SF books
- Thread starter gozpel
- Start date
I'm sorry I'm late for answer, but I read your posts!
I was already involved of re-reading Philip Jose Farmer's work of Riverworld, which in my mind is a masterpiece, but quite fragile on the deep stuff. Doesn't matter a golden star for him.
And I read through the Canticle of Liebowitz, to half of it, then poor Francis died. I hate stories that "jumps", I wanted the dude to live. I loved it that far, but with new dudes coming in, no like!
My English is bad enough already!
Anyone with ideas of free ebooks anywhere?
I was already involved of re-reading Philip Jose Farmer's work of Riverworld, which in my mind is a masterpiece, but quite fragile on the deep stuff. Doesn't matter a golden star for him.
And I read through the Canticle of Liebowitz, to half of it, then poor Francis died. I hate stories that "jumps", I wanted the dude to live. I loved it that far, but with new dudes coming in, no like!
My English is bad enough already!
Anyone with ideas of free ebooks anywhere?
I'm sorry I'm late for answer, but I read your posts!
I was already involved of re-reading Philip Jose Farmer's work of Riverworld, which in my mind is a masterpiece, but quite fragile on the deep stuff. Doesn't matter a golden star for him.
And I read through the Canticle of Liebowitz, to half of it, then poor Francis died. I hate stories that "jumps", I wanted the dude to live. I loved it that far, but with new dudes coming in, no like!
My English is bad enough already!
Anyone with ideas of free ebooks anywhere?
The Baen publishing company has a free library of many of their older titles. Since they only publish scifi and fantasy it would fit your interests and you might find some titles you like. https://www.baen.com/allbooks/category/index/id/2012
And Valka D'ur, could you please send me a sample of your writings, maybe I learn something, even at a old age?
Trying to find Alfred Bester's : Tiger tiger, I hate signing up to places I never looked at. But this book gave me a laugh back then, 30 years ago.
Thank you so much Cutlass, a good start to start reading again!
Well, I already started, but running low on free books, I think your offer is golden.
We also have a library made for us: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Not only SF, but 57.000 volumes are there, a very interesting site there at the top of my fav sites.
Check it out!
Trying to find Alfred Bester's : Tiger tiger, I hate signing up to places I never looked at. But this book gave me a laugh back then, 30 years ago.
Thank you so much Cutlass, a good start to start reading again!
Well, I already started, but running low on free books, I think your offer is golden.
We also have a library made for us: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Not only SF, but 57.000 volumes are there, a very interesting site there at the top of my fav sites.
Check it out!
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There are a lot of free Kindle books and short stories on Amazon (intended to hook new readers to actually pay for the next in the series).
You don't actually need a Kindle for this; there's a free app so you can read Kindle books on your computer.
Sorry, but I'm a bit confused - are you asking for a sample of my fanfic or other fanfic I found elsewhere (ie. the Tanith Lee-inspired material I mentioned)?
Valka D'Ur : Sorry I have been away for a bit.
But it was really about your writing, your fanfic if you like, but if there is some Tanith Lee there too, I would be more than happy,
I can write with my left hand, but that is all gibberish. I can write with my right hand, and it's all constructed, as my English is too bad to make a lower grade grammar check.
You don't know how hard it was to learn English, I took up a SF-book 600 pages and read it to the end, by using dictionaries. I did understand the book at the end, but it is hard be stubborn.
But it was really about your writing, your fanfic if you like, but if there is some Tanith Lee there too, I would be more than happy,
I can write with my left hand, but that is all gibberish. I can write with my right hand, and it's all constructed, as my English is too bad to make a lower grade grammar check.
You don't know how hard it was to learn English, I took up a SF-book 600 pages and read it to the end, by using dictionaries. I did understand the book at the end, but it is hard be stubborn.
tjs282
Stone \ Cold / Fish
Subscription-post as much as anything...
