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When life turns into investments and kids and responsibility and 'where are you at today?' constantly.. You meet death first-hand and and realize 'this is it' when realities become the norm.. There is still sci-fi, something to be excited about, a world or place or idea that is apart from this muck. Thanks Sci-Fi Thread!
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Nov 2, 2013 16:21
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 05:54 |
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How about the classic when you're down here, you'll float too? Totally wrong thread.. but as for monsters in the dark it's about as classic as it gets.
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Nov 5, 2013 10:53
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Geez man, what do you think the post above yours is alluding to?  Just reading the plot synopsis of IT on Wikipedia.. reminding myself.. The Losers then gradually realize that they are lost in the sewers, and that with their common enemy having fled they have lost their purpose as a group, and begin to succumb to panic. In order to stop the group from panicking, Beverly has sexual intercourse with each of the boys. The gang finally escape from the sewers, emerging at sunset. Perhaps don't read this book. I'd forgotten how.. ugh Stephen King it is. edit: ha then again, it is a classic horror / small group confrontation with evil story. Dean Koontz is the same stuff, yeah yeah I know he's a hack and I read him as a teenager, but bugger me if they're not exciting when you don't know any better! edit2: That big pic in the OP of NPR's classics.. that is absolutely magic. I have an Amazon order of a couple of hundred bucks worth coming.. thanks thread! Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 11:51 on Nov 5, 2013 |
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Nov 5, 2013 11:37
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Ok sci-fi thread, I really love me some Robert A. Heinlein. I've read Starship Troopers before, but it's on my Amazon order because I want to read it again. Read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel recently, heh that was fun Have Stranger in a Strange Land in the order too, never seen it but apparently it's really good.Anything else I need to cover off his best stuff? He wrote so much so I know there is plenty more I can read. I'll add The The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as well, people generally speak well of it.
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Nov 5, 2013 22:55
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tonytheshoes posted:were all straight up like Paula Abdul Is this serious? What does that even mean? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xweiQukBM_k
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Nov 6, 2013 16:49
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The best Heinlein novel that nobody has read is Citizen of the Galaxy.The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is his best work overall. Stranger in a Strange Land is his best weird novel. Oh, I'm no Heinlein newbie, that's where the love comes from I'm just a stranger in a strange land myself right now (ha!) and I'm ordering a pile from Amazon and want to flesh out that part of my personal library. I know he gets weird, but I like the weird. I read Starship Troopers something like 10 years ago and what I remember is pod-soliders and loving power-armor that once you've read that you forever look at the Paul Verhoeven movie with scorn.. but then long sections of politics and talk of society and some of that really deep, thinky sci-fi that you're pondering long after you've put the book down for that day.So Troopers is on the list and I'm going to do that thing where you go back to something you remember as awesome and see if it's still awesome (don't disappoint me, you bastard  ). The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is on the list because I never even knew about it and everyone says to read it.Now is Citizen of the Galaxy like Have Spacesuit, Will Travel? That was fun and all, but I'm looking for something a bit thicker and deeper. As for the short story collection, this is for everyone else here too, rather than just Heinlein isn't there a collection published by the Hugo Awards or something.. a famous one that if I perhaps get a back copy of I can get a whole stack of great sci-fi shorts in there? Can anyone recommend the name of the collection, a particular issue.. or know what I'm babbling about?
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Nov 6, 2013 18:32
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:The collection you want is http://www.amazon.com/Science-Fiction-Hall-Fame-Vol/dp/0765305372 There was a volume 2A and 2B also and they're also worth getting. Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein. One book. $15 bucks. gently caress YEAH.  coyo7e posted:This is my personal favorite Heinlein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Past_Through_Tomorrow I still get choked up when I re-read The Man Who Sold the Moon and get to Delos' trip. Creating an entire industry that changed the world just to get to visit the moon, and then nobody ever lets you go! :baw: Oh right, this is that collection of his shorts I think someone else mentioned. Holy smokes, it's worth a lot of money on Amazon, I'm guessing it's thick. I think I've got enough for my current order and that one can wait for the library edit: Totale provvisorio= EUR 165,66. What? So I'm in Italy and my Italian sucks and I'm getting bored, gently caress this stupid TV.. bring me space mens! Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Nov 6, 2013 |
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Nov 6, 2013 21:11
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mllaneza posted:It also has Stanley G Weinbaum and Cordwainer Smith. Both of those authors are vastly underappreciated and should be read by many more people. Weinbaum was one of the very best of the "planetary fiction" pulp writers, he did great things with classic pulp versions of Mars, Venus, Ganymede and other places. Unscientific but fantastic in both senses. Smith built a far future and wrote about the Rediscovery of Man and what it really meant to be human. He's a gourmet prose writer in a largely fast food field. 15 bucks Spent nearly that to read these drat forums!
