i also recommend "Stranger in a Strange Land" (the uncut version if you can get it). less military, but (still?) an exellent book.

TTFN & lol

Cosmi

PS: can you really ask such a question to scifi fans? that's like "is the sky really blue?" lol.

you get the idea. i quit.

TTFN & lol

All you who promoted Heinlein's Starship Troopers were right. It was super. I was so afraid it'd be all war and giant bugs, but it sure wasn't. Actually, it seemed more like a treatise on a lot of common sense.

(Also read Ice Station by Matt Reilly. Not SF, but if you want, as the Chicago Tribune said in its jacket blurb, "Some of the wildest and most sustained battles in an action thriller," this is it.)

EDIT: Wow, my account still exists! And wow, after looking at some other profiles, it seems I have been here quite a long time! So hey, I am back, for now.

[This message has been edited by Goober (edited March 18, 2003).]

Kidding: H. G. Wells.

This pessimistic Pole has spent a whole career telling ironic stories of futility and frustration. Yet he is also a master of wordplay so witty that it sparkles even when translated into English.

***

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die
Had he but known such a-squared cos 2(phi)!
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

Or:

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"

The primary answer I got was William Gibson. With the two slightly altered answers I got John Brunner. While I am familiar with the first, I don't know the second - but the description made him sound similar to Gibson in choice of topic.

Weird.

My husband, while not a writer (a software engineer who reads tons), did it, and also got Gibson, though his combination of answers was different from mine. I do think that would be a fairly accurate assessment.

For fun we tried answering all with the first choice, and got David Brin - Bestselling producer of impossible-to-put-down epic adventures in a far-flung future. That comes up every time we put in those answers, so the quiz does not seem completely random. It was fun!

A Heinlein I like that is not so heavy-handed style-wise is "Friday" - maybe you would like that one too Kolona!

This pessimistic Pole has spent a whole career telling ironic stories of futility and frustration. Yet he is also a master of wordplay so witty that it sparkles even when translated into English.

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Frank Herbert

His style is often stilted, but he created what some consider the greatest SF novel of all time.

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Stanislav Lem wrote the novel SOLARIS. It's a great novel. I haven't seen the movie, so I can't say anything about it.

I was Kurt Vonnegut - "For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction."

Very flattered, but I noticed no one has been compared to an unknown-nobody writer. We can't all be comparable to the greats . But that is a depressing thought so I will say no more about that...

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Who the hell is Olaf Stapledon?.

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<couging, wheezing, and feeling incredibly old for only being 26.>

Uh... Try Sirius, which I believe was most recently released paired with another of his non-grand-space-civilization-rising-and-falling-and-rising-again books named Odd John. Though I have never read OJ, Sirius is a great read. According to reviews I have read on Amazon- atleast as I recall, many people liked Odd John better than Sirius. At any rate it is on my to-read list once I get back to the states.

He's won at least one Hugo (STARTIDE RISING), and he wrote the story that that became the book POSTMAN that Kevin Costner mangled into a movie (the story "Postman" was very good, the book was okay--haven't seen the movie).

I told him the day he got the Hugo for STARTIDE RISING that he introduced too many characters (it seemed like there were about 16 characters, one introduced in each of the first 16 chapters), and that it made it so that I was halfway through the book before I knew enough about any of the characters to really care for them.

When he wrote the sequel, UPLIFT WAR, it looked to me as if he'd listened to me, because he spent more time with each character before he introduced a new character, and UPLIFT WAR is better for it.

I have said this before on another thread
, but here goes, I too disliked The Postman. My reason for not liking it, was the whole Wizard of Oz-like theme, that to my memory tied the book up. I kinda liked the first half though, so I guess the short story may be good. I wouldn't know, I never knew it was one.

If you can throw a rock star in a movie and make it work, I think it is pretty cool. Tom Petty did a good job in Postman. I'm not a huge Tom Petty fan, but I have some of his albums in my collection as well.