Don't you know, Margaret Atwood doesn't write that ghastly 'science fiction' stuff, which is all about spaceships and robots and rayguns *shudders* Oh dear me, no, she writes 'speculative fiction'. I know, because she said so herself 
That said, I agree with your assessment of O&C. Have you (or @Valka D'Ur or anyone else) read its sequels, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam — and if so, were they worth it?
Same thing happened after I read Ringworld for the first time, but I rather went off Niven later, after reading some of his collaborations with Pournelle and re-evaluating the stuff I'd read before. Don't get mewrong, I enjoyed The Mote in God's Eye and Footfall, but Lucifer's Hammer had a fairly unpleasant (racist, antidemocratic) subtext, and (according to the synopsis I read) Fallen Angels looks like straight-up climate-change denialism.
I think it's one of his best, with Chocky and The Day of the Triffids also worth reading (The Kraken Wakes, not so much...)
@Synsensa:
Did John Christopher ever get published over there in NotTheUSATM? His Tripods trilogy is also pretty good entry-level SF, as is The Prince in Waiting trilogy.
A lot of the books recommended so far (including that one) have recently been re-published and re-packaged in the 'SF Masterworks' collection. Most of these titles won multiple SF awards in their day; several authors (e.g. Heinlein, PKDick) have more than one of their works included. So if you (or anyone else reading this thread) is looking to try out new-to-you SF-books/authors, it might be worth having a quick scan through those list(s), for anything you haven't seen before.
I'd also like to add Peter F Hamilton to the list of recommended authors...
Agree with those two, but don't forget the other "B", Greg Bear! I just re-read the Songs of Earth and Power duology, and Queen of Angels, and they're just as good as I remembered.
"A bit pretentious"
Don't you know, Margaret Atwood doesn't write that ghastly 'science fiction' stuff, which is all about spaceships and robots and rayguns *shudders* Oh dear me, no, she writes 'speculative fiction'. I know, because she said so herself That said, I agree with your assessment of O&C. Have you (or @Valka D'Ur or anyone else) read its sequels, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam — and if so, were they worth it?
I haven't read the novel, only the short story he wrote (by himself!), many years earlier. The first Asimov I ever read (aged about 11) was the short-story collection I, Robot (not to be confused with the Will Smith movie Not I, Robot, which really kinda sucked). As a result, teenaged-me proceeded to acquire rather a lot of secondhand Asimov paperbacks, most of which are still on my bookshelf...
Same thing happened after I read Ringworld for the first time, but I rather went off Niven later, after reading some of his collaborations with Pournelle and re-evaluating the stuff I'd read before. Don't get mewrong, I enjoyed The Mote in God's Eye and Footfall, but Lucifer's Hammer had a fairly unpleasant (racist, antidemocratic) subtext, and (according to the synopsis I read) Fallen Angels looks like straight-up climate-change denialism.
So you'd agree that it is an effectively-written book, then?
I think it's one of his best, with Chocky and The Day of the Triffids also worth reading (The Kraken Wakes, not so much...)@Synsensa:
Did John Christopher ever get published over there in NotTheUSATM? His Tripods trilogy is also pretty good entry-level SF, as is The Prince in Waiting trilogy.
Is this a different Long Earth series from the one I just finished reading (The Long Earth/ ...War/ ...Mars/ ...Utopia/ ...Cosmos), which was co-written by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter...?
Might help to look for the original (English) title: The Stars My Destination.Trying to find Alfred Bester's : Tiger tiger, I hate signing up to places I never looked at. But this book gave me a laugh back then, 30 years ago.
A lot of the books recommended so far (including that one) have recently been re-published and re-packaged in the 'SF Masterworks' collection. Most of these titles won multiple SF awards in their day; several authors (e.g. Heinlein, PKDick) have more than one of their works included. So if you (or anyone else reading this thread) is looking to try out new-to-you SF-books/authors, it might be worth having a quick scan through those list(s), for anything you haven't seen before.
I'd also like to add Peter F Hamilton to the list of recommended authors...