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Nov 7, 2013 09:16
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CowboyKid posted:Jesus, I hope you aren't this insufferable in person. Sorry if my zest for life makes you uneasy. You can go back to your own existence now.
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Nov 7, 2013 17:01
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Stuporstar posted:I have yet to check out Ian Banks. He seems like one of those authors I'd want to make a project out of reading. Right now I'm doing that with Margaret Atwood, so Banks will have to wait his turn. I've got Use of Weapons coming in my megaorder, apparently a good place to start.
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Nov 11, 2013 00:13
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Has anyone read about Bolo, the super tanks originally created by Keith Laumer? There are some original books (Bolo: Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade '76 - The Compleat Bolo '90) and I've run into this concept a number of times and thought how cool it sounded. If anyone has some experience with them and can tell my their thoughts on these books and this writer, the later writers as well if you know them.. that was would be great.
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Jan 12, 2014 20:37
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gatz posted:I forgot to mention that Brave New World is essentially just one big criticism of 20th century capitalism and the states that support it. As a side note, I've never seen a single reference to that book on SA (the let's play forum in particular) that takes this into account. "oh, brave new world has automation? Well this Ron hack of final fantasy 6 has automation!" "oh, we're going to a new planet in this star wars game, let's reference brave new world!" I think most people who do that kind of name-dropping either haven't read the book or just don't understand it. The latter being hard to do since Huxley wrote a great forward to the 1946 edition of the book (reprinted in every edition since, AFAIK) that flat out tells the reader what the point of the novel was. I'm reading it right now and it's pretty mind blowing. The children loving each other in the bushes pre-pubecence is so shocking it's a bit hard to comprehend. I wouldn't be looking for insight into scifi or anything really from the video game crowd. Some people that play games also have interests beyond that, but I wouldn't count on it. I'd more count on getting frustrated by barking up the wrong tree.
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Jan 19, 2014 17:56
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Farscape is a weird as poo poo TV show with an actually living ship, as in it's a big whale thing they get in and it flies them around. But Bank's AI is more what I think of with 'living ship', as in it's intelligent and talks to you easily and is more of a comrade and friend than a tool you use to get around. You can have an organic ship that is a lump of meat with various ways to control it, but just the way the Xenophobe acts in Use of Weapons was easily one of the highlights of that book to me. It keeps a human crew because it thinks they're fun. It likes throwing parties for them and generally hanging out, while at the same time assures one of the main characters that despite it's seemingly laid back attitude.. if poo poo gets nasty it will respond with all the might and terror of a Culture attack ship (it says it in a much cooler way than that too).
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Jan 24, 2014 21:36
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The orgies on the Xeno are apparently quite epic and the ship probably joins in. Haha, what a mindfuck.
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Jan 25, 2014 00:28
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Hey, the last post reminded me, who here has read Contact by Carl Sagan? I think it's just a loving great story and the movie with Jodie Foster is less complex, but it's still really awesome and compliments the book well.
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Jan 29, 2014 23:21
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systran posted:I love the novel, and the ending is excellent. Yep. Lots of it is excellent. They don't have the time to do it in the movie, but the way the message is layered and they only work it out after a significant period of time.. and then the next layer.. and it's.. no wait.. a blueprint? Some kind of machine? You have the whole religious thing happening just as you would think it would, and the actual manifestation of the eventual contact is just really well done. Just one of those out there that if you don't know about, pick it up and read it. It's not cumbersome and long, it's exciting and moves quickly.
