What's your favourite science fiction book?

[rh100]

The Bible.
I once found it in the sci-fi section of water stones. good read if you ask me. people walking on water, killing giants and being super strong due to there hair. Awesome!

*runs and hides*

too far fetched for me

This is almost impossible, but here is a Top Twelve (in no particular order, and which could probably change tomorrow - it was a Top Ten but it got bigger...). These are some of my favourites, but I could make an argument for most of them being amongst 'the best' in SF and that many should be seen as great novels full stop.

Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed - political SF at its best and one of the best explorations of anarchism in fiction;
Brian Aldiss - Barefoot in the Head - up there with the best experimental writing of any kind (I am totally serious);
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly - and many others... Dick was a scattershot, crazy genius and this is his darkest book and his masterpiece;
Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light - a beautiful, intellectual novel, featuring space colonists who play out Hindu and Buddhist myths;
John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar - one of the great novels to come out of the first wave of environmentalism of the late 1960s;
William Gibson - Neuromancer - invented cyberspace and reeks of neon, but it was written on a typewriter under the influence of the Velvet Underground - a definitive combination of noir and near-future SF;
Paul J. McAuley - Fairyland - 'bio-cyberpunk' - an increasingly far-out variation on what were by then becoming cyber-cliches;
A.A. Attanasio - Last Legends of Earth - aliens recreate a confused mix of humanity long after we are extinct to form the basis of a cosmic trap. A book which somehow manages to be life-affirming, twee, eon-spanning, baroque, philosophical, lush and all sorts of other things - it stays with you anyway;
Greg Egan - Diaspora - the hardest SF, yet somehow also the most humanist novel of entirely virtual people;
Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt. I could have picked The Mars Trilogy, which may be the best exploration of the alternative responses to the challenges of environmental politics offered by any novelist, but The Years of Rice and Salt is even more challenging - a novel written in a Buddhist-influenced form, but charting an alternative history of a Muslim and Chinese-dominated world, following the destruction of Christian European civilization in the Great Plague of the Middle-Ages - it's more relevant to what's going on today than hundreds of tedious, hand-wringing mainstream novelists;
M. John Harrison - Nova Swing - weird, reality-shifting, post-modern, woozy... watever, M. John Harrison is one of Britain's best writers in any genre;
Ian McDonald - Brasyl - how can you not like a novel with switches between multiple alternative Brazils, any or none of which may some connection to ours, and which ties together colonialism, quantum theory and football?

Anyone who hasn't read any decent science fiction is missing what J.G.Ballard called the 'most authentic literature of the twentieth century' and which continues to be a source of some of the most interesting writing about now.

I read Neuromancer a couple of years back, it was OK but didn't quite do it for me - maybe I should give it another go, I know it's quite respected.

Not read it - or even heard of it - but reminds me of the film Brazil, fantastic.

I'll look out for some of those on the list, look good.

what about HG Wells, Jules Verne? don't see them on any list so far. Maybe im just old.
also read quite a bit of Robert A Heinlein as a boy.

HG Wells War Of The Worlds, a very good book. I grew up with the Jeff Wayne musical version - looking at the artwork that came with it possibly influenced me into SF in the first place. They made a CD box set with all the artwork and extra CD's and a DVD - very nice set.

Philip K Dick, "A Scanner, Darkly".

Dick's dialogue was often clunky...paradoxically its clunkiness gave it a certain veracity. His themes usually revolve in some way around identity, humanity - but what makes his (non-juvenile) stuff special above almost all other SF, why it transcends any boundary, is that the people and the society he depicts, in whatever book or story, are so rich. Bits creep into most of his best novels that would probably be called "magical realism" if written by some South American author - but somehow that's not the right expression for it. There are always conceptual flipflops that somehow haunt you, too - like when the main character in A Scanner, a deep-undercover narcotics cop, is said to be "posing as a narc."

Apparently someone asked Dick whether he was a character in this novel, (ostensibly it's about Californian drug culture/law enforcement of the near future, it's dedicated to friends & acquaintances that died in various ways from drug addiction) and he said, "No - I am the novel."

His fiction has off-the-wall concepts sometimes, but it usually has very prosaic, suburban-like settings, and people with prosaic (at least to them) nonentity lives, so it connects very directly. (Like the neighbour woman in "a Scanner" who calls the main characters to get rid of a big beetle in her house. When they scoop it up and put it out, she says "Well, if I knew it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!")

