiar are you with the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks?

Good question. I'm not 100% sure which one; my friend picked it up in audiobook format for my ride back up to Canada last month. I played no part in its selection and so do not know the name or author. The one where Tanis and Flynt meet and they're chased by people (goblins? orcs?) through the woods and across a lake, yada yada yada. Except it took 4-5 hours to get to that point. That's a given since it was an audiobook, but it definitely felt like it took far too long compared to what had happened thus far.

Sounds like Kindred Spirits, in the Meetings Sextet (how the core group of the Heroes of the Lance first met, years before the events of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, which is the first Dragonlance novel published). Tanis Half-Elven never fit into Qualinesti society since his father was a human (and worse, the product of a rape), and became friends with Flint - a dwarf who preferred to travel in the upper world, rather than stay underground. It's been years since I last read it.

Are the original authors listed as Mark Anthony and Ellen Porath?

Niven did some good stuff on his own. Ringworld is still one of my favorite books and a lot of his short stories are great. His later stuff got lazy though when he had his own little "dirty old man" phase. Pournelle had some decent books, like Janissaries and King David's Spaceship, but some of his works, like the Falkenberg Legion stuff and most of the Co-Dominium books focusing on the Co-Dominium read a little to fashy for my liking.

My favorite Niven book is A Gift From Earth. The basic situation is that the human colony on Mount Lookitthat is divided along class lines - descendants of the original crew and descendants of the original colonists. The crew are the elite, and get the best of everything... including organ transplants. The colonists are the underclass, and used to supply the organs, blood, and whatever other body parts are needed to keep the crew class healthy. The "justice" system is set up so that there are many capital crimes, and the usual sentence is the Hospital, where the convicted person is killed and every bit of their body harvested and stored for future use. Even children aren't exempt from this.

It's not a situation the colonists can get away from, because there's literally nowhere they can go. Mount Lookitthat is a series of very high plateaus rising above a toxic atmosphere.

Synsena, I echo the early comment of Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat is good space opera fun. I also recommend Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry series of short stories. Think James Bond in Space during the Fall of the Space Roman Empire. Nice pulpy fun that ages surprisingly well by Poul Anderson's surprisingly well rounded treatment of Flandry's adversaries and the native populations he encounters on his secret missions through the collapsing Terran Empire.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories are excellent, as well.

Space Roman Empire! My Romanophile friend will love this news.

Does your friend read any Roman historical fiction that isn't science fiction?

Also, another series like the Stainless Steel Rate is the James Retief series by Keith Laumer (he also did the Bolo series). The books are a satirization of the authors time in the US Diplomatic Service and are genuinely quite funny.

I have the Retief books. They're a good read.

Oh no. If I'm right, you've been given one of those from the very early times (btw it's Flint with an I, Flint Ironforge) when you could practically hear the dice rolling and the entire plot and roster of characters was an ongoing D&D adventure.
I shudder to think what it must be like to actually listen to somebody reading it out loud.

That was my impression of Dragons of Autumn Twilight. At one point I thought, okay this is where they come to a crossroads in the dungeon. Do they go left, right, or straight ahead? Then a little further on, something else is presented to them, and I could mentally hear the dice rolls.

But that's a fault of the first novel... and even though it was immediately noticeable, I still found the story compelling enough to start collecting the series - novels, modules, source books. Some of the sheet music for the songs in the Chronicles Trilogy is wonderful - my favorites are the song Goldmoon sings in the Inn of the Last Home and Est Sularis (the hymn sung by the Solamnic Knights).

btw if you get far enough into Dragonlance you'll start finding my name a lot.

You were very mean to Raistlin.

Poul Anderson wrote The High Crusade and the Hoka stories among many others. He's a great option for lighter reading.

If you want space opera, consider Ryk Spoor's Grand Central Arena books and Gordon Dickson's Dorsai saga (aka the Childe Cycle) and Dragon Errant (The Dragon and the George etc.)

The High Crusade was made into a movie.

