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The Foundation Trilogy by Asimov for me is and always will be the defining space opera. These are honestly probably my favorite books of all time, one of the few that I re-read regularly, and top Lord of the Rings and Star Wars as my favorite sci-fi/fantasy series. The various sequels/prequels not so much (although I prefer the sequels just because I really liked the characters of Pelorat and Trevize and the notion of revisiting the old Robot/Empire series planets even if the plot itself was a bit flat), but the original three books are THE gold standard of sci-fi for me.
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Jun 13, 2009 03:20
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Shampoo posted:Does anyone here read the Science Fiction Anthology magazines? Asimov's Science Fiction, Jim Baen's Universe, Analog, and Orion are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Seems like they might be a source for new stuff, but I never thought about reading them before. I used to read Asimov's a few years ago - there were a few gems (a story about a lonely sci-fi nerd in the 1960s who gets abducted by aliens, but ends up loving it, and a story about some a bar on Mars in some retro-future where the British owned the planet and a Gaia religion took over both stick to mind) but largely I was kind of disappointed.
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Jun 17, 2009 20:11
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I actually was just going to bring that up, since I just started reading Juggler of Worlds. Actually, I think a lot of Niven's stuff fits well in space opera; even though it's "hard sci-fi", stuff like Ringworld and the Smoke Ring or the Man-Kzin Wars are essentially the definition of space opera.
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Jun 24, 2009 02:05
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Shampoo posted:That's a good point. The Known Space series is very Operatic. Yeah, I was looking over his site and he has six books in the works. Five are collaborations and the other is a collection of short stories and essays. In fact, I'm trying to think of the last book he's done that wasn't either a collection or a collaboration...I think it might have been whatever the last Ringworld book was, five or six years ago. And before that...maybe Destiny's Road from the mid-1990s? That being said, some of his recent stuff I think has been good. Rainbow Mars came out a few years ago; it contained a bunch of stories from the 70s but the main part of the book (the actual Rainbow Mars story) was written for the new collection and I enjoyed a lot (although it originally started out as a collaboration with Terry Pratchett, so maybe it doesn't count fully as his own work). I didn't really think Fleet of Worlds was that great, but I'm around halfway through Juggler of Worlds right now and I'm enjoying it a lot more. Probably because (so far at least) it's not really a sequel to Fleet of Worlds but mostly a retelling/expansion of the various Beowulf Shaeffer stories from the viewpoints of an ARM agent and Nessus (who was always one of my favorite Niven characters).
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Jun 27, 2009 22:29
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I used to love the Man-Kzin Wars volumes, I think I have the first seven or eight. I even loved the ones that most people (I later came to understand) didn't like, such as the one with the warrior puppeteers and plans to make Protectors to fight the Kzinti, or the one where a Kzin scout landed in British India. I reread a couple volumes a year or two back and I was struck at just how truly brilliant the two novellas by Donald Kingsbury were (the ones focusing on Nora Argamentine and Trainer-of-Slaves). Even reading them now as an adult the parts with Nora's diary as she's losing her mind really, really freaked me out. Apparently Niven is also a big fan since some of the stuff that Kingsbury introduced have been adopted by Niven himself as official Known Space continuity. I'm considering reading some of the newer ones but looking them up it seems the past four or five volumes have almost entirely been written by Hal Colebatch or Matthew Joseph Harrington and I'm not really familiar with either of them - are the later ones worth reading, then? Also while maybe the average quality of Niven's work has generally gone down starting in the 1980s, I definitely think he's done good stuff since then. Integral Trees, Smoke Ring, and Legacy of Heorot all came out after Ringworld Engineers and I haven't heard anyone think those were low quality.
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Jun 28, 2009 06:59
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I think KJA is best when he's doing ideas that are his own, not working in an established setting like Dune or Star Wars (although I haven't read any of his X-Files stuff, maybe they're good). But I really liked his Captain Nemo, The Martian War, and War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches.
