Science Fiction

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breepf said:
I've heard of this story but never read it.

I'll check out the Kessel book.

I'm a big fan of intraprofessional sniping, so I've read several ripostes to the Cold Equations, as well as knocks on Asimov's Robot series like Bester's short story "Fondly Fahrenheit" or LeGuin's response in The Dispossesed to Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. That being said, I've have not yet read Jemisin's response to Le Guin's The Ones Who Walked Away. Jemisin put me off with the whole "attack helicopter" imbroglio.
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I'm a big Bester fan so I like that story a lot. You probably already know this, but Bester is the writer who first wrote the Green Lantern oath: "In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might, beware my power, Green Lantern's light!"
 
finesse said:
Some of his books are hard to read. He did a collaboration with Weber ( March Up Country and a couple more ) that I liked a lot. He also did a series ( The Aldenata Series, maybe) where the first 3-4 books were good and then got strange. Fortunately the first 3-4 are fairly complete without a need to read the others.

I'm also a big Glen Cook fan. The Black Company series mixes sword and sorcery and military science fiction and the Garrett, PI is a fantasy knockoff of the Nero Wolfe books with elves, dwarves and other oddities.

The Black Company might not suit everyone. It starts with a scene involving rape, torture and mayhem. Then you find out that these are the good guys (so to speak).
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I'll check those out and give him another try. Thanks.
 
Have y'all ever managed to see The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin? I caught it once but by all my searching I cannot find it...PBS once made it available but no longer.

Here's the Trailer...

 
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donbosco said:
Have y'all ever managed to see The Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin"? I caught it once but by all my searching I cannot find it...PBS once made it available but no longer.

Here's the Trailer...

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I saw part of it on PBS once and thought, what I saw, was really good.
 
finesse said:
Loved The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man.
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I read both of those novels several years ago. Given that it was published in '56, I was astounded by how good The Stars My Destination was. I felt almost utterly contemporary.
 
breepf said:
I read Accelerando several years ago, and recall being disappointed. I think it struck me as a poor man's Schismatrix, no offense. Singularity Sky is staring at me from my bookshelf, but now I'm gunshy.
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I feel like Accelerando is my least favorite of his books - I liked it but it didn't really grab me. (Saturn's Children and Neptune's Brood rank pretty low as well). Halting State and Rule 34 are tougher reads because they are written in second person. Most everything else he has written, I have really enjoyed.
 
LeoBloom said:
Absolutely!! Yes, it does echo "The Cold Equations."

Kessel writes what some term speculative fiction. He wrote a great book about lunar colonies called "The Moon and the Other."
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Just ordered a dogeared copy of The Moon and the Other and Joe Halderman's All My Sins Remembered.
 
LeoBloom said:
He wrote a great book about lunar colonies called "The Moon and the Other."
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I've now got a copy of The Moon and the Other on my desk. Apparently, he is a creative writing professor at NCSU, so I can only imagine that his novel re-imagines the moon if it were paved with bricks.
 
Any fans of Walter Jon Williams? I recently completed Implied Spaces--was ready to quit over the first 40-odd pages, but then it pivoted to something much more interesting.

I've also read his novels Aristoi (a "posthuman" novel that I quite enjoyed) and and Voice From the Whirlwind, an 80s cyberpunk novel.
 
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For those with a taste for classic hard science fiction, let me recommend Hal Clements, in particular Mission of Gravity and its sequel Starlight. It involves some serious physics with a pretty good feel for character. Pretty interesting setting as well.




Mesklin is a vast, inhospitable, disc-shaped planet, so cold that its oceans are liquid methane and its snows are frozen ammonia. It is a world spinning dizzyingly, a world where gravity can be a crushing 700 times greater than Earth's, a world too hostile for human explorers. But the planet holds secrets of inestimable value, and an unmanned probe that has crashed close to one of its poles must be recovered. Only the Mesklinites, the small creatures so bizarrely adapted to their harsh environment, can help.
 
breepf said:
Any fans of Walter Jon Williams? I recently completed Implied Spaces--was ready to quit over the first 40-odd pages, but then it pivoted to something much more interesting.

I've also read his novels Aristoi (a "posthuman" that I quite enjoyed) and and Voice From the Whirlwind, an 80s cyberpunk novel.
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I am a big Walter Jon Williams fan - grew up on Voice of the Whirlwind/Hardwired. The Metropolitan series is really, really good - interesting mash-up of science/magic (sort of) and a really cool setting and tone. His Space Opera series "Praxis" is pretty good, although the first trilogy is a lot better than the second, and there is some unevenness throughout.
 
roostra said:
I am a big Walter Jon Williams fan - grew up on Voice of the Whirlwind/Hardwired. The Metropolitan series is really, really good - interesting mash-up of science/magic (sort of) and a really cool setting and tone. His Space Opera series "Praxis" is pretty good, although the first trilogy is a lot better than the second, and there is some unevenness throughout.
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I'm reading a John Kessel novel right now, but I've got Williams's Angel Station on my bookshelf. It's a hardcover discarded by a library, and it's got an unbelievably kitschy 1989 cover.

I'd really like to read his novel Hardwired, but it appears to be very OOP and, for that reason, very expensive on the used market.
 
LeoBloom said:
Absolutely!! Yes, it does echo "The Cold Equations."

Kessel writes what some term speculative fiction. He wrote a great book about lunar colonies called "The Moon and the Other."
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I'm only 50 pages into The Moon and the Other, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Kessel is at NSCU and I wonder to what extent he is writing a campus novel (think Delillo's White Noise, for example) in outer space? Right now it's a scene in a physics lab where various researchers and professors reflect on and complain about gender ideologies.

Besides remembering more details about other lunar colony novels I've read (Heinlein, Ian MacDonald's Luna), this book makes me wish I'd read something like Joanne Russ's The Female Man and other 70s feminist SF.
 
LeoBloom said:
Absolutely!! Yes, it does echo "The Cold Equations."

Kessel writes what some term speculative fiction. He wrote a great book about lunar colonies called "The Moon and the Other."
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In hindsight, I actually don't think this novel was any great shakes--I found some of the plot twists underwhelming--but I nevertheless finished this doorstop in record time. Couldn't stop reading it!

I just picked up John Varley's 1977 novel The Ophiuchi Hotline. Never read a Varley novel before.
 
breepf said:
In hindsight, I actually don't think this novel was any great shakes--I found some of the plot twists underwhelming--but I nevertheless finished this doorstop in record time. Couldn't stop reading it!

I just picked up John Varley's 1977 novel The Ophiuchi Hotline. Never read a Varley novel before.
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At the risk of typing into the void, I gotta say that I enjoyed the Varley novel. Nerds often describe M John Harrison's The Centauri Device as the novel that deconstructed space opera, though I don't think it was entirely successful. In any case, Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline has that same deconstructive vibe vis-a-vis first contact-style stories and, I think, it more squarely hits its targets.

Much to my shame, I've picked up a well-recommended Warhammer 40k novel. I'm not really into military sci-fi as a genre, but I appreciate the (sometimes overwrought) efforts at worldbuilding and machismo.
 
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