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

I think J. G. Ballard would be very suprised to find that Brian Aldiss wrote The Drowned World.

Fersum Enjinn was the last of Banks 'SF' novels that I tried to read. Absolute piffle from start to finish. I really don't think this phonetic spelling thing of his works, except in smaller doses (the Glasgow Barbarian in The Bridge, for example), and I find the whole idea of the Culture stultifyingly boring.

"I find the whole idea of the Culture stultifyingly boring."

The Culture *is* stultifyingly boring - there's no conflict and no real ambition amongst most of it's inhabitants and so any portion of his books set in the Culture consists of socialising and idle chit-chat. His first sci-fi novel had the advantage of largely being set outside of the Culture but later books largely take place within it or based-around characters from it and so don't work quite as well.

I'm very much afraid that in retrospect, and however much I have enjoyed some his later books (I enjoyed Whit, for example, but it's very flawed) Banks has failed to live up to his early promise as either a serious novelist or a science fiction writer.

You may be right about Feersom Endjinn but I personally have enjoyed his SF.Can't speak for his literary efforts as I've not read them.

Frankly it's hard finding new writers of intellegent SF.One tends to cling to the old Golden Age masters only to find that time has rather dimmed their work.The only GA SF authors that still has the ability to seem fresh is Phillip K Dick and Alfred Bester.IMHO that is..

Alistair Reynolds - Redemption Arc, Revelation Space, Absolution Gap. Not too far fetched, the laws of physics are still there, humanity is just learning to spread its wings, copying consiousness into machines is just possible, genetic engineering is fairly advanced, and we are just about to stumble into something big and nasty.

Though hard to start, once you get into them they will sweep you right along and amongst the descriptions of relativity-speed warfare the ideas seem solidly thought out - what would happen to humanity as travel between cultures takes longer. The dangers with nanotech and the reason that we have not been contacted yet.

Give 'em a shot. Oh and of course almost anything that Steven Baxter has written...
BCNU - Crescent

Nothing to contribute here (except that I've enjoyed the Iain Banks I've read - even Dead Air, which was come in for a kicking elsewhere) but just to mention I've fixed the title of this thread so that typo doesn't keep offending me in my Conversations list.

Unless Jasper Fforde is SF...

Yeah, but given that Jasper Fforde is over-rated rubbish, he hardly qualifies as intelligent anything, never mind SF.

Really, he's nonsense. The most disappointing read I've had this year was The Eyre Affair. Everybody said it was so good, and it was such arrant nonsense, not only badly written but appallingly obvious and just so tedious. I'm still trying to figure out why I even *finished* the damn thing and didn't just sling it on the discord pile with His Dark Materials.

"Frankly it's hard finding new writers of intellegent SF.One tends to cling to the old Golden Age masters only to find that time has rather dimmed their work."

I know what you mean. Two "Golden Age" sci-fi author's I've read are Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. Asimov was quite imaginative but his writing was poor (Douglas Adams famously said he wouldn't have employed him "to write junk mail") and, if you have any knowledge of Roman history the "Foundation" trilogy can seem quite shamelessly derivative at times. The only Clarke book I've read is "Imperial Earth" and it's put me off reading anything else of his again. He's far too interested in science and leaves his characters two-dimensional and the politics of the world they exist in laughably simplistic.

"The only GA SF authors that still has the ability to seem fresh is Phillip K Dick and Alfred Bester."

Not read any Bester but I agree that Dick is still impressive. He was into dealing with big issues using sci-fi, though, and his "dirty" "lived-in" future-worlds (quite out of place with the pristine utopian sci-fi of his time) were a sort of proto-cyberpunk.

Bester was the true god-father of cyber-punk. Technology is a given and Bester , like many of cyber punks better authors isn't remotely interested how it works but in how it is used by the characters who have access to it.

Having said that, only 'The Stars my Destination' (aka 'Tiger, Tiger') and 'The Demolished Man' are actually any good. The rest of his output is pretty poor.

So if the 'Golden Age' (and iI'd sugest Clarke is better in places than you give him credit for, Zagreb. You seem to have picked a particualrly obscure starting point for the author of 'Fall Of Moondust' amongst others) includes such under-rated writers as James Blish and masters such as Ray Bradbury, and even Jack Vance had his moments, what of the 'New wave' that arguably included Dick and Bester, as well as Tom Disch, Harlan Ellison, Keith Laumer, Norman Spinrad and many, many others?

Dear God, this thread is 350 posts old, and I'm the only person to have mentioned Jim Blish and Ted White, and nobody at all has mentioned poor old Bob Shaw, who was pretty damned good at what he did.

I'm ashamed to say the only James Blish I've ever read were his novelisations of the old Star Trek series.

Is there much Golden Age SF that stands up now? In the same way that there are movies of the 30s and 40s which are as good to a modern audience as they must have been to the audience at the time (I'm thinking of something like Casablanca) what are the enduring classics of SF that will probably always be read and enjoyed? Or is it all peppered with civilisations who have overcome their nudity taboos (such a common trope that I cringe whenever I read it)?

The Golden Age is nice, but let us not forget the great writing of Victorian Times. Verne, Wells, Stevenson. I'm trying to find a copy of The Island of Dr Moreau right now.

I want to read 'War of the Worlds'. I watched the 'cheapo' version that came out this year (not Spielberg's) and it claimed to be really faithful to the book, which leads me to believe the book must be very, very dull indeed. So I need to read it for myself.

If you can stand on-screen reading...

http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/w#a30

"Is there much Golden Age SF that stands up now? In the same way that there are movies of the 30s and 40s which are as good to a modern audience as they must have been to the audience at the time"

I think most of it probably still stands up. Certainly, I don't think people still read the likes of Orwell's "1984" or Asmiov's "Robot" series for any other reason than that readers still find them as enjoyable and thought-provolking in the 2000s as they did in the 1940s and 1950s.

Here's an interesting question - is there any older sci-fi that *hasn't* weathered time at all well?

Here's an interesting question - is there any older sci-fi that *hasn't* weathered time at all well?

Errr..Heinlein?Mind I'm truly biased against him..

Alistair Reynolds - Redemption Arc, Revelation Space, Absolution Gap.

Sorry but I've had real problems with this series.I've not even finished the last one because I'd forgotten whom all the characters were...The thought of rereading the first one to check the names has squshed any enthusiasm I might have summoned.

Heinlein was also the one that sprang to my mind when I read that question. His seems to have some left overs of the whole 60's "free love" idea that just seems rather silly now.

E E 'Doc' Smith isn't generally regarded as having aged well, although I do have a certain nostalgic regard for his books. The Foundation trilogy struck me as a little creaky when I read it.

Blueshark, yes Ballard was indeed astounded at the news, my apologies, too much wine. Otherwise, yes, Heinlein struck me as boring and a sort of Hugh Heffner with literary pretentions even when I started reading him in the seventies. Bradbury, like Stephen King was best when writing short stories, but the thing was, you could go into Smith's in the 60's and the SF section would be filled with authors such as Simak,Anderson, Le Guinne, Sturgeon, Zelanzy, Aldis, Ballard, Moorcock, Wyndham, Farmer, Vonnegut, Disch, Priest, Sheckley, Blish and that's just off the top of my head, and there were also a wealth of new writers that companies were publishing. Look in Waterstones or Smiths today, and it'll be packed to the roof with film tie-in's and never ending sagas and trilogies of Pratchett and Feist and Tolkein and Dr Who and Star Wars Boxed sets. Yes, it's true that most early Science Fiction is now dated and formulaic, that's the nature of the genre, but at least there was a sense of wonder and adventure that's lacking in current writings