Greatest SF novel of all time? And why? by FREESOUP

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Greatest SF novel of all time? And why?

POSTED BY: FREESOUP
UPDATED: Sunday, March 31, 2024 14:23
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Sunday, October 12, 2003 1:12 PM

I agree that Haldeman's "The Forever War" is worthwhile, and won RAH's admiration expressed by him personally to Joe in 1976 or thereabouts at a WorldCon.

Some see it as a rebuttal to "Starship Troopers", but both Joe and myself think it's more that RAH never had combat experience and was in the Navy, not the Army. YMMV.

What else do you think qualifies, and did my post pique your interest in "The Book of the New Sun" a tad?

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Sunday, October 12, 2003 1:12 PM

FREESOUP

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Sunday, October 12, 2003 1:12 PM

FREESOUP

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Tuesday, December 9, 2003 4:06 AM

TEELABROWN

There are to many. Some one the top of my head:

There are so many, so Ringworld because he (the author) has made interesting cultures and the plot is fairly good.

Or the Hitchhikker's Guide set because they are funny, off-the-wall humor, and can be random yet still be connected to the story. Like the second-hand ballpoint pen buisness connection is Zaphod. It takes sideways humor, which me and all my friends at school have. And most likely many people here.

Also, if you like Hitchhikker's Guide, read Outernet, even though it's ment for younger kids, it is so close to Hitchhikker's Guide. It's very good and funny.

And my favorite non-sf novel I think would be A Christmas Carol. It is very well done, and is a very nice story about redemtion.

Keep flyin', Happy Holidays!

............................................................................................
"Freedom is the Freedom to say that 2+2 makes 4. If that is granted, all else follws"-Winston, 1984
Keep flyin', and remember, THEY can't take the sky from US!

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Tuesday, December 9, 2003 5:39 AM

KERNELM

- The Night Watch by Terry Pratchett. The Dickens of our time, only better. (Though Michael Dirda likes to call him Chaucer.) Pterry just keeps getting better. NW is his best yet, but so many others deserve honorable mention here. Small Gods, Feet of Clay, Lords and Ladies, Thief of Time, Hogfather...

- The Dune Chronicles. For me the last two volumes are together the best part. (And btw, the series as a whole is fairly anti-messiah. The hints at galactic destruction in the first book are developed in the later books. Then there's the question of whether Leto II was a good or bad guy...)

- The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. One of the greatest works of fiction, (CBG voice) ever. Also of note is American Gods.

- The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Just read this a while ago and it was as good as everybody was saying. Great stuff. The Demolished Man was good as well.

- His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Just read this recently too. Mindblowing. Of course, it helps that I'm agnostic since the books are pretty unsubtly smashing Christianity. A little too unsubtle for my taste actually (Small Gods is a much better treatment of organized religion, IMO), but overall the story is just too good.

I've actually picked up the Book of the New Sun, but haven't really started on them yet.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2003 9:41 PM

NEESKA

I love this thread. My Faves:

1. As someone has mentioned: Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester. Demolished Man may be even better. He is the Kurt Vonnegut of Sci-Fi. With brilliant ideas to boot.

2. More than Human, Theodore Sturgeon. Talk about a mind-blower. Conceptually awe-inspiring.

3. Ubik, Phillip K. Dick. How could PKD not be mentioned?

Finally, I would also like to reiterate that Hyperion, Dune, and Ender's Game are all classics. Also, Rendevous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. I could go on and on!

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 1:02 PM

CLANGASSOCIATION

3. Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove

Ever since I read Turtledove's In the Balance, I have had entirely different view of alternate history fiction. Speaking from a sci-fi perspective, his plotlines sound campy and banal. Take, for instance, Guns of the South, in which a time traveler supplies the Confederate States of America with assault rifles, causing the South to win the American Civil War. Upon seeing the cover art of Robert E. Lee holding an AK-47, your first instinct is to snort derisively and pass the book by. But Turtledove's knowledge of history is extensive and is clearly reflected in his work.

2. Tunnel in the Sky by Robert Heinlein

Point of interest: Tunnel in the Sky is a Juvenile Fiction novel whose initials just happen to spell out a vulgar synonym for "nipples". Even so, this has to be Heinlein's best. Picture a cross between William Golding's The Lord of the Flies and Firefly, and you have Tunnel in the Sky. A group of adolescent space-frontiersmen-in-training are teleported to a deserted planet as their final exam; but a supernova interferes with the recall, so the students end up stranded there for several years. I literally could not put this book down. The suspense is overwhelming, and in the end, you realize that all of your suspicions about the story were unreasonable and paranoid.

1. Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard

If Gladiator were set in a socialist-dominated, post-apocalyptic, WWII-alternate-history Europe, then you'd have Final Blackout--a dramatic thrill-ride that is sure to please. Its historical introduction may turn you off initially, but it soon gains considerable momentum. It charms. It excites. And its tragic ending leaves you both inspired and distraught. Once I finished it, I promptly flipped back to the beginning and started it over again. It's that good.

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 2:57 PM

CHANNAIN

i DO aim to misbehave

I can't say what the greatest are, I can only say what my favorites are...

The Time Machine

20,000 Leagues

Pern Series by Anne MacAffrey

The Liveship Traders Series by Robin Hobb

His Dark Materials Series by Philip Pullman (thanks Josh!)

I'm only just now reading Tolkein, and I gotta say, it's tricky to do after seeing the movies. A friend has crowed praises for "Starship Troopers" and I did read "Postman" and found it better than the movie.

Firefly Artwork Series
http://www.mnartists.org/artistHome.do?rid=7922

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 3:02 PM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Quote:
Originally posted by Hinermad:
...I also have some favorites - almost guilty pleasures - that would never be considered great, but I like them anyway: the Lensman and Skylark series (serieses?) by E.E. "Doc" Smith...

My Brother! Nice to know there's at least one other Super-Science-Fiction fan out there.

Just thinking about what I read again and again (besides LOTR). Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, Starship Troopers, Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Liberatarian parallel universe books of L. Neil Smith, more Heinlein.

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 4:06 PM

FAHQ

Its funny how people took far too much from "STranger In a Strange Land". Find a book by Heinlein called "Grumbles From The Grave" which is a kind of memior of his time as an author. While I dont remember how it went exactly, when a fan and follower of the "church" tracked down Heinlein and invaded his privacy-Proclaiming his devotion to the religion, Heinlein effectively told him to get a life and go away.

"My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 4:08 PM

WILLIAMX

More really excellent stuff

Pat Cadigan -> Mindplayers
Walter Jon Williams -> Memory of Whiteness
Connie Willis -> Lincoln's Dreams
Gregory Benford -> Timescape

Damn though, can any of these be said to be best? What about the Stainless Steel Rat?

Out of control

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 4:11 PM

FREMDFIRMA

A.E. Van Vogt.

The Weapon Shops of Isher.

-frem
"The right to buy weapons is the right to be free."

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 4:19 PM

FAHQ

Starship Troopers was a character study. The war was merely the setting of the story. It had nothing to do with his military experience at all.

Never mind the garbage movie of the same title. Maybe if they called it something else it would not have sucked so badly. Who am I kidding? It was one of the most incredibly stupid movies. Bugs that fart plasma and launch asteroids that travel light years to Earth. I need to eat more beans...... Holy KRAP! There's an ASSteroid in my pants! Even thinking about that movie gives me gas.

Reason why Starship Troopers is my favorite?

It made me think and was instrumental in building my own values.

Moral responsibility. Taking responsibility for one's own actions and how one deals with the consequences, and NOT blaming or suing somebody else.

If our society was like the one described in the book, the moron who spilled the hot cofee in her lap and sued McDonald's never would have seen court, let alone the news for example.

Public whippings: Damn right. You screw up, you "take your lumps" as it says in the book.

For those of you who read it and didnt get it? Read it again and forget about the movie. The book preceeded it by quite a few years.

"My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle."

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 7:39 PM

WILLIAMX

FahQ, I agree with all except for the part where you say:
Starship Troopers was a character study.

All after this is dead on and brings me to say the book is a treatise on government and society, not a study at all.

Besides, Rico pretty much stayed the same humble dude throughout the thing. The war didn't really bother him too much (despite his mom getting wacked) and if he wasn't a trooper he would have had no direction at all. He got promoted cuz he was lucky . . . and kept a cleat head in action.

A good book though hugely idealistic.

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Saturday, January 10, 2004 10:00 PM

TUNNEL

Has anybody here read Falkenberg's Legion, King David's Spaceship, or The war world series?

Written by Jerry Pournelle. Similar to Firefly 'verse, these books take place in a universe where the US and USSR teamed up colonize the planets. Anyway, it has a lot of the same themes, mixed culture, poor backwater world with no or low, high tech stuff.

Very good stuff, the moon of Haven gets a good bit of attention as it is the focus of the War World series.

I recommend reading these. Gives a good idea for how colony worlds can get screwed up, have a major loss of high tech gear, and why horses and low tech stuff would be more readily avaliable.

Note that these books have a well stated means of FTL travel and that one star systems is found with aliens. ("A Mote in God's Eye" and "The Gripping Hand" are the only books they deal with the aliens.)

Over all I found them to be very good books, though the War World series is written by a compilation of contributing writers.

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Sunday, January 11, 2004 2:23 AM

CALHOUN

WilliamX, I remember Stainless Steel Rat!

