Iain M Banks’ Culture series. I’m mildly surprised I’m the first to mention it.
Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos was excellent
Stephen R Donaldson’s Gap Cycle was much better than his Covenant stuff, but it’s a little difficult to recommend as it’s, um, more than slightly brutal and rapetastic.
Glen Cook’s Passage at Arms and The Dragon Never Sleeps are probably the strongest things he’s done.
I thought some of the stuff re:Teela was an interesting idea, as well. And the puppetmaster species in general was interesting. Couple that with the idea of the Ringworld and I think there’s enough of interest there. I guess my feelings of Sci Fi is that if they present a grand and interesting idea, they tend to get a lot of leeway in characterization/action, because the idea is inherently interesting.
Of course, it probably helps that I’d read a number of Man/Kzin war books already and a lot of the known-space ideas tend to comingle. I can’t remember if the Ringworld book was the zoo, for example, or if the zoo story intimated that it was the stock source for the Ringworld, but there are a lot of ideas that interrelate amongst these stories and the overall gestalt strikes me as particularly interesting (and reasonably coherent, if you can find a reading timeline at least).
Forgot a series that I’d really meant to include:
Nancy Kress - Beggars in Spain series.
Cyberpunk-ish, without much of the cyber. Biopunk maybe? I’d give a short synopsis, but, well, it’s hard. It’s dystopian, anti-technology in some ways, anti-populist in many.
I kinda liked Sundiver, but probably because of the parts where they talk about uplifting and how the alien civilizations work more than the not-so-exciting plot about the Sun dwellers. But I haven’t read the rest yet.
That’s a great anthology. Two of my favorites of the collection are Nightflyers and With Morning Comes Mist Fall (even more so than Sandkings), both sci-fi.
Belgerog, you’re in for a good time if you keep going because Sundiver was the weakest of the Uplift Saga books and I really liked that book. I think that whole series of six books is possibly my favorite science fiction series, though my favorite single book is probably still Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep.
Not sure about this one. The last book (that I’m aware of) is absolutely fucking awesome and should be required reading for anyone who likes the idea of a biological invasion by an alien species. It’s when you read the earlier books you realise just how much he learned about his craft in the time between them and the most recent one. They are awful in comparison.
So… read A Season for Slaughter and let that book fill you in with the back story, because it’s better than the reality of the previous novels.
Frederick Pohl - The Heechee Saga (Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rondeszvous, Annals of the Heechee
I read Gateway fairly recently. What a brilliant and imaginative setting. Fantastic.
Great. I’ll probably read those before I get into the apparently massive Malazan books.
Alastair Reynold’s Revelation Space books.
For slightly older stuff, I have a soft spot in my heart for Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers and Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai series. Good luck finding them in print, though.
Seconded.
What is funny is that I prefer to skip every other chapter in Gateway. I only read Robin’s (I cannot believe I remember his name (I hope)) parts where he is remembering and not the Sigmund parts. Still great book.
The imaginary blowjob scene in the first Illuminatus book is better than Children of Dune and all the subsequent Dune books combined. Of course Dune by itself is better than the Illuminatus series, but the difference between Dune and the later books is amazing.
You weren’t :)
Glen Cook’s The Dragon Never Sleeps is definitely his most entertaining single novel.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Populous yet.
I know CJ Cherryh’s been mentioned a couple of times already, but I wanted to bring up another one of her books in the “Company Wars” universe, which is the same universe as the Alliance-Union universe, but before the invention of faster than light travel.
The first book in the series is called Heavy Time, and the second is called Hellburner. Heavy Time is the one I’ve read, and it was quite the experience. You see, before faster-than-light travel, space flight is long and boring. So how does one convey that in a book?
Well, CJ Cherryh conveys it by having Heavy Time be a book that’s really slow to move. The characters are out there for long periods with nothing but their thoughts, and so as I was reading this book, I was feeling soooooo impatient and I felt like I had ants in my pants. Reading Heavy Time is one of the most taxing times I’ve ever been through while reading a book. As a reader, being subjected to the same level of boredom and impatience and the sense that the objective is impossibly far away as the subjects you’re reading about is an amazing feat, in my humble opinion. I really couldn’t wait for them to get somewhere, so the story would move along, and something would HAPPEN. But as I kept reading, I couldn’t look away. I read word after word, glued to the page while feeling so anxious and so bored that I just could not imagine how far away the pages that held the next actual plot development could be.
I’m not doing a good job of selling this book, but I still think that when I was done with it, I felt like I’d been through the ringer, and I really felt like it was an amazing achievement. To actually write a book in which the author makes the reader feel the inner hell of long and boring journeys as much as the subjects of her book. Amazing!
As for reading Hellburner, the sequel: I never had the courage to pick it up. I don’t know if I have it in me to put myself through something like that again. Nevertheless, if you want to experience something different while reading a book, think about picking up Heavy Time. I’d recommend it.
On the serious side, I think the Dune books held together pretty well through God Emperor. Once it was trying to keep up with the various Idaho clones is when it became inpenetrable.
Tolkien
GRRM
Julian May (Saga of Pliocene Exile)
As far as horror goes, Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series is pretty good.
My ctrl-f skills failed me.
I do like C. J. Cherryh, but I can’t quite rate her as highly as some of these others because of her whiny passive incompetent male characters. I realize turnabout is fair play, and there are plenty of annoying stereotyped females in genre fiction, but even so, it’s just hard to take.
The Chanur books were quite good because most of the main characters were female, but that goddamn sniveling human they have to cart around really diminishes the enjoyment of those books.
For the first two, see the other thread :)
That Julian May tetralogy is pretty good, if a bit twee in places. So long as the antihero Marc is actually a bastard, the story holds together, though some of those alien characters are just too dumb to live.
Later on though, in her subsequent books she seems to succumb to some sort of horrible soap-opera syndrome, lavishing private fan-service on all the cool characters to the ludicrous detriment of the stories.