Escape Artists
Escape Pod => Science Fiction Discussion => Topic started by: Roney on March 06, 2008, 09:55:37 PM
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Science Fiction is mature enough to have a canon. So 'fess up: which classics do you feel you ought to have read but somehow never got around to? Which topics would you fail on your SF Geek application test? Which conversations do you have to bluff your way through at the SF party?
(Moderators, please redact Amazon links to add the Escape Pod bit.)
Childhood's End (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0345444051/escapepod-20/) - I so haven't read it that I don't even know what it's about, but I've heard the title so often (and spoken with such seriousness) that this seems on a par with not knowing who's the main character in the Gospels. Is it just laughable to claim to be an SF geek when I've never read this?
Any Robert A Heinlein* - He's hugely influential, enduring popular, politically engaged and provocative. He's right up my street. But he somehow hasn't turned up on my bookshelf.
* Other than The Number of the Beast (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449130703/escapepod-20), which was apparently a bad place to start.
A Canticle For Leibowitz (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060892994/escapepod-20/) - It's a title so memorable it will probably stay with me longer than some books that I have read. I've no idea what this one's about either.
Oh yeah -- it's not about books that you have no interest in. They should be ones that you really truly do intend to make some time to track down and get stuck into some day. Just somehow... not yet. What are yours?
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Ya know, I haven't read Childhood's End, or A Canticle for Leibowitz. I guess you've got company there.
I've never read any of the Heinlein juveniles, but that's accounted for by my late entry in the genre.
The biggest ommision: Gibson. Never read any of his stuff.
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I've never read any Gibson, or any of the many Gene Wolfe Urth books. So many people recommended Wolfe to me and I tried reading one of the books but I was lost after 100 pages and gave up. Based on all of the positive reviews of his stuff I feel like I'm missing out on something. May have to try again someday.
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Heh. Life's too short for guilt. (And I'd have a lot of guilt built up about what SF classics I haven't read, most of Roney's list and then some.)
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Science Fiction is mature enough to have a canon. So 'fess up: which classics do you feel you ought to have read but somehow never got around to? Which topics would you fail on your SF Geek application test? Which conversations do you have to bluff your way through at the SF party?
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card gets me a big F on the SF geek application test. I hear good things about it. I keep meaning to read it. I just never get around to it. I've also never read any Bester or any Cordwainer Smith, which seem like Heinlein scale omissions. And though I love Dick and have read a lot of him, I've not read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I feel like I ought to.
One book I've never read and probably never will and have some guilt over but not enough to actually change my intention about is Haldeman's Forever War.
I feel especially stupid in conversations about Delany's Dhalgren because it sounds like the sort of brainy book I should have read and haven't.
And my giant short story omission is "The Cold Equation".
BTW, I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz but then I'm big into post-apocalyptic stuff. Also love Wolfe, which is covered on many other threads.
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I just read my first 2 Dick novels in the past month. And one wasn't even SF (the other was Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep). I'm also a bit ashamed that I have read all the Dresden Files books since the start of the year ;)
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I'll first redeem myself a weensy bit by first saying I have read Childhood's End (loved it), and lots of Heinlein. Now, onto the guilty embarrassment. I've never read:
-Do sheep dream of electric sheep?
-The Canticle for Liebowitz
-1984
-I've never read a single book by Asimov. I know, it's like a Christian who hasn't read the Bible, or a Jew who's not seen the Torah. I've just never gotten around to it....
And, now you all know my dirty little secrets. I am so ashamed.
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-I've never read a single book by Asimov. I know, it's like a Christian who hasn't read the Bible, or a Jew who's not seen the Torah. I've just never gotten around to it....
And, now you all know my dirty little secrets. I am so ashamed.
Oh. My. GOD.
To be fair, I have tried to go back and reread some Asimov (I read all his major novels and short stories while in high school). As an adult in this increasingly cynical world, its hard to buy the naivety of his work and get past it. I'm sure if Issac were around still he would blame the world for this and demand it promptly shape up ;)
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-I've never read a single book by Asimov. I know, it's like a Christian who hasn't read the Bible, or a Jew who's not seen the Torah. I've just never gotten around to it....
And, now you all know my dirty little secrets. I am so ashamed.
Oh. My. GOD.
