Bill, the Galatic Hero, the book that started it all.
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of the Hippies from Hell
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Zombie Vampires
Bill, the Galactic Hero: the Final Incoherent Adventure
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure
and my favorite, sadly out of print now, Bill, the Galactic Hero : On the Planet of Ten Thousand Bars
I recommend a bunch of SF/F books that are often considered young adult fiction, but, in my opinion, don’t lose their appeal for adults. Some much more recent than others… in no particular order…
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
A Wrinkle in Time and others by Madeleine L’Engle
Dune - Frank Herbert
Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
Philip Pullman’s recent trilogy, beginning with The Golden Compass
Happy reading!
You know, jarbaby, I thought it was just me. I’ve tried the SF/Fantasy novels on several occasions, and I just can’t get into them. I agree with you. Nice to know I’m not alone.
::Slinking off to read How to Be a Superhero
Why, oh why, do people insist on referring to Ender’s Game as a kid’s book? Or rather, “young adult”?
IMHO, the themes of Ender’s War tend to be a little beyond your average teenager. Note that I said “average”, which is a word that cannot be applied to anybody around this board.
C’mon jarbabyj, didn’t you ever play at superheroes when you were a kid? Granted, choices open to us girls were a little limited…
In a way, that’s what a lot of this is to me. A great big game of make-believe, with ever so much more sophistication than when I was nine. And better stories than I could make up. The good ones are logical extensions of a what-if.
The type of story you seem to be talking about - well, remember the girl who had to be Supergirl ALL THE TIME so she never lost or had to be rescued? Remember how much fun she was to play with? Eeeeeewwww.
However, if your attempts to “get it” don’t succeed, don’t worry about it. I still don’t “get” a lot of general fiction. If I do navel-gazing novels, all I can think of is “where did all this lint come from? why is it there? if I save it for a year, will I have enough to stuff a pillow with? Geez, this book is only good for insulation.”
Stay far away from The Mists of Avalon for now. As a beginner, that is definitely Not The Thing. Something light, but well-written and engaging is what you need.
I’ll shuddup now.
No offense at all, but these were three examples I was going to give as stories I extremely disliked. I didn’t read Dune, I watched the SciFi channel miniseries. It lost me after twenty minutes.
the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings…I’m…i’m…I’m really sorry…I just didn’t enjoy them. My dad really wanted me to, we watched the cartoons…I…I don’t know. I’m sorry.
I have a very active imagination. Very. 3/4 of my life is spent in imagination. I don’t want people to think that I don’t. I DO like superheroes, and I said I loved Star Wars. X-Men was one of my favorite movies of last year…
It kind of all boils down to my favorite Onion headline:
“MAN LANDS ON THE FUCKING MOON…HOLY SHIT”
When someone presents me with “here’s a world completely submerged in water. Everyone has telepathic ability and reproduces via a complex dice game”…I have to sit there and go:
WHAT THE! how did that happen? How do you build a city underwater? Who decided it would work? How did they come up with the dice game? I can’t even imagine it!
I’m still lost on how Star Wars can be long long ago for chrissake.
And yet, when the author says “well, here’s how we built The Great SpaceCoaster” for sixty five pages, bringing in mysterious crystals and physics and tools, I’m bored to tears.
I can’t have it both ways, so I guess I can’t have it.
I loved A Prayer For Owen Meany. Not because I have an inspirational midget in my life, but because I was forced to think about what it’s like to know the exact day you’ll die, or what it means to lose a friend, or be inspired by someone.
I can’t relate to battling a thirty headed hydra on any level.
jarbaby
Yikes. No. that’s a subject I won’t read. My intense “end of the world” phobias prevent me from reading anything apocolyptic or for that matter post apocolyptic.
just a little thing with me. I’m scared of aliens, tornadoes, the apocolypse and being bludgeoned 
jarbaby
There are a very few authors in the genre I would recommend to an adult woman of your stated reading tastes, but here are the few - I second almost anything by Ursula K LeGuin, but you might want to start with “Buffalo Gals”, a collection of short stories to see if you like her style. Also on the short list is Octavia Butler. Read her if you like Alice Walker (in fact, read Walker’s “The Temple of My Familiar”, an excellent book that you won’t find in the Sci-fi/Fantasy ghetto of your local bookstore, but has some strong fantasy elements to it). I think if Alice Walker wrote in the genre it would be very much like Butler’s books. “Wild Seed” is excellent and might be a good place to start, if you are interested. Finally, Kate Wilhelm, who writes general fiction as well.