Fun fact: Poul Anderson's daughter, Astrid, married SF author Greg Bear. I've met both Anderson and Bear at conventions.


I highly recommend the Dorsai novels. Dickson had an interesting take on interstellar economies.

 

[Synobun]

So you prefer unrealistic science fiction?

Again, this is a bit vague, since different people have different ideas of what they consider realistic.

Sorry, I'm not explaining myself very well. I don't like science fiction that spends most of its time trying to convince you that it's realistic. Like an insecure SO that spends each day trying to convince you they really do love you even though you took their word for it on the first day. I'm fine with realistic sci-fi, but not fine with it when the majority of the writing revolves around telling you why it's realistic. I'm trying to think of an example but no names are coming to mind; I got a short story anthology a while ago through the free section on Amazon for hard sci-fi and it really just felt like I was reading would-be tech manuals.

Which following paragraph?

It is partly why I like Robert J Crane's Sanctuary series so much. Nobody will read his work and call them intellectual masterpieces, but they're easy to read and they get to the point without completely sacrificing detail. Action-oriented, I suppose. The exposition leads directly to conflict and isn't used to just hammer on and on about the setting.

Does your friend read any Roman historical fiction that isn't science fiction?

Yeah. I don't know if he'd actually like a "Space Roman Empire" in fiction. He always writes it during our roleplaying forums though, so it seems like something he'd be into...

Sounds like Kindred Spirits, in the Meetings Sextet (how the core group of the Heroes of the Lance first met, years before the events of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, which is the first Dragonlance novel published). Tanis Half-Elven never fit into Qualinesti society since his father was a human (and worse, the product of a rape), and became friends with Flint - a dwarf who preferred to travel in the upper world, rather than stay underground. It's been years since I last read it.

Are the original authors listed as Mark Anthony and Ellen Porath?

No, I don't think that's it. The book never mentioned anything about working in a city or anything like that. Tanis and Flint met up with their friends and talked about a staff.

Looking it up (I only remembered the staff bit 10 minutes ago, and that was apparently all I needed to find it ), it was Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Its synopsis matches what I remember exactly.

In the first chapter of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Tanis meets up with the companions five years after they had split to find proof of the true gods.[7] He is their assumed leader. On his way into the Inn, Tanis meets up with Flint and Tas. They encounter Fewmaster Toede, who sets his goblins upon them. They fight them off, but are disturbed at their peaceful town of Solace being controlled by the Highseekers and the goblin patrols. When they get to the Inn of the Last Home, the companions discuss things. In short, none have found any proof of the true gods. In addition, Kitiara has left a letter saying she will not be there. However, upon assembling in the Inn, they encounter Sturm, who has with him two barbarian plainspeople, Goldmoon and Riverwind. The woman, Goldmoon, carries a Blue Crystal Staff, which Toede had mentioned to Tanis.

 

[Dachs]

I beg to differ; the point at which Simmons lost his freaking mind is clearly identifiable as being in the middle of writing that duology.

Yeah, that's why I put that disclaimer there. Like, there's a bunch of good stuff but also...yeesh.

PRE-9/11 AND SECOND INTIFADA MUSLIMS IN SIMMONS BOOKS: Fedmahn Kassad, extremely cool and generally heroic supersoldier
POST-9/11 AND SECOND INTIFADA MUSLIMS IN SIMMONS BOOKS: the Global Caliphate that wanted to murder all Jews

I thought that there was enough cool stuff in there, mostly with the moravecs, to prevent the books from being totally unredeemable, but that might just be because I read them first.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Sorry, I'm not explaining myself very well. I don't like science fiction that spends most of its time trying to convince you that it's realistic. Like an insecure SO that spends each day trying to convince you they really do love you even though you took their word for it on the first day. I'm fine with realistic sci-fi, but not fine with it when the majority of the writing revolves around telling you why it's realistic. I'm trying to think of an example but no names are coming to mind; I got a short story anthology a while ago through the free section on Amazon for hard sci-fi and it really just felt like I was reading would-be tech manuals.