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Jul 8, 2009 01:53
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Toadsniff posted:A fellow McDevitt fan, maybe you can recommend some of his books to me. So far I have only read Seeker and Polaris. But he has so many other ones as well. I quite like Moonfall. At least, I should say I liked it maybe 10 years ago, I read it when it first came out and haven't really read it since. It's funny, I actually just got it out from the library today to re-read it, logged on, and saw your post. Anyways hopefully I'll get around to reading it again and it won't be absolutely terrible this time. Some of it I remember as being somewhat stilted, but having some pretty good Deep Impact-type scenes, nuclear rockets flying around, moonbase evacuations, jerry-rigged space suits, and other such genre staples done relatively well.
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Jul 16, 2009 02:03
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What? Really? I don't remember that at all. Thankfully. Although I kind of thought that Trainer of Slaves and Norah were going to get it on in later volumes, was very relieved when it didn't in fact happen. Although on the other hand the Ringworld books have as much interspecies sex as possible to make up for it. Niven definitely has a thing for bizarre sex, I don't think there's a single book of his I've read that doesn't involve zero-G sex, negative-G sex, interspecies sex, orgies, or combinations of the above.
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Aug 5, 2009 14:29
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Starship Troopers is probably the obvious answer. Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence has that element to that; the human race twice gets conquered by alien species, and each time manages to overthrow them, steal their technology, and essentially tell all other alien races to go gently caress themselves. Then it gets to the point where humans go to war against dark matter itself in a billion-year long war, only to get defeated and end up exile into a four-dimensional prison planet. The bits about the human race being conquered and then emerging stronger than before are mostly background elements (most stories take place either before or after the conquests, although I think one or two stories take place during them) but honestly you should read them regardless, I truly do believe that Baxter is the greatest current sci-fi writer and the one who has the best grasp on truly mind-boggling concepts and whose aliens are really alien (for example, one of the alien races that conquer mankind are just flow patterns in liquid as they evolved in patches of mud). I think in 20 or 50 years he's probably going to have the reputation that Arthur C. Clarke or Heinlein have now. Other than that, if you're willing to go a bit beyond just books, there's the comic Scarlet Traces and its sequel, which are set 10 years after The War of the Worlds and whose plot consists of the British Empire using reverse-engineered Martian technology captured during the invasion to build a space fleet and invade Mars to get the Martians back.
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Aug 7, 2009 00:43
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What was the book that was the copy of Manifold: Origins? As much as I like him I haven't really read anything he's put out in the past few years, since 2002 or 2003 or so (actually maybe not anything since Manifold Origins). Looking over my stuff his Xeelee stories that deal with the alien occupations are the novel Timelike Infinity (set as the humans overthrow the second occupation) and Vaccuum Diagrams (which is a collection of short stories including those set during both occupations and the period of human conquest of the universe afterwards). And as we're on the topic of Baxter for anyone who is unfamiliar with him, in addition to the above, I would recommend Ring, Flux, Raft, Anti-Ice, The Time Ships, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, and the Manifold Trilogy.
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Aug 7, 2009 06:29
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I just got S.M. Stirling's The Sky People today. For those who don't know it's set in an alternate history where in the early 1960s the first US and Soviet space probes to Venus and Mars found, instead of the dry dead worlds of reality, worlds teeming with life - Venus a jungle-like planet with dinosaurs, Mars a Barsoom-like planet, both with human tribes and kingdoms and whatnot on them. So instead of someone like John Carter meeting Dejah Thoris you have NASA astronauts meeting the kings of Mars. I haven't started reading it yet and to be honest Stirling isn't my favorite writer but the concept just seems really, really neat to me - does anyone know any other books that are similar to this?
