I was really wondering about that.
The Dragons Egg by Robert L Forward
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
The Cuckoo’s Egg by C. J. Cherryh
Tris
Hmmm, the way this is written it seems to imply that the listed books are all by Asimov–would I be correct in assuming you meant David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself (cracking great time travel story, BTW, classic!) and Ken Grimwood’s Replay? (Also a great favorite of mine, as well as of my daughter who has been historically extremely resistant to SF in general.) Perhaps the other two are Asimov titles?
If you like Heinlein I suggest checking out John Varley and Spider Robinson. Varley because the man thinks BIG–no subtle little effects or tweaks of current existence for him, oh no–he likes things WEIRD! Robinson is arguably the writer most alike in tone and feel to Heinlein, up to having been chosen by Virginia Heinlein to finish Robert’s last discovered book outline. Robinson has more of a puckish sense of humor than Heinlein by a longshot ('ware the puns, matey!) as well as a much more leftist modern slant. Entertaining as hell, both of them, can’t go too far wrong starting pretty much anywhere with either of them, but short story collections by both writers are readily available and give a clear window into their respective styles with very little time commitment if they’re not your cuppa tea.
One of the best ways to discover new writers is to check out the Hugo and Nebula award winner anthologies. They go year by year and I believe are complete back to like the fifties or so. These give you a great overview of trends in the genre over time and will help you decide what time slices tend to suit you best.
Hearty “me too’s” for Sturgeon, Tiptree, Bradbury, Vance and Cordwainer Smith. Another batch of excellent but underrated Golden Age writers are Henry Kuttner, C.L. Moore and Fredric Brown; most of their work is still relevant today and indeed is being stripmined regularly to make scheisty movies (The Last Mimzy, anyone?) Also big agreement for Dune, also concur that you should not touch any of the sequels with a ten foot sandworm dick. Haven’t seen any mention of Sheri S. Tepper, who writes some very good feminist style fiction which is also waaaaay weird and out there. R.A. Lafferty and Howard Waldrop are funny writers who are definitely a matter of taste–worth checking into, though. Joe Haldeman writes really good hard, military oriented SF and Joe Lansdale quite often writes stuff that will make you laugh hysterically as you’re concurrently projectile vomiting. Just roll with it, it’s fun.
Harlan Ellison, in addition to being an excellent fiction writer, is also a scathingly funny essayist–if you run across some of his non-fiction go for it, the man is screamingly funny and quite the opinionated asshole. I think he’d fit in REALLY WELL around the Dope!
Have fun!
Back in the 50s and 60s, a lot of people’s Big Three SF writer lists would run: Heinlein, Asimov and Van Vogt.
A.E. Van Vogt does’t get Big Three cred nowadays, but he could really write some mind-bending space opera. I would recommend “Voyage of the Space Beagle,” “The Weapon Shops of Isher” and “The War Against the Rull.” If you wanna do classic Golden Age SF, you gotta read you some Van Vogt.
Oh, and Van Vogt wrote “Slan” which is where the saying “Fans are Slans” comes from.
Yes, I did like Steel Beach.
I’ve forgotten Steampunk, with books like James Blaylock’s Homunculus.
There’s also Gene Wolfe. His Book of the New Sun is just plain brilliant from start to finish (it’s one book that he broke into four volumes to make it easier to market). There’s also his great short story collection, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (that’s not a typo).
Octavia Butler is worth it for Clay’s Ark and The Parable of the Sower.
I also loved Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, but I probably should reread it to make sure. His The Iron Dream is a wonderful alternate history, but is very poorly written (deliberately so – it had to be badly written according to the situation).
Jack McDevett is probably the best hard SF writer out there today. He combines hard science with excellent characterization and adventure. Try Odyssey or The Engines of God. I just finished Cauldron, but you probably should read some of his other books first.
An obscure but brilliant book is Chronosequence by Hilbert Schenck. Schenk came upon the scene with a bunch of great stories with wonderfully quirky characters in the 80s, and quickly vanished.
Rudy Rucker’s The Master of Space and Time is a weird one.
Finally, for the best science fiction novel of the past ten years, try to find a copy of The Carpet Makers by Andreas Eschbach. It is just superb, but no one seems to have ever heard of it.
Old threads: [thread=379295]July 2006[/thread] and [thread=400868]December 2006[/thread]
There are many good suggestions here! I would add Bruce Sterling to the list of (now) classics. Islands in the Net is the best near-future extrapolation I have ever read, and I’ve read many. Also, every character gets a speech that is stirring and sympathetic - especially the bad guys. The Zenith Angle is also great, IMHO. His Shaper/Mechanist stories are - HAWSOME! -
but since they turn a lot of science fiction tropes on their heads, they may not be what you’re looking for right now.
Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population and The Speed of Dark are two wonderful looks at alien minds - some human, and some not.
Not as well known is John Kessel. I read two of his recent stories in a couple of Gardner Dozois’ Year Best Science Fiction collections, and I’m very pleased to see them collected in this book. The stories I have in mind are set in a lunar colony that’s been socially engineered as a matriarchy. A classic SF setting, but much better written than most classic SF.