I don't remember any Wizard-the-Oz-like theme in THE POSTMAN. To what exactly are you refering?

If I had to state in words my problem with this novel -- and I'm not sure I can do that -- it would be this: It didn't strike me as true-to-life. That is to say, I'm not sure that's how people would actually act in a post-apocalyptic setting.

I usually try to be vague in my comments of books. But since you have already read it you can ignore to following

***(almost)Spoiler warning

The element of which I speak that both Postman and OZ share is the wizard behind the curtains theme. Think last computer.

Anyway it has been a while since I have read the Postman, and honestly I can see forgetting it. Still I bought The Postman on VHS for like a dollar and liked it well enough to be happily to add it to my collection, I probably would not still have the book if I had not borrowed it from the library at school.

I was just doing some research on rainforests, went to google and typed in lungfish and David Brin turned up on page one!

quote:

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James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon)

In the 1970s she was perhaps the most memorable, and one of the most popular, short story writers. Her real life was as fantastic as her fiction.

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quote:

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Hal Clement (Harry C. Stubbs)
A quiet and underrated master of "hard science" fiction who, among other things, foresaw integrated circuits back in the 1940s.

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quote:

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Stanislav Lem
This pessimistic Pole has spent a whole career telling ironic stories of futility and frustration.  Yet he is also a master of wordplay so witty that it sparkles even when translated into English.

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quote:

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I wish I would have gotten someone I had at least read or heard of.

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William Gibson

The chief instigator of the "cyberpunk" wave of the 1980s, his razzle-dazzle futuristic intrigues were, for a while, the most imitated work in science fiction.

I'll try to look into some of his works and see if that's true.

Have some pity, Jules. Maybe they do more fantasy! Or are very young and just stretching their wings. OSC does have quite a range - there might be people who love Alvin Maker, who've never read Ender... uh, if I blaspheme, I apologize

Secondly, I feel vindicated! I hadn't read all the posts on this thread, but I discovered on that wetwill posted in January of last year. He is no fan of Heinlein.

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Heinlein seems to be a pretty popular SF writer, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. A couple of his books were okay (like Starship Troopers) but mostly they pretty much sucked. Stranger In A Strange Land comes to mind as an example of extreme suckiness. Especially in the man's later years, when he just became a lecherous old man who wrote about nothing but sex without even pretending to try for an actual storyline. The only reason I would ever recommend Heinlein to anybody is as an example of how to write a really horrible book.

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Now I won't go quite as far as willy. I've read some of Heinlein's other works and very much enjoyed his style. I really liked ...And He Built a Crooked House. (A short). But I completely share willy's opinion of Stranger in a Strange Land. I just finished reading the restored version for the first time. I kept reading and reading because everyone says how great it is. I kept waiting for the great stuff--and waiting and waiting and waiting. I would have tossed it long before the end if it hadn't been for everyone's glowing praise of it. I reached the last page and went: "HUH???"

But I would have rather come up as Ray Bradbury (his prose is to writing what Michelangelo is to painting), and I don't notice him coming up on these posts. Another great author I would like to someday be compared with is Sherri Tepper. The way I write is very similar to the way she writes, although she is a bit too much of a femi-nazi for my taste, and sometimes her environmentalism is overdone. But her style is gorgeous, and I really enjoy most of her work.

Then there is always Anne McCaffrey. Pern will always be one of my favorite worlds.

And why isn't dear Uncle Card listed? If I can ever express inner turmoil half as well as he does, I'll die happy.

I guess I must be more well-read than I thought: I am only twenty-four but most of the authors mentioned on this thread I've known and loved for many years.

My favorite new discovery by the way is Kage Baker. If you haven't read her, please do so poste haste. If you want a stand-alone novel, I recommend the short but sweet Empress of Mars. But her really interesting stuff is about the Company. For that start with Garden of Iden, and go from there.