Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Clemens gets whinier and whinier – the fictional character is an affront to a great man – and the story becomes more and more protracted and inane. But you’re right, that first book was pretty good. PJF is good at the sense of wonder in a new setting like that, same for his World of Tiers series, which gets dull here and there, but is generally superior to Riverworld.
Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile.
Echoing Pournelle/Niven, Zelazny, Saberhagen (Berzerker series! good call) and of course the Golden Age masters like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.
Le Guin, Dick too.
Howabout some Harlan Ellison while we’re at it? (Talk about hit and miss though.)
Hey, I recommended that also but redacted it when I remembered it was actually early 1980s. :) Great, great series. Probably my favorite all time, despite the lengthy setup. Must-read for all serious fantasy/sci-fi readers IMHO. (Her subsequent Galactic Milieu series, not so much, although it’s fun in its own right).
Assuming a bit of 80s creep is actually acceptable here, Glen Cook’s Black Company series is another must. I’m counting the first trilogy only - same deal here, the others are fun in their own right but not as good.
Yes on Philip K. Dick. I like a lot of his stuff. I found Valis to be a rather distressing read, but his earlier books are very entertaining, while still having a touch of that strange cognitive dissonance that I think marks his work. It seems to me that dissonance grew more and more pronounced over his career, until at last Valis seemed to me to be all dissonance…
Also concur on Harlan Ellison – selected short stories of his are superb. I don’t think I’ve ever read any of his novels – or even heard of them, come to think of it. Looking them up, I see he’s written three, the latest in 1961. But you can’t go wrong with one of the classic collections.
I would say no on Saberhagen, though. He has these two gigantic series, (berserker and swords) neither of which impresses me at all, and though I haven’t read any lately, I doubt the sci-fi berserker series holds up very well. The best book of his I read was The Empire of the East (basis for the swords series) and it just seemed to me to be okay, not great.
This is a great list - add Asimov’s foundation series and anything you haven’t read of Tolkien’s and you’re done.
Other options: First 3 Dune books. Howard’s Conan series. Moorcock’s Corum series. Zelazny’s Amber books.
In addition to people already recommended. like Dick, I’d add:
Brian Aldiss
Theodore Sturgeon
Ursula LeGyun
Harry Harrison
Fritz Leiber
Harlan Ellison
I like Frank Herbert, he should definitely be on the list, but Dune, not so much. Dosadi Experiment, Whipping Star, various others, all I think are better works.
That Dune opinion is admittedly debatable since it had such huge sales. But I would at least stop after the first book, not go on to the other two. Each successive book just gets worse, so why not stop while you’re ahead…
Also, I thought Corum was one of Moorcock’s weaker eternal champion series – not bad, just not as good as the early Elric, or Von Bek, or for that matter Dorian Hawkmoon.
Conan is OK. But I don’t think it’s really as good as the work of most of the other fantasists in this thread, even if it did have a huge influence on them.
Asimov’s Robot series are great too! At least, the first few were if I recall.
Forgot about Howard! Great stuff, although I’ve always felt a little hesitant to categorize his stuff as fantasy. Kind of akin to Verne’s books’ sci-fi classification. Genre-challenging, for me.
And yeah, I’ll second Zelazny’s Amber books.
Search around for other Qt3 Dune series discussions. Those are very helpful if you decide to try the sequels out.
I’m going to have to disagree on Dune - I think if you read only one book by Frank Herbert, it has to be Dune. Then you can play the long out of print board game and know who the players are! Dune is definitely better than the next two (Dune Messiah and Children of Dune), but since they follow directly after, I think it is reasonable to continue. There are a couple of great scenes in the following books that make them well worth reading if you enjoyed Dune. DO NOT READ THE FOURTH DUNE BOOK - the books get increasingly crazy from there, but there is a huge gap between the 3rd book (Children of Dune?) and the 4th (God Emperor of Dune?). Not to run down his other stuff (much of which is great - Dosadi, Whipping Star etc.), but I think you’ve got to start with Dune.
Re: EE Doc Smith - I tried the first few Lensman books and bounced off them. I think that what power they retain is as the blueprint of much of what was to come in SF, and there’s no question that they were tremendously influential, but the books themselves are pretty badly dated. Perhaps in the spirit of watching some old Flash Gordon serials, they might be worth it, but I think that there are definitely better uses of your limited reading time.
I would advise against Dune myself, it’s half exciting romp, half nonsense which always seems to be written under the assumption you knew more about what was going on than the book had explained thus far. I couldn’t make it to the end of the second book.
