What's your favourite science fiction book?

[Flying_Monkey]

Clear winner has to be 1984 - not just the best SF (and it is SF), but probably the best and most important novel of the 20th century.

.... But keeping to the tradition of "the best" meaning as many good ones as I see fit, just like with the vintage cars, lets add some Ballard - unusually for SF a genuinely great writer - At the very least will want the Drowned World, and perhaps high Rise, and I think the latter just about qualifies as SF.

Aldiss, perhaps not such a "great writer" as Ballard, but pretty good all the same, and what an imagination. Let's have Non-stop, and hothouse for starters.

Nice post. It was 'favourite' not 'best'... anyway, Nineteen Eight-Four is technically what critics call 'non-genre SF', that is a novel that qualifies as SF but written outside of SF culture.

I have to disagree that Aldiss is not as great as Ballard. Ballard was a great writer but a much better self-publicist too - and that often makes the difference, but I think that Aldiss is technically a better writer and he also had a far more surreal and fertile imagination - there are very few people who have written with his range, from the experimental Barefoot in the Head, to a world as complex and rich as Dune (the Helliconia Trilogy), from exceptional fantasy (The Malacia Tapestry) togrim dystopia (Greybeard - later stolen wholesale by P.D. James for Children of Men). He also wrote what I think is one of the absolute best post-9/11 novels, H.A.R.M. - which hardly anyone seems to have read - and one of the only 'future EU' SF novels I have seen, Superstate. He's a national treasure in my view. But there's no doubt that Ballard was an SF writer despite what some mainstream critics may try to say - he defined what the New Wave of SF was in the 1960s with his editoriship of New Worlds, with the focus on 'inner space' and the social imagination, something he shared with Aldiss, Moorcock, John Brunner and M. John Harrison, but also some of the Americans like Delaney, Spinrad and Disch.

 

[Shut Up Legs]

Here's some really outlandish SF books for you to consider. I have a large SF collection at home, so here's a few selections from it that I've read more times than I can recall :

1. World Of Tiers (series), by Philip Jose Farmer.
2. Neverness, by David Zindell.
3. Well World (series), by Jack Chalker.
4. Helliconia (series), by Brian Aldiss.

 

[_aD]

Nightfall by Asimov and Silverberg works on something we take for granted and makes it incredible. It had a fantastic build-up and delivered an excellent story with believable characters. I also really enjoyed Asimov's The Complete Robot. A book full of robotics-related stories that are in the same "universe" in chronological order with some common characters.

 

[rich p]

I read one called The Forever War once which was quite clever. I meant to lend it to my father in law but gave him a different one, in error, by the same author about a bloke who orgasmed by thought process or summink.
Slightly embarrassing and revealed me in my true guise after duping him for years into thinking me normal.

 

[Wobblers]

I read one called The Forever War once which was quite clever. I meant to lend it to my father in law but gave him a different one, in error, by the same author about a bloke who orgasmed by thought process or summink.
Slightly embarrassing and revealed me in my true guise after duping him for years into thinking me normal.

Are you sure it wasn't your diary you lent him, Rich?

 

[Wobblers]

Olaf Stapleton, to answer someone else's question, is very hard work. His books lack any small-scale warmth and humanity. It's all species-level politics and therefore rather dry. Pioneering, of course, but there's not much to hold on to, emotionally, in his work.

I have to disagree with you over Olaf Stapleton. Stapleton was interested in the concept of consciousness as an end in itself, something that possesses an intrinsic nobility of its own: a nobility without limit when allowed to grow. Once you discard the humdrum insistence on charactersand accept the vast canvas of time and space he used to express his ideas: that us mere mortals possess the seed of beauty. I don't see how that can be considered lacking humanity. Though his message was ultimately bleak, it is all the more moving as a result.

And that, FM, is the closest thing to a religious statement you're likely to get out of me...

