Without question, this is my pick and my favorite Science Fiction author.
It is a great book and great read.
There is also Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 (The Year 2440), published in 1770, in which the author imagines Paris in the far future. It’s introduced as a dream, but this is just a convention, it’s an attempt to describe a future society.
There’s an 18th century English translation on Google Books under the title Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred.
But I would say that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is probably the first work that can really be classified as SF in the modern sense. The idea of reanimating a dead person was already being discussed in the decades before Mary Shelly wrote, so the idea wasn’t original, but her treatment of it was.
In modern SF, I think C.J. Cherryh is underrated. Her books are intelligent, well-written hard SF, with three-dimensional characters, and realistic space combat.
I like Downbelow Station, and Pride of Chanur.
My Favorite Martian, Mork and Mindy, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie are exactly the same show. But the first two justify the premise by aliens, i.e. science fiction, and the latter two justify it by magic, i.e. fantasy.
SF and Fantasy are far better used as marketing devices, and the “I know it when I see it” test works in 90+% of cases. I also know cheap and lazy writing when I see it, and using technology as magic was all too prevalent in the field even, perhaps especially, in the so-called Golden Age.
I don’t remember any robots at all in The Three-Body Problem and a search on the book using “robots” doesn’t bring up any hits. You’re thinking of some other book, is my guess.
That is A Closed and Common Orbit, first mentioned in post #62 in this thread. Three Body Problem was terrible for other reasons.
I enjoyed Closed and Common Orbit enough to come up with an (unlikely) fan fix for power supply issue (just as I enjoy the Expanse books in spite of their scientific errors (for which I didn’t even bother to come up with a fan fix).
There are definitely genre blurring series. I consider both the Darkhold novels and The Pern novels as fantasy although there are references to the humans arriving on those planets on spaceships.
Pern is closer to Sci-Fi. The Science is Fantastical and the most important plot devices are effectively dragons, but it is really Sci-Fi at its heart.
Good examples. And a lot of stories in Unknown used magic as technology, and did it in a more logical and worked out way than the use of “science” in lots of science fiction.
The first part was pretty good. But I had seen the problem motivating the very last bit before it came up and wondered how he was going to solve it. I wasn’t expecting such a load of unscientific nonsense. It’s like the Chinese government blocked access to physics sites for some reason.
Not to mention not having an exact solution to the problem doesn’t mean that planets and stars bounce around.
I was very disappointed, and am not planning on reading the sequels unless I really have a lot of spare time on my hands.
Ah, my mistake, then, as I haven’t read either.
And I think with Pern, what happened was that McCaffery wanted to write fantasy, but science fiction was considered more respectable at the time, so she had to toss in a few spaceships so she could pretend it was sci-fi and sell it. For fantasy that’s “science fiction at its heart”, I would instead nominate something like Hardy’s Master of the Five Magics.
Yes, I skipped them, too. It was a real test of will to finish the first one.
I am going to go with the Foundation trilogy (surprise!), but I think the bible is the first science-fiction–at least if we include fantasy (which we must unless we exclude any story with FTL drives, telepathy, time travel, and other standard memes. For best short, I’ll stick with Nightfall.
If we include Fantasy then I would put the Lord of the Rings above all others.
However, these are two different but close genres and not the same. The Odyssey otherwise would be an early Sci-Fi story and perhaps even Gilgamesh.
The biggest technology stupid in 3BP is Advanced aliens “unfolding” a proton through several dimensions until it is a sheet millions of square miles in area, etching circuits into its surface, and folding it back down again into a subatomic mega-supercomputer, which is sent to Earth to do things like give people visions by bouncing around on their retinas, screw around with physics experiments, and–once–unfold itself and surround the Earth to make it appear like the cosmic microwave background of the whole universe itself was being modulated to deliver a message to a specific scientist on Earth.
That’s just a variation of Eric Frank Russell’s Sinister Barrier plot (except he did it with invisible alien emotional vampires).
I’m not actually all that bothered by that. If you’re going to try to depict an insanely-advanced alien race, then their technology is going to be insane. And almost certainly wrong, but what can you do?
Yup. I find it baffling that folks object to stuff like that in science fiction–that’s exactly the sort of bonkers stuff that I adore–but no accounting for taste and all.
So–perpetual motion machine is bad, but acting like a cluster of sea quarks, valence quarks, and force carriers are a single solid object is okay?
It’s almost insanely stupid, and yet it makes a kind of sense. Some magic has to be allowed through the door to have a genre at all. Aliens, space battles, time travel. A lot of people can’t accept this and can’t get into sf as a genre at all. I think that’s one reason why fantasy has an easier path to grab people. Call magic magic and people understand how the rules are suspended. Call magic quarks and it’s a reminder of a failed test in science class.
I personally can’t think of anything in sf that’s stupider than zombies and vampires, but millions of people run to embrace those stories. We all have doors that are only partially ajar. (Well, some of us have fully open doors. You’ve seen what happens when they post here. They don’t last very long.) I hated The Three Body Problem, but it wasn’t the science that did me in. (Well, the magic monofiliment ending…) Lots of people will read for magic technology and be fulfilled in ways that no longer work for me, but I get what they’re seeing in a way I’ll never get zombies.
I believe it was Clarke who said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
I’m not sure I could pick a favorite SF anymore. Dune is one that I’ve reread the most, so maybe that. But I’ve also reread Passage at Arms by Glen Cook umpty times, and the characters are certainly more relatable than anyone in Dune.