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Aug 9, 2009 03:02
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EX-GAIJIN AT LAST posted:If you share his Christian viewpoint, or can at least read it as the same kind of counterfactual as life on Mars and Venus, I won't hesitate to recommend the first two books of C. S. Lewis's space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra). I've actually read those, I thought that Out of the Silent Planet was quite good but Perelandra was getting to the point where the Christian theme was a bit much for me. In the first book I felt it was a space fantasy with Christian backdrops, in the second I felt that it was mainly a Christian polemic with the space stuff more as an afterthought. I've avoided That Hideous Strength altogether, from what I've read it's even heavier than Perelandra. And looking at my question I guess I can answer it a bit myself, since we were talking about Niven above his Rainbow Mars kind of fits the type of book I was curious about, although that's more an excuse for a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-type crossover/literary homage. Although I did like how he explained how Mars could go from the planet Percival Lowell observed to the planet Mariner 4 observed within a century or two. (A giant tree serving as a living space elevator sucked all the moisture from the planet in order for it to grow and reproduce before spreading its saplings throughout the solar system...And if you think that's weird, Terry Pratchett actually came up with the idea and was originally going to co-author with Niven). platero posted:Regarding the Xeelee Sequence: What's the suggested reading order? Wikipedia says one thing, the author says another, and then there's publishing order. Looking at the Wikipedia page and the quote they have from Baxter there, I would say follow his preferred reading order. Really I think the 'main' story can be found in Vacuum Diagrams, Timelike Infinity, and Ring in that order (Vacuum Diagrams being a collection of short stories will spoil a bit of stuff from the later novels but not a whole lot more than what you'd have already read from this thread, but it also sets up a lot of the setting that would be useful to you for reading the novels set later in the series).
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Aug 9, 2009 21:38
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Morlock posted:Chairman Capone, I'm assuming you've read Burroughs since you mention John Carter. Are you looking for modern planetary romances (Philip Reeve's Larklight series? Karl Schroeder? Colin Greenland's Harm's Way? Kage Baker's Empress of Mars?), or just planetary romances in general (Leigh Brackett, maybe?), or what? The former - like you surmised I've already read stuff like Barsoom and Out of the Silent Planet, and am interested in modern versions. It can either be stuff by modern writers set in the present with the planets as they are, set in alternate present with planets as portrayed back then, set in alternate pasts, whatever - just modern takes on the whole sword and planet/planetary romance genres. Since you mention it - I've read the original short story of The Empress of Mars when it first came out and liked it, and just saw that it's been expanded into a full novel - if I've already read the short story is it worth it? How much new stuff does it add?
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Aug 10, 2009 01:14
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Morlock posted:I never read the short story, so I can't compare them, but I liked the novel! Steampunky end is fine with me. Those suggestions both look good - I shall try them out!
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Aug 10, 2009 05:20
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Astroman posted:I'd be very interested to hear what you think [about The Sky People] when you're done. The concept sounds fantastic but I can't stand Stirling, so I'd need a really good recommendation before I drop money on that. Okay assuming anyone is still interested in this... I've had a hell of a lot on my plate recently so I wasn't able to start reading The Sky People until a few days ago, I'm around 1/3 of the way through it but now I have some other stuff I need to get through before I can continue, so I figure I'd give my thoughts on it so far. The good: I really, really like the scenario Stirling sets up for his fictional setting. The details he put into building his version of Venus is really good and immersive, and I like how he also goes into some detail (but more as a backdrop, as you would expect from people talking, rather than overbearing) about how the discovery of intelligent life on Venus and Mars has affected things on Earth, both for the positive and negative (although mostly positive). Like Foundation, each chapter opens with an encyclopedia entry on the history of human exploration of Venus that helps establish the world as well. I also like the main subplot with the Venusian princess fighting the "Beastmen" (Neanderthals, basically). (There is the main plot with the American hero, and then as far as I can tell three subplots, one with a French spy, one with a Soviet cosmonaut, and the one with a Venusian tribe princess). The Venusian subplot, as well as the details of the main city-state (the American base is located next