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What are some of your favorite Science Fiction
#11
Hmm, let's see...

Books:
Poul Anderson: one of the old masters, and among other things a master worldbuilder. He remained active and current to the end of his career, too. His Boat of a Million Years for instance is not only a fine historical fiction but as good a piece as I've seen about what happens when a few old-style humans, however talented and experienced, live on into a culture that is increasingly post-scarcity and post-human.
Piers Anthony: his trilogy beginning with Omnivore, which I thought was highly original, though not more recent work
A.A. Attanasio: for his loosely related tetralogy of books beginning with Radix. Attanasio does more speculative science, but he does a nice turn of phrase and he manages epic sweep in his stories.
Gregory Benford: for Across the Sea of Suns and related books, and his short fiction best exemplified in In Alien Flesh, as well as for Timescape. Occasionally manages to evoke the alien-ness of the universe in a way other authors do not.
David Brin: the earlier parts of his Uplift universe (prime space opera) and some of his short stories are good too.
James Blish: for me A Case of Conscience stands out and is more interesting than some of his better-known works .
David. R. Bunch: if you can find any of his short stories set in Moderan (there's a book of them under that name) you'll be well rewarded, and may never look at borging or uploading and the motivations behind them in quite the same way again.
John Crowley: Engine Summer and Beasts are both books I'd recommend, though I think his best work has been in fantasy.
C.J. Cherryh: the Faded Sun and the Pride of Chanur series are both swashbuckling space-opera fun. Not deep at all, but fun.
Philip K. Dick: brought to science fiction that question about the difference between what the imagined world and the truth that might or might not be underneath it, especially in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and in The Man in the High Castle. Anybody who's read some of Dick's better work is likely to think again about virch worlds.
Julian May: Her Pliocene Exile books are psionic space opera done up just about as well as that can be done; you can almost hear the opera music.
Walter M. Miller: A Canticle for Liebowitz is one of the more thoughtful and subtly (and painfully) comical takes on the post-bomb trope.
Ursula LeGuin: for me her fantasy has made bigger mark than her science fiction, but LeGuin's science fiction work is solid too. She brings a more thoughtfully humane and personal touch to science fiction that is often lacking in the field.
Stanislaw Lem: The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress, to name just two, are hugely entertaining. Some of his other work is fascinating for the ideas but suffers from poor translation, but Michael Kandel's translation of The Cyberiad is a masterwork in itself. As for Solaris, it has much to say about our confrontation with the universe and ourselves.
C.S. Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet contains one of the more evocative early descriptions of what it means to land on an alien world, and also (very, very far ahead of its time) is an antidote to the 'humans uber alles' that pervades much of science fiction.
Larry Niven: I enjoyed the aliens in his Known Space stories when I was in my teens, and remember it fondly though I don't often return to Niven's stories now.
Kim Stanley Robinson: Robinson's Mars Trilogy contains a powerful sense of landscape as applied to a world that is not Earth, and manages to mix the mythic and the personal.
Cordwainer Smith: if you want to get a good sense of what might happen for OA's provolves and splices, then read some of his work.
John Sladek: satiric science fiction with a very different slant on things; read Tik-Tok for a robot who breaks the Asimovian laws, or Mechasm for the downside of self-replicating machines. Recently I got hold of his two 'Roderick' novels, bound together as The Complete Roderick, about an AI growing up in human society and trying to adapt to it. Painfully funny...
Charles Stross: some of his capers and caprices are amusing
Jack Vance: Vance's stories an acquired taste, but I have acquired it. His adventure novels/series are in one sense all the same story, told in different settings, but told in an entertaining way. Some of his short stories, though, are extraordinarily thoughtful and entertaining. Ullward's Retreat for instance says a great deal about what it means to own something.
Vernor Vinge: I very much enjoyed Fire on the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
Connie Willis: one of the newer writers who brings sense of humour and humanity to science fiction
Gene Wolfe: to my take on it, one of the great masters of the genre. I particularly recommend the tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, or the series of three novellas titled The Fifth Head of Cerberus, but some of his short stories are very fine too. Of these I especially recommend his collection The Death of Doctor Island and Other Stories and Other Stories (no, that's not a typo).

