In a fairly recent little-noticed comment, I let slip that I differ from many folks here in what some may regard as an important way: I was not raised on science fiction.
I’ll be more specific here: I think I’ve seen one of the Star Wars films (the one about the kid who apparently grows up to become the villain in the other films). I have enough cursory familiarity with the Star Trek franchise to be able to use phrases like “Spock bias” and make the occasional reference to the Starship Enterprise (except I later found out that the reference in that post was wrong, since the Enterprise is actually supposed to travel faster than light—oops), but little more. I recall having enjoyed the “Tripod” series, and maybe one or two other, similar books, when they were read aloud to me in elementary school. And of course I like Yudkowsky’s parables, including “Three Worlds Collide”, as much as the next LW reader.
But that’s about the extent of my personal acquaintance with the genre.
Now, people keep telling me that I should read more science fiction; in fact, they’re often quite surprised that I haven’t. So maybe, while we’re doing these New Year’s Resolutions, I can “resolve” to perhaps, maybe, some time, actually do that (if I can ever manage to squeeze it in between actually doing work and procrastinating on the Internet).
Problem is, there seems to be a lot of it out there. How would a newcomer know where to start?
Well, what better place to ask than here, a place where many would cite this type of literature as formative with respect to developing their saner-and-more-interesting-than-average worldviews?
Greg Egan: Permutation City, Diaspora, Incandescence. Vernor Vinge: True Names, Rainbows End. Charlie Stross: Accelerando. Scott Bakker: Prince of Nothing series.
I read Vinge’s Rainbows End, and I found the futurism interesting (it seems
Google is starting to
work on the
book scanning stuff), but I couldn’t really get into the story.
The whole point of the stories is that it doesn’t work in the end, it is a case study in how not to do it. How it can go wrong. Obviously he didn’t solve the problem. The first digital computer had just been constructed, what would you expect?
Obviously he didn’t solve the problem. The first digital computer had just been constructed, what would you expect?
The FAI problem has nothing to do with digital computers. It’s a math problem. You’d only need digital computers after you’ve solved the problem, to implement the solution.
Not that they weren’t good stories, and not that I expect fiction authors to do their own basic research, but I wouldn’t say they’re about the Friendly AI problem.
It is most certainly not an academic look at the concept, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t play a role in bringing the concept to the public eye. It doesn’t have to be a scientific paper to have a real influence on the idea.
Along those lines, I’d recommend the Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. It’s a short-novel length expression of an AI that gains control of all matter and energy in the universe while being constrained by Asimov’s Three Laws.
If you want to read a full length Asimov book, my personal recommendation is the End of Eternity. It has a rather unique take on time travel and functions well as a stand alone book. It has just been reprinted after being out of print for too long.
Foundation is his most well known novel and it also very much worth reading.
I can’t find someone violating the copyright online with a quick Google, but Asimov’s short story “The Last Answer” is also a good one with a different take on religion than “The Last Question”.
Why that Culture novel, precisely? I don’t recall it as one of the better ones.
Admittedly, I’m unusual in that my favourite Culture story is The State of the Art. General Pinochet Chili Con Carne! Richard Nixon Burgers! What’s not to like?
If you’d like some TV recommendations as well, here are some things that you can find on Hulu:
Firefly. It’s not all available at the same time, but they rotate the episodes once a week; in a while you’ll be able to start at the beginning. If you haven’t already seen the movie, put it off until you’ve watched the whole series.
Babylon 5. First two seasons are all there. It takes a few episodes to hit its stride.
If you’re willing to search a little farther afield, Farscape is good, and of the Star Treks, DS9 is my favorite (many people prefer TNG, though, and this seems for some reason to be correlated with gender).
If you’re willing to search a little farther afield, Farscape is good, and of the Star Treks, DS9 is my favorite (many people prefer TNG, though, and this seems for some reason to be correlated with gender).
Maybe that’s because DS9 is about a bunch of people living in a big house, while TNG is about a bunch of people sailing around in a big boat ;). I prefer DS9 myself though and I’m a guy.
With respect to B5, I’d say “a few episodes” is the entire first season and a quarter of the second. I don’t regret having spent the time to watch that, but I’m not sure I would have bothered had I not had friends raving about it, knowing in advance what I know now. :)
I was not at all impressed with Firefly. It’s idioms for the more primitive were too primitive (dresses from the 1800s???). It’s Premise was awesome, but due to the mainstream audience, the writers were very constrained. Had it been done as an anime, I imagine it would have looked far more like Trigun.
Now, Farscape. This was a re-telling of the Buck-Rogers story, and it was done Freaking Well! They did not focus overly much on the technologies, which were mostly post-Singularity (as were many of the alien species), but due to the collapse of the civilization that supported that portion of the Galaxy, the Peacekeepers had become a force for malevolence and dystopic vision rather than the force for good which they began as.
I have never been able to enjoy Star Trek in any of its genres past TOS. The lack of obvious applications of much of the technologies, and the strict adherence to a dualist New-Age philosophy of consciousness really kept me away from the show. They occasionally had some excellent shows, but overall; I found that their lack of general AI, given the supposed power of many of their computers, and their lack of nano-tech based technologies (given the absolute necessity of nanotech for some technologies) was just appalling. The Medical technologies were also rather wonky. If they can regrow bone, and they can regrow nerves, and they can regrow skin, and they can regrow muscles… Why cannot they re-grow entire limbs.
Also, the silly rationale behind there were not more technologies like Giordi’s eyes really made no sense.
IMO, the absolute Best Sci-Fi TV series in recent years has been the new BSG, and the upcoming Caprica, which will tackle a civilization as it approaches its own singularity and then fails to make it through the event horizon. Not due to having created unfriendly AI, but by having their AI corrupted by a psychopathic religious girl who manages to inhabit that AI. It should be excellent.
They did not focus overly much on the technologies, which were mostly post-Singularity
Was this ever said or shown in an episode? It seems like a cop out to just assume magical technology is post-Singularity without it being in the back story.
the strict adherence to a dualist New-Age philosophy of consciousness really kept me away from the show.
Wasn’t there a consciousness swapping episode of Farscape? Also, what about the Data is basically a person trope in TNG? I agree that Star Trek technology doesn’t make a lot of sense, though.
Give your high standards shouldn’t the fact that cylons were never much more intelligent than humans bother you?
Was this ever said or shown in an episode? It seems like a cop out to just assume magical technology is post-Singularity without it being in the back story.
A society, or group of societies, needn’t have the concept of the singularity in order for one to have occurred. Farscape had some very obvious technologies (mostly medical) which were very highly advanced nanotech, and there were elements of AI. Most of the theme of the show, though, was that they were living in a fallen society, which had once passed through a Singularity (at least parts of the interstellar civilization) yet had fallen back below it, with these magical items being carefully guarded and little understanding of how they worked. That did bother me a little, but since the story was driven by the plot and some of the characters, and they rarely sunk into techno-babble, it was easier to overlook.
There was a consciousness swapping episode of Farscape. It was not one of my favorite episodes of the show. As for Star Trek and Data… That was something that I hated. If they had the type of imaging technology that they claimed to have in their medical and scanning technologies, creating more Datas should have been the easiest thing in the world. and, Data should have known that there was no more to him that the patterns in his “Positronic Matrix” and that if he was taken apart, all that would be necessary was a back-up of this matrix… Of course, just by fiat they claimed that this was impossible.