to a bronze-age-level city-state empire similar to ancient Sumeria, and the Americans interact with them a lot) is all really great - it's both an homage to Burroughs and Heinlein while at the same time applying more realistic modern-day science fiction conventions to the notion of the jungle barbarians on the sister planet. The book really delivers on that, at least so far. The bad: The main character, Marc Vitrac, is an American Ranger officer. He is manly, brave, heroic, dashing, intelligent and witty and comments early on that he is probably a hearthtrob to every girl in America and the hero to every boy. He mentions that he read Burroughs as a kid (before it was fashionable to) which I think is Stirling's way of telling us that it's all right that he's making his main character into such a cardboard cutout John Carter imitation, because he knows he's doing it (needless to say from my tone it doesn't work). He is also a Creole. This is stated almost immediately as soon as he's introduced, and in case you forget he drops the same half-dozen Creole words into just about every sentence (it honestly seems like every sentence from his view includes the words "mais" and "weh"). He's stated as being the only person on the base who's not intimidated by the commanding general and the only human the natives respect for his ability to survive in the jungle. The main love interest is a black woman from Harlem. In case you forget this Stirling makes her talk like Detta from the Dark Tower series. Every sentence she utters includes "shee-yit", "da-yum", and/or "bro". I honestly can't remember exactly what it is she's supposed to do on the mission but she apparently tags along with Marc on everything he does. I'm assuming this is Stirling's attempt to crate a Deja Thoris-like damsel in distress for the post-feminist era and a setting where women coming to Venus from Earth would really have to have some sort of skill, even if it's not really developed (she's good with guns of course, since she's from Harlem, but even then she's of course just not quite as good as Marc is at shooting). The main villain, as it was, is a stuffy, uptight Brit who turns out is actually a scheming Frenchman who is a spy sent to Venus to try and get secrets that will make France a world power again because due to them following de Gaulle and refusing to join with the Atlantic Alliance, the French are now a worthless third-world power. Marc is of course the only person on the base who is able to detect that the villain is actually a villain and he of course realizes this immediately upon seeing him. Then there are some Soviet and Chinese characters who are the butt of Stirling's jokes about how evil and stupid communism is, just like the above character (by combining the worst stereotypes of the Brits and French) is the not too subtle vehicle of Stirling's anti-European views. The verdict (so far): If you read it for the general idea of the story (an alternate history/modern-day re-imagining of the typical Burroughs planetary romance) then it delivers in all aspects related to that general theme. However, the characters (at least the human ones) are pretty one dimensional and don't really manage to pull off (what I assume) was an attempt to update the basic Burroughs character stereotypes. The Venusian characters are a lot better though, at least the princess who is the only one a major portion of the narrative is devoted to. Again this is only based on a 1/3 of the way through reading, once I manage to get back to it and finish it I'll see if my views have changed at all.
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Aug 31, 2009 04:11
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Songs of Distant Earth is one of my favorite Clarke books - it's up there with 2001, Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama, City and the Stars...poo poo, might as well say that my list of favorite Clarke books would probably be the majority of what he's written.
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Sep 29, 2009 00:00
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WarLocke posted:John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata books. That series sounds pretty interesting, but on the other hand it is written by the absolutely terrible John Ringo, so is it worth it? Does the story manage to overcome his atrocious high-school level characterization, plots, and writing?
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Nov 3, 2009 22:59
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WarLocke posted:One of the side-story books, Watch on the Rhine, covers Germany's defense over the course of the invasion. And yeah, they invent a reason that Germany can't come up with enough soldiers, so they rejuv all the surviving SS guys and give them futuristic Panzer tanks. Okay, that makes me hate John Ringo to the point where I am definitely not going to read any more of his stuff (not that I probably would anyways, but there is just a point where I won't even consider it). I remember at a convention a few years ago where he was mocking some author who grew up in occupied western Europe during World War II for being anti-Nazi later in his life and implying that he was being stupid and that always struck me as a little bizarre. The whole SS-as-saviors-of-the-human-race thing makes Ringo's personal context a little more clear.
