Top notch Scifi

[Gota]

What contemporary Sci-fi books can you recommend?but something you thought was really good not just mediocre stuff..
By contemporary i mean books written in recent years.

[Pressure Line]

I don't know how recent these are (and tbh, books don't date the way movies do)

Vernor Vinge:
A Fire Upon The Deep
A Deepness In The Sky

Jack Chalker:
'Rings' books
Lords Of The Middle Dark
Pirates Of The Thunder
Warriors Of The Storm
Masks Of The Martyrs

Joe Haldeman:
The Forever War
Forever Free

[Kixu]

City at the end of time by Greg Bear. Set 100 trillion years after the heat death of the universe. Lots of food for thought if you're willing to chew and digest. Takes a refreshing organic view of physics, read Eon and Anvil of the Stars series too if you haven't already.

[Pressure Line]

The various books of the Xeelee sequence by Stephen Baxter (he also has some other good stuff too, Mars and Titan are ones I can think of off the top of my head)

[Llamadeus]

I can recommend:

Greg Egan (Schild's Ladder, Diaspora, Axiomatic) - Concept driven science fiction with a hard scientific edge
Stephen Baxter - great sense of scale and imagination, but can be really dry and sometimes indulges too much in cosmology porn
Peter Watts - Blindsight - one of those spaceship crew explores big dumb alien artefact kind of stories but it's pretty good !!

[PicassoCT]

I love those threads, i bought nearly 20 books mentioned in the last, the one existing in the past.

[pintle]

I just read "Inversions" by Iain M Banks. It's ostensibly a sci-fi novel, part of his Culture series of books... except at no point are the culture explicitly referenced, and without the surrounding context of the series, you wouldn't be able to place it in the context of sci fi at all.

I really enjoyed reading it, if you have read Consider Phlebas, or any of Banks' other Culture stuff, I'd really recommend it, altho it is not sci-fi per say.

I know I said this in the last thread, but yeah: read Consider Phlebas! Spring players in particular may appreciate "The Player of Games" as well and Excession, Look to Windward, The Algebraist, Use of Weapons, etc etc

[PicassoCT]

I just read "Inversions" by Iain M Banks. It's ostensibly a sci-fi novel, part of his Culture series of books... except at no point are the culture explicitly referenced, and without the surrounding context of the series, you wouldn't be able to place it in the context of sci fi at all.

I really enjoyed reading it, if you have read Consider Phlebas, or any of Banks' other Culture stuff, I'd really recommend it, altho it is not sci-fi per say.

I know I said this in the last thread, but yeah: read Consider Phlebas! Spring players in particular may appreciate "The Player of Games" as well and Excession, Look to Windward, The Algebraist, Use of Weapons, etc etc

2late bought it yesterday, my banks is completed

[Llamadeus]

Culture stuff

New Culture novel out on the 7th! I hope everyone else is as excited about it as I am!!

[tombom]

There isn't any.

[Masure]

Peter F. hamilton : Pandora's Star saga

[Machete234]

philip k dick
stanislaw lem
asimov

if you dont like that read the new starcraft novel I bet it rocks when youre 12 years old

[Gota]

I like how people just spam whatever writer they like whether he and his books fit the required description in the first post or not.

There are good average books which you read and you think are good but will never bee considered amazing-these make a pretty healthy percentage of all available works, than, there are the few books that are truly amazing and will be remembered and reread for a long time.

I was asking about the later ones but ones that are contemporary, books released in recent years, not 20 or more years ago.

When people specify books that don't answer to the description they are not helping, instead,making it harder to notice the people who did recommend books that answer the criteria.

[pintle]

Meh, anything written by Iain M Banks is contemporary Sci-Fi, and imo it's of the absolute highest order. The one book that I just read just happens to be set on a world inhabited by pre electricity societies, and doesn't feature lasers, spaceships, or robots. Go read Consider Phlebas!

[SinbadEV]

If you mean "current" by within the 20 years then I can't recommend Neal Stephensen enough. He writes "speculative" fiction, which occasionally doesn't mean science fiction as most people understand it.

What I've Read:
# Snow Crash (1992)
# The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)
# Cryptonomicon (1999)

# Quicksilver (2003) - Currently reading, interesting
# Anathem (2008) ÔÇô Haven't read it yet but I'm told it's wonderful.

[Pxtl]

David Brin's Uplift series. First book is Sundiver, but it's weak. Start with Startide Rising, then Uplift War.

Follow with Uplift Storm trilogy if you're begging for more - not as good as Startide and UW, but not bad either.

[Pressure Line]

Thats because your after books released since say 1990, ok, thats cool. And you want books that leave you thinking "OMG FUCK YES THIS IS AWESOME!" as opposed to "Yeah, it's a good book."

So imo that pretty much rules out all the 'series' sci-fi (Star Trek, Star Wars etc) books, and to be honest, doen't leave a lot.

As I said earlier, books don't date the way movies/TV does (see Star Trek's original series, some of the acting, costumes and special effects is almost painful to watch now. But in book form any given episode would be as fresh now as it was in 1966, although some of the themes may seem slightly dated)

Unless this isn't out of personal interest, and is for some sort of academic project with specific guidlines as to the age of the book (perhaps you have to compare a book from the 90's to one written in the 50's of the same genre?) saying "I'm not interested in books more than 20 years old" is being pointlessley narrowminded.

That being said, 2 of the 3 'Forever War' books by Joe Haldeman were published in the 90's (with the first being published in 1974). Jack Chalker's 'Rings' books were all published in the mid/late 80's, and the two Vernor Vinge books I mentioned were published in the 90's.

*shrug*

[Hobo Joe]

I just finished reading the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons, and it was absolutely fantastic. It's the kind of series that makes you want to start over as soon as you finish so you can get all the stuff you missed. There was a hell of a lot going on in there.




Others: Dune (obvious), Enders Game (obvious), Stranger in a Strange Land, most of Heinlein's work, and so on.

[Pressure Line]

Agreed on Heinlein, Starship Troopers is actually a really good read (forget about the movie, all that is the same is a few of the names)

[Machete234]

But isnt star ship troopers a short story?

So imo that pretty much rules out all the 'series' sci-fi (Star Trek, Star Wars etc) books, and to be honest, doen't leave a lot.

Come on these books cant be good you might as well read the starcraft novel.