Forget Asimov, forget Heinlein, forget Tolkien.
If you can read one and only one SF story, read “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. Try to dig up the short story version, for the greatest impact.
writing down recs No way – keep the recs coming! 
BTW, since we’re doing recs, one of my favorites is Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, but that’s post-apocalyptic so jarbaby probably wouldn’t like it.
No, she wouldn’t given what she said, but boy I did! The prose was beautiful, the last few pages sent chills down my spine, but I hated the fact that Miller couldn’t write a satisfying ending to a the first two parts. The first one was just annoying and the second one kinda dribbled off.
I still loved it.
Fenris
I love this story too, and a list of all the anthologies that have reprinted the short-story version (Terminus Est is right, the short story is much more powerful) can be found at the Internet Science-Fiction Database…here
It will move you. And it has one of the most powerful lines in literature. I am incapable of reading that line without tearing up (I don’t wanna ruin it, but it’s the one where Charlie prays that he doesn’t lose something… If you don’t remember it, reread the story.)
Fenris
BTW, what does Rastahomie have to do with this?
I think it’s a reference to rastahomie’s Pit thread Golf - A Very Mild Rant.
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When I read fiction I was primarily into fantasy and science fiction. Well, after I outgrew the Hardy Boys that is. I suppose there are more then one aspect to these things that attract people.
Some people might be attracted to science fiction because they’re interested in the future. Sometimes you have the ability to write about culturally sensitive topics and disguise it in a sci-fi book or even television show. Star Trek did this a few times and so did Babylon 5. I’m sure there are other examples.
I like fantasy books because I like fairy tale like stories about good fighting evil. They’re just a lot of fun.
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Well there are a lot of stupid sci-fi/fantasy books out there. I personally never liked Hitchikers Guide all that much. I still don’t understand why it is such a wildly popular book. And as for Brother Cadfael I thought this was a fictional character operating in real life 13th century England as a monk who investigates murders? Hardly a fantasy I would think.
I was starting to worry that this wasn’t pit worthy. Thank you. Actually you’re not an idiot if you don’t like these things. I don’t think people who watch soap operas or read romance novels are idiots.
Marc
PS: Although I really really hate the Star Trek universe some of the episodes were well written and worthy of praise.
What never fails to get me is the very last line…
Can’t say I have ever felt this way while reading a Sci-fi book. As for the fantasy part, mabey you should read a “real” fantasy book, one that isn’t so corny.
It helps, but it helps more if you don’t let other people’s writings bother you so much. Somebody writing a good novel does not imply that you are stupid, un-clever, or not able to understand things. I get similar feelings when I read a good book, when I see how bad my grammer, vocabulary, and spelling is; I realize I will never fulfill my dream of being a writer. (Though I still try like hell to better myself and mabey I’ll just get a late start)
Personally I love Sci-fi, I never have till recently, but I think there is some deep analytical reason you feel this way about science fiction. Tell me about your father…Was he a trekkie? Hmm?
Some great, accessible sf and fantasy:
Animal Farm George Orwell
1984 George Orwell
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court Mark Twain
The Odyssey Homer (also The Iliad, same author)
Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
Hamlet William Shakespeare (also The Tempest, same author)
I would also have to agree with those who list Flowers for Algernon.
But what I would most strongly suggest is getting ahold of a variety of short stories. Try to find some copies of “Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine” or “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction” These provide an excellent variety of science fiction and fantasy. Find an author whose style you like, and look for books by the same author or in the same style. I read every word of every issue of both magazines, and I like about half of it, but there’s some damn good stuff there.
A good book is 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories. If you don’t like one, hey, it’s only five minutes of your time lost.
At the risk of inciting a riot and being tarred and…well…more feathered:
I’m with ya jarbabyj. Only moreso. You see, I could never really get the appeal of reading in general. There are very few books (and I do mean very few) that I could make it past the first few pages of, and fewer yet that I could complete more than a few chapters.
I often joke with my friends that I don’t read because I’m illiterate. In truth, I don’t read because…well, I don’t know. Part of the problem is that I don’t feel I read quickly enough (which, I suppose, could be improved if I read more), so it takes me forever to finish a book. Part of the problem is that I have a short attention span. Related to that, often I will read a line and diverge off on my own tangent, only to realize that I’ve continued to ‘read’ several pages and can’t remember a darn thing that happened during that time! So, I wind up having to re-read passages more than once. Or, I wind up forgetting who a given character is, and I wind up searching back through what I’ve already read in order to find out! Gaaahh! I hate that!