And so to bed!
My goodness what about Ringworld? It’s been a very long time since I read it - is it now consigned to the dustbin?
Just chiming in here to recommend Heinlen’s juvenile sci-fi stuff, such as StarShip Troopers and Podkayne of Mars (which has two alternate endings, the one he wrote originally, and the one the publishers made him write instead). Even being a fan of the movie, I have to say the book (and in parts, the cartoon, which is somewhere between the two in concept), is much better.
re: Frank Herbert’s Dune. God Emporer of Dune was my favorite of the series, but the first one is great, and a crowd favorite. 
Oh, and I haven’t read I, Robot yet. Should I avoid it, seeing as how I loved the movie?
0 for 4.
The only *Timefall * I can find is book 3 of the New World Trilogy by James Kahn, from 1987.
The Green Futures of Tycho is a 1981 young adult novel by William Sleator.
They are both time travel books, presumably why they were listed with the others. I’ve never heard of either, had to look them up.
*Replay * and *The Man Who Folded Himself * are stone classics of the field, although two more dissimilar books on time travel would be hard to find.
And speaking of time travel and John Kessel inevitably brings up Corrupting Dr. Nice, which starts with maybe the best time travel creating alternate history set-up ever, as tourists visit a very changed Jerusalem at a certain major time in history, and a modern researcher brings a dinosaur back to Connecticut to grow it from a pup. Screwball stuff happens.
I think the stories in I, Robot are very interesting, and generally good “puzzle” stories, but not so good character stories. (Truthfully, I never really identified with any of Asimov’s characters, for all that I love his situations. Wait, that’s not quite right - the story about the boy who won’t use the teleporter really charmed me. But that’s not in I, Robot, either.)
If you liked the movie, I’d suggest putting your view of the movie into a mental box, over there. And then open another mental box for the book. AFAIK, the only thing the two really have in common is that they share a title, and some of the Laws of Robotics.
I tend to think that the collection is well worth reading, if you’re into getting a broader look of how written SF can evolve and grow. And while I think the stories have some lacks (not really flaws, just lacks) that doesn’t mean that they aren’t enjoyable.
Oh, but I suspect you’ll buy into time travel and FTL drives.
Verne almost cetrtainly knew what he was doing, and that the idea of a space gun was fundamentally flawed (see Walter James Miller’s introduction to the Annotated Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon, but he glossed over that in the interest of a good story. The rest of the book is hard science, so close to the real thing that Look magazine ran an article pointing out the similarities during Apollo. Verne’s moonship, made of aluminum, was lauched only a few miles from Cape Canaveral. (Verne didn’t really understand orbital dynamics, so he screwed that up, too. One book on Lunar theory I’ve got points out the errors in Verne’s orbit, without explicitly saying that it’s from Verne). Don’t lump Verne in with the ignorati – his use of a Space Gun was the equivalent of using a Transporter.
By the way, knowing all this, Wells had no excuse not knowing about the problems of a Space Gun. Yet he used one in The War of the Worlds and decades later in his film script for Things to Come, by which time it should have been abundantly obvious that it was a Really Bad Idea. If you condemn Verne for it, why not Wells?
And to make things even more confusing, although Verne DID fault Wells for his magical Cavorite Sphere to get to the moon, he PRAISED Robert Cromie for using the same idea (BEFORE Wells did) in his novel A Plunge into Space (some people think the intro – the only one attributed to Verne – was actually written by his son. Or maybe Verne was just getting forgetful. Asimov did exactly the same thing – praising one writer in an intro for an idea he condemned elsewhere.)
Lastly, I’ve got all those Ace “Fitzroy” paperbacks, but you should be aware that those translations are somewhat abridged (even though they don’t say so) and otherwise questionable. See the afterword to the recently-published The Kip Brothers, which has an extensive rundown on the reliability of english translaytions of Verne’s books.
Y’know it’s odd but for some reason I’ve never though of Replay as a time travel story–something about the way it’s presented makes me want to think of it as something different. Alternate history on an intensely personal level?
My grandchild just got done reading Starship Troopers and he LOVED it–he was very disappointed when I informed him that the movie bears only a passing resemblance and there’s no battle suits involved. Ah well, maybe some day!
As I mentioned before, it might be worth your while to check out Roughnecks: The StarShip Troopers Chronicles, a CGI cartoon based on the book and movie (bit of one, bit of the other, shake well), with various new stuff added. They bring back the powered armor, along with large mechanized Marauders (more mecha than power suit), for when you absitively posolutly need to blow the unholy hell out of every bastard in your zip code. It’s on DVD, the show divided up into five campaigns, though I unfortunately have to warn you that it ends on a cliffhanger because it was canceled before they could write the final campaign.
And of course, if we’re talking time travel, “All You Zombies…” is a must-read.
