What are some of your favorite science-fiction novels?

[Hornbein]

Listing favourite books

I'd bet you would like CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength.' I think it's up there with 1984. Deserving of wider recognition and all that.

 

[1oldman2]

I really liked Kurt Vonnegut and read a bunch of his novels about 30 years back but can't remember which one I liked best!

With Vonnegut you can't really go wrong no matter which you choose, Cats cradle, Slaughterhouse five, Sirens of Titan, His best in my opinion is "Timequake" it ties all his older writing together so well you just have to laugh all the way through.

 

[1oldman2]

Does Catch-22 count?

Sci-fi or not that's one of the best books I've ever read.
(Or as K. Vonnegut says about it in Timequake "Just read the book")

 

[Schnellmann]

With Vonnegut you can't really go wrong no matter which you choose, Cats cradle, Slaughterhouse five, Sirens of Titan, His best in my opinion is "Timequake" it ties all his older writing together so well you just have to laugh all the way through.

I'm pretty sure I've read the first three but not Timequake. Thanks for the tip: I will read that too.

 

[nrqed]

On top of some that have already been mentioned, I think (The Andromeda Strain, Ender's Game, I Robot, The Foundation trilogy, Childhood's End, Dune) I would add that among my favorites are

Neuromancer, The Left Hand of Darkness, Timescape

 

[Schnellmann]

What is unexpected about this thread is how old most of the recommended books are. I get the feeling that had this question been asked 30 years ago (when I was a bit obsessed with Sci Fi and Fantasy literature) that the suggestions wouldn't have been much different.

 

[DaveC426913]

Heh. True.

The most amazing books I've read that are recent are China Meiville's Kraken, Un Lun Dun and Rail Sea.
Kraken especially was like stepping into a whole new genre I'd never experienced before. Man his stuff is rich.

 

[sappho.poiesis]

Does Catch-22 count?

I'm not sure I've ever read a book written post-movie.

There's 2001: Space Odyssey

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

There's 2001: Space Odyssey

I think Hornbein meant HE hadn't read a book written post-movie.

 

[Stephanus]

The best science fiction book ever written was "The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin...

And I bet you'll enjoy the sequel as well. "The descent of man"

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

I was with P.Z. Meyers one year when he visited a "creation museum" near Springfield, Missouri. (He was in town for Skepticon and was his driver that day.) He sliced and diced the "tour guide".

 

[Jenab2]

@Dredge. The surest sign that you're reading the opinion of a fanatic is ridicule without correction. A worthy critic does not simply declare error; he goes further to propose what he believes the truth is, instead. When a critic does not do this, it's usually because the alternative he favors is less supportable than the opinion which he is criticizing.

Whenever someone begins criticizing something I've said with pure vitriol, ridicule, and smear, I begin my reply to him by saying that I appreciate criticism provided that it has merit. And in order for a criticism to have merit, it must regard a specific idea that I expressed through my writing. I ask that my critic (1) quote my statements by which that idea was expressed, (2) tell me why he thinks that the idea is incorrect, and (3) tell me what he believes the truth is, instead.

The theory of natural evolution, biological evolution in particular, didn't spring upon science in an a priori way. Scientists were led to it by the evidence that they found by examining the natural world. Slowly, with some mistakes along the way, which errors were gradually found and corrected, the process of biological evolution, with its mutations and its natural selection, became clear.

Data first. Then theory. That's how science works.

It is not, however, how religion works.

Religion begins with the conclusion and then contrives a voluminous body of theological writing that sets observational evidence in a role subordinate to the original metaphysical theory. It begins by declaring, without evidence, that one or more gods exist, and then it further declares that the existence of its particular god or set of gods is non-falsifiable, meaning that no matter what is found in nature, it must be interpreted in a way that supports the original dogmatic statement.

Most religions have silly metaphysics and very bad epistemology. Furthermore, there are many religions, each of them having important doctrinal conflicts with all of the others. Relying on faith as one's method for seeking truth is risky (at best), as faith is a circular argument and is, thus, invalid.

The essential question here is this:

How do you know when you have discovered a method for seeking the truth that actually does succeed in finding it?

You know that your method for seeking truth works when it can, really can, cause a light to spring forth and banish darkness. When it can, really can, heal the sick. When it can reveal what would otherwise have gone unnoticed because of distance, or smallness, or for some other reason. When it can enable people to communicate rapidly across thousands, or even millions, of miles.

In summary: You know that your method for seeking truth works when it has a history of giving to people powers that they did not have before.

Valid methods for seeking truth do that because useful truths are a subset of all truths, and it is a subset in which people have a particular interest and to which they devote a considerable amount of their time. Any efficacious method for seeking truth, used by humans, will uncover useful truths over time. Those truths, when put to their uses, will make people generally more able, more powerful, versus the challenges that they face in life.

Thus, for example, the flashlight, which when turned on can enable a person with normally functioning eyes to safely travel through a cluttered room that would otherwise be completely dark and unsafe to walk around in.

