Knights & Knaves Alehouse

The High Crusade!

Stonegiant wrote:Hardwired (can't remember the author)

Walter Williams, I believe.

I will put in another vote for Dune, and also Gene Wolf, but honestly I am hard pressed to come up with a top twenty. Guess I need to broaden my horizons.

Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League/Terran Empire series

Book of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

Planet of Adventure series by Jack Vance

Death and Designation Among the Asadi by Michael Bishop (novella, later turned into a full book along with a new story of the Asadi)

Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon(novella)

Citizen of the Galaxy by Heinlein

Dune, by Frank Herbert

Akira by Otomo, graphic novel

Hyperion series by Dan Simmons

Ringworld by Larry Niven

Otherland series by Tad Williams

At the Mountains of Madness by the cat from Rhode Island

An Evil Guest- Gene Wolfe again

The Demon Princes yet more Vance

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress-the same guy who wrote Citizen of the Galaxy

The Caves of Steel-Asimov

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Miyazaki (graphic novel series)

Black Destroyer by Vogt for the D&D inspiration

The Coming of the White Worm by Clark Ashton Smith (check out XRP's Advanced Adventures #11 for the D&D treatment)

The space trilogy by C.S. Lewis

In no particular order, as the authors come up:

Jack Vance: The Demon Princes (obviously; a treasure-house of imagination, wisdom and wit)
Jack Vance: Emphyrio (a melancholy tale, almost musical)
Jack Vance: To Live Forever (very 'roaring 20s'; I tend to imagine the whole book in the style of that era)
Stanisław Lem: The Cyberiad (this collection of stories is even more entertaining to read as a mirror image/self-parody of Summa Technologiae, Lem's big book on the possibilities and pitfalls of technological progress)
Stanisław Lem: The Invincible (maybe the most action-heavy of Lem's books, beautiful closing line)
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars (just a good bit of speculative fiction)
Ray Bradbury: The Martian Chronicles (mostly for the poetic power, e.g. Soft Rains Will Come and all that)
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Peter Zsoldos: Faraway Fire ("what if an earthman found himself the despot of a small quasi-Babylonian city-state", in Hungarian only)
Peter Zsoldos: Counterpoint (space exploration from the POV of the robots doing it; quite a powerful work, but again, in Hungarian only)
Katsuhiro Otomo: Akira (comic series; this, along with the incomparable Evangelion series, Paprika and Nausicaa, is one of the few mangas/anime I not only tolerate but find excellent)
Alfred Bester: The Stars Are My Destination
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: The Accursed City (not light reading, this; I am not sure it has ever been translated into English)
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Beetle in the Anthill (the same; the restrained menace of the truly utopian society of the book could only have been written by someone who has lived through the Brezhnev period and none else)
Daniel Keys Moran: The Ring (strangely, this book is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world)
Arthur C. Clarke: The City and the Stars (the only Clarke book I found really great)
Howard W. Miller Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (excellent juxtaposition of dry humour and tragedy)
Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (I have read several books by Dick, but this stuck me as the most intriguing)
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (the book that did cyberpunk so perfectly it also killed it in the process; also, "Hiro Protagonist"!)
Neal Stephenson: The Diamond Age (a lot lighter on action than I expected after Snow Crash, but it remained entertaining till the end, and its general optimism was a nice change of pace from the usual dystopianism permeating SF)

What surprised me while compiling this list is how hard it was to remember what I have read. There was a time when I was a voracious SF reader and read everything in the genre I could lay my hands on, but apparently, I have forgotten most of them. There are also a lot of classics I once liked, but upon rereading them, found lacking (most of all the works of His Smugness Isaac Asimov, but also a lot of the speculative SF short stories that were published in magazines and anthologies). Sometimes childhood heroes don't quite measure up.

Wonderful list, Melan! Thank you!

Arthur C. Clarke: The City and the Stars (the only Clarke book I found really great)

I completely agree. Many don't like it because it's so 'far out there' and isn't as much about 'hard science' as his other books.

It's interesting that you bring up titles/authors which are unknown in the Anglophone world. Why, just recently I had learned about the "Perry Rhodan" series of books, and had never once heard anything about it until earlier this year!

Another series I love are the "Barsoom" books by E.R. Burroughs. More surreal, dreamlike sword-n-planet than true SF, but still...

Never did dig on Sci-Fi. Read Dune and thought it was great when I was a teenager. Reread it in my 20s and thought, "wow, that book sucks". Never could read the rest of Herbert's work despite repeated attempts.

None of the other sci-fi greats ever interested me in the least.