I know I’m coming to this late but a recent hobby of mine has been going through all of the major award winners. I’m done with the Hugo novels, I’m wrapping up the Hugo winning roughly half-way through the short fiction, about the same distance through the other related awards (non-fiction and dramatic presentation which aren’t what you’re asking about), and I’m about to embark on the Nebula winning novels that did not win the Hugo. The award winners are rarely the greatest works but they’re often significant ones at the time they were published.
The Hugo awards are voted on by fans as part of the World Science Fiction Convention and have been handed out since 1953 (with a few years off in the fifties while it was still getting organized). This means they go to whoever’s popular in fandom at that moment. As fandom inflated in size tastes shifted more mainstream as well until in 2001 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won. A backlash occurred but popularity counts. Coincidently the Hugos started right around the time that the magazines were losing their importance.
The Nebulas have been handed out since 1965 and are voted on by the members of the Science Fiction Writer’s Association. In theory since it’s writers giving out the award to other writers then more literary works would be chosen. It hasn’t always panned out that way. Like the Hugos it is a popularity contest as well with an added layer of internal politics. (In reading several histories I’ve never come across a point where the author goes, “And then for several years science fiction writers weren’t in the middle of a feud that divided their ranks into several large, bickering factions.”)
With those caveats the winners of those awards make a great overview of the scope of science fiction. Your tastes may vary (and they should, I’d never pretend that a selection by popular vote is a promise of quality) but they’re worth noting.
And now just for fun, here’s one recommendation for each decade between the 40’s and the 80’s (the 90’s just run together for me and I tend give books a decade to ferment before I get to them so I don’t have any special suggestions for the 00’s):
1940’s - The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov - Kind of a cheat since it’s three books but those books are really made out of about a dozen novellas that were published throughout the the 1940’s. The writing is clunky, the science is badly outdated, but it is a perfect example of the Cambellian science fiction that acted as a bridge between the pulp adventures of the 20’s and 30’s (which I don’t know well enough to recommend anything other than Doc Smith) and the literary forms that began to emerge in the 50’s and became fully formed in the 60’s. A galactic empire is collapsing but a plan involving a carefully plotted out history hopes to reduce the interregnum to just a thousand years.
Oh and by “Cambellian” I am referring to John W. Campbell, a magazine editor of the period who was very influential in setting standards for science fiction beyond those pulp roots.
1950’s - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - Trying to pick out a book for the zeitgeist of the 50’s was the hardest one for me since it was a time when ideas were going in a lot of different directions. Things were still mainly high concept with weak writing but there are many major exceptions. So going with the choice of the improving narrative I selected Bradbury and since I’m already cheating in a few other decades I stuck to what I think is his best novel. If you’re not familiar with the story it is about a fireman in the future who burns books which have become forbidden.
1960’s - Dangerous Visions - In the mid-60’s a movement for remaking science fiction into avante garde literature started called “New Wave”. Fortunately the wave crashed against the shore (avante garde rarely coincides with good) but it left behind it a raised standard of writing. At the height of this movement Harlan Ellison compiled an anthology of stories intended to challenge the accepted standards of science fiction. Some of the stories are clever, some are clever and well written, most are pretentious or just trying too hard to break conventions and wind up reading like adolescent rantings. But the anthology is both historically significant and offers an overview of the hot authors at that time.
1970’s - The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin - There’s two things that strike me about the 70’s. The first was a retreat from the New Wave to popular themes that had been brought up to date. Niven and Clarke’s work in this period is a good example of this. The other is a shift toward political relevance. Science fiction had always had some political themes but they deepened in the 70’s and the most multitextured of those efforts was Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I’m not fond of a lot of her other work but her examination of a life in a civilization without property and that man’s attempt to work in a capitalist society is a well thought out, well balanced view of the difficulties.
1980’s - Neuromancer by William Gibson - The 80’s were when the lengthy novel became the standard form for science fiction but there was only one movement of any note then: cyberpunk. The subgenre collapsed on itself quickly enough as they ran out of things to say but the concepts have been brought back into the mainstream of science fiction. Neuromancer is the book that set it off and it has the single best opening line in science fiction.
Yeah that should read “Some of my favorite books are…” None are Asimov.
Bingo! for Exapno. All four can loosely be categorized as time travel novels. Timefall seems to be perenially out of print but it’s a fun sci-fi adventure novel that starts out like an Indiana Jones adventure and eventually steers into something else all together. I haven’t read the other two books in the series, but based on their description, I believe them to be only loosely related to this one, and less interesting. I’d skip them and just go straight for this one. It’s somewhat open ended, but otherwise for the most part is very cinematic. The Green Futures of Tycho is about a teen who discovers a time travel device and how he deals with the effects it has on his personal relationships with his family int he present and future, as well as the unexpected side effects from it’s origin. Replay features a man who keeps getting sent back into his his own younger self. The Man Who Folded Himself features a man left a time travel belt in a will, and is mostly an introspective look at his relationship with his various duplicate selves created by looping back on his own timeline.
Amen to that. I recommend doing a google image search after you read it to help untangle the complicated web it weaves… And if you survive that maybe you can try watching the “Primer” DVD >:-)
It’s actually online…take an aspirin before you read it. You may need it.