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Nov 5, 2009 04:31
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Koryk posted:John Ringo is a sick gently caress. I liked the Posleen series when it first came out, I kind of grew out of it but kept reading for nostalgia purposes. Then he started his Ghost series with his Mary Sue rapist pedophile dude. All you need to know about John Ringo is that he writes for the New York Post. Also I read the summary of the first Ghost book on Wikipedia and it just sounds absolutely terrible, literally the sort of stuff an overweight middle schooler obsessed with James Bond and Splinter Cell would write: Wikipedia posted:Ex-SEAL Mike Harmon goes back to school and uncovers a Syrian kidnap plot to force American Military Forces out of the Middle East. He secretly sneaks in, holds off enemy soldiers, kills Osama Bin Laden, and rescues the girls before collapsing from blood loss, as an American raid attacks Syrian military bases and sends in a SEAL team to hold the position. I mean, is that serious? There's no way a book like that could actually be serious, right? I see it's on the Baen website for free, I kind of want to download it and check it out to see if it could actually be as bad as the summary makes it seem.
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Nov 6, 2009 01:34
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fritz posted:here is a review: http://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.html with an excerpt Holy poo poo. I just stopped reading that when I got to the "mother-daughter action" and fifteen year old hooker part. Jesus Christ. I take it back, I think I have no need to read this to see how bad it is.
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Nov 6, 2009 04:51
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How are the Honor Harrington books? It's one of those series I've heard about for a long time but never gotten around to reading. All I really know about it is that it's supposed to be Horatio Hornblower in space, there's a telepathic cat, and it has the typical conservative sci-fi "welfare states are EVIL!" trope which is probably more than anything why I managed to keep finding excuses to not read it. But is it really like that? Just once I would like to read a military sci-fi book that doesn't have some big conservative agenda or outlook. Other than The Forever War, of course.
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Nov 8, 2009 01:11
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I just finished reading the four Virga books by Karl Schroeder. What an amazing series - I suppose from a literary point of view they're not exceptional, but just the creativity and the amount of detail and really unbelievable creations in that series blew me away. It's like if Larry Niven, Stephen Baxter, and Robert L. Forward had pooled their imaginations. Basically the Virga series is set in a giant habitat called Virga, a fullerene shell the size of Earth orbiting Vega, within which is a zero-G habitable environment dotted with hundreds of fusion reactor suns, with each sun powering the ecosystem of an independent nation. At the center is a larger fusion sun that creates circulating air currents throughout Virga, but as a side effect of its operation causes high-end electronics not to function within the sphere. As the nations drift around on the circulation air cells they are drawn into conflicts with each other. The first three books are, at least outwardly, largely about the struggle between the nation of Slipstream, the nation of Aerie which it conquered and is trying to liberate itself, and their common enemy, the totalitarian Falcon Formation. But as the series progresses that struggle is increasingly tied into the revelations that the reason the central sun causes disruption to electronic equipment is to save Virga from "Artificial Nature", a transhumanist/AI amalgamation that absorbed all other human societies in the galaxy and is trying to subvert Virga as well, and in the fourth book other post-human (and potentially extraterrestrial) civilizations also residing in similar isolated enclaves make contact with the Virgans and attempt to form an alliance against Artificial Nature. Does anyone know if he's planning on continuing the series? The last book ended on what seemed like an obvious setup for a continuation, but none of the other books really follow on from the previous one so it seems like it would be a bit out of place.