To be fair, I have tried to go back and reread some Asimov (I read all his major novels and short stories while in high school). As an adult in this increasingly cynical world, its hard to buy the naivety of his work and get past it. I'm sure if Issac were around still he would blame the world for this and demand it promptly shape up ;)
But Isaac is in Heaven now.... (Tad goes into a corner to giggle with Kurt Vonnegut over his very amusing Asimov eulogy*, yet again. And so it goes...)
I'm resisting the urge to sidetrack the thread and offer recommendations (definitely read Ender's Game - it's pretty quick and worth it; so is Forever War...and for Heinlein, I really loved Stranger In a Strange Land when I first read it, but...) ....but I'm not resisting hard enough.
Shwankie, I will now shock you in a fundamental way that ought to match my shock at your Asimov confession: I have never read Terry Pratchett.
I HAVE read Good Omens; and I checked out the very first Discworld once, but had to turn it in unread because life pooped in my cereal that month. So many, many people tell me that I would love his stuff, and I really should go get it, but... I just haven't.
Now, I'm going to shut down the computer and go to bed before I take Anarkey's comment about Dick WAY out of context, and get myself (rightfully) beaten about the head and face with an unread copy of Gormenghast.
Gooodnight, everybody!
*I couldn't find a reliable link to the quote from "God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian", so here it is:
I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, "Isaac is up in Heaven now." That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.
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-1984
-I've never read a single book by Asimov. I know, it's like a Christian who hasn't read the Bible, or a Jew who's not seen the Torah. I've just never gotten around to it....
Not getting around to it is my biggest obstacle - there is only so much time in a day and so much stuff I want to read.
Most people I know were forced to read 1984 in a High School English class (that and Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World).
The original Foundation Trilogy by Asimov is a fast, easy read on a rainy weekend. Actually, the same could be said for many of his other novels like End of Eternity and The Gods Themselves.
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I've never read Brave New World or anything by Phillip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, or William Gibson (I have a copy of Neuromancer but haven't opened it once). I have read, however, A Canticle For Leibowitz, Childhood's End and The Gods Themselves (among many others), all of which I enjoyed.
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Ya know, I haven't read Childhood's End, or A Canticle for Leibowitz. I guess you've got company there.
Me too!
[/aol]
As for what else I probably "should" have read but haven't, I suppose there's Jules Verne and H. G. Welles. I read 1984 voluntarily in my late teens or early twenties, but have yet to read Brave New World, so I suppose there's another.
My real "guilty secret" is that I enjoy Elron Hubbard's fiction. In fact I rank Battlefield Earth among my top favorite novels (along with Cherryh's Cyteen, King's The Stand, and I know there's a couple of others that I've just forgotten since all my books are still packed up from the recent move.)
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I like to bug people by pointing out that "1984" is just a four-digit number. The famous novel by George Orwell was titled Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Never read any Orson Scott Card, Terry Pratchett, or Piers Anthony,
I think the Hitchhikers Guide Tri-tetra-pentalogy went sharply downhill after the first novel.
So did Dune.
I keep confusing Frederick Pohl (read lots of his, still waiting for Gateway the movie) with Poul Anderson (can't recall many).
I have yet to see Episode III of Star Wars.
I quite enjoyed Olaf Stapledon's "The Star Maker" and "The Last and First Men" way back when I read them. (early 1970s-ish)
Never watched a whole episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer all during it's first run, thinking it was a stupid premise. Then after seeing a New Years Day marathon of them (after the series wound up) on cable, my wife and I started borrowing and/or buying the boxed sets.
I began reading The Hobbit and LoTR in high school (late '60s) merely because a hawt girl recommended them. Before that, my nearest exposure to fantasy literature was probably Bullfinch's Mythology and some version of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
I don't think very much of cyberpunk as a genre (especially in movies), even though I like most of William Gibson's work.
I have purchased and read more novels based on ST-TNG than I allow visitors to see on my bookshelf.
I have never read any of the Lensman series.
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Planish reminded me of this little secret: I have never been able to finish the LOTR books. I don't like them. I've gotten as far as The Hobbit and then the first book, and just can't get into it.
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Planish reminded me of this little secret: I have never been able to finish the LOTR books. I don't like them. I've gotten as far as The Hobbit and then the first book, and just can't get into it.
