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Originally posted by PinkFloydBut of the Dune series, only Dune itself. The rest get worse and worse. And worse. And worse...
You also can't go wrong with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Dune, or any of the Elminster books
One I read only recently, and enjoyed: Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Also very good: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.
Richard
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein is one I'd like someone to read and react to -- it had a huge following in the 1960s, of course. I wonder what folks would make of it now. 😲
For 2008, these are the nominees for the Hugo award for SF novel:
* The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon1
* Brasyl by Ian McDonald
* Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
* The Last Colony by John Scalzi
* Halting State by Charles Stross
to see a great listing of books dating a long way back, see this link to the Hugo awards and nominees -- this link is for the novels, but you can also find in the main article links to other categories of SF, such as short stories, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel
main article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award
Now, I don't mean to start a big controversy, but I'd like some thoughts on this: while I enjoyed very much the original Dune, there is something about this sort of SF that bothers me a lot and so I don't rank these sorts of stories at the top level.
The sort of story to which I refer takes familiar cultural, national, ethnic or historical peoples and societies and puts them on another planet, jazzes the place up with weird semi-alien creatures who themselves are terribly similar to Earth-like creatures.
My problem with this is that I want more imagination in SF than that -- and I also find anthropomorphic "aliens" rather boring. Sort of the feeling I got when just about every alien on the early star trek series were merely humans with tatoos and funny accents.
Ah, that brings me to a book and an author I highly recommend:
Stanislau Lem -- read The Invincible -- what happens when the most powerful conceivable weaponized, scientifically advanced, gigantic human spaceship staffed to the max encounters a truly alien lifeform that appears to defeat everything humans can throw at it?
Then read Eden and maybe Solaris -- the latter is hard to read because the alien is non-anthropomorphic and there is no explanation for it all at the end. In Eden, you get the same theme of how difficult it is to understand a totally alien society. Part of the problem is that we all tend to base our explanations on what we know from earth and earth society.
Unlike Solaris, in Eden explanations do come at the end of the book
I also like Lem's Pirx the Pilot stories ...
see article by Carol Arnold:
"In one of his wilder excursions in "The Cyberiad", Stanislaus Lem describes beings who have reached the Highest Possible Level of Development (HPLD). These creatures do nothing but lie on cushions in a desert of cybernetic sand and scratch themselves while watching indecent plays performed by lecherous elves in their abdomens.
"When interrogated about why they don’t use their highly developed science, technology and knowledge for the benefit of the universe, or at least to reduce the suffering of sentient beings, they reply that they tried, and it was useless.
"Could they straighten a humped back or correct any deformity? Of course, but " ... when a civilization starts straightening humps, .... believe me, there’s no end to it! You straighten humps, then you repair and amplify the mind, make suns rectilinear, fabricate fates and fortunes of all kinds. Oh, it begins innocently, like discovering fire by rubbing two sticks together, but eventually it leads to the construction of Omniacs, Deifacts, and Ultimathuloriums."
"In Lem’s story the interlocutor presses on: "If you are truly gods, your duty is clear: immediately banish all the misery and misfortune that oppresses other sentient beings."
"The HPLD being replies: "You wish us to bestow happiness upon everyone? We devoted over fifteen millennia to that. [We tried] evolutionary eudaemonic tectonics -- not lifting a finger to help, confident that every civilization will muddle through. Revolutionary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick, bestowing happiness by force, produces from one to eight hundred times more grief than no interference whatever. [F]or the Carrot, the results are exactly the same."
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0813-01.htm
Lem can be very funny.
for more complete info on Lem, see
http://lt.librarything.com/author/lemstanislaw
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Originally posted by Shallow BlueTo each his own of course, but the Dune sequels are widely misunderstood. Herbert is setting up the reader with Dune. At the end of the book his hero is virtually invincible. He is the King of Universe, has amazing powers, he can see the future and commands an army of fanatical warriors. Classic in its "good guy wins" story. The sequels try to show why this would be a very, very bad thing for humanity to rely on such a messianic figure; but in doing so he has to tear down the hero everybody is emotionally invested in. People generally don't like that sort of thing. The world Herbert sets up in Dune inevitably becomes a tyranny and must be taken apart so that humanity can survive on its own.
But of the Dune series, only Dune itself. The rest get worse and worse. And worse. And worse...
One I read only recently, and enjoyed: Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke.
Also very good: Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury.
Richard
Originally posted by Buzz MeeksMy name is (My Name Here) and I aprove of this message. Hands down, Frank has the best series. I wouldn't touch the other Herberts contributions to the Dune series with a ten foot book mark though if I were you.
I liked Asimov at first, but his "Foundation" idea, that science could solve everything for us, clashed with my one time favorite Frank Herbert who taught us to adapt and not rely soley on science or leaders for our salvation. After reading Herbert I couldn't stomach Asimov anymore although he's certainly a skilled writer. Has no one mentioned Frederick P ...[text shortened]... or have I just missed it? Surely he is to be in the same league as Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein.
Originally posted by nihilismorI forgot about John Brunner -- I remember reading his The Whole Man because it got me thrown out of English class in High School as I was supposed to listening to the boring old fart drone on and on and on about the Scarlet Letter.
As for best Sci-Fi Novel, I may catch a bunch of chaff, but I hereby elect Stand On Zanzibar By John Brunner..
I don't recall that book you mention -- I will definitely look it up.
Nothing wrong with citing Brunner -- you might say he was Aces with me - back when you could get two SF novels printed together, one upside down with respect to the other, for .35 cents ....
Murray Leinster comes to mind, too. I liked his idea for how spaceships would be launched by aiming a laser at their tail ends rather than using fuel aboard ship for anything but traveling outside of gravity wells. His War of the Gizmos was pretty funny.
