THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => ENJOY => Topic started by: Is it cold in here? on 26 Aug 2015, 22:28
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"The City and the Stars", by Arthur Clarke.
It's a shining example of sense of wonder and human insight, and I read it at a tender age.
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Science fiction has been the mainstay of my reading throughout my life, and many ideas that have helped form my thinking have come from such books. I started with the classics of Jules Verne and HG Wells and continued by devouring Asimov, Clarke and their peers at university in the 1960s. It's hard to pick just one; and the one I pick (which is slightly more recent again) I read less now, both because I know it too well, and because it's done its job: John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider.
Snapping at the heels of that is an earlier classic with the awesome aim of displaying in one sweep a history of humanity until its extinction, demonstrating how there could be a "human spirit" that survives as a thread through evolutionary and engineered changes to the species. It was written in the 1930s, but even the fact that it starts by getting the history of the next ten years wrong does not diminish it: Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men.
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I couldn't possibly say off the top of my head.
But I think the most influential on me, would probably be Guns Of Tanith by Dan Abnett.
I read a lot when I was a child, but I think that was what started me on my actual road to becoming a fan of Sci-Fi, and led to me still freelancing book reviews to this day.
It's in the Gaunt's Ghosts series, it's actually the fifth one, from Games Workshop. I still read White Dwarf at the time and read a gripping passage of it they printed there, and went and bought the book.
It's got brutal violence, good one-liners, a murder mystery, political intrigue, espionage, I still consider it the best book in the whole series frankly.
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Pattern Recognition - William Gibson
A difficult choice above others but it wins by an edge. There's a lot of fantastic storytelling in SF, a lot of it through the art of constructing an alternate universe with different rules and systems. However, writing SF in the current universe and in a contemporary period was something that I found just beautifully astounding. It's a great, rarely tapped resource for SF and I hope to see more of it.
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Dune. The original 6 novels, obviously. Can't explain it. These are novels which have gripped me since age ... 12, or something, and I re-read bits every year. I guess Herbert wrote some truthful novels about politics and economics. but then with lasers and sandworms.
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Dwellers In The Crucible by Margaret Wander Bonnano
One of the best Trek novels I've ever read and has one of the most interesting, and very mature storylines for Trek.