Yeah, I know, a very vague thread title.
With my new schedule, I’ve got a lot of time to read. I’m looking for suggestions as to what I might be able to find cheaply in a used book store. I know this usually means books that may have sold fairly well ten years ago and were a pleasant read, but weren’t on a must keep list so they tend to find their way to the used book store.
I tend to enjoy more of the ‘hard’ sci fi as well as books longer than 300 pages, but all suggestions are welcome.
I’m reading The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle first published in 1974. It’s pretty entertaining but it’s one of those sci-fi books where feudalism seems to have made a come back and you’ve got age of sail style navies floating around in the year 3,000.
I’m also reading Wild Cards: I edited by George R.R. Martin which is an anthology of short stories surrounding a virus of alien origin that kills a lot of people, gives some people incredible powers and makes others into mutant freaks.
If you haven’t read the Dune series I recommend the first three books. I haven’t read all 6 of the original books by Herbert.
Check out anything by Philip K. Dick but “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” is pretty good.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is another recent read of mine that I really enjoyed. It’s basically about the alienation a soldier experiences after coming home from various tours of duty. Good stuff whether you’re into military fiction or not.
I found the four books in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion/Endymion saga in a secondhand bookstore. They’re pretty decent.
I’ll bet most of Robin Hobb’s books would be available too. If you like lighter fantasy, you might like the Farseer/Liveships/Tawny Man titles. The first is Assassin’s Apprentice.
Also Gene Wolfe, the Book of the New Sun series; there are four.
Pretty much any Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Herbert, Bradbury, Niven… They did a lot more than just their biggies.
And don’t neglect anthologies. Some priceless gems in many of those.
Tad Williams, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn.
Check out Baen’s free library online webscriptions.net if you do not mind reading on a screen or have a smartphone/ebook reader.
Hm, I think most of Lois McMaster Bujold’s backlist would be available in a used bookstore, same with Elizabeth Moon, David Weber and David Drake, probably Eric Flint, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCafferey as well.
I am, of course, a huge fan of Le Guin. Her stuff isn’t exactly hard SF, but it’s not “magic has reawakened in a world of science,” either.
China Mieville: you’ll love him or hate him, and that may vary from book to book. I’ve never known anyone who was neutral on him. I tend to love him, but some of his books are horrible. I recommend Perdido Street Station if you’re up for a long, dense urban fantasy, or The Scar if you prefer your long dense fantasies to be nautical.
I recommend that you find online a list of what a large group of people consider to be the best science fiction and fantasy of all time. One such list is this one:
Then go to a used bookstore and pick out a few of them that happen to be available and buy them. This is as good as (and probably better than) asking people here for such a list. That doesn’t mean that you will like all of the books you find by this method. Indeed, you’ll distinctly dislike a few of them. The same is true of a list that you put together from the set of books that the posters to this thread will recommend to you. There is no possible way to find a list of books that you will consistently like, but at least you will have a slightly better chance that you will like most of the books in a list created by a large group than by asking a small group like the posters to this thread.
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Some of my favorites:
Arthur C Clarke: Rendevous with Rama, 1973: Mankind discovers a cylindrical object approaching earth and sends a crew to investigate.
Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man, 1953: the first Hugo award winner and The Stars My Destination, 1956: timeless classic in the noir tradition bet set in the future.
Robert Heinlen: The Door Into Summer, 1957: One of the best time travel novels written.
Anything by Jack Vance. He’s been writing for almost 70 years, and he’s produced so much SF and fantasy that I’ve never seen a science fiction section of a used book store that didn’t have at least one of his books. He’s also consistently entertaining.
I’m sort of in the middle - I can’t stand him, but I love his books. They’re brilliant literature written by (IMHO) a hateful, narrow-minded misanthrope.
Besides the major Sf writers, you should look for anthologies (always good for disciovering authors you didn’t know about), especially The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volume I and IIA and IIB (ignore the others) or The Year’s Best Science Fiction.
They’re getting harder to find now, but I love the 1950s short stories-with-a-twist of the sort that Twlight Zone made famous (many of them, in fact, having appeared as episodes of TTZ) Authors like:
Fredric Brown
Robert Sheckley
William Tenn
Theodore Cogswell
Richard Matheson
Charles Beaumont
Some titles:
Dune (Herbert)- great as a stand alone or as the portal into a huge (sometimes messy, ymmv) world of books
Glory Road (Heinlein)- Mix fantasy and sci-fi? Sure! And it’s fun, too
The Mote In God’s Eye (Niven/Pournelle)- fascinating imagination of what a totally alien culture might be like. Plus, it has big spaceships. The individual sub stories were well done, I thought
Ringworld (Niven) - As a stand alone or as your own intro to more Known Space stories. Excellent visualizations.
The City and the Stars (Clarke)- one of my faves as a youth, reread it a couple of years back, still good. A better version of his earlier Against the Fall of Night. Set so far in the future, even we are somewhat alien (in thinking, at least). Intelligent machines, space travel, mystery, etc …
Up The Line (Silverberg)- a different take on time travel. campy, weird, fun
The End of Eternity (Asimov)- another different look at time travel (of course you might also want to read his lesser known work, the Foundation series)
A Princess of Mars (Burroughs)- may be campy, prejudiced, silly, what have you, but boy is it fun. Inspired a lot of early sci-fi writers and even some who grew up to be scientists.
The Time Machine (Wells)- time travel? really? Sometimes, a story is a classic for good reasons. This is one of those times. has been reprinted in paperback many times.
Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny are usually available in most used book stores, and pretty much everything they wrote is worth reading. Most of the stores I visit also tend to have large collections of Star Trek novels, which can be hit or miss but are generally worth a look.
They’re also easy to find - just go to the last shelf.
Arthur C Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust is one of my favorites, short but hard SF (at least for 1961).
L. Sprague De Camp’s short stories are loads of fun, & in several collections.
If you can find A Gun For Dinosaur or his Rivers Of Time, you’ll enjoy them.
If you like big space operas then anything by Peter F Hamilton is recommended, they are long and complex.
I really, really like L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future anthologies. Yeah, I know you will probably recoil at the mere mention of Hubbard, but the anthologies are actually quite good. Hubbard set up a contest for writers and illustrators of SF/fantasy (tending more towards SF) and the winner and runners up of each year have their stories published.
This is what I was going to say. The question is so vague, and opinions are so divergent, that this seems like a much smarter approach.