Slippery Jim DeGriz.. :)

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Sunday, January 11, 2004 3:52 AM

LADYJAYNE

Well, shoot, this is an ENTIRELY unfair question to me because I have some serious personal bias goin' on. I'll give ya my biased answers and then try to get some not-so-biased.

FOOL'S WAR by Sarah Zettel

While I have a special place in my heart for RECLAMATION, FOOL'S WAR is a better book. Better sales, too! LOL! Sarah is a dear friend of mine; I've known her since high school and I remember how gleeful she was when her old-fashioned idea of the "ship's fool" came to life after spending nearly a decade developing it.

It's a chilling read in a post 9-11 world, though. Her main character is an Islamic woman who recalls the "bad old days" when it was literally unsafe for a woman to wear a veil because of extreme anti-Arabic sentiments.

IN THE COMPANY OF MIND by Steven Piziks

Also a book I got to see through the development process. It's out of print now and my husband doesn't write under the name Piziks anymore, but I still think his first novel was his best. I saw him develop main character Lance Michaels from a silly gaming character idea through an unpulbishable novella hero to the chilling survivor of the abuse that gave him multiple personality disorder. Very dark and scary; totally unlike his Steven Harper books, but if you can find it, read it. :-)

Okay, now some not-so-biased stuff:

WILD SEED by Octavia Butler

You'll never read anything else like it. I just don't know what else to say. I'm always glad she writes short novels because they are so intense I don't think I could handle anything longer of hers.

THE HANDMAID'S TALE by Margaret Atwood

She'll deny to the day she dies that it's sf, but cheap & easy electronic data passage is the key to what creates this distopia. I love cyclical novels (ones that have both past and present passages that come together in the end; much like "Out of Gas" is written) and this is a good one. Not her best work (CAT'S EYE and THE ROBBER BRIDE are better) but her others are definitely not SF.

--Kala

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Sunday, January 11, 2004 4:34 AM

FIREFLY68MTL

1. The Foundation Series, Isaac Asimov
2. Time Enough For Love, Robert A. Heinlein
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Rendez Vous With Rama, Athur C. Clack

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Saturday, March 30, 2024 6:56 PM

JAYNEZTOWN

not that I agree

The 50 Best Science Fiction Books to Give You the Perfect Escape
https://www.aol.com/40-best-science-fiction-books-174900803.html

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Saturday, March 30, 2024 11:44 PM

BRENDA

Quote:
Originally posted by FREESOUP:
I agree that Haldeman's "The Forever War" is worthwhile, and won RAH's admiration expressed by him personally to Joe in 1976 or thereabouts at a WorldCon.

Some see it as a rebuttal to "Starship Troopers", but both Joe and myself think it's more that RAH never had combat experience and was in the Navy, not the Army. YMMV.

What else do you think qualifies, and did my post pique your interest in "The Book of the New Sun" a tad?

You knew that one of my favourites is "Dune"

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Sunday, March 31, 2024 2:23 PM

ANONYMOUSE

They all have good and bad points. My faves:

The eponymous Hitch-Hiker's Guide. The movie was a brave but flawed attempt, the best Adamsian feature being the POV Gun. With all due respect to our American friends, you just don't get British humour - any attempt to Americanise it doesn't work. Plus: a two-headed, three-armed guy? A doddle with CGI even back then, Zaphod was cocked up. I would never have survived my 'O' Level exams without the Guide's sage advice: 'Don't Panic'. Thanks to the Guide, I didn't panic and passed 7 out of 8 exams, 3 with As (and History had gotten boring, so I didn't much care about the E).

Have Spacesuit, Will Travel - as a kid at primary school I borrowed it from the library and kept it for weeks. Loved it. Still do. Wish they'd publish it in Kindle.

Altered Carbon - butchered IMO by TV. Takeshi Kovacs (pronounced 'Kovach', not 'Kovacs', as per the Slavic languages it comes from - apparently people get that wrong a lot) is/was a soldier, an Envoy. He lives in a world where death is not final - the cortical stack in the back of your neck records your memories and experiences, so when you die you can be resurrected on the spin of a disc. Cloned bodies can be custom grown, so you can be uploaded into a body's blank stack and live again or live a different life. Wonder what it'd be like to be the opposite sex? Easy - just upload into a clone, a true sex change. Want bigger tits without surgery? Get a clone with bigger tits.
Via needlecast, your digitised personality can be sent to a different world (the only way to travel FTL in this series). Also, if you're rich enough, your stack can be backed up remotely, so you can be completely destroyed even down to the stack and still come back (unless you've been hit by a software virus such as Rawling 4851 - battlefield virus, deadly and infectious). Among other things it means you can avenge your own death if you're murdered, and that's where the novel opens. Dynamite debut, and quite likely given the way things are going.

Honor Harrington - terrific series. Love the treecats.