Okay, let me give some examples. There's a trilogy I really like called The Phoenix Legacy, by M.K. Wren (Sword of the Lamb, Shadow of the Swan, House of the Wolf). The premise is that post-WWIII, civilization was knocked back to about medieval times (aka the Second Dark Age), but over the years enough technology was recovered to enable humans to make it back to the Moon, and even to establish a colony on a planet in the Centaurus system. Society itself has been reorganized along feudal lines, with very definite class divisions: Elite, Fesh, and Bonds, with a few groups outside the law (ie. The Society of the Phoenix and the Outsiders).

The principle protagonists are among the Elite, the Phoenix, and the Outsiders, and of course they're not all on the same sides. There's a very definite religious theme running throughout the books, and one of the main characters is a "sociotheologist" who has predicted a violent overthrow of the Elite class, and tries to mitigate and prevent that (and the accompanying Third Dark Age) by preaching peace and obedience to the Bonds (who are in reality slaves).

Another theme in the trilogy is the invention of instant matter transmission, which would revolutionize communication and commerce between Earth and its various in-system colonies and more importantly, with the Centaurus system. In the wrong hands, however, it can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.

Throughout the novels there are "essays" about various historical figures (historical to the people in the novels, not to the RL readers), and various historical events that influenced the development of the Concord (the overall government that's controlled by the Elite class). It's interesting material that enhances the novels, but isn't essential to follow the story.

Is anything I've described so far the sort of thing that says "trying too hard to be realistic" to you? I'm asking for clarification, because C.J. Cherryh uses somewhat the same technique in Cyteen - extra essays that serve as a way to add in historical details to enhance the story but you don't have to read them to follow everything. Cherryh's essays, however, are more oriented to science, economics, sociology, and various issues involved in establishing colonies on space stations and planets.

It is partly why I like Robert J Crane's Sanctuary series so much. Nobody will read his work and call them intellectual masterpieces, but they're easy to read and they get to the point without completely sacrificing detail. Action-oriented, I suppose. The exposition leads directly to conflict and isn't used to just hammer on and on about the setting.

Okay.

Yeah. I don't know if he'd actually like a "Space Roman Empire" in fiction. He always writes it during our roleplaying forums though, so it seems like something he'd be into...

I asked, because I'm into Roman historical fiction, and there's a lot I could recommend if I had a better idea what your friend likes. If he's into alt-history, Robert Silverberg published a book called Roma Eterna, in which Rome never fell but continued on throughout the millennia (and did they ever have a surprise waiting for them when they met the Aztecs in the New World...).

No, I don't think that's it. The book never mentioned anything about working in a city or anything like that. Tanis and Flint met up with their friends and talked about a staff.

Looking it up (I only remembered the staff bit 10 minutes ago, and that was apparently all I needed to find it ), it was Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Its synopsis matches what I remember exactly.

In the first chapter of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Tanis meets up with the companions five years after they had split to find proof of the true gods.[7] He is their assumed leader. On his way into the Inn, Tanis meets up with Flint and Tas. They encounter Fewmaster Toede, who sets his goblins upon them. They fight them off, but are disturbed at their peaceful town of Solace being controlled by the Highseekers and the goblin patrols. When they get to the Inn of the Last Home, the companions discuss things. In short, none have found any proof of the true gods. In addition, Kitiara has left a letter saying she will not be there. However, upon assembling in the Inn, they encounter Sturm, who has with him two barbarian plainspeople, Goldmoon and Riverwind. The woman, Goldmoon, carries a Blue Crystal Staff, which Toede had mentioned to Tanis.

Okay, now I get what you're talking about. As I said, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning were novels based on a series of 12 AD&D gaming modules set in the world of Krynn. They do suffer from "here's where somebody rolled a d20" syndrome, and it's so painfully obvious in the part of the book where they're exploring the ruins of Pax Tharkas. When I got the module dealing with that part of the story I was able to look at the maps and see exactly where some of the scenes in the novel took place.