And… As to BSG… It did bother me that the Cylons (the human ones) were never much more intelligent than humans did bother me, until it was explained why (The episode where Cavil has his screaming fit at Ellen Tigh where he screams at her “I am just a machine… I want to see gamma-rays, smell x-rays, hear radio waves, touch the solar wind and taste dark matter. Yet, you gave me this arthritic old body and these failing eyes to look at the wonders of the universe”.
It was explained the Cavil, in his jealousy of the First 5, who had arrived from the Original earth in the final months of the Cylon War with the colonies, had managed to trap the 5 (long after the end of the Cylon War), and suppress their original memories and knowledge (which were vastly greater than either man or existing Cylons) and replace these memories with false memories & knowledge. Cavil then placed them in the colonies to await the final destruction of the colonies, to live among the humans (and discover how much they deserved annihilation) only to have his plans thwarted when the extermination did not go as plan.
When Ellen is resurrected after Saul kills her on New Caprica, she re-gains her old memories (and knowledge), yet does not share it with Cavil (or the other Cylons) because of Cavil’s betrayal of her (and the original 5′s) Values (and because Cavil killed Daniel, who was the most successful and advanced of the 13 models of cylons… Yes, there were 13 models, not 12. Cavil completely destroyed Daniel in a fit of jealousy because of Daniel’s incredible brilliance and talent.
Lastly, the remaining Cylons were more intelligent than the Humans. only Baltar came close to their level of intelligence. Their technology was higher than humans as well. It was not significantly greater due to the fact that the Original 5 refused to give the remaining 7 much of their technical knowledge because of Cavil’s pride and desire to exterminate mankind for what were sins that should have been forgiven.
Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time, A Fire Upon the Deep. The former introduced the idea of the Singularity, the latter gets a lot of fun playing near the edge of it.
Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men, Star Maker.
Poul Anderson: Brain Wave. What happens if there’s a drastic, sudden intelligence increase?
After you’ve read some science fiction, if you let us know what you’ve liked, I bet you’ll get some more fine-tuned recommendations.
If anyone read it for the first time recently, I’m curious what you think of the Usenet references. Those were my favorite parts of the book when I first read it.
I thought the Usenet references were really cool and really clever, both from a reader’s standpoint, and also from an author’s standpoint. For example, it doesn’t take a lot of digression to explain it or anything since most readers are already familiar with similar stuff (e.g., Usenet.) It also just seems really plausible as a form of universe-scale “telegram” communication, so I think it works great for the story. Implausibility just ruins science fiction for me, it destroys that crucial suspension of disbelief.
If you would have tried to explain to people a hundred years ago that we will have interlinked computers and a lot of people will use them to view images of naked females I think most people would have found that hypothesis very implausible.
Any accurate description of the world that will exist 100 years in the future is bound to contain lots of implausible claims.
If you’re suggesting that all science fiction is implausible though, then that’s not true. There’s a difference between coming up with random, futuristic ideas, and coming up with random, futuristic ideas that have justification for working.
It depends on what you’re looking for. Books you might enjoy? If so, we need to know more about your tastes. Books we’ve liked? Books which have influenced us? An overview of the field?
In any case, some I’ve liked—Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo which is quite a nice intro to rationality and also has Nazis in abandoned alien tunnels on the Moon, and Egan’s Diaspora which is an impressive depiction of people living as computer programs.
Oh, and Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep which is an effort to sneak up on writing about the Singularity (Vinge invented the idea of the Singularity), and Kirsteen’s The Steerswoman (first of a series), which has the idea of a guild of people whose job it is to answer questions—and if you don’t answer one of their questions, you don’t get to ask them anything ever again.
I second the recommendations of 1984 and Player of Games (the whole Culture series is good, but that one especially held my interest).
Recommendations I didn’t see when skimming the thread:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams: A truly enjoyable classic sci-fi series, spanning the length of the galaxy and the course of human history.
Timescape by Gregory Benford: Very realistic and well-written story about sending information back in time. The author is an astrophysicist, and knows his stuff.
The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Timeline, Prey, and Next by Michael Crichton: These are his best sci-fi works, aimed at realism and dealing with the consequences of new technology or discovery.
Replay by Ken Grimwood: A man is given the chance to relive his life. A stirring tale with several twists.
The Commonwealth Saga and The Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton: Superb space opera, in which humanity has colonized the stars via traversable wormholes, and gained immortality via rejuvenation technology. The trilogy takes place a thousand years after the saga, but with several of the same characters.
The Talents series and the Tower and Hive series by Anne McCaffrey: These novels deal with the emergence and organization of humans with “psychic” abilities (telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation, and so forth). The first series takes place roughly in the present day, the second far in the future on multiple planets.
Priscilla Hutchins series and Alex Benedict series by Jack McDevitt: Two series, unrelated, both examining how humans might explore the galaxy and what they might find (many relics of ancient civilizations, and a few alien races still living). The former takes place in the relatively near future, while the latter takes place millennia in the future.
Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons: An epic space opera dealing heavily with singularity-related concepts such as AI and human bio-modification, as well as time travel and religious conflict.
Otherland series by Tad Williams: In the near future, full virtual reality has been developed. The story moves through a plethora of virtual environments, many drawn from classic literature.
Edit: I have just now realized, after writing all of this out, that this is the open thread for January 2010 rather than January 2011. Oh well.
I wouldn’t recommend Scalzi. Much of Scalzi is miltiary scifi with little realism and isn’t a great introduction for scifi. I’d recommend Charlie Stross. “The Atrocity Archives”, “Singularity Sky” and “Halting State” are all excellent. The third is very weird in that it is written in the second person, but is lots of fun. Other good authors to start with are Pournelle and Niven (Ringworld, The Mote in God’s Eye, and King David’s Spaceship are all excellent).
Am I somehow unusual for being seriously weirded out by the cultural undertones in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War books? I keep seeing people in generally enlightened forums gushing over his stuff, but the book read pretty nastily to me with its mix of very juvenile approach to science, psychology and pretty much everything it took on, and its glorification of genocidal war without alternatives. It brought up too much associations to telling kids who don’t know better about the utter necessity of genocidal war in simple and exiting terms in real-world history, and seemed too little aware of this itself to be enjoyable.
Maybe it’s a Heinlein thing. Heinlein is pretty obscure here in Europe, but seems to be woven into the nostalgia trigger gene in the American SF fan DNA, and I guess Scalzi was going for something of a Heinlein pastiche.
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only person who hated Old Man’s War, though our reasons might be different.
It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I think the character who came out in favor of an infrastructure attack (was that the genocidal war?) turned out to be wrong.
What I didn’t like about the book was largely that it was science fiction lite—the world building was weak and vague, and the viewpoint character was way too trusting. I’ve been told that more is explained in later books, but I had no desire to read them.
There’s a profoundly anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist theme in Heinlein, but most Heinlein fans don’t seem to pick up on it.
The most glaring SF-lite problem for me was that in both Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, the protagonist was basically written as a generic twenty-something Competent Man character, despite both books deliberately setting the protagonist up as very unusual compared to the archetype character. in Old Man’s War, the protagonist is a 70-year old retiree in a retooled body, and in The Ghost Brigades something else entirely. Both of these instantly point to what I thought would have been the most interesting thing about the book, how does someone who’s coming from a very different place psychologically approach stuff that’s normally tackled by people in their twenties. And then pretty much nothing at all is done with this angle. Weird.
