Aren’t those the ones with the hexagonal mini-environments? I seem to recall that like the Riverworld series, they got worse and worse.
Has Gene Wolfe done anything significant other that that Torturer series? I seem to recall looking at some of his paperback covers and thinking he was into the swords and sorcery stuff, which I’m not. I read the first, and maybe part of the second, of his Torturer series.
There are swords, but not so much sorcery; what looks like sorcery is often weird science. In the Torturer series & its successors, he’s writing about a far future Earth. Then he takes it into space.
Wolfe’s writing style is rich & chewy. And you shouldn’t trust the Narrator!
The first five were written as three books–the second/third were one book and the fourth/fifth were one book. The “trilogy” of five books is great (excluding some boring redundant stuff to bridge each of the split books).
The the remaining books were written because the publisher threw too much money at Chalker and he couldn’t resist. But they’re dreadful.
I recently reread the first few Riverworld books and what’s weird is that the Riverworld books (even the first one) are atrociously written. I mean, they’re just terrible. Farmer is capable of such good stuff and the idea of Riverworld is just incredible, but his execution is terrible–there’s these horrible info-dumps where Farmer tries to show the audience how much research he did and just has expository diarrhea (actual quote that a character thinks while he’s being tortured!) “Could he actually be the legendary king of ancient Rome? Of Rome when it was a small village threatened by other Italic tribes, the Sabines, the Aequi and the Volsci? Who, in turn, were pressed by the Umbrians, themselves pushed by the powerful Etruscans? Was this really Tullius Hostilius, warlike successor to the peaceful Numa Pompilius…” etc. It goes on in this vein for quite a while. Or the PJF character saying stuff like “But of course you know that Mr Burton, for you were famous for always drinking water with your left hand.”
It really doesn’t hold up well despite the brilliance of the concept.
You didn’t mention him, but right around the time frame you mentioned was when John Varley was really hitting his stride. He gives blatant homage to Heinlein in much of his works, which can be distracting at times, but most of it comes across as tongue-in-cheek fun. His short stories are brilliant, and for novels I highly recommend Ophiuchi Hotline and Steel Beach.
I think of David Brin similarly. He has these great ideas, and often ends up writing a book that seems pretty juvenile. And Alan Dean Foster too, though I somehow get the impression his writing is specifically aimed at juveniles.
Agree wholeheartedly. The follow-ups are truly dreadful.
Ok, so I already read all of that series worth reading. I liked the guy as a writer. Has he done any other worthwile stuff since?
Maybe I’m conflating my authors, but I don’t think I’ve read any of his since the cover art suggested swords and sorcery. Am I wrong about this?
I don’t think that ANY of Varley’s cover art suggests S&S. Except maybe this cover of Titan (post 20), which does show a centaur. However, that’s not a classical centaur, and there’s a very good reason why those beings look like centaurs. And a good reason why they all have three sex organs, too. As you might imagine, their sex lives are complicated.
The Wonderland Gambit books are interesting, if dated technologically (Cybernetic Walrus, March Hare Network, Hot-Wired Dodo). I also really liked his fantasy series that started with River of the Dancing Gods.
Well, he’s dead now. 
But Books 1,2,3 and 5 of the “Spirits of Flux and Anchor” series are his masterpiece (IMO)–there’s some terrible didactism on gender politics and religious theocracy, but ignoring that, it’s fantastic.
The Devil Will Drag You Under is a really fun one-shot, as is Web of the Chosen.
The Dancing Gods series gets tiresome after a while, but it’s a fun premise. (When God created our universe, there was an “echo” and a second, much less stable universe was created. A bunch of non-fallen angels begged God for dominion over that world which He granted. But because it was an echo, the physical laws were…flexible. So the Angels (at first) and a council of humans (later) created a BIG BOOK OF RULES. The Angels just added rules like F=MA and E=MC[sup]2[/sup]. Humans added stuff like “Barbarian chicks must dress in scanty clothing or chain mail bikinis”–and those rules have the force of natural law. They don’t stand up to heavy thinking and you can overdose on them but they’re good.
I…think…that at least one British edition of the Gaea trilogy had horrible generic-fantasy covers by Boris or Rowena or some other Frazetta wannabe.
I’d suggest Christopher Hinz’s Paratwa Trilogy - Liege Killer, Ash Ock, and The Paratwa.
Very smart, very enjoyably written.
-Joe
Surprised no one mentioned it yet: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. IMO one of the best SF stories I’ve ever read.
J.
The follow-ups (Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind) form a trilogy which is very different in tone and setting than Ender’s Game, but they are worthwhile. They fall off in quality–*Children of the Mind *isn’t very good at all actually–but Speaker is worth the read.
Of the “Shadow” books that came out later and parallel Ender’s Game, I’ve only read Ender’s Shadow, which was pretty good, but didn’t inspire me to pick up the others.
Card’s Homecoming Saga is an interesting exercise in patterning a science fiction series on the Book of Mormon. I am not well-versed on the BoM, but I definitely recognized some of the borrowed themes (and names). This series, too, drops in quality as it progresses.
On a different note, John Cramer’s Einstein’s Bridge is a fun hard-science take on an alternate history where the Superconducting Super Collider actually does get built in Texas in the 90’s, and interesting things ensue. Brings to mind the recent threads here about whether the LHC at Cern could wreak havoc on Earth by creating micro black holes and such. Cramer is a physicist by trade and has only written a couple of SF books. His prose isn’t great (it’s not terrible), but the plotting and the science are pretty well done. His other novel, Twistor, is also a very good read. It is, IMO, better written than EB, but smaller in scope.
I’ve read Ender’s Game, and at least one sequel of it – can’t recall if there was more than thiat.
[Wow, already an answer on that]. Yes, I’ve read Speaker for the Dead as well. Not the others.
I heartily reccomend Peter F Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy.Space opera at its finest, but at the same time drawing on some great novel concepts.
I’ll second Scalzi’s books. I can’t stand Heinlein, but I found Scalzi to be immensely entertaining, probably because unlike Heinlein he doesn’t take himself all that seriously and doesn’t come across as an immensely arrogant sonofabitch.
The best SF I’ve read in a long time is Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. Damn, but that’s a good book: a New England coming-of-age novel with a totally ass-kicking MacGuffin and a keen sociological element. It does like three or four different genres totally right and is completely absorbing. If it was only good character, or only good society-examination, or only good MacGuffin (or only good one other element that I won’t mention because it’s a spoiler), it’d be good enough to read, but my God, it’s all of 'em together. The sequel is good but not as good, IMO.
I also loved Red Mars and enjoyed Green Mars and quit reading Blue Mars halfway through because it became sucktastic. The first one is really, really good, though.
And of course if you haven’t read Ursula Le Guin’s SF, she’s major.
Is she the one who has a lot of stuff set in Oregon?