No elves, no dragons, no techincal descriptions, and few, if, any of the other elements usually associated with the genre. All excellent writers who, sadly, have to share the shelves with the great steaming piles of crap constantly being excreted by “writers” who think that Captain-Kirk-meets-the-Terminator is a great concept for a book.
SuaSponte, I agree with you regarding Vonnegut’s motavation in using SF elements. However, I think the point you’re making is a bit strict. Adams is usually considered an SF author, for instance, at least by publishing conventions, but for whatever reason Vonnegut is not. And I’d argue that a fair number of writers who are usually thought of as SF authors have had little or no interest in creating realistic alternate worlds or dealing with the effects of technology on humans. For instance, Philip K. Dick mostly uses SF elementals to make his metaphysical points or skewer modern society. And a whole stream of more pulpish writers going back to Doc Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs have used SF elements simply as a background for their adventure plots. I’ll concede that they’re not “real SF” writers, but perhaps belong in the Fantasy genre, or someplace else (which isn’t meant to disparage their work at all; hell, I love some of Dick’s novels), but as long as their included, I don’t see why not to include Vonnegut.
I could be wrong, but I suspect the usual reason for considering Vonnegut not to be SF has less to do with whether he qualifys under a strict definition of the genre, and more with the attitudes towards SF as less than serious fiction that seemed to be prevelant when he first began writing. Of course, considering I wasn’t even alive when Vonnegut began writing I have no direct experience of that time, but I know a lot of SF and Fantasy writers have talked and written about the ghettoization of genre fiction that was very common at one time and I think still exists to a somewhat lesser extent.
I normally read SF\F for escapism, so I’m pretty much at the opposite end to the OP. Having said that, it’s really no different to general fiction, some is good, some bad, some nice and light stuff, some better quality.
And SuaSponte, I disagree, Douglas Adams was certainly a SF writer, as well as a satirist. It’s a big genre, and he fits in just as well as Pratchett or Cherryh. The SF background was important to his work, the main plot might have worked in a more conventional setting, but probably not as well.
With regards to suspension of disbelief, I don’t normally have that problem. Partially because I try to avoid the really trashy stuff, partially because authors try to make it believable, and partially because some can be accepted easily. An example is the way Star Wars does it, rather than the relatively obvious way Trek puts it in.
A good book will not make you think 'Huh? What? How on earth? etc. It’s not like that doesn’t happen in non-SF anyway, I’ve given up on two books recently that were set just in the future (not actually SF), because the science was bugging me too much.
To add to the others you might try Iain Banks, both SciFi and non, he’s pretty good, and it isn’t an obtrusive part. People are much more important.
I didn’t care for The Doomsday Book (at least the half I got through), but it’s not an “end of the world” novel: it’s about an academic who, due to a retrieval error with a time machine gets stuck back in time at the beginning of the Black Plague.
Sure you can. You don’t want “hard” science fiction (where half the fun is the author spending 50 percent of the word-count on the details of organic molecular structures on the surface of a cooled neutron star–a real example, btw) and you don’t want Star Trek Technobabble (neither do I. Yuk).
There’s a wide range of SF that’s neither extreme. Again, it’s like saying "I don’t like Movies because I don’t like slapstick comedies and I don’t like slasher flicks.
Quite a bit of SF/F only deals with minor changes. For example: Robert Heinlein wrote a story in the mid-40s about a world where the government wasn’t interested in going to the moon. He tells, in about 35 pages, the troubles that a businessman has in trying to get there through private enterprise. It details the cost of his obsession, both in his private and financial life. It’s a heartbreaking story. The only “gimmie” you need to accept is that, for reasons explained in a paragraph or two, the Government isn’t interested in going to the moon.
If you want a quicker investment of time and don’t want to start with novels, try the following two stories: (read 'em in this order) “The Man Who Sold The Moon” and “The Green Hills of Earth” which can both be found the collection The Past Through Tomorrow, which any library should have. No 30 Headed Hydras, no Time Travelling aliens, no Pod People from Outer Space. Just a simple human story. (With, granted, slightly dated prose…but Hemmingway and Fitzgerald’s prose is dated a bit too. Adds to the charm.)
