I liked Anthony's and Robert E. Margraff's "The Ring". Good hard Science Fiction.
Posted on 08/19/2006 7:09:57 PM PDT by Hacksaw
There have been several science fiction threads floating around in the near past - and I thought it would be good to hash out the books.
Here are my thoughts:
Almost anything by Larry Niven is worth it - especially stuff from the Known Space series. Jerry Pournelle is also good, but under-rated. His Janissaries books were a good read, along with Starswarm.
RAH - most of his books are very enjoyable. His later stuff (which some consider his classics) I didn't like at all, especially that one about a guy getting his brain transplanted in a womans body. I didn't make it 1/3 of the way through before I gave up.
Ben Bova - readable. Not great, but still a page turner.
Star Trek books - unfortuneately, many of these are BORING. Notable exceptions are those written by by Diane Duane or Michael Jan Friedman. JM Dillard also seems good.
Asimov - almost always worth it.
Orson Scott Card - most of the time worth it. The Enders Game series was very good.
Saberhagen - good read. His berserker concept has also been picked up by other authors.
Kim Stanley Robinson - bleech. I kept wishing the characters in his books would get killed. Unfortuneately they were the heroes. Picture a bunch of disciples of Hugo Chavez colonizing Mars and you get the picture.
AC Clarke - very entertaining. Safe bets.
Other thoughts?
I'll have to be on the lookout for "Island in the Sea of Time" then. Thanks.
Mark
"Number of the Beast" was something else! If you don't mind a bit of blasphemy, there's "Job, a Comedy of Justice," and I cried when Dora died in "Time Enough for Love."
Mark
The first page will draw you in.
I know that I've read and loved them, but for the life of me, I can't remember what they were about.
I also really loved Harry Harrison's "Deathworld" and "Stainless Steel Ray" series. They were a lot of fun.
Mark
I owe Harlan a debt of gratitude, for his "Dangerous Visions" anthologies. If not for them, I might never have "discovered" writers like Fritz Leiber, Piers Anthony, and Theodore Sturgeon.
Ellison can be a real ass, and I disagree with him on his politics, but the guy's a top rate writer, and even better editor, and he is the source of one of my very favorite quotes: "You are NOT entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your INFORMED opinion!"
Mark
Wasn't that the "Farfner and the Gray Mouser" series, or something along those lines? Those were teriffic!
Again, those were fantasy
Mark
Those two series, and of course the Pelucidar series are all classics. I dreamed of being magically transplanted to Mars, and meeting my own Deja Thoris.
Mark
It's been a long time, but L. Ron Hubbard's "Mission Earth" series was a very enjoyable read. I averaged one volume a day.
Do finish them. The entire series was very interesting.
I guess you didn't read his early stuff.
I have read everything Heinlein ever published. I started reading Robert Heinlein when I was in 3rd grade... in 1957. I grew up with Robert Heinlen's books and short stories.
Farmer in the Sky was all about people having to farm other planets because of food shortages on earth.
No way!
"Farmer in the Sky" was about a family that chose to emigrate to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, and the adventures and tribulations of a Boy Scout in learning to be a pioneer. It is an optimistic viewpoint of the future. No food was or could be exported back to Earth. The point was to make the colony self sufficient. I first learned the concepts of ecology in "Farmer" when Heinlein expounded on the steps necessary to turn the rocky ground of Ganymede into fertile soil.
I challenge you to find any works of Heinlein in which your statement:
He was one of the few of the "we are all going to starve to death" future history writers who had the honesty to later admit that he had totally missed the boat.
applies at all. You won't. In fact, you reveal that you have not read any of his early works if you think that "we are all going to starve to death" in any way represents his fiction's premises.
You may find some comments about "overpopluation" that are merely "asides" about some societal circumstances that may be pressures on various actors in his books... but the themes of his novels are never pessimistic. The fact is that we will be facing population pressures... but the negative consequences of overpopulation are not the themes of any Heinlen fiction. His works are certainly NOT part of an "everybody dies" genre.
Read "Expanded Universe" (the 1980 version) where he talks about his predictions for the year 2000 and how he hit or missed.
The predictions that Heinlein discusses in "Expanded Universe" did not appear in any of his fiction as you implied. Those predictions were made in an essay Heinlein wrote in 1950 as part of a magazine's look forward to the year 2000... I think it was published in the Saturday Evening Post. He had been asked to write a treatise giving his best guesses on how the world would be in 2000. These are the predictions he is writing about in "Expanded Universe." The predictions were mostly based on his treatises on the future that he had written and in discussions he and fellow S.F. writers had.
Look at the quotations you cited. They are not in the form of prose used in fiction... they are the type of writing you would find in a scholarly essay... which is what they are referring to.
Note also, that Heinlein was also correct on some of the "predictions" and stood by them.