I think my main problem is that whatever I read goes in one eye and out the other. I am very visual, and if I don’t ‘see’ what’s going on, I quickly lose interest, even if the subject matter truly appeals to me. Sadly, this is also the reason why most movie dramas don’t do anything for me: I can’t handle watching a bunch of people just…talking.
I am a sad, pathetic being. Pity me.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jarbabyj *
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Ya lost me here, jarbaby. There’s not a single fucking thing I understand about the City of Chicago
So…if you’re irked ( and I use that term cautiously when applying it to you. I feel like you being irked is like most people being psychotically enraged, but that doesn’t make you a bad person…<cackle> ).
What kind of books DO you like? Have you explored the idea of joining a Great Books chapter in ChiTown? My HS girlfriend’s parents were lifelong members of a group in Philly, it was something I greatly respected as I dove into my John Irving pap.
I’m a Margaret Atwood/ Chris Bohjalian/Stephen King/New Yorker kinda reader. Great Books interests me, but I’m not sure I’m up for the intellectual rigor aspect of it ( see recent thread on arrogant PhD. holders, etc. ).
Cartooniverse
OTOH, I have been debating starting a kind of a parallel organization, called Great Schnooks.
This would be a gathering of people whose sole foray into the world of literature is the Golden Key Comics Classics.
Cartooniverse
But you know that people get from place to place via flying on airplanes, not by teleporting, so I don’t have to explain how airplanes work.
I thought I listed this? 
Unfortunately for you, I love John Irving, John Fowles, Eric Bogosian, I’ve read everything by De Sade, I read the unabridged Les Mis, Tale of Two Cities is one of my favorite books of all time. I like old classics.
In the “what’s the most depressing book you’ve ever read” thread I mentioned that to ME, reading margaret atwood is like having a loaded gun cocked at my temple. If I ever see her on the street I’ll spit on her and say “There’s your Cat’s Eye, you pretentious, depressing bitch.”
Well, not really.
Also, help me everyone. I read Flowers For Algernon in high school! I loved it! I would never have thought to qualify it is Science Fiction. It is (or was) contemporary literature to me. IIRC It was in a world we all understood, human beings, real medical problems, real medical solutions that failed. Right?
And HAMLET is Science Fiction?
Now I’m completely lost as to what the genre even IS!
jarbaby
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jarbabyj *
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See? We have very similar literary tastes! 
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Nope. Sorry. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy And Science Fiction, won a Hugo (the big SF award) for best SF short story (I believe), won a Nebula (authors vote for best story/novel) I think.
It deals with the impact of a new (fictional) invention (an operation that increases intelligence threefold) on an individual. Pure science fiction. That’s practically the definitionof Science Fiction).
Somewhere upthread, someone (sorry…don’t remember who) made the very accurate comment that the reason people don’t think of Science Fiction as Literature is because as soon as someone writes Science Fiction that gets popular enough to be considered literature, somehow it’s not “really” science fiction. But “Flowers for Algernon” was SF’s long before it was stolen by the lit-crit crowd.
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Sure. Speculative Fiction or Fantasy would be more precise, but either way. Think of a back cover book description.
Hamlet, the young prince of Denmark is a melancholy man. Given to brooding rather than action, he’s an easy target for his evil Uncle Claudius and his men. An easy target until Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears and convinces Hamlet to seek revenge. Then Claudius will learn that Hamlet isn’t such easy pickings after all!
(And if Donald Wollheim (famous SF editor from the '50s and '60s noted for changing names of stories for the worse) had done Hamlet as half of an Ace Double, the title would have been something like “The Bloody Ghost’s Revenge!”)
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No one’s come up with a good defintion of Speculative Fiction, but to swipe several definitions (Judith Merril’s? Robert Heinlein’s?) and mash them into my own definition it’d be something like: An examination of a new idea, invention, society, location or frame of reference on an individual or society.
So you wanna show what happens to society if the ability to teleport becomes common? (Bester’s Stars My Destination, Niven’s “Last Days of the Permanant Floating Riot Club”) it’s SF.
