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Any Sci-Fi Book recommendations?


Orphalesion

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17 hours ago, Desertrat56 said:

I have those on my list of favorites too, except I have not read Michael McCollum, I will have to look him up.  Thanks.

McCollum is self published at (If I recall correctly) Arizona Sci-Fi.... It's been a while since I looked in on his site, so I might be a bit off on the name...

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15 hours ago, Piney said:

I usually eat dry Cheerios with my movies. :yes:

 

Damn!  I thought I was the only one :w00t:  Well... not exactly.  I actually sip some milk too ;) 

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1 minute ago, and then said:

Damn!  I thought I was the only one :w00t:  Well... not exactly.  I actually sip some milk too ;) 

Tea.....

.....and good whole leaf and gunpowder stuff from China. Not that leaf mulch in a plastic strainer baggy.     See what I did there @acute???  :o

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Thanks for the recommendations everyone, I'll check them out and I', sure I'll find something among the list :D
 

3 hours ago, Desertrat56 said:

One of my favorites for fantasy is Terry Pratchet.  The phrases he uses will stop you short and have you laughing for days.

Oh facourite fantasy novels I have stacked to the ceiling,a nd yes Terry Pratchett is definitely among them. Especially the Disk World novels set in Lancre. Granny Weatherwax is one of my favourite characters in all of fiction.  

18 hours ago, Piney said:

The original Dune series was my favorite. I hated Brian's later trash. Then Asimov, Heinlein, Ellison in that order......I'm boring that way. 

Hey everybody has their preferences. And with a lot of them it's not that I find them "boring", just I find the stories and characters of Asimov and Heinlein unappealing.

With Dune...the universe is interesting enough, and I appreciate the female characters like Lady Jessica and Alia but...I can't find myself rooting for or be interested in a character who fully knows that what he does will kill billions, "sterilize" planets and extinguish whole cultures and does it anyway. No. Sorry.
And, sorry I know that the personal beliefs of an author shouldn't cloud my judgment of their work what I found about Herbert suggests that he was the angry kind of homophobe and I think that hatred of his bled over into Dune with the book's glorification of/obsession with genetic survival and the only LBGT character (unless count my interpretation of Duncan) being a utterly disgusting, vile and horrible pedophile. 
Not saying nobody should enjoy Dune. Just that I'm unable to.

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Dune is my top read, I’ve read it over and over.

If you want epic character building and Really developed universes any of Peter F Hamilton’s books will do, start with the Nights Dawn trilogy.

I also got into James S A Corey’s books, the expanse, there’s about 8 so far, and the series is on Amazon just waiting on season 4 and that’s looking really good at the moment a very well made and faithful adaptation.

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13 hours ago, Piney said:

Sting as Feyd......meh...... and Patrick Stewart wasn't broad and ugly enough to be Gurney Halleck.  But I like all his work. 

 

Well, you can't knock Toto. :tu:

The casting for the Lynch adaptation was close to sacrilege.  And what Lynch did to Idaho is beyond me.

Are you excited for the 2020 remake?

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Thanks again. Wow I seriously hadn't expected so many suggestions. I love it :D
I added them all to a spreadsheet now and I'm gonna look into each of them.

 

13 hours ago, Dumbledore the Awesome said:

I recommend Iain M. Banks' Culture books (and some that aren't specifically set in the Culture). Very humourous, particularly the sentient ships.

I think I 've heard of that, is the Culture the one were the Ships have those really awesome names like "Eternal Paragon of Justice" and stuff like that?
 

20 hours ago, Desertrat56 said:

Have you read anything by Ann McCaffrey or Zenna Henderson?  I love the stories and they are sci-fi.  Also, you might like Marrion Zimmer Bradley.

 

I did like the Mists of Avalon so yeah, I'll definitely could see myself liking her SciFi work.

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4 minutes ago, Orphalesion said:

I think I 've heard of that, is the Culture the one were the Ships have those really awesome names like "Eternal Paragon of Justice" and stuff like that?

and things like "it won't get better if you keep scratching it". The ships, robots, drones etc, are all equal citizens, (although of course they all have minds immeasurably superior to ours), and the people are never entrusted to do anything important. And there's every conceivable kind of alien lifeform.