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Your stubbornness is clearly to be applauded! As a high-school student I fought my way similarly through Pierre Boule's La planète des singes (i.e. The Planet of the Apes in the original French) with my dictionary firmly in hand, and that's less than half the length.
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.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Is anyone waiting for the final Honor Harrington book? Uncompromising Honor is due out 2 October.
To those who do not follow epic space opera sagas, this is book 14 in the Honor series. It depicts the career of a young naval officer in a pre-war buildup through the first war, the hiatus, the brief second war into the conflict with the great but distant imperial power. Along the way, we see all sorts of fighting, from hand-to-hand, spies and assassins, POW insurgency, duels, single ship actions, small groups, fleets and massive all-or-nothing combined fleet/home guard infernos. Weber does best with armed conflict and not as well with personal and political actions/motivations.
If that sounds a bit like CS Forester, it's intentional. The primary combatants are British-like, with a Queen Elizabeth, vs a French empire, led by a revolutionary named Rob Pierre. Eventually the conflict is resolved and the two countries/empires join forces to face the Earth Alliance. Uncompromising Honor is the culmination of that struggle.
J
To those who do not follow epic space opera sagas, this is book 14 in the Honor series. It depicts the career of a young naval officer in a pre-war buildup through the first war, the hiatus, the brief second war into the conflict with the great but distant imperial power. Along the way, we see all sorts of fighting, from hand-to-hand, spies and assassins, POW insurgency, duels, single ship actions, small groups, fleets and massive all-or-nothing combined fleet/home guard infernos. Weber does best with armed conflict and not as well with personal and political actions/motivations.
If that sounds a bit like CS Forester, it's intentional. The primary combatants are British-like, with a Queen Elizabeth, vs a French empire, led by a revolutionary named Rob Pierre. Eventually the conflict is resolved and the two countries/empires join forces to face the Earth Alliance. Uncompromising Honor is the culmination of that struggle.
J
No, I stopped reading the series when the treecats became more important than half the actual people in the story.
But I've read series well after they peaked so I can understand if you want to see it through the end.
That's what I'm doing on his Safehold series. I can't stop reading it despite it peaking 4-5 books ago. At least they're getting ready to move on to the aliens.
But I've read series well after they peaked so I can understand if you want to see it through the end.
That's what I'm doing on his Safehold series. I can't stop reading it despite it peaking 4-5 books ago. At least they're getting ready to move on to the aliens.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
I agree. You can skip from the middle of Safehold book 3 to the end of book 8 without missing much. They finally catch Torquemada and show him his errors. Huzzah. The interesting part starts when they finish consolidating the fractured church but Weber will never write that.
Interesting mind game. Assume a xenophobic alien intelligence is wiping out all intelligent life that it finds. You have a safehold planet (hence the name of the series). How do you develop an interstellar civilization without attracting the bogeyman? You may assume all radio frequencies are closely monitored. Even high gain power generation might trip something.
J
Interesting mind game. Assume a xenophobic alien intelligence is wiping out all intelligent life that it finds. You have a safehold planet (hence the name of the series). How do you develop an interstellar civilization without attracting the bogeyman? You may assume all radio frequencies are closely monitored. Even high gain power generation might trip something.
J
I thought that book is coming out in January and another is in the works. And I'll be suckered in and buy it. But I will admit that it took me almost two years to read his latest addition because it took me that long to talk myself into it. Yes, they've all started to sound the same. At least we finally got some satisfaction. However little it was.
And to answer the second. The obvious is what he wrote, use religion to suppress technology. But he contradicts himself with the "special" cave. Why not hundreds of these? You don't need radio if you do it all with underground landlines. Same with the rest of your technology. Underground. And for most technologies, there's a way to mask it. Space is awfully vast.
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
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It is. Or rather, I misremembered, the series was called "the book of the long sun".
Do you have public libraries in Australia? Our have both paper and ebooks.
