I know you started Sundiver even though it’s not a direct prequel to Startide Rising et al, but A Deepness in the Sky isn’t dependent upon the other Zones of Thought books.
A clear example of the bias of this Message Board. 
It is remotely possible that I’ve shown admiration for Left Hand of Darkness before, but I’m not sure if anyone would notice.
FWIW, I read Book 1 (A Fire Upon The Deep), and I’m in the minority in disliking this generally well-liked book. I found it to be poorly paced (long slow-moving spaceship chase intercut with slow buildup to a battle on a planet), and poorly scaled (the science-fictional elements stretched too far into gods using magic). I was not inspired to read the second book.
I did like Vinge’s other novel, The Peace War, and would recommend it. That has a plausible and human-scale Macguffin with a lively plot and a twist that works. The sequel to that one is a sci-fi detective story, and a little more talky and draggy, but I got through it.
I think the main appeal of A Fire Upon The Deep is the setting. Particularly the alien Tines and how their biology/culture works.
A Deepness in the Sky, although the setting and alien culture are a big part, has a lot more going on. Particularly in how the on-the-alien-world chapters are presented for the reader. I’d probably recommend reading them out of order, and starting with this, to anyone new to the Zone of Thought books. (and I’d recommend the sequels only if you really liked the preceeding book.)
At the Mountains of Madness, HP Lovecraft
A lot of great sci-fi recommendations. Any chance we can compile everyone’s recs into one, easy-to-read list?
Based on this thread, I read The Book of the New Sun and then continued on to the second book, the title of which escapes me at the moment.
I actually quit reading the second one 3/4 of the way through last night. Thinking back, I can’t even tell you what made me keep reading either of them. They weren’t bad, but my feeling is that they were only good enough to keep reading, if that makes sense.
What’s more, I think calling them sci-fi is a stretch. They’re clearly fantasy novels with hints of technology scattered here and there.
Pretty much my reaction too. I didn’t even finish it.
This is a good idea–do you want to take it on?
Meanwhile, I added this thread to the omnibus thread of book recommendations. Good lord almighty do we love to recommend books around here!
(Also, Panther Modern, welcome to the board!)
Clearly a lot of people really liked it, and it won the Hugo award, so I’m not going to say it’s a bad book. But I’m glad I’m not the only one who didn’t ‘get it,’ whatever there was to get.
Hee. I found To Say Nothing Of The Dog hysterically funny, albeit all for the non-scifi parts. It’s an elaborate comedy of manners, and I think one either buys into it completely or gets left outside.
The time travel framing is a bit fiddly and dry , but certainly nothing that a fan of Asimov would object to. In my view, the time travel works better to create farce in this book than to create drama in her others, where it grows increasingly tedious.
Yes, I can try compiling the responses thus far. And, thank you!
Le Guin, Le Guin, Le Guin. I can’t say enough good things about her work. The gender-shifting one is called “The Left Hand of Darkness” and it takes a look at how we split society along gender lines. She takes another look at it in “The Word for World is Forest”. She’s a great, deep writer but can also have fun, especially with short stories, i.e., “Changing Planes”.
I am personally quite fond of Walter Jon Williams books. He writes great space opera. If you like Greg Bear, you’ll probably like WJW. You can also try classic Spider Robinson. Maureen McHugh was a very promising writer who got caught up and spit out in the great publishing implosion of the 90s and turned to ARGs to make a living but her “China Mountain Zhang” is wonderful. So is her “Half the Day is Night” if you can find them.
Here is the list so far. Let me know if there are any typos.
