What are your favorite sci-fi novels?

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bacterium

bacterium

Pronouns: She, him, Tom
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
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Jun 20, 2014
As the title says.

Mine would have to be Dune by Frank Herbert and Neuromancer by William Gibson. Two of the only books I have read multiple times.

While we are at it, what are your favorite sci-fi shows?

Aside from the usual (Star Trek, Stargate, Doctor Who) I am partial to Farscape and Lexx.
 
Hoooo boy, where to start? I only ever read sci-fi or a blend of that and horror.

Neal Shusterman is a favorite author of mine, he created two series I've been following, one of which is complete. The other one may be finished too, but I'm not sure.

His book series that hooked me in was Everlost, a world where children that strayed off the path to heaven by unfinished business, fears, or not being truly dead and instead in a coma, would enter this limbo-like world. It's an amazing story, I can't even begin to describe it. So much went into it, and it shows.

Another favorite by Shusterman is the Unwind series, where a war broke out over pro-choice and pro-life, the only way to restore peace being an alternative to abortion--namely, "unwinding". It's a method used to completely disassemble a child once reaching a certain age, no part of them being wasted. Their parents just had to sign the papers, and they'd be taken to a gruesome prison-like camp to wait to be unwound. Some are even raised in a religious setting as "tithes", a child to be unwound in the name of god and believing it's their purpose in life to die. The creepiest part about the unwinding procedure is that the person being unwound must remain alive throughout the entire process. I completely recommend giving it a read if you like some dark sci-fi stories.

He also has a couple one-shots, one of my favorites being The Dark Side of Nowhere. It's filled with a hideous amount of typos, but if you can get past that, it's an amazing read. To mention much about it would give huge spoilers, but I can say that it includes aliens in hiding and genetic experiments.
 
I have a big love for The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke. Much more magical and emotional than his more famous works (which I'm also a fan of). I've never forgot the atmosphere of that book.

As for shows I have to say the 2000s Battlestar Galactica.
 
Just finished Dune a little while ago and I'm currently devouring Dune Messiah with plans to continue the series to the end. I'm still undecided about whether or not to tackle the Brian Herbert books, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

I don't know if this is a cop-out but my favourite sci-fi novel so far has been a book set in the EVE Online universe called Empyrean Age. I've always loved EVE so that's probably why I enjoyed the book so much. I also really enjoyed the Esienhorn books by Dan Abnett, which are set in the Warhammer 40k universe, as well as the Gaunt's Ghosts books. Other than that I'm not really sure. I've decided to read more sci-fi recently which is why I picked up Dune as well as finishing Starship Troopers and Warship.
 
Mainly books by Robert Heinlein. I love his narrative voice.

Some of my favorites by him are

Job: A Comedy of Justice
Time Enough for Love
Glory Road
The Puppet Masters
The Sixth Column

Granted, many of his works could be considered outdated by today's standards, especially since his novels of "the future" are retro and antiquated, but that's never affected my enjoyment of his stories.
 
Hyperion
Forever War
Caves of Steel
The Automatic Detective (it's really schlocky compared to most serious SF but I love it all the same)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly (most people tout Ubik as being their favorite PKD novel but I like these two more)
The Demolished Man

I dunno, it's hard to narrow down. SF is right up there with detective fiction as my favorite genre.
 
I love sci-fi but havenot read it as much as I did in highschool/middle school
I really liked:
Hitchhiker's guide series
2001 series
The Dnd Spelljammer books were fun
Snowcrash
Neuromancer

I need to dig out my old books, there's a lot of names that I'm drawing a blank on.
 
press1forjews said:
I love sci-fi but havenot read it as much as I did in highschool/middle school
I really liked:
Hitchhiker's guide series
2001 series
The Dnd Spelljammer books were fun
Snowcrash
Neuromancer

I need to dig out my old books, there's a lot of names that I'm drawing a blank on.
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I love all of those. Never heard of Dnd Spelljammer, though.
 
bacterium said:
I love all of those. Never heard of Dnd Spelljammer, though.
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Spelljammer_-_Pirates_of_Realmspace_Coverart.png

Spelljammer is the lamest/coolest dnd setting at once. Basically 2nd edition dnd in space.
 
Starship Troopers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are both fucking tops.
 
Literally anything by Isaac Asimov

Neuromancer

Do Androids dream of Electric sheep?

also I read a bunch of assorted Star Trek novels in highschool but I can't remember the name of any of them for the life of me
 
Dune is great.
So is Farenheit 451, that's a classic.
Red Mars is pretty good, not an "Oh my god" like the first two but still alright.