Funnily enough, his "scramble suit" in the novel, which I think the predator's clothing in the Predator movies was based on - the US military are very close now to developing a working one.

QUite a few films of his stuff have been made, but unfortunately, they often murder the very essence of his stories - Blade Runner (not too bad) Minority Report, Total Recall etc.

I had read every science fiction book in my local library by the time I was about 13, and there are loads written since that I love. China Meiville's "Perdido Street Station" is one of the more recent ones that stands out. (I can't be arsed with the finer-and-finer slicing of SF into sub-sub genres by critics and booksellers: who cares if it's labelled "fantasy" or "steampunk" or whatever.)

I've refrained from mentioning Fantasy books so far - but they are very closely related to SF in my opinion. A whole other thread perhaps.

Scanner Darkly, not read it but the film is very enjoyable - I highly recommend it. There are a lot of his books made into films - my favourite is probably Blade Runner, both versions.

Has anyone read Olaf Stapleton? I have a couple on the shelf the OH bought me, but not read them yet.

 

[WeeE]

Joanna Russ and James Tiptree jr deserve a mention - for jointly being the first people to write aliens into their stories that aren't surburban Americans in disguise - aliens that have different mores, different thinking.

Tiptree (I'm so proud I thought "he" was a great SF writer before he was discovered to be a she) - Tiptree wrote one of the seminal short stories of the English language, something that didn't just transcend the genre but had a huge impact, ripples out in the real world. It had a very, very simple plot turn - you couldn't even describe it as a twist - that was downright revolutionary, flabbergasting at the time, when I was a teenager - yet I doubt the teenage members of my family would even see what it was getting at - things have changed so much, and that story was itself part of what made the change possible.

So - nomination for best SF short story; The Women Men Don't See.

 

[Beardie]

Try "Computer One" by Warwick Collins. Scary. Never let a computer be in charge of its own off-switch.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Joanna Russ and James Tiptree jr deserve a mention - for jointly being the first people to write aliens into their stories that aren't surburban Americans in disguise - aliens that have different mores, different thinking.

Alice Sheldon, I will agree on, but Russ? A bit ho-hum. Liked by the critics but that's largely because of what she represents, I reckon. And neither were certainly not the first to have the idea that aliens might be err... alien. How about Stanislav Lem? And there are plenty of SF stories from the 40s onwards of humans failing to recognise aliens because they are looking for human-like beings.

I totally agree with you on A Scanner Darkly and about his dialogue. His dialogue seems odd, I think, because it is actually closer to the stumbling efforts of inarticulate ordinary people to articulate things that are often beyond them (truth, alienation, the divine etc.).

Olaf Stapleton, to answer someone else's question, is very hard work. His books lack any small-scale warmth and humanity. It's all species-level politics and therefore rather dry. Pioneering, of course, but there's not much to hold on to, emotionally, in his work.

 

[TheDoctor]

'The Chrysalids' and 'Midwich Cuckoos' by John Wyndham are very good.
Peter F Hamilton's Greg Mandel trilogy - they manage to be good SF and good whodunnits, which is a very difficult trick to pull off.
I also like Larry Niven in general, and Heinlein (except for Stranger in a Strange Land, which I could never get into).

 

[661-Pete]

SF .... so many to choose from, I cannot begin to think which one ought to be my favourite ... there are quite a few that I'll tend to pick back off the shelf and re-read from time to time.

Anyone come across Nightwings by Robert Silverberg? Started life as a short story covering just the first part, then expanded by the author into a full-length novel. Delightful piece of 'soft' SF set in a future Earth, somthing of the dystopia about it, but then there's so often only a fine distinction between SF and dystopia. Ending's weak though in my opinion, a bit too much dea ex machina. So difficult to have a really good ending to SF (Childhood's End is probably the best).

Brings to my mind another short story that was re-worked into a full-length novel. A World Out of Time, Larry Niven. More of the 'hard' SF genre, this one, a good read but once again I find the ending a bit disappointing.

 

[byegad]

If I'm allowed a trilogy of more than three books.

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov.