Again, I’m not arguing with your “right” to dislike SF, but the stuff you’ve read/watched is only a narrow corner of the genre and some of it is just so-so and some of it assumes a greater famliarity with the ‘rules’ of the genre (Dune). (Note also, that the animated The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings are horrible butcheries of the original work. I can’t even begin to tell you how BAD the films were compared to the richness of Tolkein’s story. And that idiot Glenn Yarborough got the “moral” of the story exactly backwards in his theme song. Aaargh.) Rule 1 with SF.
If you want to try a good fantasy movie, forget the Tolkein cartoons and try “The Princess Bride”. Action, adventure, swordfights, heroics and true Love. (Except for the slightly cheesy effects with the rats)
Fenris
(Note: I’m really, really not trying to argue with your dislike, I’m just trying to offer some options. I have the feeling I’m coming across as a street evangalist (“Worship Heinlein! Prrrrraise Asimov! All Hail the Holy Niven!”) )
Aaargh: The two short stories should be (in this order) “The Man Who Sold the Moon” and “Requiem”. NOT
“The Green Hills of Earth” (which is also a really good story, but…)
Fenris
I’m gonna weigh in here, too. I read SF, but not really much fantasy any more, because so much of it these days falls into the “elven cat”/heaving bosom thing. I’m also gonna posit a book recommendation, but first I’m going to explain what I get out of SF.
I read SF, but only particular types, because I’m interested in people. The best SF, in my opinion, is about human beings, and how they respond to extreme circumstances. Greg Bear’s Moving Mars isn’t about terraforming, or teleportation, or other technical stuff like that, though those do play a role. (This isn’t my recommendation yet, either, by the way.) Rather, the book is about a young woman who goes from being a callow youth to a major political activist who plays a significant role in an independence movement. The fact that it’s Mars vs. Earth in the near future, instead of, say, Vietnam vs. France in the 50’s, is a cosmetic detail. The whole point is about putting interesting characters in an extreme situation in order to learn something about human ingenuity, resilience, and so on. Likewise, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (also not yet my recommendation) isn’t about mining, atmospheric science, or space elevators, though again those are plot elements; the thesis of that book is about how human beings fragment into tribes and factions, even when, supposedly, they share objectives.
Look at it another way: It’s impossible to relate to the superficial specifics of somebody who wakes up as an insect, or somebody who becomes unstuck in time, or whatever. However, the central conflict of really good SF is about what it means to be human, and whether (and how) humans can adjust their behavior in wildly new circumstances. Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (again, also not my recommendation yet) theorizes a quantum shift in human evolution, but then after establishing those ground rules, looks at how society, and the individuals in the society, would respond to that. Metaphorically, you can apply that to any major social or technological revolution, and therefore the thesis is relevant to one’s everyday life.
As others have said, there’s certainly a whole helluva lot of bad SF out there. Try to read Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant sometime, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s basically just adolescent fantasy, and has nothing to do with anything except flying around the solar system and getting laid. Bad SF! Bad! Go sit in the corner.
The thing about good SF, though, is that in order to be responsible to the world, the author has to establish the ground rules, and make sure they’re clear and consistent. I don’t know why I keep using Greg Bear as an example, but his books just keep popping to mind. Anyway, consider his Blood Music, which is about a guy who makes a breakthrough on a particular type of independent cell. He determines them to be intelligent in a colony sense, and then, for complicated reasons, injects himself with them. In order to make this plausible, Bear spends some time on the biology and such, but then leaves it behind to focus on the guy’s reaction, how he deals with his friends, and what happens to society at large. The technical details are there to make the premise believable, but if you recognize that, and you know it’s a McGuffin of sorts, then naturally you may get bogged down. The fact remains, though, that the central point of the book is not to explore a biological idea; he could have written a scientific thesis to do that. The point of the book is to look at what happens to the people after the biological revolution begins.
So I’m going to give you my single recommendation that I believe distills a lot of these elements and keeps the scientific stuff to a minimum. Re the previous recommendations, I like Connie Willis a lot, and can second Doomsday Book (though it’s awfully bleak and depressing) and Bellwether (which is quite funny, but is definitely rooted in a complex idea), but I’m going to name something else.
My recommendation is Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. It’s about a Jesuit priest who befriends a couple of people at a local observatory. They’re lucky enough to be the first to receive signals from an off-planet intelligence, signals in the form of music and song. While the rest of the planet argues, the priest’s Jesuit masters marshal their financial resources and mount an expedition to the planet.
