Stuck in a rut - need new Sci Fi authors

I just returned from the library, browsing the stacks in the Sci Fi section & didn’t see much new among my usual authors. I’m a fan of the old classic “hard” sci fi - rockets, decent physics, bug-eyed monsters & the occassional heaving breast of a rescued space-babe.

There’s a lot of authors I don’t recognize anymore as my usual prolific classic authors are starting to die off (after which their publications seem to drop off a bit).

So, recommend to me, please, some new authors. Those I’ve liked the past:

Harry Harrison
Spider Robinson
Joe Haldeman
Larry Niven
Isaac Asimov
Robert Silverberg
Jerry Pournelle
Allan Dean Foster (except the Flinx stuff)
Robert Heinlein
HG Wells
Jules Verne
Brian Herbert
Jack Chalker

I tend away from the “sociological” fiction from writers like Phillip Jose Farmer. (statement slightly in conflict with Heinlein above but this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, it’s a tendency).

I’m especially fond of the short/novella forms. There’s something great in starting, developing, and resolving something in 50 pages or so. I’m always crawling around for new short SF (the Gardner Dozois anthologies are very good, IMO). I tend to read collections of multiple authors because the short SF of a single author, collected, sounds a little one-voiced to me by the end of the book.

I also occasionally enjoy a good Clancy-style techno-thriller. What can I say, I’m a geek.

Jules Verne was good, but what’s he done lately?

You might check out Kim Stanley Robinson and Stephen Baxter. I’m sort of in the same boat as you; a quarter century ago I would have known almost every name on the shelf in the science fiction section at the bookstore; now I’m lost. (And they stopped even trying to separate science fiction and fantasy.)

Have you read CJ Cherryh? She writes some good human-politics books, and some much better ones which tend to be all about the process of “going native”. Quite good, although mostly not novellas (some of her earlier work was quite short, however.)

Jack McDevitt writes some really good stuff. Try “The Engines of God,” “Eternity Road” and “Infinity Beach.” Great mix of action, science and philosiphing.

Alastair Reynolds - Chasm City was very good IMHO
Neal Stephenson
Dan Simmons
Some of Neil Gaimon’s stuff is okay
My husband has every David Drake book ever written, but the plots tend to center around guys in souped up tanks blowing things up. If that floats your boat then go for it.

Connie Willis
She tends to favor time travel.
Good combination of technical stuff and human nature insight.
“The Doomsday Book” is a personal favorite.

James White.

His Sector General novels are the best non-military SF on the shelf. Medical Science Fiction, on a giant, multi-species space station/hospital.

If you don’t read them, I’ll tell Major O’Mara on you. :wink:

David Weber’s Honor Harrington series! First book is On Basilisk Station; do read them in order, as this is a series where it matters. Harrington has been described as a ‘female, space-going Horatio Hornblower’. I’ve never read the adventures of Mr. Hornblower (one of these days…), so I can’t tell you how accurate that description is. What I can tell you is that IMO, this series is a good example of hard military SF with characters that actually grow as the series goes along.

Science Fiction Novels:

  • Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series is a masterpiece. Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion has everything a science fiction fan could want: space travel, godlike AIs, interstellar war, abundant mysteries (that actually get solved by the end of the second novel), mysterious planets, and the fate of the human race.

  • Frederik Pohl’s Gateway is a great book that I think would fit the classic science fiction mold.

  • David Brin has plenty of good stuff to and fits into the mold of classic sci-fi as you described it with plenty of aliens and decent to good physics.

  • Orson Scott Card wrote some great science fiction in the past, though now he seems to tend towards fantasy. I recommend Ender’s Game, Treason, and the Earth series.

  • C. S. Friedman wrote an excellent science fiction story called This Alien Shore (I also love her ColdFire trilogy, which is also science fiction but reads just like a fantasy and is stylistically different).

  • Other good author’s include Vinore Vinge, John Varley, Philip K. Dick, and Gene Wolfe.

Collections of Short stories:

  • Harlan Ellison is the master of the short story, however they are not always science fiction.

  • Cruel Miracles is a great collection of very powerful short stories by Orson Scott Card.

  • Philip K. Dick has had a bunch of his short stories republished lately. I have not read them all, but the collection that includes Minority Report is excellent and is probably closer to your ideal “classic hard science fiction” than the above two.

  • A good anthology is Future on Ice which contains short stories by authors including Isaac Asimov, George R. R. Martain, Greg Bear, C. J. Cherryh, John Varley and Orson Scott Card (among others).

I also highly recomend a very cool website http://www.hour25online.com this website has some great radio interviews with a good collection of science fiction authors, which you can listen to for free over the internet. There are not even any advertisements! Not only are many of the interviews fascinating in and of themselves, but it is a great way to hear about some terrific science fiction.

Vernor Vinge. Almost anything.

I second the recommendation for Alastair Reynolds. Revelation Space came out before Chasm City. I have the 2nd book but haven’t read it yet.

Wil McCarthy has written some interesting books. I liked Bloom (one review here. I also read The Collapsium by the same author, and had a little more trouble with it. The style was a little odd to me, but it had plenty of far future high-tech and speculation.