Some favourite authors from my childhood to early-teen years that I remember fondly are Andre Norton, Zenna Henderson, and John Christopher.

If I had to name just one science fiction author, just one, it would be Gene Wolfe, for style and depth. And, for that matter, if you are an old fashioned idea-as-hero science-fiction fan, for the ideas. Some of Wolfe's work has ideas that would have been the basis of a long (perhaps tedious) novel in another author's hands but are casually tossed off in a brief description or short conversation, to be followed by a half dozen more just within the same chapter.

Movies
2001 had its moments. Men in Black was fun. Star Wars entranced me when it first came out for a rather odd reason: it was the first science fiction movie I'd seen that had beat up worn out tech. When I saw that, I was in, aside from the standard fantasy story plot which is good fun all on its own. Blade Runner, of course. Alien was good in its way but I never have cared much for horror stories, even if they are science fiction. Speaking of horrific, Brazil is a well done dystopia. I won't watch it again, but I am glad I watched it once.

TV
I enjoyed the original Star Trek as a boy (when I was young enough to have heroes, Spock was one of my heroes), and parts of its follow-on series were occasionally good. Sometimes the original series and its successors were unintentionally funny, too, though. Doctor Who is fun in places.

Comics/Webcomics/Graphic Novels
For webcomics, I regularly visit
http://www.schlockmercenary.com/
and
http://xkcd.com
and
http://freefall.purrsia.com
I enjoy the occasional graphic novel, but I can't recall any that were science fiction.

Could say more, but perhaps I've gone on too long already...
Stephen
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#12
Aside from many that have already been mentioned I'll just list a few from grade school through college that I remember fondly. And there are some whose titles I, unfortunately, cannot remember.

Stranger From the Depths by Gerry Turner - I ordered that from the Scholastic Book Club sometime in grade school. I also purchased story collections of both Lovecraft and A.E. Van Vogt from Scholastic.

In my grandparents' house were found a few volumes of Tom Swift, Jr. belonging to my uncles. (They also had some New Wave stuff like The Fall of Chronopolis and Joanna Russ' Picnic On Paradise but I honestly don't remember all that much about those.)

The Junior High library contained Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky. His The Star Beast was also read.

Across a Billion Years by Robert Silverberg - My high school library had that. My first encounter with a Dyson Sphere. Sturgeon's The Cosmic Rape was also there as well as some others with forgotten titles. It also had The Satanic Mill - but that's not science fiction. :-)

Somewhere around high school to college I read the Foundation series and in college, for a English course in Science Fiction no less, I read The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volumes I, and II. That was well worth the investment!
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#13
This thread is so useful to create a reading list from Smile I have a long haul flight next week, definitely going to be dipping in here to top up my kindle. A long those lines perhaps we should sticky this thread?

In either case two more additions:

Transmetropolitan - a cyberpunk graphic novel with a lot of transhumanist tropes and dark humour. Concerns a writer/journalist who is called back into "the City" after living as a hermit in the hills. First volume deals with corruption, rise of cults and conflict between ordinary citizens and those trying to change their species with technology.

Ancillary Justice - only half way through this one but it's an excellent story about an ex-warship, now in human form, looking for revenge. It's quite a deep book, despite focusing on the military of an imperialist empire there's little fighting. When there is the story focuses on the emotional fallout, the nature of military obedience and complicity in atrocity. There aren't many ideas that haven't been seen before but they are extremely well executed. Two big examples: the warship main character inhabits not only the ship but also scores of bodies. The writing style effortlessly deals with different bodies having different conversations in different places in a way that's easy to follow. Another aspect of this universe is that the main empire has no real concept of gender, as the story is written in a language that does have one the main character refers to everyone as "she" even if they are male.
OA Wish list:
  1. DNI
  2. Internal medical system
  3. A dormbot, because domestic chores suck!
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#14
Authors:

H.G. Wells
Carl Sagan
Douglas Adams
Jules Verne
Claire Bampton
Mary Shelley
Robert Jordan
C.S. Lewis
Brian Jacques
Isaac Asimov
Harry Bates
Stan Lee

