What's your favorite science fiction storyline?

In My Humble Opinion
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Storylines, not necessarily authors. (We just had a big tussle over Heinlein over in Great Debates.)

It can be from movies, novels, short stories, comix, TV series, basically anything.

One of my favorites is a Philip Dick short story called, I think, “Second Variety.” (Hope I got the title right.)

The Earth has been taken over by machines. The last human holdouts are being stalked by robots that look human, ingratiating themselves and then suddenly–SHKKKKH. There are three varieties. There’s the Wounded Soldier (Variety I). There’s the Lost Little Boy (Variety III). The humans know there’s a Variety II, because the Roman numerals are on the inside of the components of the robots that have been destroyed. But they don’t know what Variety II looks like.

The human holdouts become paranoid, suspecting each other of being Variety II. After all, none of them really know each other. I think one guy is even killed on suspicion of being a robot. Then one girl says she’ll go for help in a space shuttle, and asks the other survivor for directions to the humans’ secret moonbase, their last hope. He gives her directions, she takes off, and he is suddenly attacked by robots. Suddenly, he sees the Second Variety–the exact double of the girl who just took off.

The only hope for mankind is that the different Varieties are now fighting and killing each other.

Awesome! Written in the early Fifties, thirty years before Terminator!

I saw an Outer Limits episode which is similar. Two prisoners of war, a young man and a young woman, are being tortured by aliens. Every night they take away the girl and do something to change her a little bit more to an alien. Gross. The couple despairs and resolves to commit suicide. The guy wants to give the girl a little hope before killing her, so he tells her: the humans have a reserve attack fleet which is hiding behind the sun. There is hope. After this revelation, the girl suddenly gets up to leave the cell for the last time. “They’re not changing me,” she says. “They’re changing me back.”

Oh, by the way, I really LOOOOVE Pat Murphy’s “There And Back Again.” It’s The Hobbit, set in space. It’s not derivative, Murphy really makes it work! There are the equivalent of spiders, the Gollum, the Ring, the Dragon and some ingenious things that have no parallel! And it’s still creative and original! I love this book!

So how about you? Know any good ones for the campfire?

By the way: my brother recommended Stanislaw Lem, but I can’t find him in the bookstore. Anything good by him?

Also: what Philip Dick story or novel is the movie “Total Rekall” based on? Can’t find it.

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Being a fan of “Reboot”, I can’t help but say that I always enjoyed the show, the storyline (especially season #2 & 3), the characters and the general premise. For those unfamiliar, “Reboot” tells the story of life inside a computer called Mainframe which has unfortunately been infected with two viruses, Megabyte and Hexadecimal. Most episodes are about Megabyte trying to take over Mainframe and the heroes, lead by Bob the Guardian with Glitch his trusty keytool, stopping him. Inevitably a game lands which the heroes have to win to save the lives of people in Mainframe (if the computer loses the game the sector is nullified which is bad for them). The show is probably more comedy than science fiction … well, lets call it comedy/science fiction

I also am a big fan of “Robotech” and I think it had a great story as well. It isn’t necessarily original but I find the execution of it to be great. A alien starship lands on Earth, which the we manage to rebuild and discover great new technologies which brings all humans together in peace. However, its original owner, the Zentraedi (50’-80’ tall humanoids), show up and want it back. A war ensues. The story is really a love story with a war backdrop. Again not original, but I found it was executed well.

However for those who want something different, I have to recommend my favorite short story called “Into the Darkness”. It is a sci-fi story about life. It is about a cosmic entity and its quest of entering the vast void and the edge of known space.

I guess you could say I like sci-fi that really isn’t science fiction, but uses a science fiction backdrop to convey another story.

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I’ve always liked stories where the timeline gets manipulated. Like Terminator or Back To The Future. Some of my favorite Star Trek episodes do this, like “Yesterday’s Enterprise” or “The City On The Edge Of Forever.” Or that New Generation episode where they are stuck in a time loop and keep blowing up.

