Tharizdun wrote: "Armor" by Steakley (a one hit wonder of an author)
Tharizdun wrote:I didn't like Vampire$. It has good ideas but I liked Armor way better! That movie was John Carpenters and yes it wasn't good.
JasonZavoda wrote:Peter S. Beagle wrote The Last Unicorn (I think)Cordwainer Smith wrote science fiction (a series of books that are slightly absurd). It is a strange future history series wih a planet settled by australians who raise giant (100ton sheep) for an immortality serum.
MetamorphosisSigma wrote:Yeah, Beagle wrote The Last Unicorn in 1968, and then fell off the map for about 25 years. More (relatively) recently there was The Innkeeper's Song, which is a lot edgier (there are sword fights, assassins, and the only tastefully done group sex scene in SF and F I've seen since Heinlein), and a slew of short stories in the 2000s which are quite good.Cordwainer Smith IS a strange bird, and there is definitely some (intentional) absurdity in his stories. Norstrilia (short for Old North Australia, pronounced NorSTRILia, LOL) is the name of the novel and the planet featuring the 100-ton sick sheep that produce the immortality serum. He's sort of a thinking person's Douglas Adams.
JasonZavoda wrote:Hmmm... I put Douglas Adams way, way, way up there... and Cordwainer Smith as a writer I've rread and don't plan on rereading. Smith had some interesting ideas but I would have been perfectly happy picking up someone elses book and never reading Smith's. I feel fairly blah about his writing.With Adam's, I will probably reread Hitchhiker's guide someday, but I will definitely reread his Dirk Gently books. I do think that you can tell fairly quickly if you will like Smith or not and the books I had by him were not long.Everyone has different tasts, personally I cant stand Jordan and that wheel of time series, the Game of Thrones series by Martin, Terry Goodkinds series, and probably most of the best selling modern series novels that tend to come in those 7 or 8 hundred page books.
MetamorphosisSigma wrote:I liked the Dirk Gently books, too, better than Adams' other stuff. Yes, Smith's style is something that'll either immediately turn you off or suck you in. I do think his stuff repays repeat readings, but his output certainly was somewhat uneven in quality (Norstrilia, for instance, is not the place to start). I'm happy to agree to disagree about him.I'm with you 100% on Jordan, Goodkind, Martin, etc. I knew I wasn't into the Wheel of Time when about halfway through the second book I was desperately hoping that Ran-alwhatshisface would die soon, and knew he wouldn't because there were like 8 books left to read. It's never good when you want the main characters to perish because you're so bored with them. One thing I will say for GRRM is that this isn't the case with him--in his books, it seems like everyone dies eventually, usually when the character in question is just getting interesting... I was okay with him until his boneheaded move of putting out half of a book 5 years ago (A Feast for Crows) and promising the second half the following year and not delivering (still no release date for A Dance with Dragons). He's been relegated to my, "Yeah, maybe I'll read something by him again someday, if there's literally nothing else left," shelf.You seem to have a good background in SF, Jason. Any authors from the 50s/60s/70s I might have missed that you particularly like? I've read most of the "big names" (Asimov, Niven, Heinlein, etc.), but not so many of the lesser-known guys.
JasonZavoda wrote:A.E. Van VogtClifford SimakTheodore SturgeonPoul AndersonLarry NivenJerry PournelleJohn WyndhamJohn Myers MyersGordon R DicksonRobert Silverberg
MetamorphosisSigma wrote:Thanks, always looking for new reading material, and suggestions are always helpful.I know Piper, somewhat. I've read the Fuzzy books, Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, and the collection of stories you mentioned, Empire, which I think were set in the same milieu if I remember rightly. Yeah, I've read Zelazny, Moorcock, Leiber, etc.I haven't read too much from the others you listed, except for Niven (everything) and a little bit of Simak and van Vogt; also the odd short story or two from some of the others.With Sturgeon, I just don't know where to start. The man wrote like a thousand short stories. They can't all be great, and I'd hate to start with the wrong stuff. Is there a "Best of" collection out there for him (I guess I'll just go look), or should I start with something like More than Human? Same with Silverberg, the man is a machine.I'm not too much into the military scifi scene, which I gather from what I've heard that Pournelle is the poster boy for. I've read his collaborations with Niven, which were okay, but I'm a little wary of the David Drake-esque stuff I hear he writes on his own. Am I wrong? Not that there's anything wrong with the subgenre, but I've had more than my fill of Starship Troopers, Forever War, and that sort of thing over the years..Wyndham - Is Day of the Triffids the place to start?
ashmire13 wrote:Anybody else read the Asprin books with Skeeve? I found those very amusing.Another comedy series was the Cineverse cycle by Craig Shaw Gardner, but I did read that just after I left school, so memories may be diluted to its quality. I'm guessing Pratchetts Discworld has been covered earlier in the thread, but with his illness, its a shame those will stop too early.
JasonZavoda wrote:Triffids is a good place to start and usually the easiest to come by. Pournelle, try Mote in Gods Eye which is more SF than military, though I like military SF if done well (Drake is one of the best at it, though Drake is infleunced by Pournelle, rather than the other way round).
Sturgeon can be a little funky and philosophically surreal. For short story The Worlds of Theodore Sturgeon (ACE 1972), More than Human. The Dreaming Jewels (also titled The Synthetic Man).
Have you tried Alan Dean Foster - Many decent novels out of him (and some crap).
MetamorphosisSigma wrote:I like funky and philosophically surreal, otherwise I wouldn't be a Cordwainer Smith "enthusiast" . Seems like you meant it in a disparaging way... I'm getting the impression that our tastes don't overlap too much , which is of course fine. You seem to go more the hard scifi and space opera side of things, whereas I'm at the other end of the genre spectrum. I'm guessing you're not a huge fan of Philip K. Dick? Tom Disch? Yeah, I've read a bunch of Foster over the years, mostly a loooong time ago.. The Flinx and Pip (or is it Pip and Flinx?) books, the humanx stuff, and some of his early Star Wars tie-ins (Splinter of the Minds Eye comes to mind, I think that was him). I tend to put him in the same category, perhaps unfairly, as Kevin Anderson...sharecropper.
JasonZavoda wrote:That's Sir Terry Pratchett, knave!Intentionally Being able to write humor is a rare, rare gift. For some reason British writers received more than their fair share.