His follow up books were a product of a lifetime's writing and brought together so many themes from his other works it was a joy to read.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

[reply to The Doctor]

Short-stories into novels (often called 'fix-ups' in the trade) are a strange beast. They very rarely work as well as the original stories. Nightwings is one of the better ones IMHO. The worst example may be Bob Shaw, who turned his beautiful, poetic 'slow glass' short-stories into a lumpen, cliche-ridden, misogynistic 'novel' called Other Days, Other Eyes. That said, Diaspora, which I mentioned above, contains a chapter that was originally a stand-alone short-story, but the difference is that I think it was always intended to be part of a novel. Short-stories remain the foundation and lifeblood of SF...

 

[661-Pete]

'The Chrysalids' and 'Midwich Cuckoos' by John Wyndham are very good.

I certainly had a good read of both of those!

Once again the ending of Chrysalids is dreadful! [spoiler alert]To have our intrepid heroes helicoptered out of a bows-and-arrows-on-horseback battle - well it's beyond belief that an author as imaginative as Wyndham couldn't have come up with something better - and I understand he was often challenged about it. But to read Chrysalids up to, but excluding the final chapter, is a stonkingly good bildungsroman sort-of read!

I think Midwich Cuckoos is not bad but falls a bit short of this. The first movie they made of it was OK, but not the second... The main argument I have against the book is poor first-person narrative (the protagonist isn't there for many scenes he describes, and he has virtually no role in the latter half of the book).

 

[Flying_Monkey]

I think I've said it before here but I find the dialogue and writing style in Wyndham's books so clunky and so immovable from mid-century middle-class England that I find it hard to enjoy them. This may be my problem.

 

[Corvette chic]

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

 

[rich p]

I think I've said it before here but I find the dialogue and writing style in Wyndham's books so clunky and so immovable from mid-century middle-class England that I find it hard to enjoy them. This may be my problem.

How very humble of you

I read one once about a soldier in an intergalactic war where the plot involved time travel and going back to where the war started after it finished or something. Entertaining tripe and tosh, like most SF in my humble bla bla bla....

 

[661-Pete]

I think I've said it before here but I find the dialogue and writing style in Wyndham's books so clunky and so immovable from mid-century middle-class England that I find it hard to enjoy them. This may be my problem.

Not 'your problem'! I couldn't agree more, that's why I mark down The Midwich Cuckoos, although the plot idea in it is excellent. But I quite like the character Zellaby, exactly epitomises the absent-minded liberal academic of the 1950s, all right maybe a bit stereotyped, but I think Wyndham's setting of him against the (frankly, awful) other characters in the book comes off reasonably well.

I find the ending in the written version of the book, quite disturbing. The ending of the 1960 movie (Village of the Damned), even more so. I don't remember how the American re-make ends, don't think I've ever sat through it to the end...

John Wyndham, however, doesn't set all his novels in middle-class England, though. One of the great features of his most famous work, Day of the Triffids, is how, with such consummate ease, he destroys his middle-class England with the stroke of a pen (well the flash of a meteor actually...).

 

[Fnaar]

I've never really got SF (just as I never got fantasy stuff, like LOTR or the Hobbit ), but if Day of the Triffids counts as SF, that's fab!

 

[WeeE]

Alice Sheldon, I will agree on, but Russ? A bit ho-hum. Liked by the critics but that's largely because of what she represents, I reckon. And neither were certainly not the first to have the idea that aliens might be err... alien. How about Stanislav Lem? .

I suppose I should've said Russ's humans aren't middle-American lads in disguise. Yes, some of it was ho-hum, but because it was replying to/based on/poking fun at much of the middle-American-laddish ho-humness that passed for sf up till them.

And some of it just broke moulds that people were still trying to cast. Like - her female societies that were not utopias and not man-hating dystopias either, but accidental, complex, with inherent features that really made you think. Mainly, with Le Guin, what was electrifying about these authors was simply the fact that they were actually writing women as main characters and point-of-view characters. (Hard to imagine now how amazing that was. It was so extraordinary that Heinlein (I think it was) in an intro to Tiptree/Sheldon, went out of his way to compliment the "masculinity" of "his" work (still thinking Tiptree was a man) - this was basically to assure himself and everyone else that it was OK to put females at the centre of your story, it didn't make you a pathetic wuss and threaten the basis of Science Fiction. Which it did, actually - hooray! Think back - how dull Alien would have been - for men and for women - if Ripley had been the standard male space-opera hero.

Stanislaw Lem - I'm guessing that like me, you made your way through all of those yellow Gollancz books in the library? I had weird dreams for weeks after reading Cyberiad. I think it did something long-lasting to the brain cells.