We're not far apart on that one, KF. I loved the Hobbit when I was a kid, but couldn't get more than a third of the way into Fellowship.
Then, when the movies were coming out, I found an omnibus edition of the trilogy at the library, and decided that I was going to elf up and read it. Now, I like to read while soaking in a nice, hot bath. It's relaxing, and my own personal hobbits actually tend to leave me alone in there. I was about halfway through Two Towers when I started this particular bath. Since it was a very heavy book (despite being paperback), my arms got really really tired as I read. I decided not to risk getting it wet by dozing off or dropping it in the tub, so I reached up to set it on the lid of the toilet...
But someone had left the lid up, and... *PLooP* Soggy Hobbits.
I haven't had the heart to try to finish the books since then.
(If you don't want to know.... don't read this part. But for those of you who want closure:
The end of the story is that I fished it out of the mercifully clean water, and stacked about 20 heavy textbooks and dictionaries on top of it for three days so that it would dry flat. My wife looked up some kind of home anti-mildew solution for protecting paper on one of her scrapbooking sites, and we treated the pages. And I try not to think about it when I check out a book that looks like it's been through the rain forest.)
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I think the Hitchhikers Guide Tri-tetra-pentalogy went sharply downhill after the first novel.
So did Dune.
Actually, the fifth Dune wasn't too bad, nor was the sixth. In fact, after reading the 5th and 6th, I really started to get into the mold of only using "said" or not tagging dialogue directly at all. One of my problems with the otherwise-great stories in many Star Trek novels is that the editors continue to require the authors to use words other than "said".
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I only read "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and "Brave New World" last year, though I'd seen both films.
I've never read "I Am Legend".
I've never seen "Schindler's List" (which I suppose one could consider a horror film).
I actually still really like "Star Trek: The Motion Picture".
The only Asimov I've ever read was "Nightfall", and that was on EP.
I tend to stay away from the broad, sweeping SF epics that populate our store shelves, as well as the space-adventure books (Elizabeth Moon, David Drake, et al), because I'm afraid to get into a series that started so long ago and has so much back-catalogue.
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I've never read
1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four either.
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The end of the story is that I fished it out of the mercifully clean water, and stacked about 20 heavy textbooks and dictionaries on top of it for three days so that it would dry flat. My wife looked up some kind of home anti-mildew solution for protecting paper on one of her scrapbooking sites, and we treated the pages. And I try not to think about it when I check out a book that looks like it's been through the rain forest.)
Glad to hear it survived. I would've given up on the beast, I would've thought that a book that big would take forever to dry.
I decided to read the whole LOTR saga after seeing the Fellowship movie. It was a not an easy read but I'm glad I plowed through it. It was interesting watching the last two movies and comparing them to the books.
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Hmmm. I didn't think of it earlier, but I've never read any Dick either.
On the fantasy front, my deficiencies are boundless: I've never ready any Mcaffrey, Lackey, LeGuin, and I disliked everything I ever tried from Terry Brooks.
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On the fantasy front, my deficiencies are boundless: I've never ready any Mcaffrey, Lackey, LeGuin,
Lack of LeGuin is a Science Fiction deficiency as well as a fantasy failing.
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And I try not to think about it when I check out a book that looks like it's been through the rain forest.
Not to make you feel worse, but as someone who has actually dragged books through a rainforest, they surprisingly don't end up looking all that bad. The only real problem is that the glue denatures (the bindings fall apart) and there is a faint smell of mildew that you can't get rid of (though storing in sealed bags with baking soda and silica gel helps a lot).
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Shwankie, I will now shock you in a fundamental way that ought to match my shock at your Asimov confession: I have never read Terry Pratchett.
You really are a heretic. I am shocked. Appalled. Taken aback, even. TAD, you fooled me into thinking you were a true geek. Currently, the saving grace of my good opinion of you is I had the same thought about Anarkey's Dick comment. For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.
Um...on that note, I secretly like two of Hubbard's books, too: "The Mirror of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through." They are the closest thing to smarmy romance I've ever read. Let the beatings begin?
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I think the Hitchhikers Guide Tri-tetra-pentalogy went sharply downhill after the first novel.
I think it was only a slight decline from the first to the second, which recycled most of the good bits of the second radio series and the latter half of the first series. It went steep when the third novel came out, and dropped so far that I call the fifth book "Mostly Worthless".
