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I am E.E. "Doc" Smith Never heard of him, but the site says he's "The inventor of space opera. His purple space war tales remain well-read generations later."
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I don't know how to recommend Le Guin. It's like telling someone that it's a good idea to eat food every day so they won't die.
I used Google Cache to circumvent the blockage, but I cannot run the cgi script for the quiz, so I'll just post my answers here and hope someone is nice enough to plug them in for me.
quote:Which Science Fiction Writer Are You? 1) What is the grand theme of life that you focus on most often? Art vs. inner demons.
2) What kind of science and technology interests you the most? Whatever is big, fast, and/or powerful.
3) Are you patriotic? Patriotism is foolish... but I suppose I'm rather parochial.
4) How big of an asshole are you? I do not believe someone of my stature should have to suffer fools gladly.
5) Are you a total dork when dealing with the opposite sex? I probably offend a lot more people than I realize I do.
6) Are you loud and flamboyant? When you get onto a subject that I care about, I'll surprise you.
7) Do you consider what you do to be art? It's a craft, and I take pride in being a professional.
8) Who did you vote for in the 2000 presidential election? George.
9) Are you a blabbermouth? I'm such a fascinating talker, folks are glad to let me do more of the talking.
10) Do you have the answers? I have some intriguing theories that might be fruitful.
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Would that I could. My psyche is still scarred. (No one told me to stick to his early stuff until it was much too late.)
I am apparently Asimov. Ironic, since I've never cared for his longer work, and only like some of his shorts.
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quote:Originally posted by Noemon: You are none other that Robert A. Heinlein, Primal.
Now I'm waiting for someone to post that they've never read any Heinlein.
Awesome. I'm not a huge fan, but I can see where we have similar personalities. I wonder how much of the Heinlein diagnosis hinges on that presidential election answer...
Whenever I think of Heinlein, it actually reminds me of Gaiman. Specifically, I am reminded of a random scene in American Gods where the main character gets into the car of some American Indian and notices a paperback copy of Stranger in a Strange Land in the back seat. Those kind of random details always stick out in my head for no particular reason and, since his writing is littered with them, it's one of the main reasons I like Gaiman.
As for Le Guin, a quick, easy read is the original Earthsea Trilogy. Short, and brilliant.
For more in-depth stuff, there are a ton of compilations of her short stories all over the place. There's also The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven and many, many others.
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Isaac Asimov! W00t! Funny, I was re-reading favorite passages of his autobiography and a short story or two just last night.
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I came out as Olaf Stapledon. Funny, I read "Odd John" years ago, and was not impressed enough to read another. But then, I've learned a lot and changed a lot since then. Maybe I should reread it, or find another OS.
As with most online quizzes, I wished that it would be possible to choose two or more of the alternatives, or have a "none of the above" (for all of them)
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Standing outside the science fiction "field", he wrote fictional explorations of the futures of whole species and galaxies.
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I am James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon.) Does someone want to enlighten me on what she wrote?
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Isaac Asimov. And I'm reading the Foundation Series right now. But that's probably why I got him. I answered questions about what interested me based on my info intake for the past couple of weeks, in which I've been reading Asimov.
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James Tiptree Jr. only wrote two novels that I'm aware of, Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air. Both of them are decent, but neither struck me as fantastic. Her real strength was in her short fiction, of which she wrote a slew. Pretty much any collection of her short stuff is going to be well worth reading.
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Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs), whom I've never heard of, but sounds interesting. Can anyone reccomend anything of his?
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Well, David Brin (one N), wrote The Postman (Think Kevin Costner) and The Uplift Saga among others. I'm surprised you've never heard of him.
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Any suggestions on what to read from him? Just curious to see hwat he has.
The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man are probably his two most famous novels. He wrote reams of short stories which range from uninspired to brilliant. "Fondly Farenheit" is arguably the best known of his short fiction.
Pretty much every author who has been listed so far, with the exception of Brin*, I'd say, has undisputably had a fairly powerful impact on the genre. If you're serious about SF they're all probably authors you'll want to read.
*No insult to Brin, here. He's just new compared to the other authors that have been listed so far, except for Butler.
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I'm Heinlein, myself, though I've always identified well with Harlan Ellison (though he'd scoff to be called an SF author).
EE Smith wrote the Lensman series of stories during the pulp era in the 20's, which was subsequently turned into an anime movie. I loved the movie, though I've never read any of Smith.
Apparently Lucas stole heavily from him.
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quote:No OSC? Is he even an option? Can anyone that knows him better than I do even try to get him?
If you look at the code for the page you can see who the possibilities are, and Card isn't among them. It's actually a kind of strange list, and two of the people on it don't seem like SF authors at all to me.
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Noemon is like the SF Guru. We'll all have to make a pilgrimage to Ohio to study under his masterful hand. Pretty soon we'll all grow all our hair out, get shunts installed in our brain stems and have balisets suddenly appear in a lot of our studio recordings.
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I'm Gregory Benford apparently. It's kind of sad cause I haven't read anything by him, guess that's my cue to go to the library.
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quote:Originally posted by FlyingCow: I'm Heinlein, myself, though I've always identified well with Harlan Ellison (though he'd scoff to be called an SF author).
Actually, I think Ellison was the one who introduced SF (as speculative fiction) into common parlance, by describing himself as writing it.
quote:Originally posted by FlyingCow: EE Smith wrote the Lensman series of stories during the pulp era in the 20's, which was subsequently turned into an anime movie. I loved the movie, though I've never read any of Smith.
Apparently Lucas stole heavily from him.
So did the creators of the Green Lantern Corps.
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out of curiosity (since it's been brought up a few times now here) were any of you big fans of Left Hand of Darkness? I've liked her earthsea books (that I've read) but this one (despite being well known) was mostly just off-putting for me. The only thing I can specifically recall as just annoying me was the constant references to time and date in the local nomenclature which I could never get into, and therefore just jarred me too much every third word when they were mentioned. It was interesting, but dissapointing for me, and i'm curious of other's responses to it.
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quote:Originally posted by Marlozhan: I'm Ursula K. LeGuin
Who is she anyway?
The Earthsea Trilogy. The Left Hand of Darkness. The Lathe of Heaven.
I'm going to go and cry now.
Had she read my comments to Pix earlier, she would have had an answer. I'm not going to cry about it, but my eyebrow is definitely raised in muted shock.
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quote:Originally posted by TheGrimace: out of curiosity (since it's been brought up a few times now here) were any of you big fans of Left Hand of Darkness? I've liked her earthsea books (that I've read) but this one (despite being well known) was mostly just off-putting for me. The only thing I can specifically recall as just annoying me was the constant references to time and date in the local nomenclature which I could never get into, and therefore just jarred me too much every third word when they were mentioned. It was interesting, but dissapointing for me, and i'm curious of other's responses to it.
I think that The Left Hand of Darkness and The Lathe of Heaven are LeGuin's two best novels. TLoH probably edges TLHoD out, but just by a hair. It's been a few years, so I probably need to reread it before I discuss it at length, but I'll put it at the top of my list (after Solaris, which I started rereading this morning, so I should be able to talk intelligently about it soon.
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