I've read that series. And originally liked it quite a lot. I even have most of the series in hardcover, where I mostly only buy paperbacks. But after a time it got worse, and then I was only picking them up in the library, and the last one was a complete waste of time, which didn't advance the story line at all. And how there's a spin off series of it with Timothy Zahn as coauthor, and it's not worth it at all. I've only read this far to see how it ends after all this time. But it's borderline "why bother?" at this point.
And, in any case, it was always more space opera than true scifi.
Fallen Angels is a case of Niven and Pournell's politics overcoming their scifiness. They took the political meme of 'global cooling' and ran with it. So it's bad politics and bad science. But it still has some interesting parts, as they do fan service to scifi conventions and geeks.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
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
J
Very little of my fanfic has been posted online, since most of it needs a lot of editing and some of it was written during a very bleak and depressing time in my life, not long after my grandmother died. She was the one who raised me, and there's a lot of stuff in my writing that's too personal to share.Valka D'Ur : Sorry I have been away for a bit.
But it was really about your writing, your fanfic if you like, but if there is some Tanith Lee there too, I would be more than happy,
But there are a few things I'd be willing to share via PM. Of course they won't mean much if you're unfamiliar with the source material (obviously I'm not talking about Star Trek or Doctor Who or other really well-known things).
As for the Tanith Lee links, I will dig those up and send them along.
Now you've got me curious as to which book.
You forgot the giant space squids. That's the crap she thinks is science fiction."A bit pretentious"
Well, it would have been in the 1930s and even the '40s, before John Campbell started mentoring authors like Isaac Asimov and pushing them to become the best of the best. But Atwood seriously needs to get her nose out of the upper levels of the atmosphere. There are numerous sub-genres of science fiction, and there's no shame in being one of the better writers in the dystopian sub-genre. Particularly not when the first of those novels was adapted into a multi-award-winning TV series.
I haven't read those, no. I'm honestly not sure if I want to. There's only so much mental energy to spend on dystopian stuff, and I've just re-read the Handmaid's Tale novel, to bolster my arguments on the websites where people come up with the most outlandish notions that are contradicted both in print and on-screen. It's insane to be arguing with a group of women, and I seem to be the only one who remembers that it takes 9 months to gestate a human baby!
I've read more of Asimov's nonfiction than fiction. I've read his autobiography twice (it's in three very large volumes), and most of his essay collections (I think I only missed a couple). Sadly a lot of the content in Jupiter is out of date, but there are still some interesting essays in Science, Numbers, and I, as well as The Sun Shines Bright.
If Wyndham's goal was to give me nightmares about my city being nuked and one of the things I saw in the shelter I managed to reach was a TV broadcast of some preacher wagging his finger and saying, "You should have read your Nicholson's Repentances...", then I would say Wyndham succeeded admirably. I woke up around 4 am, the morning of November 29, 1979, and promptly had an anxiety attack. I remember shaking and crying, having difficulty breathing, and my cat was so freaked out by this, she bit my arm to calm me down. The dream was in color, and very vivid. This was over 38 years ago, and I still remember it.So you'd agree that it is an effectively-written book, then?
I have those. My editions are Collier, which is an American company.
While Australia just might have public libraries (you seriously needed to ask that?), not all libraries are free.
For example, the "public" library in Red Deer means the public is allowed in to read, buy discarded/donated books, have lunch, and take part in whatever free programs there are, but not to borrow unless they've paid $$ for their membership fees. So if you don't have a membership, you can't borrow anything, or even use the computers. I guess I'm fortunate that a membership isn't necessary to use the card catalogue.
warpus
In pork I trust
I own the Year of the Flood and started reading it a couple years ago, but didn't get very far in. It sounded promising from what I remember, but other things in life took over instead. I might have to re-read O&C, there are a lot of themes in that book that I'm sure continue in the sequels, but it's been in a while since I read O&C and I'm having trouble remembering all the details and the way the story was presented.
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