Getting back into SF

RealityChuck, I love Jasper Fforde! Thursday Next rocks. I own, but have not yet read Shades of Grey. You’re right that I wasn’t really classing it as SF, but I can’t think why, right now.

A good friend of mine is always telling me to read Christopher Moore, but I’ve never been inspired to do so yet. Will check it out!

I don’t think of Christopher Moore as writing “science fiction” exactly – but he is very, very funny. “The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove” is a delight: from wry to utterly hilarious, and filled with people just like the real people you know well in real life. A blessed gusher of fun!

Its my opinion , but most sci/fi today has two branches, Military Scifi and Space Opera. If your current through the nineties, then you have read most “new” scifi. Most of the new material I am reading now is found on fanfic websites, and 95 cent specials on Amazon Kindle. I think that most folks replying to this, will pass on their recomendations with established writers, and mostly be solid.

With the price of paperbacks well over ten dollars a for a dead tree book, the Kindle app on my ipad, has brought back those glory days in the eighties, when a dead tree book did cost 95 cents and I could load up with 5 or 6 at a time, and not worry if I picked a lemon.

Declan

The price for paperback books was well above $.95 in the 1980’s. The average price for paperbacks was already $1.35 in 1975 and $5.78 in 2000. I can’t find anything online with a more precise timeline for paperback prices than this article:

Iain M Banks Culture series is great. The Algebraist by same author (stand alone space opera) also very good

Huh. I check out half a dozen novels at a time from the library, dropping them if they’re duds. My only fee for reading is the occasional late fee :).

And I think there’s plenty of SF not in those genres, albeit not all hard SF. Touch, by Claire North, is a fun book that’s not clearly SF or fantasy. Embassytown, by China Mieville, is set in space, but I wouldn’t call it space opera; it’s more like a punk version of something Le Guin would write, much more concerned with society-building than with anything else (and it’s VERY hard science fiction, as long as you recognize linguistics as a science). Jeff Van Der Meer’s Southern Reach trilogy is some of the weirdest SF I’ve ever read, neither military nor space opera.

Thanks, Chuck - I’ve added these to my to-read list.

The aforementioned Robert J. Sawyer has written at least a couple books that have a mystery/whodunnit aspect to them (Illegal Alien is one).

Then let me repeat my earlier recommendation for Peter Hamilton and specifically mention his Mindstar series: Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder, and The Nano Flower. They’re science fiction/mysteries.

Thank you! Perfect.

John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy is an amazing feat of far-future world-building that really displays what alien thought processes might look like. His other, more fantasy-oriented novels are fun but not as breathtaking.

His personal politics are quite off-putting, but they are not present in his fiction.

Say, how about Neal Stephenson? You might like Snowcrash, or Diamond Age, in particular.

Well, Sawyer fans, so far I’m really enjoying Flashforward!