I loved Enders game until near the ending
Why the heck did the writer decide "Lets not actually annihiliate the bugs"? It completely removed a whole lot of power and impact and also made it way stupider. Admittedly I was trying to use this as a substitute for Dune but come on man, this just isn't fair. It was pure garbage man. The movie didn't help at all because it was a poor man's Tron.
 
waffle said:
Starship Troopers and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are both fucking tops.
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I remember really liking Starship Troopers when I was younger but looking back at it I'm not too crazy about Heinlein's constant pontificating on the merits of his weird pseudo-fascist utopia. I agree with the idea people who perform acts of public service are usually better suited for leadership but flat out denying suffrage to or electoral opportunity to "little people" is pretty unethical in my opinion. He basically plugs militant statism as if its superiority is a mathematical fact.

To answer OP's question;

Jurassic Park/The Lost World
The Forever War
Neuromancer
The Illustrated Man
Fahrenheit 451
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Obviously)
 
Furina said:
I'm still undecided about whether or not to tackle the Brian Herbert books, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
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Don't, they're fucking awful. Vague plot, poor progression, heavy reliance on deus ex machina get outs. I really wish that him and his mate had the decent to have left his father's work alone.
Personally, I'd say that dune should have remained a trilogy. The last three in the Frank Herbert series are a bit weak, in truth.

My favourites: Dune, Accelerando, Revelation Space Neuromancer, Excession, Snow Crash, Hyperion, Gridlinked. That's off the top of my head, but I read at a ridiculously high speed, so will probably have more to add to that after a week or two.
 
Some great PKD stuff:
Man in the High Castle
Valis
Do Androids?

Titan by John Varley was an amazingly fun read and it's the first part of a trilogy. Just need to get around to reading it.

Some Kurt Vonnegut would fall under this category if only barely:
Sirens of Titan
Slaughterhouse Five
Cats Cradle
Player Piano
Slapstick
 
Too many to list...

All works by:
HP Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Robert Sheckley, Ursula D Le Guin, Steve Baxter...Etc, etc.
 
Sirens of Titan by Vonnegut
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Dune, up to God Emperor of Dune by Herbert - everything before and after that is mostly crap
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller

Favorite sci-fi book, however, would be Harlan Ellison's Deathbird Stories. Not a novel, though.
 
If we include Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle
A Scanner Darkly and Ubik and VALIS by PKD.
Neuromancer like everyone else.
Both Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and also WHERE'S THE DV III, HARLAN? Plus Strange Wine and Ellison Wonderland.
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin.
The short stories of Henry Kuttner, which fucking nobody reads any more.
An odd book that also nobody reads called A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay.
A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem but this is barely even SF at all as it is just a bunch of purported reviews by literary critics of books that Lem made up, only some of which are SF at all.
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg. Most of what he wrote was pretty flat, but this was amazing. It's about a telepath whose abilities have ruined his life, and now he's losing the one ability he ever had.

Most of the SF of the classic era that I even care about isn't novels at all, but the kind of short stories that got published in Galaxy and magazines like that when they existed, mostly before I was born. One example:

"A Pail of Air" by Fritz Leiber from the December 1951 issue of Galaxy. This is about a future where a black hole randomly crashes through the Solar System and drags off the Earth in its gravitational pull into empty space with no Sun, and the world that results, with the remnants of humanity trying to survive.

I haven't seen any reason to give a shit at all about any SF published in the last 20 years or so. It may say more about me than the quality of the work, though.
 
AnOminous said:
If we include Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle
A Scanner Darkly and Ubik and VALIS by PKD.
Neuromancer like everyone else.
Both Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and also WHERE'S THE DV III, HARLAN? Plus Strange Wine and Ellison Wonderland.
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany.
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin.
The short stories of Henry Kuttner, which fucking nobody reads any more.
An odd book that also nobody reads called A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay.
A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem but this is barely even SF at all as it is just a bunch of purported reviews by literary critics of books that Lem made up, only some of which are SF at all.
Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg. Most of what he wrote was pretty flat, but this was amazing. It's about a telepath whose abilities have ruined his life, and now he's losing the one ability he ever had.

Most of the SF of the classic era that I even care about isn't novels at all, but the kind of short stories that got published in Galaxy and magazines like that when they existed, mostly before I was born. One example:

"A Pail of Air" by Fritz Leiber from the December 1951 issue of Galaxy. This is about a future where a black hole randomly crashes through the Solar System and drags off the Earth in its gravitational pull into empty space with no Sun, and the world that results, with the remnants of humanity trying to survive.

I haven't seen any reason to give a shit at all about any SF published in the last 20 years or so. It may say more about me than the quality of the work, though.
Click to expand...

I've had Blindsight on my shelf waiting for me to finish Man in the High Castle. I heard it's a pretty good sci fi horror novel in the vein of Crichton's earlier stuff.
 
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