Come to think of it, I had a similar problem with James P. Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear, which was about a colony world of in vitro grown humans raised by semi-intelligent robots without adult parents. I thought this would lead to some seriously weird and interesting social psychology with the colonists, when all sorts of difficult to codify cultural layers are lost in favor of subhuman machines as parental authorities and things to aspire to.
Turned out it was just a setup to lecture how anarchism with shooting people you don’t like would lead to the perfect society if it weren’t for those meddling history-perpetuating traditionalists, with the colonists of course being exemplars of psychological normalcy and wholesomeness as well as required by the lesson, and then I stopped reading the book.
There was so much, so very much sf-lite about that book. Real military life is full of detail and jargon. OMW had something like two or three kinds of weapons.
There was the big sex scene near the beginning of the book, and then the characters pretty much forgot about sex.
It was intentionally written to be an intro to sf for people who don’t usually read the stuff. Fortunately, even though the book was quite popular, that approach to writing science fiction hasn’t caught on.
What I didn’t like about the book was largely that it was science fiction lite—the world building was weak and vague, and the viewpoint character was way too trusting. I’ve been told that more is explained in later books, but I had no desire to read them.
Nor I—I’ve read Agent to the Stars, which was just as bad, so I have no expectation of improvement.
This isn’t a Scalzi problem so much as a general problem with the military end of SF. See for example, Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game. Ender’s Game makes it more complicated, but there’s still some definite sympathy with genocide (speciescide?).
I wonder how important what the characters say is compared to what they do—and the importance may be in what the readers remember.
Card has an actual genocide.
In ST, Heinlein speaks in favor of crude “roll over the other guys so that your genes can survive” expansionism, but he portrays a society where racial/ethnic background doesn’t matter for humans, and an ongoing war which won’t necessarily end with the Bugs or the humans being wiped out.
I really like Anathem (am about halfway reading it); I’d goes into many of the
themes popular around here (rationalism, MWI), except for the singularity
stuff.
I am a huge fan of Philip K. Dick. I don’t usually read much fiction or even science fiction, but PKD has always fascinated me. Stanislav Lem is also great.
Bearing in mind that you’re asking this on LessWrong, these come to mind:
Greg Egan. Everything he’s written, but start with his short story collections, “Axiomatic” and “Luminous”. Uploading, strong materialism, quantum mechanics, immortality through technology, and the implications of these for the concept of personal identity. Some of his short stories are online.
Charles Stross. Most of his writing is set in a near-future, near-Singularity world.
There are many more SF novels I think everyone should read, but that would be digressing into my personal tastes.
Some people here have recommended M. Scott Bakker’s trilogy that begins with “The Darkness That Comes Before”, as presenting a picture of a superhuman rationalist, although having ploughed through the first book I’m not all that moved to follow up with the rest. I found the world-building rather derivative, and the rationalist doesn’t play an active role. Can anyone sell me on reading volume 2?
many good recommendations so far but unbelievably nobody has yet mentioned Iain M. Banks’ series of ‘Culture’ novels based on a humanoid society (the ‘Culture’) run by incredibly powerful AI’s known as ‘Minds’.
highly engaging books which deal with much of what a possible highly technologically advanced post singularity society might be like in terms of morality, politics, philosophy etc. they are far fetched and a lot of fun. here’s the list to date:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Use of Weapons (1990)
Excession (1996)
Inversions (1998)
Look to Windward (2000)
Matter (2008)
they are not consecutive so reading order isn’t that important though it is nice to follow their evolution from the perspective of the writing.
I don’t know whether to be surprised that no one has recommended the Ender’s Game series or not. They’re not terribly realistic in the tech (especially toward the end of the series), and don’t address the idea of a technological singularity, but they’re a good read anyway.
Oh—I’m not sure if this is what you were thinking of by sci-fi or not, and it gets a bit new-agey, but Spider Robinson’s “Telempath” is a personal favorite. It’s set in a near-future (at the time of writing) earth after a virus was released that magnified everyone’s sense of smell to the point where cities, and most modern methods of producing things, became intolerable. (Does anyone else have post-apocalyptic themed favorites? I have a fondness for the genre, sci-fi or not.)
A poorly thought out, insult-filled rant comparing scenes in Ender’s Game to “cumshots” changed your view of a classic, award-winning science fiction novel? Please reconsider.
If you strip out the invective and the appeal to emotion embodied in the metaphorical comparison to porn, there yet remains valid criticism of the structure and implied moral standards of the book.
I did not believe this was possible, but this analysis has turned EG into ashes retroactively. Still, it gets lots of kids into scifi, so there is some value.
A really great kids scifi book is “Have spacesuit, will travel” by Heinlein.
I did not believe this was possible, but this analysis has turned EG into ashes retroactively.
I’ve heard that effect called “the suck fairy”. The suck fairy sneaks into your life and replaces books you used to love with vaguely similar books that suck.
The suck fairy always brings something that looks exactly like the same book, but somehow....
I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to enjoy Macroscope again. Anthony was really interesting about an information gift economy, but I suspect that “vaguely creepy about women” is going to turn into something much worse.
I recommended “A Canticle for Leibowitz” and “Jericho” earlier. Also, Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead would have been the next two books on my list, though I read them when I was younger and don’t know if they would be appealing to adults. How do people think Card (a devout Mormon) does at writing atheist/agnostic characters (nearly all the main characters in the series)?
I haven’t really thought about his portrayal of atheists, but he did a good enough job of writing a convincing, non-demonized gay man in Songbird that I was speechless when I discovered that he firmly believes that such people are going to hell.
He believes that they are sinning. Mormons have a really complicated dolled-up afterlife, so if he’s sticking to doctrine, he probably doesn’t actually expect gays as a group to all go to Hell.
Edit: He did a gay guy in the Memory of Earth series too (the plot of which, I later found, is a blatant ripoff of the Book of Mormon). Like the gay guy in Songbird, this one ends up with a woman, although less tragically.
I have to say. It is an interesting coincidence that he has written two gay characters that end up with women. Especially since he is absolutely terrible at writing (heterosexual) sex scenes/sexuality- I mean really I’ve never read a professional writer who was worse at this.
Is there any significance to how OSC avoids using the standard terms for gay, but instead uses a made-up in-world term for it that you have to infer means “gay”. (At least in the Memory of Earth series; I haven’t read the other.)
Is there any significance to how OSC avoids using the standard terms for gay, but instead uses a made-up in-world term for it that you have to infer means “gay”.
wtf? that’s the kwyjiboest thing I’ve ever seen. omg lol
I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all. The way I understand it is that under Mormon doctrine, the act, not the temptation towards the act, is what’s a sin: so a gay character who marries a woman and (regardless of whether he actually has sex with her or not) refrains from extramarital sexual activity is just fine and dandy. The Songbird character didn’t get married; the Memory of Earth one did. But the former, while not “demonized”, was presented as a fairly weak person; the latter was supposed to be a generally decent guy.
Where does OSC even attempt to do so? He generally just leaves the actual sex scenes out of the books, to the best of my recollection. Would that Turtledove had shown similar restraint.
It has been a while since a read any Card but Folk of the Fringe included a really bizarre story about sex between a young white boy and an middle-aged native American. The Enders Game sequels almost all include ostensibly sexual relationships and he tries to describe aspects of that and moments when, presumably, the characters would be experiencing sexual attraction.
