Is that like StarGate SG1 or Galaxy Express 999?
God I love that movie.
Jules Verne was doing itin the 1890’s
You misspelled H.G. Wells name… 
D’oh :smack:
But in past treatments I’ve seen, people understood the concept of deceit, they were just unable to use it (same thing with the Jim Carrey movie Liar Liar). The Invention of Lying is the only book or movie I’ve seen where we have a society where the concept of deceit doesn’t exist.
I’ll grant the Thermians in Galaxy Quest seem to have no concept of deceit but Galaxy Quest wasn’t about that idea. It was just something in the background to move the story along. We saw very little about how their society worked.
In the Larry Niven/Brenda Cooper book “Building Harliquin’s Moon”, a group of human refugee’s are fleeing the Solar System in a fusion powered space ship. The humans are in suspended animation, until the drive goes nuts, and has to dump the anti-matter core.
Given the near perfect suspended animation technology, the humans smash together some small planetoids to create an Earth like world upon which to build a particle accellerator to create anti-matter.
That’s just the rough frame surrounding a very interesting story. I recommend the book!
Not exactly sci-fi, more like a mashup of western and fantasy, but Felix Gilman’s The Half-Made World had some ideas I’d never seen before.
The reality in the book is a vaguely 1800s America, except instead of a central government, it’s a wild west dominated by two opposing factions, the Engine and the Gun. The Engine is a dystopian society ruled by seemingly sentient giant trains, bent on controlling nature. The Gun is an outlaw group of assassins and rebels who are given superhuman abilities by their demon-possessed sidearms. In addition, the further west across the continent the characters go, the more reality breaks down, as physics and time get weird and monsters appear.
It’s a crazy trip, and I definitely recommend it.
Has anyone done anything further with ambisexual species since LeGuinn’s “Left Hand of Darkness”? Love that book.
Some of Octavia Butler’s works were/are pretty unique
Yes, I really liked The Half-Made World, too. Weird stuff.
He has a sort-of sequel to it due out soon, I believe.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest, 2312, takes the idea of asteroid habitats to extremes! Hundreds of them have been hollowed out and all sorts of ecologies developed inside. And their orbits have all been changed as well…
edit to clarify which book I liked!
Another of China Mieville’s books defies easy genre-categorization (and I hope folks won’t discuss it here, because even categorizing it may involve spoilers): The City and the City. The relationship between the two titular characters is unlike anything I’ve seen elsewhere.
It’s only a short, but it may be Harry Harrison’s finest work: “The Streets of Ashkelon.” A relatively primitive race works everything out according to exhaustive logical analysis. Then a missionary shows up…
I started reading Mieville’s *Kraken *just this morning. Enjoying it so far, though the heavily colloquial British English makes some of it hard to follow. I’m almost wondering if he’s making some of it up, like Burgess did for A Clockwork Orange.
I was thinking of that story, but I couldn’t remember the name of it! Really great short story.
Timothy Zahn’s Quadrail series has as a central feature the Quadrail, which is a train that travels between stars.
And it’s not quite trains, but the Starrigger trilogy has interstellar travel by truck (they use an alien built Road that passes between gigantic Tipler cylinders).
Good series, both of them.
Seconded. DeJohn’s never quite hit that level of sweeping accomplishment since, unfortunately. But I reread the StarRigger books every year or so with great pleasure.
Whereas older SF was very often genuinly original and thought provoking, especially in the pulps, todays efforts are more akin to “Space Opera”, (Westerns, Soaps etc.set in space/the future) or rehashes at best of very old “original ideas”.
The only contemporary author that I know of, who has any reallly original ideas was mentioned in the o.p. (Ian M Banks), and unfortunately I’m not a great fan of his actual plots.
Wellll… I’d suggest you round up a good selection of pulps and read all the stuff that was never, ever going to make it into a later collection. I suspect your view of pulps comes from the very select best of the Golden Age, hardly a fair sampling.
That said, I don’t think I’ve read a truly compelling piece of short sf since the 1970s or so. The stuff of the last 20 years seems thin and trite where it’s not an obvious rehash of some great sf old enough to pillage. Just offhand, I’d date it from the sharp peak of the first cyberpunk to a rapid devolution into formulaic repetition.
Like Plato’s Republic?
Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure series uses this idea.