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22 minutes ago, Orphalesion said:


Thanks again. Wow I seriously hadn't expected so many suggestions. I love it :D
I added them all to a spreadsheet now and I'm gonna look into each of them.

 

I think I 've heard of that, is the Culture the one were the Ships have those really awesome names like "Eternal Paragon of Justice" and stuff like that?
 

I did like the Mists of Avalon so yeah, I'll definitely could see myself liking her SciFi work.

You might like Marrion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series.

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49 minutes ago, Grey Area said:

Are you excited for the 2020 remake?

Yup, let's see what Timothy does with Paul and the guy who portrayed me does with Duncan.

MacLachlan was a turd just floating around in Lynch's abortion and I was p***ed about Duncan.    

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1 hour ago, Orphalesion said:

Hey everybody has their preferences. And with a lot of them it's not that I find them "boring", just I find the stories and characters of Asimov and Heinlein unappealing.

Golan Trevize should receive a reward for the scifi  character with the least personality. It's far below "none".

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1 hour ago, Piney said:

Golan Trevize should receive a reward for the scifi  character with the least personality. It's far below "none".

Never read the later Foundation books. I bailed out in the first one at some point when all those Space-Don Drapers sat around on their planet and patted each others backs about how much more intelligent and wonderful and awesome they were than everybody else in the universe. :P

 

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15 minutes ago, Orphalesion said:

Never read the later Foundation books. I bailed out in the first one at some point when all those Space-Don Drapers sat around on their planet and patted each others backs about how much more intelligent and wonderful and awesome they were than everybody else in the universe. :P

The science is decent for their respective eras and the storylines are good but character development is not one of Asimov's strong points. 

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28 minutes ago, Piney said:

The science is decent for their respective eras and the storylines are good but character development is not one of Asimov's strong points. 

I loved Asimov and read almost everything he wrote, fiction and non-fiction;  I also loved Ann McCaffrey and read all of her books but I do see that both those authors were more interested in the "big picture" than the characters, though the Caves of Steel and I Robot were two where I think he did develop some good characters.  

Todd McCaffrey took over the Pern series for his mother and he is all about character development, but I don't care for his books as much.  It must be a mind set thing.  Though I do have to say that Harry Dresden is a very well developed character and I have read 15 or 16 books where he is the main character and the point of the series is to leave Dresden a little smarter and better off by the end of each book even when he is stuck on an island half dead he is still better off somehow.

And now for some reason that brings me to thinking about The Illustrated Man and other books by Ray Bradbury.  The Electric Grandmother is a short story he wrote that I love. 

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8 hours ago, Desertrat56 said:

I loved Asimov and read almost everything he wrote, fiction and non-fiction; 

Yes, I like the Foundation books, but he did get rather obsessed about robots. In compilations of his stories I tend to skip the robot ones. 

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I will admit that a lot of the problems I had with the first Foundation book were probably because it's cobbled together from short stories. So it kinda sets you tumbling from one decade, setting and scenario to the next.

However even so, except for the description of Trantor, I found all of those scenarios pretty "blah" and, from a 21st century perspective, they had a lot of cringe-worthy elements. Like, it takes a whole lot of book to even have the first woman mentioned and when she appears she's brainless arm-candy who drools over jewellery, or the 1950's gentlemen's club vibe that whole Foundation Society/Psycho Historian Society has. 
I think in my eyes, that'as the kind of stuff an author can get away with in a historical novel, a novel set in (beck then) current times or a Medieval-style fantasy novel, but not in a book set in the future (unless it's a Dystopian or Post-Apocalyptic novel)

I really hope that they will revise/cut/update some of those elements in that upcoming TV series.

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I feel you on the classics. A lot of the old timer's styles are difficult to read because they're so dated. So much of it is outright space opera.

One of my personal favorites is Lois Mcmaster Bujold, specifically the Miles Vorkosagan series. If you like epics, try CJ Cherryh.

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7 hours ago, Dumbledore the Awesome said:

Yes, I like the Foundation books, but he did get rather obsessed about robots. In compilations of his stories I tend to skip the robot ones. 

Those were my favorite.

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On 12/4/2019 at 8:13 PM, Piney said:

Tea.....

.....and good whole leaf and gunpowder stuff from China. Not that leaf mulch in a plastic strainer baggy.     See what I did there @acute???  :o

:huh:

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