Just to back up the others, read Ender’s Game, don’t read anything after it, with the possible exception of Ender’s Shadow which I haven’t read yet but sounds interesting. How someone can write such a superb book then write so much dry, tedious nonsense I don’t know. And to think that Ender’s Game was the book he WASN’T going to write!
I recommend everything by Asimov (though especially the Foundation series), he just reads really readable stories, and a lot of shorts in there too which I like in the world of sci-fi. In an age of tedious epics where everyone is living a million years and losing emotion due to old age, or saving the universe, Asimov makes for a refreshingly entertaining read.
Nearly forgot:
- Stanislaw Lem (best known perhaps for his 1961 Solaris)
- Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (1928 or 1966 depending on how you look at it)
Edit:
Just recently I learned this the hard way, having finally broken down to try out his Maker books. I had high hopes part way into the first one, but sticking with it ultimately proved to be very unrewarding and sometimes tedious.
About Niven, I would like to give a counter-recommendation about Ringworld – don’t read it, or if you read it, stop about 2/3 of the way in (you’ll have gotten all the interesting ideas, and you won’t get to the utterly awful ending). But Niven has some other stuff that is worth reading. His version of the Inferno (with Pournelle) is fun, and I enjoyed World Out of Time and World of Ptavvs, although as someone else said, he’s not really a great writer as far as character and such.
Zelazny is of course awesome. If you want the cream of his work, read the first six Amber novels (skip the second Amber series until you’ve read most of his other stuff), Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness.
My personal opinion on Cordwainer Smith is that he’s worth avoiding, or putting low on your list. This is not a very highly informed opinion, but I read Norstrillia and remembered hating every minute of it (although that was maybe six or seven years ago, so I can’t remember why).
This is hilarious. I have a copy of Ringworld near my bed that’s been dogeared at the 2/3 mark for nearly a year now.
Don’t listen to this crazy man. Cordwainer Smith is someone who every fan of SF should experience. Although I might grudgingly admit that Norstrillia plays better if you’ve previously read the Instrumentality of Man short stories. There’s a lot of helpful backstory there.
I have a sentimental attachment to Asimov, as I read his Foundation trilogy at a very young age, and then tried to read everything else he wrote. I really think Asimov is much better as an essayist and science writer than as a science fiction writer.
But I don’t think he’s bad at fiction, just not really great. I recommend not reading the various sequels he wrote towards the end of his career, merging all the histories and so on. The basic Foundation Trilogy is much better than the sequels written long afterwards, and the first two robot/detective books (Caves of Steel and Naked Sun) are much better than the later ones. In other words, stick to his fiction prior to 1980.
But of his many hundreds of books, most are very good, it’s just that they’re not fiction.
Niven’s stories were all a lot of fun when they were published, but they’re mostly too dated to be good now, I think. Ringworld is still decent, though for best effect you have to read some of the other stories in that future history first, but I’m not a big fan of the sequels.
Niven’s collaborations with Pournelle are mostly better than either of those author’s individual works, I think. Lucifer’s Hammer was a great blockbuster disaster book – as those go – and Inferno was a lot of fun. Incidentally, they have a sequel to Inferno coming out soon, and have also started working on a sequel to Lucifer’s Hammer.
I read Pournelle’s blog, which is interesting. Pournelle is a dyed in the wool Goldwater conservative, and I agree with him on few political subjects, but even so he often has something interesting to say if you can get by the polemics. He’s recovering from brain cancer now, by the way.
Let me suggest C.L. Moore, and, in general, Paizo’s Planet Stories reprint line if you’re looking for pulpy goodness. (Full disclosure - I have a short story in one of their anthologies)
And, to go a bit further afield, there’s T.J. Bass’ Half Past Human and The Godwhale, not to mention Clifford D. Simak and Theodore Sturgeon.
If you can find them, White Wolf published some James Gunn-edited anthologies of science fiction by decade that had pretty good cross-sections of the classics and the shoulda-been classics. They might serve as a good place to start.
I’m curious as to why (and this is legitimate curiosity, not “I’m curious why you are such an idiot” or “I’m acting curious so I can get in a vicious debate with you.”). Like I said, I can’t remember why I didn’t like Norstrillia, just that I really did not like it at all (I was someplace relatively boring and needed to read something, and it was all I had). I’ve heard him recommended before, and maybe I should give him another try. On the other hand, maybe the qualities of his writing which appeal to other people are not qualities that are important to me. Hearing what you like about him would help me decide if I should try again.
“The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is pretty good. That was one of the last good things (arguably the best) that Heinlein ever wrote.
Almost anything by Jack Vance, provided you enjoy characterization and style more than plot.
The Riverworld books are pretty good; the first two are the best, though.
Lots of good suggestions in this thread already, I see.
Edit: A personal favorite: The Malacia Tapestry.