The predictions, the societies, and the events, especially the conclusions in his fiction were almost entirely optimistic.
The fact is that most of his early stuff, especially the novels, were written for either Boys Life Magazine or for publisher John W. Campbell, who did not accept stories with negative viewpoints of the future. Campbell did agree to publish the stories written in which America fell under a religious dictatorship, Heinlein's Future History series... because they ended triumphantly with the dictator falling... but Campbell never OK'ed Heinlein to write story of how the Prophet Nehemiah Scudder (By the Thunder of His Wings) came to power.
The vast majority of Heinlein's work is set in a future far beyond the period in which his concerns of hunger and even fears of being conquered and occupied were set. While some of his fiction is based on the premise that population growth would force extra-terrestrial colonization, it was much more benign than you imply. Overall it was extremely optimistic and always took the position that humanity would find an answer.
The one Heinlein novel that I can think of that actually covers this period before 2000 is "The Door Into Summer". His predictions for the year 2000 are almost universally optimistic except for perhaps his hero Danny's job of crushing "brand new ground cars" as they come off the assembly line; cars made only to provide jobs for people who would otherwise be out of work.
One novel he did write during this "Early work" time (1949) was "Sixth Column" that started out with an America conquered and occupied by an Asian Empire (reflecting his concerns about our ignoring the changes taking place in China) but it even ends with America triumphant.
Another novel that depicts a somewhat distopic future is "I Will Fear No Evil" (1970). Contrary to the opinion written earlier in this thread, "Evil" was published while Heinlein had full editorial control. This book is set in an era in which those who can afford it live in protected enclaves while those who can't are threatened with crimes from an underclass of criminals. It still ends optimistically, even though its protagonist, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, dies from tissue rejection.
L
I didn't find any "gay undertones" in Starship Troopers... it used as its model the military as it existed, especially the Marines, at the time it was written. Unlike the movie, the Mobile Infantry of Starship Troopers was an all male operation. His story line featured the comradery of male soldiers not unlike other military stories of the period. Females were in the military but were likely to be Naval Officers and pilots. Any "gay undertones" are like the "fascist undertones" in Starship Troopers: present only in the minds of liberal, post-modern critics.
Also if you think that Heinlein's obsession with sex was "later" you should read his first novel... the first written in 1939 but the published in 2003... For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs in which the major characters spend much of their time naked. Also read the un-Bowdlerized version of "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961) where sex is much more explicit than in the original edited version.
Heinlein was a member of Naturist societies (Nudist Colonies) for much of his life and at least for the time of his marriage (1932 - 1947) to Leslyn MacDonald, supported "open relationships".
I liked Anthony's and Robert E. Margraff's "The Ring". Good hard Science Fiction.
THANK YOU!
I've been trying to remember for sometime where I read about "pointing to the north".
If it's convenient (and safer) for you to believe that, go right ahead. If you don't think the self-loving descriptions of the hero, the fact that he gets into fistfights within one page every time a woman's sexual desires are mentioned in the book (EVERY time), and that he gets off on watching men whipped are all just part of being soldiers, you need to meet more real soldiers.
Also if you think that Heinlein's obsession with sex was "later" you should read his first novel
Well, it was "later"--his books from the mid-sixties to the end of his life were more sex-obsessed than those published before. The key word being "published"--as you point out, For Us... was not published until much later. So why is it so hard to believe that he had sex on the mind throughout his career, even though it didn't come out till later?
I Like to post my favorites before I read through the thread...just to see how many agree with me. My strong opin ion is thus:
Once you mention RAH, you don't have to go any further. He's the undisputed master in my opinion. Some people don't like all his books, and I can understand that. But once an author produces and undisputed masterpiece, he gets a lifetime pass. At least 2 RAH books rise to that:
Starship Troopers
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Second tier (but still better than almost all the competition):
Farnhams Freehold
Tunnel in the Sky
Citizen of the Galaxy
Time Enough for Love
Stranger in a Strange Land
Glory Road
The list goes on and on. One I don't agree with (as far as it winning the Hugo Award) was Double Star. It was a decent read, but didn't rise to Hugo level IMHO.
Just my $.02
I tend to buy way too many books, if such a thing is possible.
I started the first one and enjoyed it until the page where he examines the cards and we see a description of each one, and got bogged down there. But I've got all five of the original series and will get to them someday.
Spider Robinson's new book has a passage calling the WOT a bunch of hooey.
His characters do go on. I couldn't get through much from Stranger... onward because of all the yapping the characters do.
I've only lately started reading his juveniles, and they're terrifically entertaining. I'd recommend them to a boy before I'd recommend Harry Potter wimpiness. Farmer in the Sky, for example, has the boy hero facing death in the family and such. Orphans in the Sky, too, has some pretty grim stuff. But in the end, Heinlein's stuff was optimistic, just not sappy.
Too bad he started getting verbose later on.
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