The point of the book is ethics, and relative morals between cultures. It’s written by an anthropologist, not an astronomer or whatever. It’s about social differences, about cultural blinders, about communication and perception. It’s a marvelous, thought-provoking book, complex in its themes, rich in its creations. It isn’t about flying around the universe shooting bug-eyed aliens with laser beams. It goes right to the heart of the human experience, and keeps the technical distractions to a minimum. It is, in short, literature.
I can’t guarantee you’ll like it, or that anything I’ve said above will make a lick of sense. We all have different preferences; nobody will ever convince me, for example, to enjoy country-and-western music. But you did ask what’s the appeal, and I explained, and I gave an example of what I consider to be a prime example of the type of SF that I find interesting and valuable. If you choose to read it, I hope you find it as moving and thoughtful as I did.
For me, a big part of the appeal in sf is the world iteself. I like seeing how an alien culture might work, or how a human culture might evolve over decades or centuries. I like the idea of space travel, just in general. I read the latest news out of NASA with much the same feeling, I suspect, as a devout Christian reads the Bible. I’m always going to be slightly bitter that I won’t be able to travel to Mars in my lifetime, and reading sf makes me feel a little better about that.
That’s why I like it. As to why YOU don’t like it, sounds mostly like you’ve got a problem with space opera, not sf in general. Science Fiction is a mighty big territory. I honestly don’t believe that anyone who reads can’t find some aspect of it to enjoy. Fenris provided a good (actually, a very good) spread of novels, let me add a few of my own, focusing on those I felt had especially compelling characters, as you mentioned that as something you look for when you read.
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. For my money, the best cyberpunk novel to date. Very satiric, very intelligent. (Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon is one of the best books I’ve ever read, although it is not sf in any sense of the word)
Towing Jehovah, by James Morrow. Religious parable. God is dead, and someone has to bury the three-mile long body floating out in the Atlantic. Shocking and funny, although Morrow’s Indignant Agnostic pose may be a turn off to some.
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie. The handful of children born on the stroke of midnight on the day of India’s independence find themselves mysteriously endowed with magical powers. Tell me that’s not a fantasy novel.
The Princess Bride, by William Goldman. The novel, not the film (though the film is very good too). The swashbuckling Romanticism is used as a foil for the author’s supposed real-life problems with his marriage and his relationship with his son.
Man, I feel like I’m witnessing here! Hey, please let me know if you like any of these books. I’d like to know how I stack up against the various fundies who crop up here from time to time.
PS: A word of warning. Don’t ever call it sci-fi. I don’t know why, but this term drives certain fans into a homicidal rage. I learned this myself after having to fend Mike Resnick off with a chair and a broken bottle for close to forty-five minutes, following a casual mention of the Sci-Fi Channel.
PPS: About how Star Wars could happen “a long time ago.” The trick here is that the the opening crawl is being related from a point in time after the events of the movie, but not necessarily from our own time. If Star Wars happens 5000 years from now, the opening scrawl happens in 10,000 years. Speaking practically, its a stylistc dodge that allowed Lucas to tell a slam-bang war story, in the tradition of John Wayne’s WWII movies, in the poisoned climate left after Vietnam.
Fenris: Could you explain what the song was and why it was wrong? I saw both films a long time ago, and I can’t remember the songs…
You should use the term around Ellison
For the great “sci-fi” debate (including a couple of detailed histories of the term and it’s various nuances), see this threadhere. Especially page 2.
And can this thread please not get hijacked by the “sci-fi”, “SF”, “Science Fiction” debate? (Not that Nimune did anything wrong, but please…let it end here!)
Please?!
Fenris
Ha! Someone bit! I knew I’d get asked! <heh, heh, heh! My plan worked!!! I really wanted to rant about it. Thanks!!! 
>
In Yarborough’s song “The Gggggreatest Adddddventurrrrre”
he sings:
A man who’s a dreamer
And never takes (heed? leave?)
Who thinks of a world that is just make-believe
Will never know passion
Will never know pain
Who dreams by the window will someday see(know?) rain
In other words, Yarborough thinks Bilbo is a dreamy, do-nothing Hobbit who only thinks of adventure, and will never do it. Imagination is bad. Action is good. Yarborough is an idiot.