 

[enorbet]

At first I thought, "Cool! P.Z. Meyers, eh?. A Sci-Fi author of whom I know nothing. New books to check out!" but then through the wonders of Internet Search, I found that possibly the only recent Sci-Fi he's even been associated with was having to read Ray Comfort's personal edition of Origin of Species ... although it might be better classified as Fantasy.

 

[Stephanus]

Today I learned,
that IF On the Origin of Species was a great science fiction then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate was the best publicity ploy ever conducted. Surpassed Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code
Talking about sci fi...
Digital Fortress is nonsense. There's no way you can crack a virus. A virus is a computer program not a document. And for a computer to run a program, it has to understand its original OS. You have to know which kernel/library it calls. Much less the machine code.
Angels and Demons is okay. But in one respect. Anti matter is an energy source. I think this is a gross blunder, even for a non scientist like myself. To produce anti matter for, say 1 tera joules you need 1 tera joules!
Even CERN has post an issue about Angels and Demons, wait googling...
http://angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/faq
You see even in this link, the very first FAQ is

http://angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/faq/antimatter-to-create-energyWhen antimatter comes into contact with matter it annihilates: ...the mass of the particle and its antiparticle are converted into pure energy. ...

And in its detail, which I have suspected, it explains

The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10^-10) of the invested energy back.

For fuel is okay, but energy source? No, you can't fool me Mr. Brown. Waiting for your seventh...

 

[Jenab2]

That's right. Antimatter production is very inefficient. Only a small fraction of the energy used to create positrons or anti-baryons actually does end up in those particle forms. Most of it makes particles of other kinds, kinds that you don't want. And there's bound to be more inefficiency in the process of collecting the particles of antimatter that do appear in your accelerator. Some will be lost before you can filter them off.

Antimatter would a store of energy, not a natural resource for energy. That is, it would function like a capacitor, a fuel cell, a battery.

If you're going to launch ONE "fast" interstellar probe, and it doesn't matter what the cost is, then you might go with antimatter propulsion.

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

How about a matter/anti-matter reaction system? Seems like there would be plenty of power released. (Containment issues?)

 

[Stephanus]

How about a matter/anti-matter reaction system?

Yeah, the science are all there, the only matter is the engineering problem.

http://mappingignorance.org/2013/10...llenges-of-putting-the-sun-into-a-box-part-1/
Nobel-laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes allegedly once said of nuclear fusion: “We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don’t know how to make the box“.

But, that applies to fusion power. I think matter/anti matter reaction system would have the same engineering problem, too.

 

[enorbet]

Today I learned,
that IF On the Origin of Species was a great science fiction then https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Oxford_evolution_debate was the best publicity ploy ever conducted. Surpassed Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code
Talking about sci fi...
Digital Fortress is nonsense. There's no way you can crack a virus. A virus is a computer program not a document. And for a computer to run a program, it has to understand its original OS. You have to know which kernel/library it calls. Much less the machine code.
Angels and Demons is okay. But in one respect. Anti matter is an energy source. I think this is a gross blunder, even for a non scientist like myself. To produce anti matter for, say 1 tera joules you need 1 tera joules!
Even CERN has post an issue about Angels and Demons, wait googling...
http://angelsanddemons.web.cern.ch/faq
You see even in this link, the very first FAQ is
And in its detail, which I have suspected, it explains

For fuel is okay, but energy source? No, you can't fool me Mr. Brown. Waiting for your seventh...

Re: Huvley-Wilberforce debate, from what I've read was it far more gentlemanly and possibly even less heated than the PZ Meyers - Ray Comfort debate but possibly that is due to the added incredulity that, after more than 150 years, there are still people who apparently think "the jury is still out" on that score.

Someone noted that most of the Sci Fi listed here is over 30 years old, and i think your observation on just how sophisticated the average reader has become (difficulty in suspension of disbelief) is one of the reasons. It seems substantially more difficult for a writer these days to come up with a plot that is both fascinating and realistic. Back when we had done less and knew less about the Universe, especially the unimaginable difficulty of travel within it, there was a lot more "low hanging fruit".

 

[Jenab2]

I don't think that humans will make the trip as living organisms. I think robotic ships will go out with humans stored in information form, perhaps as DNA, and assembled and/or gestated once arrived. There will have to be redundant computers enabled to repair each other's software using a comparison-and-vote test on which copy of each location in their memories is the correct copy. Cosmic rays will degrade the fidelity of the computer operating system and applications such that the computers will need to wake up and correct each other every century or so. And when that's done, they'll need to review all of the multiply redundant copies of the human data, fixing any errors that have crept into those files. These starships will be slow boats, only 0.001c or so, so the typical journey will take tens of thousands of years. The fuel source will have to be a radioisotope with a commensurate half-life, and there will need to be enough of it to maintain the necessary electrical power.

 

[ebos]

The whole Foundation and Empire series by Asimov.
A Time For Love by Heinlein.
Anything by Farmer. Philip K. Dick is probably the coolest. He wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which became the movie Blade Runner.

 

[ebos]

Oh, if you can call Kurt Vonnegut a sci-fi writer (I do) anything by him.

 

[Jenab2]

Is that supposed to be
Time Enough For Love
by Robert Heinlein?