Ok, I was thinking more in terms of straight-out sex scenes, as in Turtledove, where the tab goes in the slot. I must say I didn’t find OSC’s writing on sexual attraction particularly awkward; what about it did you dislike so?
Sorry, really late reply. Was just looking over this thread and happened to see this.
Card’s writing that involves sexual attraction just comes off as asexual. I never got the sense that the characters were actually sexually attracted to each other; affectionate maybe, but not aroused. It’s like the way sexuality looks on tv, not the way people actually experience it. I recall reading Card himself say that he didn’t think he was very good at writing about sex or sexual attractions in an interview or something. It might have been in the Folk of the the Fringe book somewhere but I can’t find it in my library.
Ok, I guess I agree with that. He either cannot or will not write such that you feel the emotions associated with sexual attraction; it is an area where he tells rather than showing. Perhaps this is a deliberate choice based in his Mormon religion; he’s also rather down on porn. Either way, though, it seems to me that his stories rarely suffer from this. To take an example, ‘Empire’ is way worse than the Ender sequels, but it’s not because of the sex; indeed it has effectively zero sex in it, even of the kind you describe. Rather it suffers from being nearly-explicit propaganda.
Robert Heinlein wrote some really good stuff (before becoming increasingly erratic in his later years). Very entertaining and fun. Here are some that I would recommend for starting out with:
Tunnel in the Sky. The opposite of Lord of the Flies. Some people are stuck on a wild planet by accident, and instead of having civilization collapse, they start out disorganized and form a civilization because it’s a good idea. After reading this, I no longer have any patience for people who claim that our natural state is barbarism.
Citizen of the Galaxy. I can’t really summarize this one, but it’s got some good characters in it.
Between Planets. Our protagonist finds himself in the middle of a revolution all of a sudden. This was written before we knew that Venus was not habitable.
I was raised on this stuff. Also, I’d like to recommend Startide Rising, by David Brin, and its sequel The Uplift War. They’re technically part of a trilogy, but reading the first book (Sundiver) is completely unnecessary. It’s not really light reading, but it’s entertaining and interesting.
Note about Tunnel in the Sky—they didn’t just form a society (not a civilization) because they thought it was a good idea to do—they’d had training in how to build social structures.
I’d say identify what sort of future scenarios you want to explore and ask us to identify exemplars. Or is the goal is just to get a common vocabulary to discuss things?
Reading Sci-Fi while potentially valuable should be done with a purpose in mind. Unless you need another potential source of procrastination.
While I don’t think you need to read it, per se, I have found sci fi to be of remarkable use in preparing me for exactly the kind of mind-changing upon which Less Wrong thrives. The Asimov short stories cited above are good examples.
I also continue to cite Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (there are more after the trilogy, but he openly said that he wrote the later books purely because his publisher requested them) as the most influential fiction works in pushing me into my current career.
This might not be the best place to ask because so many people here
prefer science fiction to regular fiction. I’ve noticed that people who
prefer science fiction have a very different idea of what makes good
science fiction than people who have no preference or who prefer regular
fiction.
Most of what I see in the other comments is on the “prefers science
fiction” side, except for things by LeGuin and maybe Dune.
Of course, you might turn out to prefer science fiction and just
not have realized it. Then all would be well.
It’s actually very important to ask people for recommendations for books, and especially for sci-fi, since it seems like a large majority of the work out there is well, garbage. Not to be too harsh, as IMO, the same thing could be said for a lot of artistic genres (anime, modern action film, etc, etc.).
For sci-fi, there are some really top notch work out there. But be warned, that in general the rest of the series isn’t as good as the first book. Some classics, all favorites of mine are:
Dune (Frank Herbert)
Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)
Ringworld (first book) (Larry Niven)
Neuromancer (William Gibson) (Warning: last half of the book becomes s.l.o.w. though)
I haven’t seen much of the Star Wars or Star Trek stuff either, and don’t really consider them science fiction as much as space action movies. That’s not really what we’re talking about.
I would strongly advise you to start with short stories, specifically Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Sheckley, and Philip K. Dick. All those authors are considered giants in the field and have anthologies of collected short stories. Science fiction short stories tend to be easier to read because you don’t get bogged down in detail, and you can get right to the point of exploring the interesting and speculative worlds.
I recommend anything by Charles Stross, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga (link gives titles and chronology), and anthing by Ursula LeGuin, but especially City of Illusions and The Left Hand of Darkness.
As much as I love LeGuin, her work tends to be fairly challenging. It’s worth noting that her novels tend to be much easier to read than her short stories, unlike most authors.
You find her novels easier? I’ve loved many LeGuin short stories (most notably The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, and everything in the Changing Planes collection) but I can’t stand her novels. They lose me ten pages in; I’ve never managed to slog more than halfway through a single one.
The novels are definitely still challenging, but until I’d read a few of her novels and figured out how to think about her writing, I wasn’t able to make sense of most of her short stories (Omelas being one exception to that). I’d get to the end of the text and go ‘wait, was there supposed to be a story in that set of words?’
I can see you have already been deluged in recommendations, but here are a few novels I liked, with notes:
Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. One of the better-written books from one of my first favorite authors. Hal Clement is, in my opinion, the definitive writer of hard science fiction, the benchmark to which others should be compared. If possible, get a copy with the essay “Whirligig World” included (the volume Heavy Planet, for example).
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling. Something of a science-fiction bildungsroman, and some of my favorite writing of all time. It’s surprisingly accurate as futurology, although that’s not a particularly important feature in a novel; more to the point, it’s got wonderful worldbuilding and characterization.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Excellent epic science fiction. I don’t believe it is a classic in the way some others may have suggested, but I do believe it’s a good read.
A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason. An excellent entry in the realm of anthropological science fiction, with beautiful characterization of both the human anthropologists and the population of aliens. (Worth comparing to Sheri S. Tepper, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Joan D. Vinge.)
Okay, so....a confession.
In a fairly recent little-noticed comment, I let slip that I differ from many folks here in what some may regard as an important way: I was not raised on science fiction.
I’ll be more specific here: I think I’ve seen one of the Star Wars films (the one about the kid who apparently grows up to become the villain in the other films). I have enough cursory familiarity with the Star Trek franchise to be able to use phrases like “Spock bias” and make the occasional reference to the Starship Enterprise (except I later found out that the reference in that post was wrong, since the Enterprise is actually supposed to travel faster than light—oops), but little more. I recall having enjoyed the “Tripod” series, and maybe one or two other, similar books, when they were read aloud to me in elementary school. And of course I like Yudkowsky’s parables, including “Three Worlds Collide”, as much as the next LW reader.
But that’s about the extent of my personal acquaintance with the genre.
Now, people keep telling me that I should read more science fiction; in fact, they’re often quite surprised that I haven’t. So maybe, while we’re doing these New Year’s Resolutions, I can “resolve” to perhaps, maybe, some time, actually do that (if I can ever manage to squeeze it in between actually doing work and procrastinating on the Internet).
Problem is, there seems to be a lot of it out there. How would a newcomer know where to start?
Well, what better place to ask than here, a place where many would cite this type of literature as formative with respect to developing their saner-and-more-interesting-than-average worldviews?
Alicorn recommended John Scalzi (thanks). What say others?
Greg Egan: Permutation City, Diaspora, Incandescence.
Vernor Vinge: True Names, Rainbows End.
Charlie Stross: Accelerando.