Want to write about the effects of human intelligence increasing dramitically? (The effects on society; Poul Anderson’s Brainwave, on as individual and personal a level as possible Daniel Keye’s “Flowers for Algernon”.
Want to write a book about life in the past as seen from the perspective of present day man? (Humorous: Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court , light: DeCamp’s Lest Darkness Fall, serious…a short story by Poul Anderson I can’t remember the title of…)
Science Fiction to many people means “Rockets ‘n’ Rayguns ‘n’ bug-eyed monsters” and there’s so much more to it than that.
And “Flowers For Algernon”, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, Stephen King’s entire body of work, Bradbury entire body of work were all Science Fiction’s before they were everyone else’s.
Fenris
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jarbabyj *
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Waiiiiiiiiit a second here… :rolleyes:
I’ll agree with you here. It’s like using a Dobie Pad on my psyche. Still, her art is astonishing. I read a Margaret Atwood, THEN John Irving’s “158 Lb. Marriage”, THEN another Margaret Atwood. The whole thing took me about 5 weeks, and while I had not planned to read in that order, by the end of it I was fairly sure of several things: 1) I was a sick man. 2) I was a man, and therefore deserving of bucketloads of loathing. 3) I hated my marriage, and needed a divorce.
So, it was poor planning. Oh well. Sometimes it’s worth the agony.
Not where I grew up !!!
Cartooniverse
Jarbaby, I think you were onto something when you said “Now I’m completely lost as to what the genre even IS!”
A good book is a good book. I’ve read science fiction, fantasy, classics, westerns, romances, biographies, horrors, mysteries, and comic books that I enjoyed and felt enriched for having read them.
As for Margaret Atwood (like I’ve said before, we’re keeping the good stuff here in Canada and exporting stuff like Margaret Atwood and Alanis Morissette), I think the tone of her body of work can be summed up in this sad little poem we had to study in First Year English class;
“You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye”
Yup, that’s ol’ Margie for ya.
(Darwin’s Finch, I never know what to say when someone says that they don’t read. I don’t know how old you are, but my advice would be to keep trying - it’s worth it. You might find a short story or novel that really grabs your imagination some day, and it might change your outlook on reading. And yes, you do get much better with practice. No one starts reading at a fast speed. :))
You know, it just occurred to me that I should thank my English 101 professor for having us study that really short poem by Atwood; she could have inflicted a much longer work on us. Thank you, Ms. Gingell, wherever you are.
Well, I’d say no, Hamlet isn’t Science Fiction, but your OP mentions both SF and Fantasy, and Number Six presented his list as containing both SF and Fantasy works. And Hamlet is certainly Fantasy. After all, a ghost is hardly a realistic element. And sometimes people combine both genres (and Horror too) into one big genre called “Speculative Fiction”, as Fenris mentions, and Hamlet would definetly fit in that. Of course, the best example of Fantasy among Shakespeare’s dramas is Macbeth, which is chock full of supernatural elements.
Science fiction is about exploring the impact of change on human beings. That change is often technological, but may also be cultural or historical. All too often, an author emphasizes the technology (or magic) rather than the humanity. When that happens, you get the “Gosh! Wow! Gee-whiz!” kind of story that is sometimes derogatorily called “skiffy”. There is a place for these kinds of stories. Indeed, I enjoy a good, old-fashioned space opera as much as the next person, but that’s not really what good science fiction is all about.
“Flowers for Algernon” for me is the essense of great science fiction (SF, speculative fiction, sci-fi, call it what you will). An intelligence-enhancing treatment forms basic premise for the story, but wasn’t the focus at all. From Charly’s point of view, he’s put under anesthesia and he wakes up with bandages around his head and a headache. A bad SF story would have focused on the treatment itself; it would have gone on and on in boring and excrutiating detail about the operation and how it was performed, etc, etc, etc. A good, if ordinary, SF story would have told how the operation changed the protagonist’s life and stopped there. (Imagine if “Flowers…” had been cut somewhere in the middle - the happy-ending Disney version if you will.) What makes “Flowers…” great is a combination of factors. It’s so intensely personal because Charly tells his own story in his own words. A storytelling gimmick, but an effective one nonetheless. You can see directly how the treatment affected him. And Charly’s life changes not just once, but twice. I think it was sheer genius when Keyes took the concept to its ultimate, logical, and awful conclusion. Was the treatment a blessing or a curse? That’s up to you to decide.