An obscure one, E.C. Tubbs' Dumarest Saga - Earl Dumarest is a traveller in the far future, living in a declining empire. He's from Earth, but he's travelled far and wide since he was a boy, into regions which after millennia have forgotten Earth - it's a myth, or if it isn't the coordinates are lost...or hidden by our protagonists, the Cyclan. Cybers are trained in logic and other things, undergoing an operation on the thalamus to remove emotion. To the cybers, logic is all. They give advice to rulers et al, but advice which subtly brings them under the domination of the Cyclan. Dumarest just wants to get home to Earth, but he's been given a secret which would give the Cyclan the galaxy in a lifetime, so they want him. Badly.

(Incidentally I have reason to believe the 16th novel, Haven Of Darkness, actually saved my life. I had a stroke in '22, and all I could think about when it hit was one particular passage in the book:

It wasn't just the wound. The beam had missed the bone and he had stanched the blood, but too much had been lost already and he was too weak. His heart pounded like a bursting engine (as, in fact, did mine) and the lights appeared to dim as he fought for air. The tips of his fingers felt cold and, he knew, death was close.
Too close and too soon. He fought it, gritting his teeth, concentrating on the single act of breathing and, slowly, the immediate danger passed.

That's what I did. I just breathed. Never mind the total disorientation, never mind that the right side of my face had apparently seized up, never mind calling for an ambulance for the moment or the fact that they couldn't get in if I did because the front door was locked - just...fucking...BREATHE. Some people don't survive strokes. I believe I wouldn't have, had I not emulated Dumarest.)

An even more obscure one by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davies, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater. A scientist creates and accidentally releases a mutated bacterium he's cultured in such a way that it can eat plastic and solve the pollution problem...any plastic. It starts infiltrating London's infrastructure...dissolving insulation. Imagine what would happen. It's an adaptation of a Doomwatch episode, and is horribly plausible...especially on the discovery of a fungus or something that can eat plastic.

Doctor Who: Seeing I - a fun one where the 8th Doctor and Sam Jones are separated, Sam ending up on Ha'olam, where everyone's using IXNet, an optical network...based on, as it turns out, Time Lord tech. I loved the data-umphs, little pieces of viral code which have nothing on their tiny 'minds' but fun and seeking out Sam, tying up data systems all over human space, 6.023 x 10^23 of them causing utter chaos and confusion for a grand total of 4.8 seconds.

Asimov's Robots And Empire, full of intrigue and robots lying by omission, discovering an extension of the Three Laws, the Zeroth Law: 'A robot may not harm humanity, nor allow humanity to come to harm.' This modifies the First Law to read: 'A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to be harmed, except where this would violate the Zeroth Law' - so now a robot could kill, say, a murderer or a dictator.

Star Trek: The Entropy Effect - completely unlike standard Trek because Kirk is killed quite early on. The Enterprise investigates a naked singularity which has appeared out of nowhere. Spock discovers it's accelerating the increase of entropy such that the Universe is beginning to fall apart and has less than a century left to it. A scientist they're taking to Rehab Seven kills Kirk and the security chief - but he's confined to his quarters and hasn't left, and is in fact drugged almost into insensibility. So how did he do it? Answer: he didn't...a mad future version of him did.
Vonda N. McIntyre was a terrific writer. RIP, Vonda.

Star Trek: Strangers From The Sky, a terrific one from Margaret Wander Bonanno, telling the true story of first contact with the Vulcans in 2045 (this was in the days before Star Trek: First Contact) as a result of a survey ship malfunction and its subsequent crash - the Vulcans have been watching Earth since 1943 but in accordance with their Prime Directive they haven't intervened. Earth still isn't united and xenophobia is still rampant, thus it isn't ready for the Vulcans yet.

John Scalzi's Old Man's War series - you can't enlist until you're 75. Ridiculous? Not with the Colonial Union's tech to grow a modified (green!) clone body to accept your personality.

Toni Andrews' Mercy series. Mercy Hollings is a woman you don't mess with. Why? She can order you to do something and if she uses the "press", a telepathic command, you will bloody well do it, no ifs ands or buts, especially if she's pissed off and loses control. As a kid she told a boy who was pissing her off to go jump off a building, as you do - and he did. She told another to shut up, inadvertently using the press, and for nearly a year he never said a word to anyone, let alone Mercy. She has to be so careful - the most innocent phrase can lead to disaster. She decides to use the talent to help people as a psychotherapist. Wanna quit smoking or drinking or philandering? Mercy will tell you under hypnosis not to do it, and you will stop doing it. But who is she? Who were her real parents? Why was she a foundling?
Alas, these questions are left up in the air; Toni hasn't written a fourth novel yet and I suspect she won't. But I live in hope.

"People tend to confuse the words 'new' and 'improved'."
- Phil Coulson, Level 7 S.H.I.E.L.D. Agent

Windows 11 is a case in point.

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