Scott Bakker: Prince of Nothing series.
Voted up mainly for the Greg Egan recommendations.
I read Vinge’s Rainbows End, and I found the futurism interesting (it seems Google is starting to work on the book scanning stuff), but I couldn’t really get into the story.
(edit: fixed typo, thanks)
Rainbows End, but I agree.
I am a big fan of Isaac Asimov. Start with his best short story, which I submit as the best sci-fi short story of all time. http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
I prefer this one, and yes, it really is that short.
Thanks, Brown wrote that in 1954, two years before Asimov wrote The Last Question. Do you think Asimov read Brown’s story?
Asimov thought it was his best story, too (or at least his favorite). Can’t say I disagree.
Ah yes, CronoDAS recommended that, too. (Sorry, I should have acknowledged!)
Oh! More Asimov, “I, Robot”. Here the guy was talking about Friendly AI in 1942.
Not really; they’re not decision theory stories. The Three Laws are adversarial injunctions that hide huge amounts of complexity under short English words like harm. It wouldn’t actually work. It didn’t even work in the story.
The whole point of the stories is that it doesn’t work in the end, it is a case study in how not to do it. How it can go wrong. Obviously he didn’t solve the problem. The first digital computer had just been constructed, what would you expect?
The FAI problem has nothing to do with digital computers. It’s a math problem. You’d only need digital computers after you’ve solved the problem, to implement the solution.
Not that they weren’t good stories, and not that I expect fiction authors to do their own basic research, but I wouldn’t say they’re about the Friendly AI problem.
It is most certainly not an academic look at the concept, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t play a role in bringing the concept to the public eye. It doesn’t have to be a scientific paper to have a real influence on the idea.
Along those lines, I’d recommend the Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. It’s a short-novel length expression of an AI that gains control of all matter and energy in the universe while being constrained by Asimov’s Three Laws.
It’s available free online under copyright. http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/
If you want to read a full length Asimov book, my personal recommendation is the End of Eternity. It has a rather unique take on time travel and functions well as a stand alone book. It has just been reprinted after being out of print for too long.
Foundation is his most well known novel and it also very much worth reading.
I can’t find someone violating the copyright online with a quick Google, but Asimov’s short story “The Last Answer” is also a good one with a different take on religion than “The Last Question”.
My first recommendation here is always Iain M Banks, Player of Games.
Personally, I’d recommend starting with Consider Phlebas, then Use of Weapons, then Player of Games.
Why that Culture novel, precisely? I don’t recall it as one of the better ones.
Admittedly, I’m unusual in that my favourite Culture story is The State of the Art. General Pinochet Chili Con Carne! Richard Nixon Burgers! What’s not to like?
It’s one of my favourites, and I also think it’s a good one to start with. But so is The State of the Art. My favourite by him is Feersum Endjinn.
If you’d like some TV recommendations as well, here are some things that you can find on Hulu:
Firefly. It’s not all available at the same time, but they rotate the episodes once a week; in a while you’ll be able to start at the beginning. If you haven’t already seen the movie, put it off until you’ve watched the whole series.
Babylon 5. First two seasons are all there. It takes a few episodes to hit its stride.
If you’re willing to search a little farther afield, Farscape is good, and of the Star Treks, DS9 is my favorite (many people prefer TNG, though, and this seems for some reason to be correlated with gender).
Maybe that’s because DS9 is about a bunch of people living in a big house, while TNG is about a bunch of people sailing around in a big boat ;). I prefer DS9 myself though and I’m a guy.
With respect to B5, I’d say “a few episodes” is the entire first season and a quarter of the second. I don’t regret having spent the time to watch that, but I’m not sure I would have bothered had I not had friends raving about it, knowing in advance what I know now. :)
Does Jericho count as sci-fi? Either way, I highly recommend it.
Who will be the first person to recommend Lexx? :-)
You can probably find someone who has the Firefly discs, too.
I was not at all impressed with Firefly. It’s idioms for the more primitive were too primitive (dresses from the 1800s???). It’s Premise was awesome, but due to the mainstream audience, the writers were very constrained. Had it been done as an anime, I imagine it would have looked far more like Trigun.
Now, Farscape. This was a re-telling of the Buck-Rogers story, and it was done Freaking Well! They did not focus overly much on the technologies, which were mostly post-Singularity (as were many of the alien species), but due to the collapse of the civilization that supported that portion of the Galaxy, the Peacekeepers had become a force for malevolence and dystopic vision rather than the force for good which they began as.
I have never been able to enjoy Star Trek in any of its genres past TOS. The lack of obvious applications of much of the technologies, and the strict adherence to a dualist New-Age philosophy of consciousness really kept me away from the show. They occasionally had some excellent shows, but overall; I found that their lack of general AI, given the supposed power of many of their computers, and their lack of nano-tech based technologies (given the absolute necessity of nanotech for some technologies) was just appalling. The Medical technologies were also rather wonky. If they can regrow bone, and they can regrow nerves, and they can regrow skin, and they can regrow muscles… Why cannot they re-grow entire limbs.
Also, the silly rationale behind there were not more technologies like Giordi’s eyes really made no sense.
IMO, the absolute Best Sci-Fi TV series in recent years has been the new BSG, and the upcoming Caprica, which will tackle a civilization as it approaches its own singularity and then fails to make it through the event horizon. Not due to having created unfriendly AI, but by having their AI corrupted by a psychopathic religious girl who manages to inhabit that AI. It should be excellent.
Was this ever said or shown in an episode? It seems like a cop out to just assume magical technology is post-Singularity without it being in the back story.
Wasn’t there a consciousness swapping episode of Farscape? Also, what about the Data is basically a person trope in TNG? I agree that Star Trek technology doesn’t make a lot of sense, though.
Give your high standards shouldn’t the fact that cylons were never much more intelligent than humans bother you?
A society, or group of societies, needn’t have the concept of the singularity in order for one to have occurred. Farscape had some very obvious technologies (mostly medical) which were very highly advanced nanotech, and there were elements of AI. Most of the theme of the show, though, was that they were living in a fallen society, which had once passed through a Singularity (at least parts of the interstellar civilization) yet had fallen back below it, with these magical items being carefully guarded and little understanding of how they worked. That did bother me a little, but since the story was driven by the plot and some of the characters, and they rarely sunk into techno-babble, it was easier to overlook.
There was a consciousness swapping episode of Farscape. It was not one of my favorite episodes of the show. As for Star Trek and Data… That was something that I hated. If they had the type of imaging technology that they claimed to have in their medical and scanning technologies, creating more Datas should have been the easiest thing in the world. and, Data should have known that there was no more to him that the patterns in his “Positronic Matrix” and that if he was taken apart, all that would be necessary was a back-up of this matrix… Of course, just by fiat they claimed that this was impossible.
And… As to BSG… It did bother me that the Cylons (the human ones) were never much more intelligent than humans did bother me, until it was explained why (The episode where Cavil has his screaming fit at Ellen Tigh where he screams at her “I am just a machine… I want to see gamma-rays, smell x-rays, hear radio waves, touch the solar wind and taste dark matter. Yet, you gave me this arthritic old body and these failing eyes to look at the wonders of the universe”.
