If you haven’t done so, check out Robert Charles Wilson. He’s an excellent author who is undeservedly little known. He’s written nine novels; none of which is a sequel, prequel, or part of a series. The Harvest and Mysterium are two personal favorites of mine.
If your looking for “hard” s/f check out James P Hogan. He did have the Giants trilogy +1, but but he also has a bunch of stand alone stuff that’s pretty good. The last one I bought was “Cradle of Saturn”, an awesome end of the world story.
My husband reads a lot of this fantasy stuff (and he wishes that it were not shelved among the “sci-fi” books, too), and it is almost always part of a series. He loves it. He’s always looking forward to “the next book”.
In his words, “You like the world, you like the story, you like the characters, why wouldn’t you like to hear more about them?” He can’t understand how I can stand for a novel to just “end”. “Don’t you wonder what happened next?” Well, generally, I don’t. I guess that’s just the way I am, and the way he is :).
Anyway, people like my husband like and expect series, so that’s what fantasy authors write. Meanwhile, we continue to add more bookshelves around here…
Oh, and he gets around the library problem by requesting the first book from another library. Our library is a branch library, and if our branch doesn’t have the first book, some other branch will. I suppose that if they didn’t, he’d get it through interlibrary loan or something like that.
My thunder stolen yet again. A hearty second to all the above. (I’ll bet my collection and Cal’s are very similar). I would add Theodore Sturgeon as a top notch choice, and if you can find any Edgar Pangborn’s short work (especially “Angel’s Egg”), snap it up.
If you like a dash of humor to your short stories, you might sample the “Reteif” collections by Keith Laumer.
And of course, a heavy duty endorsement to Spider Robinson’s “Callahan’s” stories – bad puns, real human emotions and what I can call “life affirming” without feeling too precious.
Yean, and this fella Heinlein writes a pretty good stick, too.
I get irked with the epic thing myself…especially when it goes too far and ultimately ruins what started out to be a great story. Case in point: The Night’s Dawn trilogy by Peter Hamilton. AWESOME first book, ok second, and the third…Better off using it as toilet paper than to read it. It develops this great concept, story, action and characters…then the author couldn’t finish it properly so he created an all-powerful being that, y’know, took care of everything in one fell swoop (I mean, when your facing hordes of possessed beings, the only thing you can do is remove Earth to another universe, after all). Horribly disappointing. Read the first book Reality Dysfunction and then make up an ending for yourself…
There happens to be a happy medium that I found- two authors (probably more like this, but I have just read these two) have taken general universes, and then each book focuses on a story/planet/character/situation. You get a feeling for how developed the background is, but each new book can be read alone. Basically it would make very little difference to read the series in order, or from the last book backwards.
The first one is Iain M. Banks and his Culture novels. I love these books! Great storytelling! The first one Consider Phlebas sets up the arena and history, but it was the 3rd one that I read. I think there are around 10 Culture novels (anything by Iain M. Banks is sci-fi, by Iain Banks is his normal fiction- also quite good). The stories are each different and unique in their own way, and one Inversions is set upon a feudalistic world where there are exactly 3 scenes of one paragraph each that let you know it is involved with the Culture. Other than that, it follows its own story. Warning: Feersum Injinn is a bitch to read- the main character isn’t that bright, so he spells everything phonetically. Interesting concept in writing, but hard to plow through a whole chapter of phonetic words. However, one of his books (oh jeez…is it Inversions? Maybe a different one) also plays around with how the story is presented- the odd numbered chapters tell one story forward in time, then even ones tell a separate but semi-related one backwards in time. They meet in the middle…neat, creative stuff!
The second is C.J. Cherryh and her books Downbelow Station, Merchanter’s Luck, 40,000 at Ghenna, and a few others. She is great because she doesn’t get trapped into this “the future will be so bright for everyone!” (said in a high-pitched, sweet voice). In her books, heroes die, things don’t come to a clean, pretty end and life isn’t all peachy-keen. It’s not morose, but they seem to have more ‘real’ elements in them.
OK, that is my $.02.
-Tcat