Flynn’s novel *Eifelheim *is very good, too. An alien first-contact novel that takes place in a medieval German village.
I also like his *Firestar *series, which is realistic near-future science fiction (rapidly becoming alternate history) about the development of a private space program. It’s set in the same universe as Wreck but takes place about 100 years earlier. It will leave you a little depressed about our sluggish real-life space program.
Nice thread! I’ve read a lot of the books mentioned here, but I’m glad to get some more recommendations.
I do think I’m the only person on the planet who doesn’t like Scalzi. I feel like I’m missing out on something. Maybe I need to re-read Old Man’s War to see if perhaps I was in some kind of bizarre mental state when I read it that blinded me to its virtues.
Promise? Cross your heart and hope to die? I think that I was really mad because I got caught up in the stories, and I wanted some better resolutions. I’ll try another book or two. Maybe.
Hehe… I too recall the Diamond Age as the worst offender. I’m not prepared to go as far as to claim he’s great at endings, but the others I’ve read (Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Baroque Cycle) all seemed OK in that respect.
I’ll add that the series is really, really good for the first five books. But then, you should just make up your own ending, 'cause damn. That was kinda crap.
But yes. This book. Very this book.
If you’re into sci-fi-that’s-not-traditional-sci-fi, try The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood. It’s. . .well, kinda-sci-fi, but very, very good.
Another enthusiastic vote for John Scalzi. Old Man’s War is the first book in the series, with humanity fighting a number of hostile alien races. It’s right up there with Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Haldeman’s The Forever War for page-turner hard-military sf, mixed with a generous dash of wry humor. Good, good stuff.
I’m a big Haldeman fan. His recent short-story collection, A Separate War and Other Stories, is definitely worth a read. The title story and “For White Hill” are almost masterpieces, IMHO.
I second Little Brother, Charles Stross, Snowcrash, and The Diamond Age. In fact, I heartily recommend everything Cory Doctorow has written, including A Place So Foreign and Overclocked. It’s almost all available for free download here.
Here are my favorite quotes from Makers**: **
“And the bad people and the potential chaos were what he loved about the place, too. He’d grown up in the kind of place where everything was predictable and safe and he’d hated every minute of it. The glorious chaos around him was just as he liked it. The wood-smoke curled up his nose, fragrant and all-consuming.”
“Now he contemplated his face in the mirror and told himself he’d get used to this, he’d come to like it, it would be a trademark. It would make him gothier than goth, for life, always an outsider, always one of the weird ones, like the old-timers who’d come to Disney with their teenaged, eye-rolling kids. Goths’ kids were never goths, it seemed–more like bang-bangers or jocky-looking peak-performance types, or hippies or gippies or dippies or tippies or whatever. But their parents were still proudly flying their freak-flags, weird to the grave.”
“One had gills. One glowed in the dark. One was orange and claimed to photosynthesize.”
Meanwhile, my favorite kind of SF is cyberpunk, or whatever it’s evolved into. I don’t much like neo-detective or vampires-in-alternate-San Francisco type stuff. (I saw one about a vampire who is a detective in San Francisco!) Does anyone have any specific recommendations for me, apart from the stuff already mentioned? (and thanks for that.)
This does: Anathem (2008). Set on a planet similar to Earth, where for millennia (literally), philosophers, mathematicians and scientists have lived in what amounts to monasteries, isolated from the outside world. And it’s a lot more exciting than it sounds from that description. Well, that’s very YMMV, I realize; you need a high tolerance for philosophical digressions, which are crucially not digressions at all in this story. See discussion on the TVTropes page.
And Anathemdoes have a definite and decent ending, all tied up in a bow and resolving (practically) all plot threads.
Another vote for Soon I Will Be Invincible, and right now I am enjoying the hell out of Jasper Ffordes’ latest, Shades of Grey, which is (or seems to be) more sci-fi than the Thursday Next series, which I also loved.
Since this thread has reawoken, I’ll second the recommendation for Robert J. Sawyer as a currently-working author of accessible, entertaining science fiction with lots of interesting ideas.