It was explained the Cavil, in his jealousy of the First 5, who had arrived from the Original earth in the final months of the Cylon War with the colonies, had managed to trap the 5 (long after the end of the Cylon War), and suppress their original memories and knowledge (which were vastly greater than either man or existing Cylons) and replace these memories with false memories & knowledge. Cavil then placed them in the colonies to await the final destruction of the colonies, to live among the humans (and discover how much they deserved annihilation) only to have his plans thwarted when the extermination did not go as plan.
When Ellen is resurrected after Saul kills her on New Caprica, she re-gains her old memories (and knowledge), yet does not share it with Cavil (or the other Cylons) because of Cavil’s betrayal of her (and the original 5′s) Values (and because Cavil killed Daniel, who was the most successful and advanced of the 13 models of cylons… Yes, there were 13 models, not 12. Cavil completely destroyed Daniel in a fit of jealousy because of Daniel’s incredible brilliance and talent.
Lastly, the remaining Cylons were more intelligent than the Humans. only Baltar came close to their level of intelligence. Their technology was higher than humans as well. It was not significantly greater due to the fact that the Original 5 refused to give the remaining 7 much of their technical knowledge because of Cavil’s pride and desire to exterminate mankind for what were sins that should have been forgiven.
Vinge’s Marooned in Real Time, A Fire Upon the Deep. The former introduced the idea of the Singularity, the latter gets a lot of fun playing near the edge of it.
Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men, Star Maker.
Poul Anderson: Brain Wave. What happens if there’s a drastic, sudden intelligence increase?
After you’ve read some science fiction, if you let us know what you’ve liked, I bet you’ll get some more fine-tuned recommendations.
I second A Fire Upon the Deep (and anything by Vinge, but A Fire Upon the Deep is my favorite). BTW, it contains what is in retrospect a clear reference to the FAI problem. See http://books.google.com/books?id=UGAKB3r0sZQC&lpg=PA400&ots=VBrKocfTHM&dq=%22fast%20burn%20transcendence%22&pg=PA400
If anyone read it for the first time recently, I’m curious what you think of the Usenet references. Those were my favorite parts of the book when I first read it.
I thought the Usenet references were really cool and really clever, both from a reader’s standpoint, and also from an author’s standpoint. For example, it doesn’t take a lot of digression to explain it or anything since most readers are already familiar with similar stuff (e.g., Usenet.) It also just seems really plausible as a form of universe-scale “telegram” communication, so I think it works great for the story. Implausibility just ruins science fiction for me, it destroys that crucial suspension of disbelief.
If you would have tried to explain to people a hundred years ago that we will have interlinked computers and a lot of people will use them to view images of naked females I think most people would have found that hypothesis very implausible.
Any accurate description of the world that will exist 100 years in the future is bound to contain lots of implausible claims.
If you’re suggesting that all science fiction is implausible though, then that’s not true. There’s a difference between coming up with random, futuristic ideas, and coming up with random, futuristic ideas that have justification for working.
It depends on what you’re looking for. Books you might enjoy? If so, we need to know more about your tastes. Books we’ve liked? Books which have influenced us? An overview of the field?
In any case, some I’ve liked—Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo which is quite a nice intro to rationality and also has Nazis in abandoned alien tunnels on the Moon, and Egan’s Diaspora which is an impressive depiction of people living as computer programs.
Oh, and Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep which is an effort to sneak up on writing about the Singularity (Vinge invented the idea of the Singularity), and Kirsteen’s The Steerswoman (first of a series), which has the idea of a guild of people whose job it is to answer questions—and if you don’t answer one of their questions, you don’t get to ask them anything ever again.
I second the recommendations of 1984 and Player of Games (the whole Culture series is good, but that one especially held my interest).
Recommendations I didn’t see when skimming the thread:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams: A truly enjoyable classic sci-fi series, spanning the length of the galaxy and the course of human history.
Timescape by Gregory Benford: Very realistic and well-written story about sending information back in time. The author is an astrophysicist, and knows his stuff.
The Andromeda Strain, Sphere, Timeline, Prey, and Next by Michael Crichton: These are his best sci-fi works, aimed at realism and dealing with the consequences of new technology or discovery.
Replay by Ken Grimwood: A man is given the chance to relive his life. A stirring tale with several twists.
The Commonwealth Saga and The Void Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton: Superb space opera, in which humanity has colonized the stars via traversable wormholes, and gained immortality via rejuvenation technology. The trilogy takes place a thousand years after the saga, but with several of the same characters.
The Talents series and the Tower and Hive series by Anne McCaffrey: These novels deal with the emergence and organization of humans with “psychic” abilities (telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation, and so forth). The first series takes place roughly in the present day, the second far in the future on multiple planets.
Priscilla Hutchins series and Alex Benedict series by Jack McDevitt: Two series, unrelated, both examining how humans might explore the galaxy and what they might find (many relics of ancient civilizations, and a few alien races still living). The former takes place in the relatively near future, while the latter takes place millennia in the future.
Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons: An epic space opera dealing heavily with singularity-related concepts such as AI and human bio-modification, as well as time travel and religious conflict.
Otherland series by Tad Williams: In the near future, full virtual reality has been developed. The story moves through a plethora of virtual environments, many drawn from classic literature.
Edit: I have just now realized, after writing all of this out, that this is the open thread for January 2010 rather than January 2011. Oh well.
I wouldn’t recommend Scalzi. Much of Scalzi is miltiary scifi with little realism and isn’t a great introduction for scifi. I’d recommend Charlie Stross. “The Atrocity Archives”, “Singularity Sky” and “Halting State” are all excellent. The third is very weird in that it is written in the second person, but is lots of fun. Other good authors to start with are Pournelle and Niven (Ringworld, The Mote in God’s Eye, and King David’s Spaceship are all excellent).
Am I somehow unusual for being seriously weirded out by the cultural undertones in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War books? I keep seeing people in generally enlightened forums gushing over his stuff, but the book read pretty nastily to me with its mix of very juvenile approach to science, psychology and pretty much everything it took on, and its glorification of genocidal war without alternatives. It brought up too much associations to telling kids who don’t know better about the utter necessity of genocidal war in simple and exiting terms in real-world history, and seemed too little aware of this itself to be enjoyable.
Maybe it’s a Heinlein thing. Heinlein is pretty obscure here in Europe, but seems to be woven into the nostalgia trigger gene in the American SF fan DNA, and I guess Scalzi was going for something of a Heinlein pastiche.
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only person who hated Old Man’s War, though our reasons might be different.
It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I think the character who came out in favor of an infrastructure attack (was that the genocidal war?) turned out to be wrong.
What I didn’t like about the book was largely that it was science fiction lite—the world building was weak and vague, and the viewpoint character was way too trusting. I’ve been told that more is explained in later books, but I had no desire to read them.
There’s a profoundly anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist theme in Heinlein, but most Heinlein fans don’t seem to pick up on it.
The most glaring SF-lite problem for me was that in both Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, the protagonist was basically written as a generic twenty-something Competent Man character, despite both books deliberately setting the protagonist up as very unusual compared to the archetype character. in Old Man’s War, the protagonist is a 70-year old retiree in a retooled body, and in The Ghost Brigades something else entirely. Both of these instantly point to what I thought would have been the most interesting thing about the book, how does someone who’s coming from a very different place psychologically approach stuff that’s normally tackled by people in their twenties. And then pretty much nothing at all is done with this angle. Weird.
Come to think of it, I had a similar problem with James P. Hogan’s Voyage from Yesteryear, which was about a colony world of in vitro grown humans raised by semi-intelligent robots without adult parents. I thought this would lead to some seriously weird and interesting social psychology with the colonists, when all sorts of difficult to codify cultural layers are lost in favor of subhuman machines as parental authorities and things to aspire to.