That said, this is only a problem in the Chronicles trilogy. The next batch of novels are the Legends trilogy (Time of the Twins, War of the Twins, Test of the Twins), which start up some time after the end of the Chronicles books. The Heroes of the Lance aren't together anymore; some have married and returned to their people, some are off wandering, Raistlin is up to no good, having gone over to the dark side (no, he didn't get any cookies, but he's decided to challenge Takhisis herself and become a god; all he needs is the willing cooperation of a Cleric of Paladine), and Caramon is really not having a good life at all at this point.

The Legends trilogy is a more adult story than the Chronicles, and it's not based on any modules. The principle characters are Caramon, Raistlin, Crysania (the aforementioned Cleric of Paladine), Dalamar (Raistlin's apprentice), Kitiara (who's looking to recover from the defeat suffered by her side in the War of the Lance), and Tasslehoff Burrfoot.

The basic premise is that Raistlin wants to become a god, and Caramon and Tasslehoff are determined to stop him.

The themes of the trilogy include time travel, whether or not history can - or should - be changed (can the Cataclysm be undone? Should it?), how far should an oath of loyalty go if the person to whom it was pledged turns out to betray the person giving the oath, understanding the nature of good and evil, and the quest for redemption. It's not the kind of story where you can tell where the dice rolls happen. There aren't any.

Many years later, Dragons of Summer Flame was published, taking the War to the next generation. Again... no dice rolling. One of the themes in this book includes honor... can a knight who serves the gods of evil be honorable?

And those are the core Dragonlance novels, plus an anthology that introduces the second generation characters.

The rest of the novels flesh out the history of the Dwarves, Elves, the pre-Chronicles lives of the Heroes of the Lance, there's a trilogy about the Kingpriest of Istar, novels about various characters in the Chronicles trilogy who aren't the core group, as well as a lot of anthologies. There are further novels and anthologies that take place after Dragons of Summer Flame, but I haven't really read those.

So if dice rolling is your only objection to Dragonlance, I recommend giving it a try. It's only 3 books where this is a problem, and for me most of it is because I've read the modules and know where the DM is supposed to step in and prompt the characters to make a choice or decide how to handle a particular combat.

 

[innonimatu]

A Canticle for Leibowitz is also excellent. It takes place in a Roman Catholic monastery in the southwest United States several hundred years after a nuclear war, with the task of the monks to copy and preserve what scraps of knowledge they can from the pre-war world.

Second that one. There's also the Long Earth books from Gene Wolfe. From Zelazny I think the best one is This Immortal.

Solaris embodies one of Lem's perennial themes - how would we recognize
an advanced intelligence?
The movies didn't capture the feel of the book. Clooney's was awful.

I liked Tarkovsky's. Thought it was somewhat "tainted" by russian misticism... as usual with russian artists it seems! But though it lost some of the original meaning, it worked quite well in its own way.

 

[Takhisis]

That's a considerate offer. How familiar are you with the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks?

Not at all. But that's never stopped Disney from doing Star Wars films, just to name one example.

That was my impression of Dragons of Autumn Twilight. At one point I thought, okay this is where they come to a crossroads in the dungeon. Do they go left, right, or straight ahead? Then a little further on, something else is presented to them, and I could mentally hear the dice rolls.

But that's a fault of the first novel... and even though it was immediately noticeable, I still found the story compelling enough to start collecting the series - novels, modules, source books. Some of the sheet music for the songs in the Chronicles Trilogy is wonderful - my favorites are the song Goldmoon sings in the Inn of the Last Home and Est Sularis (the hymn sung by the Solamnic Knights).

The best ones were the very old prequel series e.g. the one where the wizards decide to build a Tower of Sorcery right on Thorbardin, or The Dargonesti, etc. -and, of course, the anthologies, Galen Beknighted, etc. The farther away they are from obvious-campaign-syndrome, the better.

You were very mean to Raistlin.

Well…

but he's decided to challenge Takhisis herself and become a god

what do you expect?