The whole damned point of the book is that Bilbo is a stolid, unimaginative Hobbit who’s never once in his life (except for his Tookish side) dreamed of what’s over the next hill. Who’s never imagined anything more exciting than next year’s garden. And that dreams and make-believe and imagination are good. Bilbo’s encounter with the fantastic changes him for the better in much the same way that Eustace’s does in Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In the end of the book, Bilbo BECOMES a “dreamer”, writing elvish-style poetry, etc. And Tolkien heartily approves.
This really, really irritates me.
(Could you tell?)
Fenris
The “appeal” of anything can be very hard to quantify. As it is pointed out in previous posts, SF and fantasy have a wide range. However, if you enjoyed X-Men, I would say you have discovered SF that appeals to you. C’mon, it’s a story about people whose random genetic malformations give them amazing powers (telepathy, flying and all that jazz), but these gifts alienate them from society… etc etc. Its as much science fiction as anything with a space alien or rayguns. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking “well, I liked this, so it must not be SF” . Of course, it could always be fantasy, because some of those powers would have to violate the third law of physics. Superhero stuff is a highly stylized part of the SF/fantasy domain.
P.S. you don’t have to prove anything. all available evidence leads to you being an intellegent and astute reader who just doesn’t happen to like the examples of SF and fantasy you’ve encountered
jarbaby stumbles back into the thread, buried under stacks of books…Fenris keeps throwing them on…she coughs, falters…
when will I watch t.v.?
Right. But they’re living in the USA, eating potato chips and going to school and watching MTV and wearing jeans, getting involved with romances, doing homework.
That’s why I like it. They took superheroes and made me identify with them. On the other hand: Superman lives in a cave filled with crystal. Does he have a blanket? does he go to the bathroom? Does the fortress of solitude have cable? I wonder about these things.
Golly. that’s nice of you to say! I actually wrote this OP because I think I need to be a more voracious reader if I want to be a better writer…
jarbaby
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jarbabyj *
**jarbaby stumbles back into the thread, buried under stacks of books…Fenris keeps throwing them on…she coughs, falters…
when will I watch t.v.?
Right. But they’re living in the USA, eating potato chips and going to school and watching MTV and wearing jeans, getting involved with romances, doing homework.**[/quote
Adding more books to the stack.
Way out of print is Wilmar(sp) Shiras’s Children of the Atom (but readily available through http://www.bookfinder.com ) about a school for mutant children, living in the USA (of 195x, but…), watching TV, wearing then current fashions, not having romances, being just barely pre-teen, doing homework (a big part of the first story), being feared and hated by a world they’ve sworn to prote…well, not protect, exactly…cope with? It’s one of Stan Lee’s big inspirations for The X-Men. It’s a collection of about 5 linked stories, the first of which is beautiful and moving, the next three of which…well…they have a dated sort of odd nostalgia flavored weirdness but aren’t very good and the last one of which, well…if any of the characters in X-Men would bother to read it, they’d figure out why they’re still feared and hated after almost 40 years.
Also, The People stories by Zenna Henderson were also cited (somewhere) by (maybe?) Roy Thomas for the tone of his X-Men and are beautiful, life-affirming stories of people. The People are aliens, escaping from a world who’s sun has gone nova. All the evacuation ships scattered in different directions. One came to Earth and and malfunctioned just outside of our atmosphere. The People escape in lifeboats and are widely scattered across America. They have vast psychic powers, but no experience on Earth. Many are hunted and killed. The People stories tell how the survivors and descendents of survivors found each other again. Very, VERY personal, character driven stories.
Also, SLAN, which is about a bald, telepathic mutant feared and…well, you get the drift. (but the prose is clunky. Good story, but what I see of your tastes, I suspect you prefer character driven stories to plot driven stories. Not recommended for you.)
I’ve a theory that many of Stan Lee’s inspirations were swip…were inspired by SF. Iron Man =Starship Troopers, X-Men = Lots and Lots of stories (esp. Slan and Children of the Atom, Hulk =Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, Fantastic Four (in terms of the flavor only)=“Doc” Smith’s Skylark of Space series, etc.
(Am I overdoing the recommendations? Should I shut up?)
Fenris
My opinion - I read speculative fiction almost exclusively, and I have tried three times to get through “The Hobbit”, and cannot get past about the third chapter. “Dune” is a wonderful, rich novel, but it reads so dry (no pun intended) that I waded through it only on sheer determination. These are not books that I would recommend to someone who is not already in love with the genre.