• Isaac Asimov: I, Robot
• Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles
• Davin Brin: Startide Rising, The Uplift War
• Orson Scott Card: Ender's Game, etc.
• Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous With Rama, etc.
• Philip K. Dick: A Scanner Darkly
• Harlan Ellison: Deathbird Stories
• Philip José Farmer: To Your Scattered Bodies Go
• David Gerrold: A Matter For Men, etc.
• William Gibson: Neuromancer, Burning Chrome
• Joe Haldeman: The Forever War
• Robert A. Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers
• Frank Herbert: Dune, etc.
• Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
• Walter Miller, Jr: A Canticle For Leibowitz
• Larry Niven: Ringworld, Ringworld Engineers
• George Orwell: 1984
• Dan Simmons: Hyperion
• John Steakley: Armor
• Gene Wolfe: Book of the New Sun, Urth of the New Sun, Book of the Long Sun

Re: Gene Wolfe
He's my favorite author. Just about anything by him is good, including his short stories. He kinda transcends genre, too.

Re: Dune
I liked all the Dune books up through Chapterhouse: Dune. Some are better than others, of course, but I've read them all multiple times.

Re: David Gerrold / War Against the Chtorr series
This one is kind of an odd-man-out, on the list. It's a bit of a Heinlein rip-off, actually, but pretty well done.

I forgot about Ender's Game. My cousin made me read it. Its really good.

drin wrote:I forgot about Ender's Game. My cousin made me read it. Its really good.

Good point. I forgot about that one, too. That did hold up when I reread it in my twenties.

Melan wrote:Howard W. Miller Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz (excellent juxtaposition of dry humour and tragedy)

Philotomy Jurament wrote: Howard Miller, Jr: A Canticle For Leibowitz

Odd. It's Walter Miller fellas.

His short stories are superior to Canticle but that novel is good too.

Philotomy Jurament wrote:Gene Wolfe: Book of the New Sun

I don't consider this SF. It is Fantasy in my view. Particularly for the way it is written since when Wolfe writes SF it feels different but I have argued the point before at length [in my youth] with a friend so can guess why you do consider it so.

kent wrote:Odd. It's Walter Miller fellas.

His short stories are superior to Canticle but that novel is good too.

Oops. Yeah, Walter. I'll fix that.

I read the sequel to Canticle, too, but found it disappointing. Actually, I don't think I even finished it. I don't believe I've read any of his short stories, but I'll be sure to seek them out. I appreciate short stories a *lot* more than I used to.

I don't consider [Book of the New Sun] SF. It is Fantasy in my view. Particularly for the way it is written since when Wolfe writes SF it feels different but I have argued the point before at length [in my youth] with a friend so can guess why you do consider it so.

I agree that it's questionable to call Book of the New Sun sci-fi. I think it falls in a grey area, but when you consider it along with Urth of the New Sun (which follows and "completes" it), it edges a little more into sci-fi territory. I don't feel strongly enough about it to argue the point, though.

That's the beauty of theose Gene Wolfe books, along with Vance and others. Is their stuff Sci-fi or fantasy? I would say that Book of the New sun + Urth of the New Sun is less "hard sci-fi" than Book of the Long Sun, but still could be stuck in the sci-fi section. None of it is very "hard sci-fi", exept in places, and all of it could still qualify as fantasy in some respects. However one files them, they are well written, at least in my opinion.

Let's see:

• Dominic Flandry series - Poul Anderson
• Foundation trilogy - Isaac Asimov
• The Stars, My Destination - Alfred Bester
• Fahrenheit 451 & The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
• The Lights in the Sky Are Stars - Fredric Brown
• Barsoom series - Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Childhood's End - Arthus C. Clarke
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
• Riverworld series & World of Tiers series - Philip Jose Farmer
• Neuromancer & Burning Chrome - William Gibson
• The Stainless Steel Rat - Harry Harrison
• The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Green Hills of Earth, The Menace from Earth & The Door Into Summer - Robert A. Heinlein
• Dune - Frank Herbert
• The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Big Time - Fritz Leiber
• The Mote in God's Eye - Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
• Demon Princes series & Planet of Adventure series - Jack Vance
• The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum

I'm sure there's at least a couple I'm forgetting, and even more I haven't read

Old School: Cordwainer Smith, Norstrilia and The Rediscovery of Man - Immensely talented writer, very lyrical style, compelling ideas on every page, and admittedly not for everyone.

Middle School: William Gibson, the Sprawl series and also The Difference Engine, his steampunk (before the term had been coined) collaboration with Bruce Sterling - Everyone already knows who he is, I much prefer these books to his current series, which I find formulaic and plodding.

New School: Michael Flynn, The Wreck of the River of Stars - Successor to Cordwainer Smith's legacy (though the newer books are slightly less satisfying), with a similar lyrical style and sets all his books within a shared world. Wreck is just a graceful, poignant book... and not for everyone.