What's your favourite science fiction book?

[Yellow Fang]

Mine is "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It was a book about a first contact with an alien species that were extremely inventive but kept suffering civilisation crashes due to a too high birth rate. I read quite a few of Larry Niven's books in my youth. They had some decent science in them, but I often found them a bit too easy reading and rather fanciful. I only read one of Jerry Pournelle's books and I found that rather stodgy, as well as commiting the crime of using SF to write history rather than the future. Together they were a really good team though.

 

[Noodley]

I don't think I have ever read a science fiction book.

 

[Chris Sirrus]

Hitch-hikers guide or 2001 a space odyssey.

 

[rh100]

I'll second 2001 as a good book, really makes you see the film in a different light doesn't it. He wrote a couple of sequels aswell - 2010, 2061 and 3001 I think.

My favourite - possibly Julian May, Intervention - which I read first, then read all the other related books - a great story but doesn't seem very popular. Havn't read them since I was a teenager.

 

[MacB]

I've read so many good ones that I don't think I could select just one. Ian M Banks is always worth a read, I like Larry Niven, Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, I've got most of the books in the masterworks series. Depends also on what you want to class as SF A couple of stand out works are Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keys and Replay by Ken Grimwood. But they're about as far from space opera type stuff as you get. Full blown space opera then Ian M Banks Culture novels, Peter F Hamiltons commonwealth stuff and Neal Ashers Polity based books are the best of the current crop.

I'm going to go with 3 books:-

Excession - Ian M Banks(though probably not best to choose this as your Culture novel)

Ringworld - Larry Niven, not great literature but the mother of all BDO's(big dum objects) in the Ringworld itself

Childhoods End - Arthur C Clarke

 

[MacB]

I'll second 2001 as a good book, really makes you see the film in a different light doesn't it. He wrote a couple of sequels aswell - 2010, 2061 and 3001 I think.

My favourite - possibly Julian May, Intervention - which I read first, then read all the other related books - a great story but doesn't seem very popular. Havn't read them since I was a teenager.

Ah, The Exile Sage(4 books) Intervention(1 book) and the Galactic Milieu Trilogy(surprisingly 3 books), enjoyed them all.

 

[gaz]

The Bible.
I once found it in the sci-fi section of water stones. good read if you ask me. people walking on water, killing giants and being super strong due to there hair. Awesome!

*runs and hides*

 

[Flying_Monkey]

This is almost impossible, but here is a Top Twelve (in no particular order, and which could probably change tomorrow - it was a Top Ten but it got bigger...). These are some of my favourites, but I could make an argument for most of them being amongst 'the best' in SF and that many should be seen as great novels full stop.

Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed - political SF at its best and one of the best explorations of anarchism in fiction;
Brian Aldiss - Barefoot in the Head - up there with the best experimental writing of any kind (I am totally serious);
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly - and many others... Dick was a scattershot, crazy genius and this is his darkest book and his masterpiece;
Roger Zelazny - Lord of Light - a beautiful, intellectual novel, featuring space colonists who play out Hindu and Buddhist myths;
John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar - one of the great novels to come out of the first wave of environmentalism of the late 1960s;
William Gibson - Neuromancer - invented cyberspace and reeks of neon, but it was written on a typewriter under the influence of the Velvet Underground - a definitive combination of noir and near-future SF;
Paul J. McAuley - Fairyland - 'bio-cyberpunk' - an increasingly far-out variation on what were by then becoming cyber-cliches;
A.A. Attanasio - Last Legends of Earth - aliens recreate a confused mix of humanity long after we are extinct to form the basis of a cosmic trap. A book which somehow manages to be life-affirming, twee, eon-spanning, baroque, philosophical, lush and all sorts of other things - it stays with you anyway;
Greg Egan - Diaspora - the hardest SF, yet somehow also the most humanist novel of entirely virtual people;
Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt. I could have picked The Mars Trilogy, which may be the best exploration of the alternative responses to the challenges of environmental politics offered by any novelist, but The Years of Rice and Salt is even more challenging - a novel written in a Buddhist-influenced form, but charting an alternative history of a Muslim and Chinese-dominated world, following the destruction of Christian European civilization in the Great Plague of the Middle-Ages - it's more relevant to what's going on today than hundreds of tedious, hand-wringing mainstream novelists;
M. John Harrison - Nova Swing - weird, reality-shifting, post-modern, woozy... watever, M. John Harrison is one of Britain's best writers in any genre;
Ian McDonald - Brasyl - how can you not like a novel with switches between multiple alternative Brazils, any or none of which may some connection to ours, and which ties together colonialism, quantum theory and football?