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Jun 3, 2010 23:06
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onefish posted:Okay, this is making me reconsider. I was very deeply disappointed by book one - I thought the characters were all cardboard and the writing pretty weak. Do the later books still have Hayden as a main character? Did you notice other differences between the first and later books? Hayden is a second-tier character in the fourth book, and isn't in the second or third at all. Minor character spoilers: of characters from the first book, Lady Fanning is the only character who returns in the second book, Hayden is the only character who returns in the fourth book, and there are a few characters who return in the third book: mainly Admiral Fanning, the Slipstream ambassador, the kid bosun, and cameos at the beginning and end by Lady Fanning. I do think the quality of the books increases as the series goes on, and they all have different focuses. The second book is set entirely on an ancient habitat cylinder that is now occupied by dozens of feudal states the size of an acre or less and is mainly Lady Fanning engaging in a lot of subterfuge and intrigue among all the pocket kingdoms; the third book is maybe most similar to the first book, as it involves the resolution of the Slipstream-Aerie-Falcon plots, but is more interesting when it explores the politics of other nations (Falcon Formation is run by a press corps whose purpose has evolved to where reporters control the state and their purpose is to conceal news, and there is a nation whose populace is controlled by regulated indoctrination of fairy tales). The fourth one is more of a standalone from the earlier three, and focuses more on the conflict with and nature of Artificial Nature, which for me was the most interesting part of the third book also, along with the revelation of details on Virga's past and the other intelligences outside Virga. There were a few parts in the sequels that I wasn't too fond of, though. The third and fourth books introduce a nation whose ancestors were genetically-engineered to resemble anime characters (big eyes, small mouths, etc) and the fourth book is set in a nation run by a party obviously supposed to represent the American religious right and anti-intellectual populism, although I will say that while it is hamfisted, it was still done in an interesting way all citizens have to read the newspaper and mark off on little boxes whether they agree with or disagree with stories, the newspapers are collected and tallied, and the replies determine the official ideology and policies of the nation and society.
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Jun 4, 2010 03:10
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Miss-Bomarc posted:To sum up, there's nothing that Scalzi writes that Ringo didn't write better earlier--and, for that matter, that David Drake didn't write better and earlier than Ringo I take exception to the idea that John Ringo ever wrote anything good, ever.
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Jun 14, 2010 05:34
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WarLocke posted:Ringo is one of my dirty pleasures. I'll be the first to admit that his books are horrible, but they're balls-to-the-wall over-the-top fun cheese horrible. The Ghost series of his absolutely terrible on just about every level and reveals just how terrible a person Ringo is, since he's said that it's just a way for him to write out his own personal fantasies. So apparently his fantasies include BDSM incest and sex with 14 year old Eastern European sex slaves. After that I can't stomach reading Ringo's poo poo for even light passing-time reading. Not to mention the fact that I've heard him talk at a convention and he came across as really, really crazy - he was talking about Starship Troopers in a way that seemed like he was defending the notion that it was about fascism, but that fascism was a good thing, and he mocked Paul Verhoeven for letting growing up in Nazi-occupied Holland tinting his adult views on militarism.
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Jun 14, 2010 11:42
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Definitely seconding Stephen Baxter if you're into the technical/hard-sf side of things. Pretty much anything he does is amazing and mind-blowing. He definitely has the ability to take things to a truly universal level that dwarfs humanity.
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Jun 16, 2010 21:43
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One thing about Baxter (that I bring up just because the subject of this thread is space opera) is that while his two space opera series' (the Xeelee Sequence and the Manifold: Time series) are both really, really good you might also enjoy some of his stuff that's not really space opera. Mainly Anti-Ice (an early steampunk work based on stable antimatter being used as an energy source in the 1800s), Moonseed (a combination nanotech doomsday scenario/return to the Moon using early 2000s technology), Titan (a manned mission to Titan in 2008 using Shuttle technology after life is discovered there by the Cassini probe), Voyage (an alternate history where NASA sends out a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s instead of developing the Shuttle), and The Time Ships (an authorized sequel to The Time Machine that really covers way too many different topics to be listed here). Again, these aren't space opera (although I guess Anti-Ice and The Time Ships have elements of it) but if you're really interested in hard understandings of physics/geology/biology then I think those might all appeal to you. Also I will take any opportunity to promote Baxter I can get 
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Jun 18, 2010 02:21
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Just finished reading Kage Baker's The Empress of Mars. Loved it. I know it's loosly set in a big series of hers, my question is, are any of the other ones as good as Empress of Mars/have the same sort of feel to them? Or are they a completely different creature altogether?
