h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Thank you for the URL.I shall bookmark that one.
I am reading Iain Banks' 'Against a Dark Background' at present.Very interesting so far.

Incog.

I just finished Gregory Benford's "The Martian Race." I enjoyed it very much - it is based on a believable premise with believable science. I believe it bears comparison with Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" and the like, although you may disagree (de gustibus ne disputandum)

If you want less SFX then maybe SF based on 'softer' sciences such as biology or sociology are more to your taste then stories that try to 'break the laws of physics' or chemistry.

I just started re-reading 'More than human' by Theodore Sturgeon which is about a human based Gestalt mind. Highly recomended.

I've always found Iain M Bank's 'Culture' sci-fi really turgid, immense in scope, but lacking in thematic and ideological drive - while his other books (without the 'M') are fully of ideas and alow these to grow into the course of the narrative into the main theme of the book, which is something i really like. For me, Sci-fi based upon narrative is a really turn off - that's just stories, sci-fi should be just that - fiction where you use science as a charachter, where the 'what ifs' are technichal and philosophical.

Iain Bank's first book "The Wasp Factory" is an enquiry into how far we should alow science to go, how much we should let it guide our thinkinking, and how much do we live our lives as part of the 'big experiment'. Not exactly standard sci-fi though.

'Walking on Glass' and 'The Bridge' (both i think written before he came up with his 'm' persona), are more traditional sci-fi. And both are really wonderful - one word of note however - don't read the blurb on the back of the books - they give away all the plot and the twist at the end.

Damn! I realised that I hadn't told you all about the absolutely fab book I read in the early summer of last year.It's a by a new author,China Mieville and it's called Perdido Street Station.I can't even begin to explain it but I'll try.It's Gothic Horror meets Cyberpunk with elements of Dune and the Godfather.The city described in the book is like no city you will have seen and yet it's like every city you have ever visited.I also hope never to meet anything like the slake moths in my life.I even dreamt about them.
It was a fascinating book to read and an excellent first novel.In fact I think I'll read it again this half term.After I've read all the other books I've got in my to read pile.

I really enjoyed 'More Than Human.' Don't remember much about it though - it was during my speedreading years, when I went through the library like a locust on crack. So to speak. I especially enjoyed the concept of being able to teleport your 'excretions' wherever you wanted. Sitting at your desk - no time to take a whiz? Simple - just send it to the bathroom down the hall. Guess I need to read it again and get something more out of it besides scatological notions.

I also love Ray Bradbury - but again his novels (which are his best stuff - aren't sci-fi at all. But they are written in the style of sci-fi, in that they take the world and its ideas (science) and then look at them from a different point of veiw in order to examine those ideas and preconceptions.

"Something Wicked this Way Comes" is justly well know and is a great book, but his real master pieces are "Death is a Lonely Business" and "A Graveyard for Lunatics" - truely some of the most eerie and thought provoking books, and the most fully realise Kafka-esque narratives (yes, the two can go together) i have ever read.

But that *is* sci-fi - with the exception of space opera, the function of sci-fi is to examine the effect of a changed world on the human condition. You take the world, change one thing (e.g. add faster-than-light flight) and see what happens. Many of the best sci-fi novels, like Harrison's "Make Room!, Make Room!" and Orwell's "1984" are almost exclusively about the human condition, the science part is the change in parameters.

A sci-fi book without a good human story is usually dull in the extreme!

I like that term 'space opera' - that descibes the sci-fi i dislike perfectly.

I wish I could claim to have invented it, but it's been around forever. Usually used to describe the works of E E 'Doc' Smith and the worst excesses of Robert Heinlein. Although to be fair I have nothing against a bit of space opera myself. If you hate it, "Star Smashers Of The Galaxy Rangers" by Harry Harrison may well raise a chuckle (as might any of the "Bill, The galactic Hero" books).

My current favourite Space Opera is David Feintuchs' Hope series about Nicholas Seafort.It's a wonderful swashbuckling read.A sort of Hornblower in Space.

Icog.

Pretty sure I mentioned Perdido Street Station right at the start of this thread, but to lazy to check, but if I didn't then I second Incognitas's opinion, as it is great, shame by paer back started falling apart after one read - two friends reading it later has left it almost destroyed.

CH

MM. Before reading the backlog, I wrote myself a little list of intelligent Sf authors, just to see. (Note, imho, the best book by each author in brackets)
Sterling (Heavy Weather), Gibson (All Tomorrows Parties), Ellison (Shatterday), Noon (Pollen), Dick (Ubik), Banks, (Who uses the
'M' to distinguish the drivel SF from the real writing...), Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles), Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron, honourable mention; The Iron Dream) and Sheckley (Dimension of Miracles) have all been mentioned. Which only leaves me wondering, where are;
John Courtnenay Grimwood (redRobe) , Jack Womack (Let's Put the Future Behind Us), Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic), John Shirley (A Splendid Chaos),Thomas M. Disch (Echo Round his Bones), Fritz Leiber (A Spectre is Haunting Texas), J. G. Ballard (just about anything...), Robert Charles Wilson (Darwinia), Howard Waldrop (Strange Things in Close-Up and Night of the Cooters), Simon Ings (City of the Iron Fish), Pat Cadigan (Synners), George Alec Effinger (The Exile Kiss)? To name but a few...
Moorcock's latest 'King of the City' is also a very sneaky alternate reality book, so I'd recommend that as well....

Iain Bank's space opera stuff is certainly pretty simplistic compared to his "straight" writing. However, I find them highly enjoyable in the way I find the "Star Wars" films highly enjoyable.

The best of them I've read is probably "Consider Phlebas". It has the most scope, much of his later stuff concentrates on a single environment for most of the book.

Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (Roadside Picnic) - Absolutely, fantastic book, though not a patch on the reworked version by Tarkovski that became the film "Stalker" - which almost anyone who watches it must admit is the greatest sci-fi film of all time. Greatest in scope, greatest in aesthetic, greatest in realisation.

"Rogue Moon" by Algis Budrys. Published 1960. Plot is an analog to how science progresses, i.e. creative destruction. I once gave a copy to a physicist, but he didn't like it. He said, "I read for escape, and it's too much like my real life."

It involves an engineer using an early prototype of the Star Trek transporter to explore the moon (in 1959). He has discovered a region of the moon that kills the men he sends in, for reasons that make no sense ('It is fatal to kneel on one knee while facing lunar North. It is fatal to make the hand or arm motions necessary to write the English word "yes."') He hires an adventurer obsessed with tempting death, and uses the transporter's well-known human duplication mode to make copies of this adventurer to go in and die repeatedly. (Budrys's title was "The Death Machine," but his publisher preferred "Rogue Moon." Publishers.) You get the idea.

'Stalker' is a superb piece of cinema, Autist. Have you seen the slightly coloured version? Beautiful.

I prefer 'Who?' by Algis Budrys myself, and it occurred to me as I came into work that I missed out Ted White's 'Sector General' stories, and Colin Kapp's 'Unorthodox Engineers' series.

The only version i have or have seen is a colour version - i'm not sure if that's what you mean by 'slightly coloured' - it's the usual muted tones of Tarkovsii.

That's the one.
Their is also a black and white print (which is about ten minutes shorter as well!), which is the first version I saw, on Channel 4, just after the channel started...

Is this Alex Cox's "Stalker"? If it is, I never realised it was sci-fi. I've seem some reviews of it and they didn't seem too positive. If it's not this "Stalker" then what one is it? Year, Director?