[ul]
[li] 1963[/li][li] 1971[/li][li] 64K[/li][li] A Canticle for Leibowtiz[/li][li] A Clockwork Orange[/li][li] A Closed and Common Orbit[/li][li] A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court[/li][li] Adventures in Time and Space[/li][li] Against A Dark Background[/li][li] All My Sins Remembered[/li][li] All Systems Red[/li][li] American War[/li][li] Ancillary Justice[/li][li] Another Fine Myth[/li][li] At the Mountains of Madness[/li][li] Blackout / All Clear[/li][li] Book of the New Sun[/li][li] Bored of the Rings[/li][li] Deepness in the Sky[/li][li] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?[/li][li] Doomsday Book[/li][li] Doon[/li][li] Feersum Endjinn[/li][li] Fire Upon the Deep[/li][li] Grand Central Arena series[/li][li] Hyperion Cantos[/li][li] Lock In[/li][li] Lord of Light[/li][li] Mars Evacuees[/li][li] Mindbridge[/li][li] Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology[/li][li] Misspent Youth[/li][li] Ninefog Gambit[/li][li] Old Man’s War[/li][li] Pandora’s Star[/li][li] Rainbow’s End[/li][li] Scanners Live in Vain[/li][li] Skylark[/li][li] Something Wicked[/li][li] Startide Rising[/li][li] Stranger in A Strange Land[/li][li] Sundiver[/li][li] The Book of the New Sun[/li][li] The Collapsing Empire[/li][li] The Commonwealth Saga[/li][li] The Engines of God[/li][li] The Expanse series[/li][li] The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August[/li][li] The Forever War[/li][li] The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy[/li][li] The Illustrated Man[/li][li] The Left Hand of Darkness[/li][li] The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet[/li][li] The Man Who Was Too Lazy to Fail[/li][li] The Many-Colored Land[/li][li] The Martian Chronicles[/li][li] The Practice Effect[/li][li] The Ship Who Sang[/li][li] The Sudden Appearnce of Hope[/li][li] The Three Body Problem trilogy[/li][li] The Uplift War[/li][li] The War Against the Chtorr[/li][li] The Weapon Shops[/li][li] Time of Enough for Love[/li][li] To Say Nothing of the Dog[/li][li] Void trilogy[/li][li] World War Z[/li][li] Worlds[/li][li] Worlds Apart[/li][/ul]
“Dying Earth” is really its own special corner of genre.
I love Always Coming Home to an unreasonable degree.
Your opinion on whether they are fantasy or sci-fi novels is clearly not credible, since you didn’t even manage to get halfway through.
They’re sci-fi in fantasy tradedress. It’s a deliberate subversion, and although not the earliest such, was rather startling in the 80s. And my feeling is, if you think they were only good enough to keep reading, you missed out on a lot of what Wolfe has going on in those books.
Lois McMaster Bujold is our go-to author to recommend. She has two main universes: one the wholly SF “Vorkosi-verse” featuring Miles Vorkosigan and pals. A few Hugo and Nebula winners there. Ignore “Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen” - last in the series, chronologically, and unnecessary for any kind of contiinuity (one Amazon reviewer likened it to a book-length epilogue).
Then the “Chalion” (or more properly, World of the Five Gods) series beginning with The Curse of Chalion - high fantasy in a wonderfully-built world where those five gods have direct involvement in people’s lives. The full length tales are Curse oF Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt, but she’s now writing a series of novellas centered around Penric, a young man who accidentally becomes possessed of a demon. Not specifically designed as humor but lots of humorous moments, including one of my favorite lines ever “Are you out of my mind???”.
Less well-known are the four Sharing Knife books (Beguilement, Legacy, Passage and Horizon). They’re fantasy, sort of, though set in something much like North America in the early 1800s (except no gunpowder). I read one article comparing its world-building - favorably - to that of Lord Of The Rings. It’s certainly a hella lot easier to read. I personally think the Five Gods series is a better contender there, but I do love the Sharing Knife books.
For fluff: I’ve been reading the Unidentified Funny Objects anthologies, edited by Alex Shvartsman. You can get them in ebook form directly from the publisher (though they’re also available at Amazon etc.). I prefer the publisher, as I don’t know if Amazon enforces DRM on this particular series. For similar reasons, if a book I want is available at Baen, I’ll buy from Baen vs Amazon / B&N.
For more SF than you can read in a lifetime - and free! - go to http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ - Baen periodically puts out CDs containing an assortment of new and older stuff, and that site has them all available for download. Unzip them, and there you are. Some things already mentioned are found there including some of the Weber / Honor Harrington books. Baen made the CDs free, and they can be shared (hence allowing that website) but cannot be distributed for money, or modified. There was a Bujold CD included in the Cryoburn hardback, with similar rules, though Baen (or Bujold?) requested that be removed from the Fifth Imperium site.
I highly recommend using Calibre to manage your ebook library, especially if you’re sideloading a lot of stuff (e.g. from Baen, the UFO series etc.). It will convert from one format to another (e.g. mobi to epub) and has a nice GUI to move things to / from the device.
Yeah, my favorite Le Guin is a tie between Always Coming Home and The Dispossessed. The latter really hits my love of ambiguity+leftism, but the former is just a breathtaking accomplishment. It’s so un-novel-like that it verges on unreadable, but instead it’s compulsively readable and is so incredibly layered and complex and lovely.