Turned out it was just a setup to lecture how anarchism with shooting people you don’t like would lead to the perfect society if it weren’t for those meddling history-perpetuating traditionalists, with the colonists of course being exemplars of psychological normalcy and wholesomeness as well as required by the lesson, and then I stopped reading the book.
There was so much, so very much sf-lite about that book. Real military life is full of detail and jargon. OMW had something like two or three kinds of weapons.
There was the big sex scene near the beginning of the book, and then the characters pretty much forgot about sex.
It was intentionally written to be an intro to sf for people who don’t usually read the stuff. Fortunately, even though the book was quite popular, that approach to writing science fiction hasn’t caught on.
Nor I—I’ve read Agent to the Stars, which was just as bad, so I have no expectation of improvement.
This isn’t a Scalzi problem so much as a general problem with the military end of SF. See for example, Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game. Ender’s Game makes it more complicated, but there’s still some definite sympathy with genocide (speciescide?).
I wonder how important what the characters say is compared to what they do—and the importance may be in what the readers remember.
Card has an actual genocide.
In ST, Heinlein speaks in favor of crude “roll over the other guys so that your genes can survive” expansionism, but he portrays a society where racial/ethnic background doesn’t matter for humans, and an ongoing war which won’t necessarily end with the Bugs or the humans being wiped out.
Solaris by Stanislaw Lem is probably one of my all time favourites.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson is very good.
I really like Anathem (am about halfway reading it); I’d goes into many of the themes popular around here (rationalism, MWI), except for the singularity stuff.
LeGuin- The Dispossessed
William Gibson- Neuromancer
George Orwell- 1984
Walter Miller—A Canticle for Leibowitz
Philip K. Dick- The Man in the High Castle
That actually might be my top five books of all time.
I am a huge fan of Philip K. Dick. I don’t usually read much fiction or even science fiction, but PKD has always fascinated me. Stanislav Lem is also great.
Bearing in mind that you’re asking this on LessWrong, these come to mind:
Greg Egan. Everything he’s written, but start with his short story collections, “Axiomatic” and “Luminous”. Uploading, strong materialism, quantum mechanics, immortality through technology, and the implications of these for the concept of personal identity. Some of his short stories are online.
Charles Stross. Most of his writing is set in a near-future, near-Singularity world.
On related themes are “The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect”, and John C. Wright’s Golden Age) trilogy.
There are many more SF novels I think everyone should read, but that would be digressing into my personal tastes.
Some people here have recommended M. Scott Bakker’s trilogy that begins with “The Darkness That Comes Before”, as presenting a picture of a superhuman rationalist, although having ploughed through the first book I’m not all that moved to follow up with the rest. I found the world-building rather derivative, and the rationalist doesn’t play an active role. Can anyone sell me on reading volume 2?
Strongly seconding Egan. I’d start with “Singleton” and “Oracle.”
Also of note, Ted Chiang.
I couldn’t unless ‘pretty good fantasy version of the Crusades’ sounds like your cup of tea.
many good recommendations so far but unbelievably nobody has yet mentioned Iain M. Banks’ series of ‘Culture’ novels based on a humanoid society (the ‘Culture’) run by incredibly powerful AI’s known as ‘Minds’.
highly engaging books which deal with much of what a possible highly technologically advanced post singularity society might be like in terms of morality, politics, philosophy etc. they are far fetched and a lot of fun. here’s the list to date:
Consider Phlebas (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Use of Weapons (1990)
Excession (1996)
Inversions (1998)
Look to Windward (2000)
Matter (2008)
they are not consecutive so reading order isn’t that important though it is nice to follow their evolution from the perspective of the writing.
I mentioned “Player of Games” above.
duly noted. i missed it before amongst all the BSG and ST dicussions.. good choice btw—i’ve always considered it to be one of his best.
I don’t know whether to be surprised that no one has recommended the Ender’s Game series or not. They’re not terribly realistic in the tech (especially toward the end of the series), and don’t address the idea of a technological singularity, but they’re a good read anyway.
Oh—I’m not sure if this is what you were thinking of by sci-fi or not, and it gets a bit new-agey, but Spider Robinson’s “Telempath” is a personal favorite. It’s set in a near-future (at the time of writing) earth after a virus was released that magnified everyone’s sense of smell to the point where cities, and most modern methods of producing things, became intolerable. (Does anyone else have post-apocalyptic themed favorites? I have a fondness for the genre, sci-fi or not.)
I had a high opinion of Ender’s Game once (less so for its sequels). Then I read this.
A poorly thought out, insult-filled rant comparing scenes in Ender’s Game to “cumshots” changed your view of a classic, award-winning science fiction novel? Please reconsider.
If you strip out the invective and the appeal to emotion embodied in the metaphorical comparison to porn, there yet remains valid criticism of the structure and implied moral standards of the book.
I did not believe this was possible, but this analysis has turned EG into ashes retroactively. Still, it gets lots of kids into scifi, so there is some value.
A really great kids scifi book is “Have spacesuit, will travel” by Heinlein.
I’ve heard that effect called “the suck fairy”. The suck fairy sneaks into your life and replaces books you used to love with vaguely similar books that suck.
Great name, but unfortunately it’s the same book; the analysis made it incompatible with self-respect.
The suck fairy always brings something that looks exactly like the same book, but somehow....
I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to enjoy Macroscope again. Anthony was really interesting about an information gift economy, but I suspect that “vaguely creepy about women” is going to turn into something much worse.
I recommended “A Canticle for Leibowitz” and “Jericho” earlier. Also, Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead would have been the next two books on my list, though I read them when I was younger and don’t know if they would be appealing to adults. How do people think Card (a devout Mormon) does at writing atheist/agnostic characters (nearly all the main characters in the series)?
I haven’t really thought about his portrayal of atheists, but he did a good enough job of writing a convincing, non-demonized gay man in Songbird that I was speechless when I discovered that he firmly believes that such people are going to hell.
He believes that they are sinning. Mormons have a really complicated dolled-up afterlife, so if he’s sticking to doctrine, he probably doesn’t actually expect gays as a group to all go to Hell.
Edit: He did a gay guy in the Memory of Earth series too (the plot of which, I later found, is a blatant ripoff of the Book of Mormon). Like the gay guy in Songbird, this one ends up with a woman, although less tragically.
I have to say. It is an interesting coincidence that he has written two gay characters that end up with women. Especially since he is absolutely terrible at writing (heterosexual) sex scenes/sexuality- I mean really I’ve never read a professional writer who was worse at this.
Is there any significance to how OSC avoids using the standard terms for gay, but instead uses a made-up in-world term for it that you have to infer means “gay”. (At least in the Memory of Earth series; I haven’t read the other.)
wtf? that’s the kwyjiboest thing I’ve ever seen. omg lol
I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all. The way I understand it is that under Mormon doctrine, the act, not the temptation towards the act, is what’s a sin: so a gay character who marries a woman and (regardless of whether he actually has sex with her or not) refrains from extramarital sexual activity is just fine and dandy. The Songbird character didn’t get married; the Memory of Earth one did. But the former, while not “demonized”, was presented as a fairly weak person; the latter was supposed to be a generally decent guy.