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“We Can Remember It For You Wholesale”

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Given our…strong…disagreement in another thread, I may be incurring the wrath of tclouie here :wink: : If you like time-paradox stories, let me suggest two short stories by Heinlein. These are generally considered to be two of the best time-paradox stories ever written in the history of S.F.

The first is “All You Zombies”, which can be found in the collection titled “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag”.

The other, “By His Bootstraps” can be found in the collection which has been reprinted everywhere, but the easiest place to get it is “The Menace from Earth”. If you liked the time-loop episode of Next Gen, you’ll love “By His Bootstraps”.

I can’t tell you anything about them or I’ll spoil them for you, but if you check your library or a used book store, you should be able to find them inexpensively.
Another good time-paradox author is Keith Laumer (“Dinosaur Beach”)

A theme that I love is “scientific magic”. It’s not the same as science-fantasy, althought I love science-fantasy (of the sort that appeared in UNKNOWN magazine).

In a “scientific magic” novel, the characters systematically learn the “rules” of magic and learn to manipulate the rules. Two examples would be Duncan’s “A Man of His Word/Handful of Men” series and Hardy’s “Master of the Five Magics” series.

In Science-Fantasy, the gimmick is “What would the real world be like if magic was commonplace” and there are only a few examples. Heinlein’s “Magic, Inc” was the first of the sub-genre, Anderson did two winky-winky sequels (“Operation Chaos/Operation Luna”), Turtledove did “The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump” and Anthony did a series that started out ok and degenerated into crap (not that that’s a surprise from Anthony) called “The Incarnations of Immortality”. Sadly that’s about it for that genre. I wish there was more of it.

Great topic, tclouie!

Fenris

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(Fenris - as a fan of really bad puns, I loved “The…Toxic Spell Dump” - many, many giggles in there).
One of my favourite sci-fi storylines is what I call Apocalyptic Fiction in which mankind is virtually wiped out on Earth for whatever reason. The storyline usually focuses on how people deal with this huge catastrophe, and also on how life on Earth would be for the survivors, where they go from there, how they re-build, fight the evil that caused it, etc. One of my favourite novels with this theme is Stephen King’s “The Stand”. L.Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth” (the book, not the very inadequate movie) is another fairly good example (I’ve read much better, but I can’t think of them at the moment).

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tclouie: The Philip K. Dick story about the robots you referenced was made into a distinctly mediocre film - Screamers.

Another excellent time-travel/paradox work ( or at least there are elements of that storyline present, along with a dozen other plots ) is The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers. Not for everyone as there are fantasy elements involved ( the novel falls under the category of “Steampunk” - there are elements of both sf and fantasy ), but a personal favorite of mine. It also won a Philip K. Dick memorial award.

And just to toss another Heinlein out there ( :smiley: ), there’s The Door into Summer, which also deals with the time paradox question.

  • Tamerlane
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I went through a period where I read every Apocalyptic book I could get my hands on, and kind of burned out. An oddball one is “Of Men and Monsters” by William Tenn (aka world-class skeptic Phillip Klass). Aliens invade and wipe most of us out. The ending is really, really creepy.

Have you tried any of the British-style “cozy catastrope” novels from the '50s and '60s? From Wyndham’s “Day of the Triffids” to John Christopher’s “No Blade of Grass” to Ward Moore’s “Greener than you Think”, to Jones’s “Denver is Missing” they all feature novel ways of wiping out the earth (Everyone is blinded in Triffids, grain won’t grow in Christopher’s, everything with chloriphyll grows too well and takes over in Moore’s and the atmosphere is poisoned from a mile above sea-level up in Jones’s book), they all feature small groups trying to survive. I think you’d enjoy them.

BTW: Spider Robinson, in “Telempath” has the most inventive way of destroying civilization I’ve ever read: Someone lets loose a virus that gives all humans the ability to dectect smells better than a bloodhound. And no ability to filter it or turn it off. Cities are destroyed in a matter of hours as people rush to get free of the scent.

Fenris

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featherlou: Have you read Earth Abides by George R. Stewart? Written in the 40’s, I think. Considered a classic of the ‘Apocalyptic’ genre.

