I've posted something similar on the original thread, but: When I recommended Glory Road, I meant Starship Troopers

Someone else had already mentioned The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but that's my favorite of his.

I have Doomsday Book. I have tried twice to get through it and failed. You are welcome to my copy.

I think Canticle for Leibowitz is very overrated; it hasn't aged well, and I don't consider it a must read. The Cyberiad is a little overrated (heresy I know), but it's pretty cool.

A lot of people really like Charles Stross, so he must have something, but I thought The Atrocity Archives was only pretty good, and I couldn't get through Accelerando at all.

I didn't care for The Diamond Age, but I think Neal Stephenson is very overrated. He can write some great scenes --- there are parts of Snow Crash that are terrific --- but I haven't read a novel by him that I love, and I've read a bunch. Also, I think he writes about science in a particularly annoying way where if you don't already know what he's talking about, you don't learn anything, and if you do, you're bored. In The Diamond Age this is particularly acute in a section where he spends what feels like 100 pages recapitulating theoretical computer science through analogies about knights and gates and locks. Bleh.

Neuromancer is totally incredible. I know of no better science fiction novels.

i'm not generally into sci-fi, but michele had me read doomsday, and i really enjoyed it. if 'enjoyed' is the right word for something both funny and depressing.

[i]? Clearly I am spending too much time on boards running vBulletin…

I think The Anubis Gates is likely my favorite time travel novel, too.

To Say Nothing of the Dog was great, and wanting to read more in that universe kept me going through Doomsday Book, which was good, but terribly depressing. I don't think they suffered from being read in that order.

Yeah, I have to third the vote for "To Say Nothing of the Dog". :-)

Oh, and I just bought a copy of cyberiad if you wanted it when i was done. :-) If this SF list doesn't mean you're joining MITSFS instead, of course. *grin* If you even read 2 books off the list this year it's totally economical to have a MITSFS membership! ;)

Edited at 2009-02-08 04:29 pm (UTC)

I'd strongly encourage you to add Spin by Robert Charles Wilson, if you haven't read it already. It's wonderfully written, clever, and good sci-fi.

As a counterpoint to Rif, I find Gibson to be overrated and Diamond Age to be a real classic. Cyberiad was great, but I haven't read it in a long time. Stanislaw Lem is worth exploring in general.

Rendezvous with Rama is clearly a classic, and it's aged ok, but it does show that age more than a little, and didn't find it that satisfying, in the end. Doomsday book, I found a little plodding, but was still worthwhile.

Cat's Cradle and Dragon's Egg are really good, and sort of at opposite ends of the sci-fi spectrum. Slaughterhouse Five is my other favorite Vonnegut, though most wouldn't call it sci-fi. Forward's other stuff is, comparatively, disappointing.

I'd also recommend goodreads.com or librarything.com as good sites for social-networky tracking of reading lists, reviews, recommendations, and read books. I'm currently using godreads for this (http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/544561)

I found the three main characters (Tyler, Jason and Diane) to actually be not only compelling characters, but more "real" and atypical than a lot of sci-fi character's who can be pretty cookie-cutter.

That said, I clearly just like RCW's character's in general, across his novels.

Well, I think it gets credit for being (one of?) the first cyberpunk books. Even Lord of the Rings looks like a standard quest adventure populated with D&D characters at this point. :)

I've become very fond of Richard K. Morgan's work in the past year or so, and it very much has the feel of mixing science fiction with other genres. In particular, the Takeshi Kovacs books seem like Science-Noir-Detective and Science-Pulp-Adventure to me. Neither are `classics', but I'd recommend all of his currently-out books (even Market Forces, which is basically a screenplay he novelized himself).

Apropos of not necessarily anything:

I don't know if you've read your Wells, Verne, et al. I imagine most people have probably read Frankenstein and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, too. If you only know them from derivative works, there are some surprises there.

To any list in that vein (I guess maybe at the time it was called "scientific romance") I'd add Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Professor Challenger" stories The Lost World or The Poison Belt.

As to Edgar Rice Burroughs, I found A Princess of Mars only marginally readable and The Land that Time Forgot a touch dull (Tarzan was good, but not so much sci-fi).



Edited at 2009-02-08 03:36 pm (UTC)

If you do read The Diamond Age, be aware that it's entirely conventional and acceptable to stop 50-100 pages from the end.

If you haven't read Snow Crash, I would read that instead of Diamond Age. Everyone I know who's read both liked Snow Crash much better. If you have read Snow Crash, knowing that Diamond Age falls apart at the end, rather than resolving things, may let you avoid the shattering of high expectations that so disappointed me when I finished it.

Rendezvous with Rama always felt overrated to me. The City and the Stars and Childhood's End are Clarke novels I like much more. I got more out of playing the Infocom game modelled after RwR (Starcross?) than reading the novel.

Apparently this is a contrarian viewpoint: The Diamond age is better than Snow Crash in pretty much every way, including the ending. I think it's probably Stephenson's best ending ever (or maybe I should say "Stephenson's only good ending").

BUT, it is probably wise to read Snow Crash first. The thing about The Diamond age is, it's seriously dense, and it demands multiple readings, probably more than any other book I've read. Snow Crash is less of an undertaking.

I read 2 or 3 of Doris Lessing's science fiction novels, and they didn't really feel like science fiction, and I didn't like them. It's as if she felt that she didn't have to know anything about the genre to write in it.

Andre Norton's books may be best read when you're in your teens. The one that I have the most fond memories of was Star Man's Son; it's about people trying to rebuild a civilization a long time after everything's been destroyed.

I am amused that rifmeister and I seem to have nearly exact opposite taste in novels.

I found Neuromancer kind of boring and cold and not particularly memorable, though worth reading for cultural value. But far better on that front than as an actual novel.

The Diamond Age suffers from the same problem as Snow Crash in that it's essentially two (or more) very different novels smashed together rather ungracefully, but I tend to like most of the component parts enough that I can generally overlook his tendency to fail at constructing coherent narrative. It has some fascinating world-building and concepts, several interesting characters, and a really nifty atmosphere. And it's more of a messy epic steampunk/nanopunk hybrid than cyberpunk, and I like that about it, too.

Doomsday Book is admittedly rather depressing, but in this very intense, human, and profound way. Plus, time-travelling historians. (I'll note that I agree with some of the above commenters (including rifmeister, so I guess not exact opposite taste, anyway) that The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers is indeed a very good time-travel novel (maybe not super-memorable for me, but quite enjoyable), though my favorite book of his that I've read is Declare (a spy novel with supernatural elements) . I wouldn't think of either of them as "SF Classics," though.)

I admit I haven't read A Canticle for Leibowitz since high school, so perhaps I'd feel differently about it if I read it now. But it definitely didn't feel dated to me then, and we're still in such a post-Cold-War world that I suspect I'd still find it extremely relevant. Of course, I'm more of a historian than most people, too, so "dated" is also perhaps not such a bad thing to me, as it can indicate that something is especially evocative of its time period.