Where does OSC even attempt to do so? He generally just leaves the actual sex scenes out of the books, to the best of my recollection. Would that Turtledove had shown similar restraint.
It has been a while since a read any Card but Folk of the Fringe included a really bizarre story about sex between a young white boy and an middle-aged native American. The Enders Game sequels almost all include ostensibly sexual relationships and he tries to describe aspects of that and moments when, presumably, the characters would be experiencing sexual attraction.
Ok, I was thinking more in terms of straight-out sex scenes, as in Turtledove, where the tab goes in the slot. I must say I didn’t find OSC’s writing on sexual attraction particularly awkward; what about it did you dislike so?
Sorry, really late reply. Was just looking over this thread and happened to see this.
Card’s writing that involves sexual attraction just comes off as asexual. I never got the sense that the characters were actually sexually attracted to each other; affectionate maybe, but not aroused. It’s like the way sexuality looks on tv, not the way people actually experience it. I recall reading Card himself say that he didn’t think he was very good at writing about sex or sexual attractions in an interview or something. It might have been in the Folk of the the Fringe book somewhere but I can’t find it in my library.
Ok, I guess I agree with that. He either cannot or will not write such that you feel the emotions associated with sexual attraction; it is an area where he tells rather than showing. Perhaps this is a deliberate choice based in his Mormon religion; he’s also rather down on porn. Either way, though, it seems to me that his stories rarely suffer from this. To take an example, ‘Empire’ is way worse than the Ender sequels, but it’s not because of the sex; indeed it has effectively zero sex in it, even of the kind you describe. Rather it suffers from being nearly-explicit propaganda.
I went back and checked my source (wikipedia); you’re right, I’d mis-remembered.
Robert Heinlein wrote some really good stuff (before becoming increasingly erratic in his later years). Very entertaining and fun. Here are some that I would recommend for starting out with:
Tunnel in the Sky. The opposite of Lord of the Flies. Some people are stuck on a wild planet by accident, and instead of having civilization collapse, they start out disorganized and form a civilization because it’s a good idea. After reading this, I no longer have any patience for people who claim that our natural state is barbarism.
Citizen of the Galaxy. I can’t really summarize this one, but it’s got some good characters in it.
Between Planets. Our protagonist finds himself in the middle of a revolution all of a sudden. This was written before we knew that Venus was not habitable.
I was raised on this stuff. Also, I’d like to recommend Startide Rising, by David Brin, and its sequel The Uplift War. They’re technically part of a trilogy, but reading the first book (Sundiver) is completely unnecessary. It’s not really light reading, but it’s entertaining and interesting.
Note about Tunnel in the Sky—they didn’t just form a society (not a civilization) because they thought it was a good idea to do—they’d had training in how to build social structures.
Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I strongly second Snow Crash. I enjoyed it thoroughly.
I’d say identify what sort of future scenarios you want to explore and ask us to identify exemplars. Or is the goal is just to get a common vocabulary to discuss things?
Reading Sci-Fi while potentially valuable should be done with a purpose in mind. Unless you need another potential source of procrastination.
Goodness gracious. No, just looking for more procrastination/pure fun. I’ve gotten along fine without it thus far, after all.
(Of course, if someone actually thinks I really do need to read sci-fi for some “serious” reason, that would be interesting to know.)
While I don’t think you need to read it, per se, I have found sci fi to be of remarkable use in preparing me for exactly the kind of mind-changing upon which Less Wrong thrives. The Asimov short stories cited above are good examples.
I also continue to cite Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (there are more after the trilogy, but he openly said that he wrote the later books purely because his publisher requested them) as the most influential fiction works in pushing me into my current career.
Since noone’s mentioned it yet, Rendevous with Rama. You really don’t want to touch the sequels, though.
Agreed on both points.
Oh, definitely 1984 if you’ve never read it. Scary how much predictive power it’s had.
This might not be the best place to ask because so many people here prefer science fiction to regular fiction. I’ve noticed that people who prefer science fiction have a very different idea of what makes good science fiction than people who have no preference or who prefer regular fiction.
Most of what I see in the other comments is on the “prefers science fiction” side, except for things by LeGuin and maybe Dune.
Of course, you might turn out to prefer science fiction and just not have realized it. Then all would be well.
It’s actually very important to ask people for recommendations for books, and especially for sci-fi, since it seems like a large majority of the work out there is well, garbage. Not to be too harsh, as IMO, the same thing could be said for a lot of artistic genres (anime, modern action film, etc, etc.).
For sci-fi, there are some really top notch work out there. But be warned, that in general the rest of the series isn’t as good as the first book. Some classics, all favorites of mine are:
Dune (Frank Herbert)
Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)
Ringworld (first book) (Larry Niven)
Neuromancer (William Gibson) (Warning: last half of the book becomes s.l.o.w. though)
Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)
I haven’t seen much of the Star Wars or Star Trek stuff either, and don’t really consider them science fiction as much as space action movies. That’s not really what we’re talking about.
I would strongly advise you to start with short stories, specifically Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Sheckley, and Philip K. Dick. All those authors are considered giants in the field and have anthologies of collected short stories. Science fiction short stories tend to be easier to read because you don’t get bogged down in detail, and you can get right to the point of exploring the interesting and speculative worlds.
Films:
Blade Runner
Gattaca
2001: A Space Odyssey
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series:
Foundation
Foundation and Empire
Second Foundation
Foundation’s Edge
Foundation and Earth
There are prequels too, but I don’t like ’em.
I recommend anything by Charles Stross, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga (link gives titles and chronology), and anthing by Ursula LeGuin, but especially City of Illusions and The Left Hand of Darkness.
Upvoted for the Vorkosigan suggestion; seconded.
As much as I love LeGuin, her work tends to be fairly challenging. It’s worth noting that her novels tend to be much easier to read than her short stories, unlike most authors.
You find her novels easier? I’ve loved many LeGuin short stories (most notably The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, and everything in the Changing Planes collection) but I can’t stand her novels. They lose me ten pages in; I’ve never managed to slog more than halfway through a single one.
The novels are definitely still challenging, but until I’d read a few of her novels and figured out how to think about her writing, I wasn’t able to make sense of most of her short stories (Omelas being one exception to that). I’d get to the end of the text and go ‘wait, was there supposed to be a story in that set of words?’
Just reading that I am curious what you did end up reading and what you think about it.
My recents were Heinleins: citizen of the galaxy, and the starbeast.
I can see you have already been deluged in recommendations, but here are a few novels I liked, with notes:
Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. One of the better-written books from one of my first favorite authors. Hal Clement is, in my opinion, the definitive writer of hard science fiction, the benchmark to which others should be compared. If possible, get a copy with the essay “Whirligig World” included (the volume Heavy Planet, for example).
Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling. Something of a science-fiction bildungsroman, and some of my favorite writing of all time. It’s surprisingly accurate as futurology, although that’s not a particularly important feature in a novel; more to the point, it’s got wonderful worldbuilding and characterization.
A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. Excellent epic science fiction. I don’t believe it is a classic in the way some others may have suggested, but I do believe it’s a good read.
A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason. An excellent entry in the realm of anthropological science fiction, with beautiful characterization of both the human anthropologists and the population of aliens. (Worth comparing to Sheri S. Tepper, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Joan D. Vinge.)
You already have more than enough, I’ll nevertheless add a few:
Larry Niven’s Ringworld
David Brin’s Uplift books
John Varley’s Titan, Wizard, Demon