 

[smutchin]

I have to disagree that Aldiss is not as great as Ballard. Ballard was a great writer but a much better self-publicist too - and that often makes the difference, but I think that Aldiss is technically a better writer and he also had a far more surreal and fertile imagination

I love Aldiss. I first discovered him via a short story of his that was in a sci-fi anthology I got out of the school library. It made me want to read more of his stuff. He's a brilliant writer. If we're comparing epic sagas, I read the Helliconia trilogy in my teens and found it vastly preferable to the Dune books, which I got bored of after the first couple. I never really got on with Tolkien either, apart from The Hobbit.

I don't think you're missing much by not having read the Foundation series, FM. I struggled through the first one at the insistence of a friend but didn't bother with the rest. Asimov had some important/interesting ideas but he couldn't write.

Does Yevgeny Zamyatin's We count as sci-fi? Not read it yet but I bought it last week because it was a Kindle cheapie and I thought it sounded interesting. Surprised I'd not heard of it before. It also cropped up as the subject of a question on this week's University Challenge.

 

[Inertia]

I read one called The Forever War once which was quite clever. I meant to lend it to my father in law but gave him a different one, in error, by the same author about a bloke who orgasmed by thought process or summink.
Slightly embarrassing and revealed me in my true guise after duping him for years into thinking me normal.

+1 for the forever war, its a great book

Foundation and Dune are also right up there for me

 

[PaulB]

I used to be well into science fiction books but probably grew out of them. There's far more going on in the actual world we live in that we are often guilty of neglecting by focussing on someone's imaginings. But I do like a bit of Dick. Counter-clock world is a cracker.

 

[smutchin]

I used to be well into science fiction books but probably grew out of them. There's far more going on in the actual world we live in that we are often guilty of neglecting by focussing on someone's imaginings.

Conversely, I find the best sci-fi (and fiction in general) actually reveals many deeper truths about the real world than mere reportage is capable of.

 

[TheDoctor]

Mine would be a long list.
Arthur C Clarke. Anything by him, the bloke was a visionary and a good writer.
Larry Niven. Ringworld in particular, and the Dracos Tavern short stories.
Robert Heinlein. Time Enough for Love and Glory Road I've read dozens of times. Number of the Beast is...odd. Some of the writing in it is laughable, but a lot of it is great, inventive stuff. It's almost as if he's constructing an elaborate practical joke...
John Wyndham. Midwich Cuckoos is one of the most unsettling invasion stories ever, Chrysalids is great, Trouble with Lichen is very good,. I could never get on with Day of the Triffids.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

I have to disagree with you over Olaf Stapleton. Stapleton was interested in the concept of consciousness as an end in itself, something that possesses an intrinsic nobility of its own: a nobility without limit when allowed to grow. Once you discard the humdrum insistence on charactersand accept the vast canvas of time and space he used to express his ideas: that us mere mortals possess the seed of beauty. I don't see how that can be considered lacking humanity. Though his message was ultimately bleak, it is all the more moving as a result.

I wrote the sentence you're replying to four years ago... I think my view would be much nearer yours these days.

 

[Andrew_Culture]

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.

On your recommendation I've just finished reading 'The Mote' and have immediately bought the sequel.

 

[Yellow Fang]

On your recommendation I've just finished reading 'The Mote' and have immediately bought the sequel.

I hope you enjoyed it. I liked it a lot at the time, but I was only about twenty years old. I didn't know there was a sequel, although I know Nivel and Pournell wrote several other books together, which were also good. Sometimes they wrote with a third author too.

 

[Andrew_Culture]

I hope you enjoyed it. I liked it a lot at the time, but I was only about twenty years old. I didn't know there was a sequel, although I know Nivel and Pournell wrote several other books together, which were also good. Sometimes they wrote with a third author too.

The sequel is 'The Gripping Hand'. I'm only a couple of chapters in but it already seems quite straight forward and enjoyable; a bit like the Mote was setting the scene and now we can get on with the action!