Or “That Perry Rhodan crap from Germany” as we affectionately called it.
I have about 80 of these things - I found a set of them for 10 cents each in a bookstore last year and bought 40 beyond the ones I had already.
To get a sense of what people were reading almost 40 years ago, try Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad, or some of the earlier J G Ballard novels. A real interesting one by Spinrad is The Iron Dream, Adolph Hitler’s sf novel, set in an alternate universe where Hitler emigrated to the US and became a famous science fiction illustrator before turning to writing. Very controversial, but an interesting and different book.
And for hard sf, the classic example is Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement.
Okay, Meeko, you lost me here. I can sort of understand your objections to Frank and the Doctor (although you can make good cases for both being SF), but how can you classify 20,00 Leages as fantasy? Verne practically invented carefully researched hard-core SF. His explanation of how the Nautilus generates its electricity won’t work, but his decriptions of diving suits, high-pressure hulls, electric lights, etc. are spot-on, and the result of reading and extrapolation. (Not to memtion accurate maps and dscriptions f underwater features).
:dubious: “Dorothy stared in horror at the accelerometer. An acceleration of one light! The g-forces pushed her relentlessly against the floor, helpless to move, barely able to breathe. DuQuesne struggled against the forces but finally reached the control lever and brought the Skylark to a stop.” Or something like that. 3.0 E 8 m/s[sup]2[/sup]? Roughly 30,000,000 G’s? And DuQuesne could walk against it?
They’re good space operas, but the part that was “science” at the time is now “fiction.” I’m not sure if that strips them of their Sci-Fi category, but they’re more Fi than Sci.
Well… Like I said, I generally tend towards harder SF with interesting characters, and though I agree that the plot of Number falls apart faster than TP in a flush, the characters are delightful enough that I enjoy revisiting them. They feel like friends within text – playful, smart, silly, capable… They’re much like friends that I’d like to have. Heck, they’re much like some friends that I DO have, and like very much.
Okay, so I also admit that I reread it for Gay Deceiver quotes. My wife and I figure that someday we’ll name one of our vehicles Gay Deceiver – but only if it’s got a Mae West voice with snide comebacks.
I’d forgotten to mention that I also love all the Callahan/Lady Sally’s place books/stories by Spider Robinson – again, it’s characters that feel like friends that keep me coming back. Some characters are worth revisiting even if they keep on repeating the same old stories again and again. Heck, many of my real-time friends are like that too.
No way does that strip them of their sf cred, IMO. “Science Fiction” does not have to mean “accurately predicts the future” (although I admit it’s cool when it does). If a work of fiction speculates about what the future might be like in a creative and thought-provoking way, then it’s science fiction.
You might say that it hasn’t aged well or withstood the test of time, and I won’t argue with you; but you can’t say it’s not sf because the science turned out not to be true.
There’s your problem right there: An acceleration of one light isn’t 300,000,000 m/s[sup]2[/sup]. It isn’t anything. The Speed of Light isn’t an acceleration, it’s (as one might guess) a speed.
I, too, was very annoyed at that passage. But I will say this, to Doc Smith’s credit: He knew that he didn’t know physics, and therefore did a very good job (except for that passage) at refraining from mentioning actual units. Most of the book, the characters talk about accelerations at the tenth setting of the throttle lever, or speeds increasing by three notches, or the like. Of course, this is still all unreconcileable with the fact that they’re travelling to other stars in a matter of days and surviving the trip: At accelerations of a few gees (all that’s survivable, even with “specially designed acceleration couches”), it’d still take a matter of years to reach even nearby stars.
Guys. We’re not going to do the Heinlein argument again, are we? Puppet Masters was good. Glory Road, too.
Alan Dean Foster’s Flinx series, starting with For Love of Mother-Not.
If you want something a little lighter, I’d suggest Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series. And I agree with Satogata, Callahan’s is fun.
It’s not my problem, it’s the good Doc’s problem. That particular sentence I KNOW I got right, just because my jaw dropped when I read it. The only way I could reconcile the immense distances they traveled in such short times was to read it as an acceleration rather than a speed. At a speed of one light they wouldn’t even have made it out of the solar system(probably not even the inner planets) in the timeframe when Duquesne hijacked the Skylark. They had to be going much faster than that, so I figured he must have meant 300,000,000 m/s[sup]2[/sup]. A ridiculous acceleration which will quickly get them to ludicrous speed(and therefore plaid), but still the only explanation consistent with the descriptions of the activity and distance traveled in a certain time.
I enjoyed the books, they were good reads, albeit pretty heavily romanticized(Can we hear just one more time about Seatons awesome physique or unmatched mind Doc? Please, Please!). I was pretty disappointed that my local library did not have the Lensmen books and I’m trying to find copies to read because I still like Doc’s stuff, even though I can’t suspend disbelief during some passages.
Sorry, that’s what I meant. I didn’t mean that you mis-read it; like I said, that passage rather screamed at me, too. And he probably meant c/second, but no matter how you interpret it, it’s ludicrous.
I’m suprised this thread has gotten so far without someone mentioning Stanislaw Lem. His work is uneven, but much of it is interesting. Check out The Cyberiad for starters. It’s an episodic novel, and some of the episodes are better than others. Many of them are based on really interesting philosophical questions and are both thought-provoking and witty. My favorite episodes of The Cyberiad are, I think, are “The Machine that Did Nothing” and “The Mechanical Bard,” but there are others I enjoyed, too.
Oh ok, so I guess a Lot of people don’t like Rand’s work, which again is probably why it isnt listed.
On 20,000 Leagues:
Granted I havent read the book, but I was working with the assumption/grounds that if Sci fi doesnt create a new world over what we know, it isnt as much Sci-Fi as it could be. (Futuristic Worlds / Online Creations).
But you can’t look at any literature without considering the world that made it. At the time that 20,000 Leagues was written, for example, the US Navy was gutting itself; and Holland’s experiements with submersible vessels was still fifteen years in the future, IIRC. Even the Dreadnought building races were still unimagined.
Similarly, a number of good SF stories have been written that have since been overturned - the science that they were based upon has been proven unsound. At one point, for example, Pluto was assumed to have the highest density of any planetary body in the solar system. Or consider just how quaint descriptions of computers are in books from the 50’s and 60’s.