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Aug 12, 2010 01:44
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Midget Fist posted:Even The Forever War features time travel, just not in the cheesy "go back in time and rob banks and kill peoples' parents" style. Some of Robert L. Forward's work has time travel stuff in it in a vein similar to Baxter's stuff - Timemaster basically has the same "tow wormholes around at relativistic speed" stuff (although his wormhole are more interesting, being made out of beings of sentient negative matter) and Dragon's Egg has stuff about the effects of beings living on the surface of neutron stars.
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Aug 23, 2010 17:12
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Yeah, I was being kind of loose with my definition of time travel to basically just mean "time going strangely" (although I did think that at one point the neutron star beings developed time travel but I guess not) but it's a really good book regardless. It's interesting to note that it began as a collaboration with Larry Niven because it's really not like anything of Niven's that I've ever read.
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Aug 24, 2010 18:06
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I just started reading David Drake's "Seas of Venus" (which is available online). I'm only a few chapters into it but I'm enjoying it immensely. The basic premise is that it's set thousands of years into the future, when Venus has been terraformed into a roughly Earth-like world, albeit one mostly composed of warm oceans and jungle land. Human colonies exist on Venus in underwater city-state domes (the society is based on Renaissance Italy, down to mercenary sea fleets on the surface conducting ritualized warfare). It's an homage to 1940s/50s sci-fi when Venus was beginning to shift from a jungle to a water world in sci-fi settings and as a huge fan of those old pulps I'm finding it really enjoyable. I've also read Kage Baker's Empress of Mars, Niven's Rainbow Mars, and S.M. Stirling's The Sky People (which really did not impress me, although I'm still tempted to try the sequel set on Mars). I'm also just starting Michael Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars. My question is, does anyone else know of any other books worth reading along that similar vein, ie postmodern takes/homages on the classic Burroughsian sword and planet/planetary romance setting? I've heard some good things about Leigh Brackett's Stark series, but haven't actually read anything she's written, although if she's as good a novelist as she is a screenwriter I'm sure they're wonderful. And I realize that sword and planet isn't really space opera technically, but since this thread seems to be the default "classic sci-fi" station and there's enough genre overlap hopefully someone will be able to help me nevertheless.
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Nov 24, 2010 07:47
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I read Signal to Noise/A Signal Shattered back around the time they came out, and remember liking them both a lot. For some reason the limerick in the second book about the multiple Jacks has always stayed in my mind for all these years.
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Nov 28, 2010 16:17
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I used to give Baen a lot of credit for their willingness to put both old and new titles online for free. But on the other hand, most of their free stuff is poo poo like this. Also the covers to their books are, without a single exception, absolutely terrible.
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Dec 1, 2010 06:32
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What's the Ringo book where the UN is collaborating with alien invaders to turn the Earth into a totalitarian state, and the Special Forces officer with his bisexual prostitute/assassin girlfriend leads a squad of cloned Spartan warriors equipped with power armor and blasters from Area 51 to defeat the UN-alien forces? Also I just completely made that up, but it's kind of depressing how that's not even too outlandish to be a typical Ringo plot.Nucleic Acids posted:In all seriousness, I never thought I'd read such blatant fascism apologia in this day and age. I think I mentioned it in this thread before, but the one time I saw Ringo in person, he didn't understand how living under Nazi occupation could have made Paul Verhoeven somehow not like fascism. You see, Ringo was talking about the notion that Starship Troopers is supposed to be an apology for fascism, and Ringo had no problem with that. Chairman Capone fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Dec 2, 2010 |
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Dec 2, 2010 20:34
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I don't think Heinlein purposefully decided to make Starship Troopers a fascist apology, but at the same time, that doesn't mean it isn't one. It's a utopian fascist state where happy citizens voluntarily support a benign government where power is vested in a small cadre of soldiers and which is militaristic, nationalist, and racist (through the sci-fi lens where aliens stand in for ethnicity). Just because George Lucas didn't purposefully set out to include racist stereotypes in the Star Wars prequels doesn't mean they're not there.
