Gender: Male Location: On a rock, floating through space..
Depends on how mature your reading level is.
Vernor Vinge is fantastic, as is Neal Stephenson (I've just read Snow Crash for about the third time and it's still as good as ever). Peter F. Hamilton is not too shabby, although his books are a bit space opera-ish for me.
I grew up on short stories by Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Roger Zelazny, Philip Jose Farmer, etc., so I have a predilection for scifi anthologies - just go to your nearest decent book store (or any second-hand book store) and look for the collections of short stories.
Short stories seem perfectly suited to the scifi genre, and usually somebody really have to be a master to keep an audience's interest for anything longer than a novella in pure, hard-core scifi, as opposed to the prevalent trend to blend fantasy with science fiction.
Speaking of which, the Dune series is well worth checking out as well, if all the screen adaptations haven't put you off for life...
Thanks for the tips, just ordered "Rendezvous with Rama" read some reviews and like the look of that.
Ive read various "maturity" level of books but prefer ones wich are dark and believable , Ben Nova was a bit on the easy side and I read em on the beach on holiday because they were the only English books in the local shops
The last Sci Fi book I read was Red Mars. (Mars Trilogy) from Kim Stanley Robinson. Which was excellent with lots of believable things happening.
i would suggest...
1984 by george orwell...
heads by greg bear.. failing that, either queen of angels or forge of god by the same....
radix by a.a. atanasio
the stainless steel rat by harry harrison
the postman by david brin (don't let the film put you off...)
expedition to earth by arthur c clarke
martian chronicles by ray bradbury
the man in the high castle by philip k dick.. failing that, try do androids dream of electric sheep
neuromancer by william gibson
try some of JG Ballard's sci-fi-esque books...they're refreshingly different in that they dont look too far into the future and also explore alot of unusual theme's
it explores the concept of the evolution and devolution of biological memory
"Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs… Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory."
you could also try the related novels "the burning world" and "the crystal world"
or if you want something a little more futuristic then try "Hello America"
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Last edited by jaden101 on Apr 6th, 2008 at 11:40 PM
Gender: Male Location: On a rock, floating through space..
Starship Troopers is a good read, much better than the movie. I liked Stranger on a Strange Planet by Heinlein as well.
And don't forget Battlefield Earth, by Hubbard! Yeah, I know the movie sucked - but the book is a good read! - a good, old-fashioned space adventure, with the good guys beating the bad guys at their own game.