Anyone who hasn't read any decent science fiction is missing what J.G.Ballard called the 'most authentic literature of the twentieth century' and which continues to be a source of some of the most interesting writing about now.

 

[Keith Oates]

I never read SF or watch SF movies, there is too much real and interesting things going on without seeing that stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[lazyfatgit]

what about HG Wells, Jules Verne? don't see them on any list so far. Maybe im just old.
also read quite a bit of Robert A Heinlein as a boy.

 

[purplepolly]

Ian M Banks is always worth a read,

I prefer Ian Banks

 

[purplepolly]

what about HG Wells, Jules Verne? don't see them on any list so far. .

HG Wells cetainly, but I've just read 20,000 leagues under the sea and, dear god, it was the very definition of tedium. Far too much science, very little action and practically no characters. How on earth the same person could have written the very funny Around the world in 80 days is beyond comprehension

 

[Bman]

Hitch-hikers guide or 2001 a space odyssey.

I second HHGTTG

 

[wafflycat]

Reading John Wyndham books as a child got me started on sci-fi. Those and my brother's Marvel comics.

Julian May's series of the Saga of the Exiles, which came before Intervention and then the Galactic Milieu trilogy - got them all.

Much of Philip K Dick, Larry Niven & Ursula LeGuin. Frank Herbert.

And I do enjoy reading my copy of the complete short stories of HG Wells.

 

[WeeE]

Philip K Dick, "A Scanner, Darkly".

Dick's dialogue was often clunky...paradoxically its clunkiness gave it a certain veracity. His themes usually revolve in some way around identity, humanity - but what makes his (non-juvenile) stuff special above almost all other SF, why it transcends any boundary, is that the people and the society he depicts, in whatever book or story, are so rich. Bits creep into most of his best novels that would probably be called "magical realism" if written by some South American author - but somehow that's not the right expression for it. There are always conceptual flipflops that somehow haunt you, too - like when the main character in A Scanner, a deep-undercover narcotics cop, is said to be "posing as a narc."

Apparently someone asked Dick whether he was a character in this novel, (ostensibly it's about Californian drug culture/law enforcement of the near future, it's dedicated to friends & acquaintances that died in various ways from drug addiction) and he said, "No - I am the novel."

His fiction has off-the-wall concepts sometimes, but it usually has very prosaic, suburban-like settings, and people with prosaic (at least to them) nonentity lives, so it connects very directly. (Like the neighbour woman in "a Scanner" who calls the main characters to get rid of a big beetle in her house. When they scoop it up and put it out, she says "Well, if I knew it was harmless, I'd have killed it myself!")

Funnily enough, his "scramble suit" in the novel, which I think the predator's clothing in the Predator movies was based on - the US military are very close now to developing a working one.

QUite a few films of his stuff have been made, but unfortunately, they often murder the very essence of his stories - Blade Runner (not too bad) Minority Report, Total Recall etc.

I had read every science fiction book in my local library by the time I was about 13, and there are loads written since that I love. China Meiville's "Perdido Street Station" is one of the more recent ones that stands out. (I can't be arsed with the finer-and-finer slicing of SF into sub-sub genres by critics and booksellers: who cares if it's labelled "fantasy" or "steampunk" or whatever.)