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Dec 2, 2010 23:57
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Over winter break I read Larry Niven's latest short story/essay collection, Stars and Gods, and...I think I no longer feel the need to follow any more of his releases. Ignoring the fact that half the collection is excerpts from books he published over a decade ago, it just lacked the narrative energy and interesting concepts that his old works had. The only passable parts were the two Man-Kzin War stories, and even those were just kind of blah. I noticed two or three times that he wrote the exact same jokes in multiple stories. And I knew he was a libertarian, but I thought he was kind of on the level and left all the serious nutty ramblings to Jerry Pournelle, but every other paragraph in it had to mention how terrible urban blacks or, or how environmentalists are traitors, or how the space program would be amazing if private companies ran it, or how Ronald Reagan was the greatest figure in the history of the world (literally, a Kzin names himself after "the greatest warrior of Earth's past" - 'Ronreagan'). One story was about how IRS agents literally deserve to be murdered, and another was about a president who allows Washington to be nuked as his way of killing Congress to punish them for canceling SDI. But on the other hand I just started reading Paragaea by Chris Roberson (who's the head of MonkeyBrain Books, if anyone is familiar with them). It's great so far. It really reminds me of Michael Moorcock in how it deconstructs/reimagines for modern day sensibilities and scientific views the Burroughsian sword and planet genre.
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Jan 9, 2011 03:33
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ThaGhettoJew posted:Although being one of the resident Niven Believe me, I'm there with you - I'm a longtime Niven fan, for around a decade or so my two absolute favorite books were Ringworld and Mote in God's Eye. I even thought the later Ringworld books and his Fleet of Worlds co-authored books were decent enough, although I think I would classify the Rainbow Mars novella as the last really great thing he did. But like I said, I've known he was a libertarian for a long time (converted by Pournelle) but the only times I've seen evidence of it before in his works was in stuff he co-authored with Pournelle (The Burning City, Fallen Angels...ugh) so I assumed that those parts came from Pournelle. This was the first of Niven's solo work where it really came out in force, and it kind of shocked me. Maybe Niven's becoming cranky in his old age? So like I said, I doubt I'm going to be reading any future releases of his, but whenever I get a hankering I can always go back to The Integral Trees or Neutron Star and think back on fonder memories of him.
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Jan 9, 2011 05:16
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Really? That's really funny. I knew Pournelle got approached to do stuff for SDI because he's mentioned it in a few things I read, but each time it was basically him saying "I came up with SDI and sold it to Reagan almost entirely on my own." Which always seemed like BS to me but I didn't realize it was that much BS.
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Jan 9, 2011 21:35
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Ring is an excellent book, one of the best works of one of my favorite current SF authors. The entire Xeelee Sequence is required reading if you're interested in hard-scifi space opera. Also the Manifold series, although that's not strictly a series in that each book basically is set in an parallel universe with the same set of characters. I agree, Rama II was still halfway decent, although it still really irritated me how they basically used hand-waving to explain how the solar system-wide civilization of the first Rama book complete collapsed and entirely returned to Earth in the space of a decade or so. As I recall, for the Rama sequels didn't Gentry Lee basically write them entirely on his own and they're "co-written" just because Clarke let Lee use his setting?
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Jan 29, 2011 16:44
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Psykmoe posted:I'm a huge whore for exciting space battles. I read all the Honor Harrington stuff which was nice because it was interesting between battles too. I don't mind the occasional infantry engagement but from what I'm hearing I probably wouldn't like Ringo's stuff too much. Any suggestions? I've read barely any Niven stuff except the Mote in God's Eye. I also read some Greg Bear stuff mentioned earlier in the thread. Outside of a few short stories Niven's work is devoid of space battles - he's said that he's terrible at writing them so the only time they really appear in his work is when he cowrites with someone else (like Pournelle in Mote). But he let other authors write in his universe in the Man-Kzin War story collections, which contain lots of space battles. I haven't read any of the more recent ones, but the earlier ones are all worth checking out. There are loose story progressions/continuity but since they bounce around a lot, I'd say the best bet is to read them in the order published.
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Sep 19, 2011 19:45
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