I’ve got Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt on my to-read pile. The premise is what if the Black Plague killed off 99% of the population in Europe instead of 30%. How would history have been affected? More alternate history than science fiction, but the premise caught my interest. The same author has also written several books on terraforming Mars, but I haven’t read them and can’t comment.

I tend to read a bit more fantasy than s-f, but sometimes only good hard science fiction will satisfy!

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash didn’t invent cyberpunk, but it almost perfected it. The hero (or protagonist), whose name eludes me, is a pizza deliverer (for the Mafia, which now controls pizza delivery but does it right) in the Real World but a gallant swordsman in the Metaverse (cyber world) that’s overpopulated with Wal-Mart packaged images. He encounters a computer virus that originated in ancient Mesopotamia and then it gets weird, but it’s very entertaining.

John Varley:
Titan
Demon
Wizard
Steel Beach

Robert Charles Wilson:
Bridge of Years
The Harvest
Mysterium

At the moment, I’m stuck on John Barnes. He’s not brilliant, but I keep picking up more of his stuff nonetheless. If you like Heinlein, you might like him. He’s obviously inspired by Heinlein in a Larry - Niven - slobbering - fanboy kind of way.

Orbital Resonance and A Million Open Doors are both shortish novels, and quite good.

The dude needs to be taken firmly in hand by a good editor, IMHO, but he’s got that spark of fifties-era je ne sais quoi that keeps me coming back for more.

Now, if you want pure, unadulterated brilliance, you should be reading Stephenson.

I second all recommendations for Neal Stephenson. When is he coming out with another book, anyway? Other cyberpunk leaders are William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. If you like the short-story form, Sterling has several wonderful collections out.

S.M. Stirling is a hot new talent, mostly in military SF – I don’t know if he’s ever been in combat, but he certainly writes the most vividly rendered combat scenes I have ever read. (Either you like that kind of thing or you don’t . . .) He specializes, so far, in alternate-history SF: His two best-known series are the Domination of the Draka (after the American Revolution, Loyalists found a colony in South Africa and set out to conquer and enslave the whole world), and the Nantucket series (the entire island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, is thrown back to the year 1250 B.C. and the people have to survive by dealing with Bronze Age tribes and nations). He shows a very vast and well-mastered knowledge base.

The Uchronia Alternate History List (www.uchronia.net) deals only with alternate-history SF but will direct you to the very latest in that field.

I notice your list of favorite classic SF authors does not include Theodore Sturgeon. Give him a look – Spider Robinson loves him!

You didn’t mention Ben Bova, either. Bova has been around seemingly forever, but always striking out into new territory. Lately he has been writing a lot of near-future SF, set within the solar system: Moonscape, Moonwar, Venus, Jupiter, and the Asteroid Wars series. This is a wonderful and refreshing development – SF without any impossible or improbably black-box technologies such as warp drive or transporter beams. Allen Steele has also done a lot of work along these lines.

Oh, and also check out Robert J. Sawyer, Canada’s most prominent SF writer (other than Spider Robinson, who is a Yankee immigrant). His latest is a trilogy called the Neanderthal Parallax: There is an alternate Earth where Homo sapiens went extinct and Homo Neanderthalensis became the dominant species. A Neanderthal scientist, Ponter Boddit, is transported to our Earth in a freak accident involving a quantum computer. The volumes now out are Hominids and Humans; the third, Hybrids, will come out in September. And if you attend this year’s WorldCon in Toronto, Sawyer is sure to be there! Robinson too, I hope!

Based on the authors you listed as liking, I’d recommend David Brin, Lois McMaster Bujold, Larry Hinz, William Saunders, S.M. Stirling, and Harry Turtledove.

Oops: It’s Christopher Hinz, not Larry Hinz.

Baldwin hit it right on the head - 25 years ago, I’d have known all the shelf. Today, I’m livin’ in the past.

Boy! A “quarter-century”; thanks for making me feel old but, you’re right, a quarter century ago I was starting my teenage years.

I cut my teeth on Tom Swift and his Amazing Widgets & it’s ilk from the JV section of the library when I was just a kid. I even have a small collection of them for my son when he’s older (I caught a library cleaning out its shelves.)

I’m making an author’s list for the next library visit, I’ll probably have to fire up the Inter-library loan system but they’ve got that all automated, now.

Thanks for the great suggestions so far. Keep’m coming.

This fall. And I third the recommendations. Cryptonomicon, though not actually sci-fi, is easily the best book I’ve read this year. His sci-fi’s good, too. Just FYI, he’s starting a new series (trilogy, maybe?) this fall that’s going to be sort of historical-fictiony, and a lot of the characters will be the ancestors his the Cryptonomicon characters - i.e., the same people, just in a different time period. Can’t wait.

I’ll fourth Neal Stephenson but I’d start with The Diamond Age. Quirky, deep, humourous, serious and in my view, brilliant prophetic work. Especially if you have any interest in nanotechnology.

And since you said you like the older generation writers, how about Frank Herbert beyond Dune he has a host of other good books, titles include, The Dosadi Experiment, Hellstrom’s Hive, Destination: Void and many others.