It was pretty good. I've read it. I think my favorites from Heinlein are The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and The Rolling Stones. In the latter book, Heinlein actually did the celestial mechanics for a transfer orbit to Mars, using the real positions of the Earth and Mars at the times of departure and arrival. And he got it right.

However, for the later trip from Mars to "The Hallelujah Node" (near Ceres), Heinlein made a math error and got the ecliptic longitude of Ceres off by π radians.

And for the subsequent interplanetary trips of the intrepid Stone family, Heinlein just faked the celestial mechanics. He didn't bother trying to do the math after the asteroid belt arrival.

I also liked Starship Troopers (the book) a lot, especially the chapter where the main character is taking a class on military ethics. I could only nod in agreement with a lot of the philosophy there.

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

Starship Troopers. I took a copy of that to S.E.A. back in 1970, along with Stranger in a Strange Land and LOTR.

 

[ebos]

Is that supposed to be
Time Enough For Love
by Robert Heinlein?

It was pretty good. I've read it. I think my favorites from Heinlein are The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and The Rolling Stones. In the latter book, Heinlein actually did the celestial mechanics for a transfer orbit to Mars, using the real positions of the Earth and Mars at the times of departure and arrival. And he got it right.

However, for the later trip from Mars to "The Hallelujah Node" (near Ceres), Heinlein made a math error and got the ecliptic longitude of Ceres off by π radians.

And for the subsequent interplanetary trips of the intrepid Stone family, Heinlein just faked the celestial mechanics. He didn't bother trying to do the math after the asteroid belt arrival.

I also liked Starship Troopers (the book) a lot, especially the chapter where the main character is taking a class on military ethics. I could only nod in agreement with a lot of the philosophy there.

Yes, of course. It's been awhile since I read it. Great storyteller. Starship Troopers was my first Heinlein and I actually loved the movie as well.

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

Hissssssss. verHooven read the back of a paperback edition of SST and decided to make a movie about that paragraph.

 

[Stephanus]

Hissssssss. verHooven read the back of a paperback edition of SST and decided to make a movie about that paragraph.

Paul Verhoeven? Yeah, from what I remember from SST is only Denise Richards.

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

When I saw the previews in the theater and there was this wave of big bugs charging at the soldiers I turned to my wife and said "Starship Troopers!" I was severely disappointed.

 

[ebos]

You're right, it was a disappointment as far as the book was concerned but I watched it again as a movie on its own merits and enjoyed it. It was a fun movie while the book was gritty.

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

I used SST as leadership training material when I was in the USN. The guys that "got it" usually showed potential in other areas as well.

 

[enorbet]

It seems to me that Sci Fi movies tend to suffer from the tradeoffs Directors must make to have box office success. There are more people who just want entertaining Monster Movie Space Opera than deep thought. Most of the best ones find a decent blend although it is my opinion that the movie Contact could possibly have been a sort of breakthrough genre changer had they expanded on the reveal of the layers of unanswered questions about and of "the aliens", since they too knew little about their precedents. In the book the nature of The Hub (the interstellar roundhouse) was at least explained while in the movie it was merely a diffuse picture. That would have been a logical progression from 2001 which still benefited greatly from exposition in the book.

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

You're aiming well over the heads of the crowd, enorbet.

 

[enorbet]

You're aiming well over the heads of the crowd, enorbet.

Maybe, but I contend that Gene Roddenberry managed to find an excellent blend that culminated in The Next Generation and all the non-Gene productions afterward suffered to varying degrees by falling back more on "sax and violins" ;). However I must admit that even so, I would still gladly watch T'Pol read a newspaper... sorry...Tricorder

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

I watched the original series and thought it rather silly. I gave up on it during the second season.

 

[enorbet]

We are flirting with an OT tangent but I suppose Series/movie scripts are enough like novels and are required to even get a view as to the character and plot devices we are in no pressing danger of hijacking the thread. So please allow me to suggest that there were indeed silly monsters and convoluted, unlikely plot devices in the original series like having Attilla and Lincoln recreated from human minds so an alien could discover the difference between the human concept of "good" and "evil" but even that had philosophical undertones. Additionally the entire series had an important premise, that cheap, renewable power would ultimately result in a society without poverty, poor healthcare, and racism... that violent conflict had all but ceased between homo sapiens and every individual could rise to wherever his desires led him, with few obstacles and to the benefit of society as a whole..

The Next Generation was far less silly if only because the success of the original series gave Mr. Roddenberry both the finances and administrative power to bend to far less compromising concerns. As much as Star Wars was entertaining, for awhile anyway, IMHO it can't begin to compete with TNG for serious content and contemplation of the advancement of human civilization - the very opposite of silly. It might be worth a new look and it is readily available for no charge but time.

 

[Noisy Rhysling]

The minus for TV/movies is they can't do the whole book, or contain as much information as a book. AND they're more profit driven than books.

The plus would be aiding in visualization. The Rohirrim "capital" in the LOTR movies, and Minas Tirith as well, came through very nicely in the movies. Readers who saw the movie first would be greatly added by that.