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Jan 29, 2014 23:54
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There you go scifi thread, you may have read the genre writers and know all about Asimov or Banks.. but if you've never read the scifi novel from a very real space scientist with a writer's streak (Pale Blue Dot), you really should. The plot is simple, or starts that way. What if SETI found something? Now? What if they were listening as they are, and they picked up a signal. Now, they actually have picked up weird things (the Wow signal), but this time.. when they turn the dishes back to where it was.. it's still there. What happens next? How does humanity react? Contact - Carl Sagan. edit: don't read the plot summary on the wiki page, you'll ruin it if you're going to read it. You should, the reveals are fantastic. Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Jan 30, 2014 |
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Jan 30, 2014 00:54
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Solaris is a great suggestion, I'm a big fan of the Clooney movie too. I found the original book and the Russian classic movie a bit much, but just like Contact or Bladerunner, Solaris has a movie adaption that is good in it's own right and after you've read the text you get to see someone's visual interpretation of it. I liked your question, here is a thread I found: http://nanowrimo.org/forums/science-fiction/threads/146752 Check out the book Blindsight by Peter Watts. The aliens in that are kind of a hivemind, but they're spider-like and they're only visible when moving - except they only move between 'frames' that your eyes take. It's creepy stuff. what the gently caress
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Jan 30, 2014 22:22
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Fried Chicken posted:What the gently caress is right, that is a gross misrepresentation of what they are. I had no idea, I've not read it. I'm interested now though, can you give a non-spoiler, brief description of this race? Cardiovorax posted:On the other hand, there's Stanislaw Lem's Solaris on the far upper end of the scale. Humanity attempts interaction with an ecosystem-sized alien organism, but because it's so alien no communication can be established and the story basically resolves nothing in the end. Well exactly, it's almost like in Trek you think 'ugh, they are all humanoids with bumps and talk English.. how lame and samey' but the reality is that means you can have a stack of plots and ideas and just jump straight into them, otherwise every episode would have be prefaced with 'then we took 3 years learning how to communicate and how to support their life so we could interact'. Solaris ends up very much being staring into the abyss and the abyss staring back to you and.. that's it. If you want to get all realistic, the alien is really alien and there is no understanding, certainly not in the short-term and quite probably not in the long-term either. Just think even just between different tribes of humans the problems we have, you're taking it to literally incomprehensible levels of difference. edit: this is also why Solaris is so good, and I like the Clooney movie. The soundtrack is amazing and the visuals as well.. you get this incredible sense of loneliness and isolation. There is no victorious moment of recognition. There is no communications break-through. Just the endless silence and loneliness of space and the living ocean below.. Kalenn Istarion posted:I personally always thought the robots in Asimov's Robot series (and some of the Foundation books) had an interesting inhuman feel to them. Mm, yes. Two robots endless debating till the end of time gets pretty inhuman. Tony Montana fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jan 31, 2014 |
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Jan 31, 2014 00:50
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Neurosis posted:People on this site in particular are very quick to assert an author's views make him or her unreadable. The changes to the moderation lately are diminishing that, but Jesus it often seems people are worried about thinking incorrectly. General Battuta particularity, you know what I ran into with Starship Troopers. People just couldn't get past the fact that a ruling military class was a dictatorship and that's undemocratic and not fair to our current ideals. The point was it worked and the ruling class doing their job as it should be done, but people just couldn't make the leap that this was a future society where corruption wasn't an issue. Hive mind has always been a hallmark of SA though, just because any other kind of moderation and you end up with 4chan.
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Feb 19, 2014 23:20
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General Battuta posted:I don't know if you're trying to call me out or just summoning past shared experience, but I think there's genuine grounds to criticize Starship Troopers for its politics. The fact that a work depicts an internally functional society doesn't immunize it from criticism. Just shared past experience, mate, I just thought it was a good example. Just one where applying today's logic to their ways of doing things is not acknowledging the fact we're talking about a different society of different people with different influences. It's fiction after all. It's like trying to explain why the Enterprise can't really do warp.
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Feb 19, 2014 23:35
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That was one of the greatest things I've read in a while.
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Feb 20, 2014 14:35
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Slo-Tek posted:The only one I can think of who gets regularly, and I think unjustly, poo poo on is Robert Heinlein. People read a bit of Starship Troopers, and decide he is a fascist dickhole. Or Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and decide he was a libertarian kook, or Stranger, and decide he was a proto-hippy. That he could write plausibly on all of those different ideas on society I think speaks well of him, and it is possible that he'd be ok living in any of those constructed societies, but dude had several, rather than the same one again and again. His own personal work with the socialist End Poverty in California program doesn't reflect any of his big three 'political' books. Some of his writing definitely reflects a somewhat 40's and 50's dirty old man view of the world, but some of it also attempted to explore very different from 40's and 50's ideas on sex and sexuality (also dirty). Thank Christ. No surprise this comes from one of the forum's older members. INTERNET CLARIFICATION: I am also older and think exactly as you do
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Feb 21, 2014 12:52
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Let me tell you which books you can read because of this moral structure I have in my head which is RIGHT because I'M RIGHT
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Feb 21, 2014 13:28
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General Battuta posted:Asimov's biggest claim to creepiness was probably his behavior at cons - he was a terror. Do you have any stories?
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Feb 21, 2014 15:45
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systran posted:It's just starting to feel like a lot of people in here really like dumping on certain authors for being bad people over talking about scifi/fantasy novels. It happens all over the forums, the thread will be quiet for ages about it's actual long-term topic and someone will say something lovely or controversial and suddenly the thread is flooded with all these people just wanting to be part of the pile on. They're not interested in the topic at all, just the drama. The Power of the Internet. Or as SA has been saying for ever.. Serious Business.
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Feb 21, 2014 21:36
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But you know you're in the minority and most people are just there for the gang-bash
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Feb 21, 2014 22:03
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 05:54 |
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Got an Asimov stories? Yeah, I guess this is why I enjoy my scifi alone or with select friends. Going to a scifi club or something always made me feel dirty.
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Feb 21, 2014 22:42
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