Also I would imagine the classic Davy by Edgar Pangborn sort of falls into that group as well.

Oh, and another classic A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, also deals with those issues as well.

  • Tamerlane
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I loved The Anubis Gate! A great moment is when the hero is trapped back in Victorian England and hears one of the time-travellers whistling a Beatles’s tune (Yesterday?) as a signal for other timetravellers. Somehow that sent shivers up my spine. That’s the only book I’ve read by Powers, though (other than an early fantasy of his “The Drawing of the Three” or somesuch). Is his other stuff as well plotted and atmospheric?

Fenris

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Fenris: I can’t say enough good things about Last Call by Tim Powers. Magic as tied into primal archetypes ( expressed through Tarot and by extension regular poker cards ) and involving the manipulation of probability. All set in modern Las Vegas ( and featuring Bugsy Siegel as a former Fisher King :smiley: ).

Not quite as good ( but still very, very good :wink: ), is On Stranger Tides about pirates and voodoo set in the Caribbean in 1725 ( end of the classic Pirate era ) and featuring such luminaries as Blackbeard, English classicists turned sorcerors, magic based on Hematin in blood, and the Fountain of Youth in the Everglades. Weak female character in this one, but otherwise vastly entertaining.

His longest ( I think ) and also very strong is The Stress of Her Regard, involving jealous vampiric muses ( of a very unusual and fascinating sort ) for the likes of Byron and Shelley.

Needless, to say, I’m a big Tim Powers fan :slight_smile: . Although he does seem to have a fascination with mutilation ( somebody is forever getting a limb shattered or eye blown out in his books - shrug ).

  • Tamerlane
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Thanks, Fenris and Tamerlane. Those are some great ideas for more novels. I have read some of them already - Earth Abides is one of the best novels I’ve ever read - how could I forget that one?!? and I think reading Day of the Triffids in high school is what got me started down this path.
Another of my fav. sci-fi storylines is humans and aliens interracting on a one-to-one basis. I have an idea for a novel where humans meet an alien race, and both the humans and the aliens are instantly addicted to each other, will have nothing to do with their own kind once they have met an alien, and also cannot reproduce with the aliens. Lots of interesting repercussions.

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Tamerlane – Powers’ new book will be out momentarily.

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I remember my younger sister reading a series by Rick Cook (thank you, Amazon.com!) that I think would fall into the humorous end of this genre. The first book was called “The Wiz Biz”, although Amazon tells me that this book is actually a combined volume that consists of the first two books in the series, which seem to be out of print individually. Anyway, the series is about a computer programmer who was transported to a typical fantasyland. By applying programming rules to the local magical system he came up with a new school of magic.

I liked The Stress of Her Regard a lot, not least of all because it is the only novel I’ve ever read that featured my namesake so prominently. :slight_smile: I have yet to read any of Powers’ other stuff, but since several of you have mentioned The Anubis Gates favorably I’ll probably check it out soon.

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A movie made sounds very similiar to the plot outlined in the OP, it’s called Screamers.

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I vaguely remember a story about astronauts who visit a dead planet, and eventually figure out that the planet had been thriving until God blew up its sun in order to create the Star of Bethlehem and lead the Three Wise Men to Jesus. Does anyone know what I might be referring to?

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I’m pretty certain it’s Arthur Clarke’s “The Star”.
BTW. Lamia I’ve read the “Wiz” books and they’re exactly the sort I was talking about. The later books aren’t nearly as good, but the first three or so are wonderful.

Fenris

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Fenris:

"William Tenn " is a pen name for Phillip Klass, but NOT the same Phillip Klass that used to be an editor at Aviation Week, and who wrote so many book debunking UFOs. In fact, he placed a notice in “The Skeptica;l Enquirer” saying just that.

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Bablyon 5 – its all about B5

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I love Tim Powers’ stuff too, and if you like his you’ll probably like James Blaylock too. The early work you were talking about is “The Drawing of the Dark” and it has been reprinted. I just got a copy from Amazon about a month ago.

Another author who does good time travel stuff is Connie Willis. I especially liked “To Say Nothing of the Dog”.