Recommend some actual good sci-fi books

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my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

Revelation Space is a good series that got kinda stupid at some parts in my opinion but the first book especially is great and its worth reading.

I like Hyperion & Hyperion 2 too

Robert Heinlein also owns Starship Troopers owns

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 16:05

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 14:58

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

chaosbreather posted:

everyone already knows foundation and the robot series are great, but also read the end of eternity, the time travel story. that, by the way, is the asmiov book that should turn into a movie.

also read the illuminatus! trilogy as many times as it takes

yeah End of Eternity rules, definitely worth reading, supposedly there is a movie adaptation in the works. I really wouldnt mind if it turned out to be a Minority Report-esque future action romp so long as they kept the core story intact.

Illuminatus! is fantastic and I highly recommend it, I really couldn't get into Shroedinger's Cat though which was a shame. it just seems...boring.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2014 18:59

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

Maoist Pussy posted:

Alistair Reynolds has some really good poo poo.

Like, the dialogue isn't great but the sci-fi storytelling is top-notch

i have an irrational hatred of one element in Revelation Space that almost ruins the series for me the loving pigs

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 00:22

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

SnowblindFatal posted:

And Neuromancer has a sequel what the jesus. Not gonna read any of that crap.

It has two sequels actually! They're not really directly related but are set in the same world. I have only read Count Zero but it is actually very good and deals with some of the consequences of the ending of Neuromancer. I recommend it.

Kilmers Elbow posted:

(Have just ordered Hyperion thanks to this thread. Christ knows if I'll ever get around to reading it but it's been in my Amazon wishlist since the last ice age.)

You are going to want to get The Fall of Hyperion too as they are basically two halves of one book. They're written in different ways but it's one coherent story and Dan Simmons said something about it being one book but published as two because of length.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2014 13:58

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

MeLKoR posted:

I kind of liked Hyperion\The Fall of Hyperion although The Culture has ruined evil AIs for me and I thought the human authorities were pretty loving stupid. Anyway I liked the Shrike\Tree\time travel ideas and the Canterbury Tales "gimmick" of the first book. All in all they were pretty solid as long as you didn't mind the dumb conspiracy\political parts.

I literally just finished reading Endymion\The Rise of Endymion and holy poo poo these books have some serious loving problems.

At the beginning I liked the Messiah vs Church\Pax setting but it was completely hosed up by the author's decision to incorporate so many characters from the first two books. He should have used the android, the poet and maybe the shrike, no one else. Instead to make it work he had to go completely "gently caress it, whatever" with time travel and the amount of retconning bordered on Brian Herbert Dune prequel levels. On top of that as the books progressed the Messiah aspect went "Children of the Mind" crazy which didn't help at all.

To add insult to injury the human authorities were once again completely retarded. He could have arrived at the same initial setting by having the Church just grow increasingly more powerful for the same reasons it did after the fall of the roman empire, being the last extant trans-planetary organization with a proven record of multi-generational planning. Or they might have had the TechnoCore whispering in the minds of the Popes like they were divine inspiration, whatever. Instead the Church authorities in control knew for a fact that the AIs they were dealing with had almost succeeded in killing everyone just a dozen years before.

There are faustian deals and then there is being a drooling moron.

Having said this should I waste my time with Ilium\Olympos?

Im burning through the last one right now and yeah Endymion and it don't really hold their weight compared to Hyperion, the story is kind of just a generic action romp across a space and crazy planets woah desert world ice world jew world!!! with a really predictable messiah storyline.

I do like the idea of the far-future Roman Catholic church being genocidal maniacs, and I interpreted Lenar Hoyt as having gone batshit crazy and really thinking that God was speaking to him through the TechnoCore as a result of his trials in Hyperion/Fall of Hyperion. All the retconning going on which is literally explained by Aenea going "This was a lie." is pretty annoying too.

I'm still enjoying the books though!

quote:

My current impression is that the autobiographical accounts of the main characters are (thus far) a bit too long-winded and could have done with some trimming. It seems that the only relevant information to the broader mystery is to be found in the final dramatic revelations of each character's tale - which renders the majority of it somewhat superfluous.

Oh man just wait until you read the detective's tale

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 17:07

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

MeLKoR posted:

Man, you're going to have a really bad time with these books.

That's what I thought in the beginning but in the end it turns out that no, they both knew. The Pope was a puppet with no real power, the guy from the Inquisition was secretly running poo poo from the start along with the AI ambassador. But both he and the Pope (and presumably several other people) knew from the start they were dealing with the TechnoCore. This was less than 20 years after the near complete genocide by the AIs. Both the Church and the AIs were pretty dumb to be honest.

Don't get me wrong, I liked the idea of a revived church in space thing, a less outrageous Imperium of Man but in the same vein. What annoyed me is that they could have done it without the TechnoCore. Just the willingness to sacrifice their lives traveling between the stars and having an organization that has survived 3000 years would make them the only game in town in the post-portal universe. They could even keep a semblance of lifetime connections if they planed their travels and having synods every 500 years, taking advantage of time dilation to run a loooooong game.

I think when he wrote Hyperion he realized "immortality granting parasites could have serious implications in an interstellar civilization without instantaneous travel times" and he decided that retconning his last book was the best/laziest way to write a story about it.

Maybe he's just another late term Orson Scott Card and Hyperion was the best he could do? I was hoping someone who'd read Ilium\Olympos would chime in because I'm not going to risk another 30 or 40 hours reading mediocre poo poo.

Man I finished The Rise of Endymion and I am pretty disappointed. I did enjoy the story, but it really wasn't what I wanted to read after Hyperion and it felt like it took the parts of the first 2 that I didn't like and expanded on them while leaving the parts I did like as an afterthought. Feels like so much wasted potential.

Regarding the Cruciform, the implications of it were dealt with pretty thoroughly in the Hyperion I thought - you can live forever, but it makes you a retarded eunuch in the process. It felt more like Simmons having zero ideas and using the Cruciform exactly as he did the Farcasters, that is that the Pax was a clone copy of the Hegemony and a dead-end of human progress in favor of AI evolution. The end of The Fall of Hyperion made it seem like the Ousters and former Web humans would come together to create a real revolutionary civilization, leading to the far-future hints of Kassad's story when the ultimate battle of mankind vs. the TechnoCore plays out, but nope, just more of the same with lots of confusion and retconning and unnecessary side-characters thrown in. I still don't know why Kassad or Het Masteen or Rachel were in The Rise of Endymion nor remember half the names of the random characters introduced for the last third.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 06:50

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 14:58

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

MAKE NO BABBYS posted:

I only scrolled through the first two pages but really?! He requests sci fi with weird sex scenes and NO ONE suggests Heinlein? smdh.

stranger in a stranger land is really fuckin good

# ¿ Sep 2, 2014 07:07

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > General Bullshit > Recommend some actual good sci-fi books