Movies:

Men in Black
AvP
Hitchhikers Ride to the galaxy

TV:

Doctor Who
Babylon 5

Video Games:

Universe Sandbox
The Talos Principle
MGR: Revengeance
FF 10, 10-2
FF 12
FF 13, 13-2, 13-3/LR
Eve Dust 514
Doom 1, 2
[Image: HoGW5uz.gif]
Ghost Net
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#15
Just to add to the reading list

The expanse series by by James S. A. Corey, the pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck
-cold war between earth & mars with the astroid belters caught between. Good gritty near future SF (it's also a TV show on sci fi now). Really good moral struggles from the characters. Also, there's an entire short scene about just turning an ice hauler ship around in a 'flip and burn' maneuver. It really made me feel how hard space travel could still be.
http://www.businessinsider.com/sci-fi-sh...lem-2016-1

Dawn by Octavia Butler-
In Dawn, protagonist Lilith Iyapo finds herself in a spaceship after surviving a nuclear apocalypse that destroys Earth. Saved by the Oankali aliens, the human survivors must combine their DNA with an ooloi, the Oankali's third sex, in order to create a new race that eliminates a self-destructive flaw in humans—their aggressive hierarchical tendencies.

Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross- it's a decent treasure hunt story- I read it mostly for its description of interstellar trade and banking.

Windup Girl by Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
-really good ecological science fiction set in 2500AD thailand

The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin
-This chinese author's recently got translated into english- not hard sci fi by any means, but wow. such a mishmash of ideas..virtual reality games to solve communication problems with a new alien race.. the three body physics problem..

Story of your life by Ted Chiang.
Just read anything by him. His stories are so well constructed and inventive.

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald- five powerful family-run companies fight for power on the harsh environment of the moon

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson- It's a slow sort of book about a landscape designer and a diplomat wandering around the mostly post-capitalist solar system. I read it more for the setting and the way KSR writes info-dumps than anything else

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, as Rynn says. Really good.

Some of these songs- reminded me of how science fiction stories could be translated into music
http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-top-100-scien...1650307105
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#16
No one seems to have mentioned Frank Herbert's Dune series yet, so I guess I'll do it  Smile

Also, Edgar Rice Burroughs for shear adventure.
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#17
Some of mine, in no particular order:

BOOKS
The Years of Rice and Salt , Kim Stanley Robinson
Alternities, Michael P. Kube-McDowell
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
Door Into Summer, Robert A. Heinlein
Friday, Robert A. Heinlein
Stranger In A Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
Pavane, Keith Laumer
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
Rendezvous With Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Proteus Operation, James P. Hogan
The Probability Broach, L. Neil Smith
1984, George Orwell
For Want of a Nail, Robert Sobel
Evolution, Stephen Baxter
The Shockwave Rider, John Brunner
Timescape, Gregory Benford
A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter Miller
The Crucible of Time, John Brunner

FILMS
Metropolis (1927)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
The Andromeda Strain (1971)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Solaris (1972)
Silent Running (1972)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Star Wars, Episodes I-VI (1977-2005)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Alien (1979)
The Lathe of Heaven (1980)
Blade Runner (1982 theatrical release)
The Thing (1982)
Star Trek (even-numbered releases, 1982-1991)
The Terminator (1984)
Dune (1984)
The Handmaid's Tale (1990)
Stargate (1994)
Contact (1997)
Sphere (1998)
eXistenZ, (1999)
The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
The Matrix (1999)
Primer (2004)
District 9 (2009)
Avatar (2009)
Inception (2010)
In Time (2011)
Cloud Atlas (2012)
Lucy (2014)
Interstellar (2014)
Arrival (2016)
Passengers (2016)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)

Radtech497
"I'd much rather see you on my side, than scattered into... atoms." Ming the Merciless, Ruler of the Universe
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#18
A few great sci-fi movies I haven't seen mentioned yet:
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - 1954
Dark City
The Fly - 1986
Metropolis - 2001
Minority Report
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