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On the fantasy front, my deficiencies are boundless: I've never ready any Mcaffrey, Lackey, LeGuin,
Lack of LeGuin is a Science Fiction deficiency as well as a fantasy failing.
I heartily concur; depending on whether your mood is leaning SF ("Left Hand of Darkness") or Fantasy ("Earthsea") you should remedy LeGuin-lessness, post haste!
(though storing in sealed bags with baking soda and silica gel helps a lot).
Yes! Baking Soda - thanks AarowOM! That was definitely a key ingredient (we were too poor at the time to afford much else... certainly not a replacement copy of the snazzy LOTR Omnibus sporting Elijah Wood on the cover).
You really are a heretic.
(Nicest thing anyone has said all week!) 8)
For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.
Um...on that note, I secretly like two of Hubbard's books, too: "The Mirror of Her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through." They are the closest thing to smarmy romance I've ever read. Let the beatings begin?
I take perverse exception to the implication that I am NOT a geek! :'( If watching every Star Trek episode doesn't qualify me, having children who build "Delta Flyers" out of their legos should! Besides, I need something to look forward to after retirement... if I haven't read Mr. P in the ~20 years between now and then!
I think the only series I've ever read which continued to satsify beyond the 2nd/3rd book (a trilogy, if it's good, registers as "a story" in my mind) was Bujold's Vorkosigan series (as close as I tend to come to smarmy romance). Asimov's Robot stories could be viewed as a whole series... but they kind of group naturally into threes. Peirs Anthony's Xanth stuff was entertaining until age 15 (too many icky sexual innuendos after a while); and his Incarnations of Immortality began to wear on me after realizing it was the same story each time (give or take).
And I'm sure I'm not the first to notice, but when you read Asimov's stuff in somewhat chronological order, it's amusing to see how the style changes according to the taste of the times. Over the years, his dialogue seemed to pass from mostly stiff scientific discourse or awkward educational film-style "chit-chat" to incorporating attempts at slang, romance, and even (gasp) minor swearing! I've heard some readers complain about the style of the old masters, but because of Isaac's longevity, I find it endearing to see him trying to adapt over the decades.
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Ya know, I haven't read Childhood's End, or A Canticle for Leibowitz. I guess you've got company there.
I've never read any of the Heinlein juveniles, but that's accounted for by my late entry in the genre.
The biggest ommision: Gibson. Never read any of his stuff.
Awful as it is to admit given my pathological fondness for Cyberpunk (The game and the literary genre), I still haven't made it to the end of Neuromancer.
Or Count Zero.
Or Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Or Burning Chrome.
His later books, stuff like Virtual Light and Idoru and Spook Country I absolutely love. 'The Gernsback Continuum' is flat out my favourite short story of all time but the classics? Not for me.
Oh and I've never read Canticle for Liebowitz either...
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I feel especially stupid in conversations about Delany's Dhalgren because it sounds like the sort of brainy book I should have read and haven't.
Dhalgren (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhalgren) reminds me of something attributed to Mark Twain: "Wagner's music is much better than it sounds".
Or, William Gibson calls Dhalgren "A riddle that was never meant to be solved."
I really enjoyed it the first time I read it, lo, these many years ago, but I recently tried reading it again and got easily distracted.
I did like the idea of the "scorpions" though.
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First, a correction:
I haven't read any Hubbard, either. I had some, not sure what happened to them, but the two books I reference ("Mirror of her Dreams" and "A Man Rides Through") are by Donelson (Or however you spell it, I am not looking at the books at the moment). Sorry about that. One more deficiency, it seems.
And, to pursue a remedy for my sadly lacking SF background, Thaur and I went to a local going-out-of-business bookstore that was selling books for $1/each, or buy 10 get 10 free. The selection was pretty picked over, but here's the SF/Fantasy we picked up:
-A City in Winter, Mark Helprin
-The Death of a Necromancer, Martha Wells
-Childhood's End, Clarke (Which Thaur has already started reading. I've read it, but had no idea what became of my copy)
-The Voyage, David Drake
-All About Venus, anthology including Clarke, Poul Anderson, C.s. Lewis, and Olaf Stapledon
-Changeling, Zelazny
-The Man in the Maze, Silverberg
-The Robots of Dawn, Asimov (I will likely read this first, just to stop the embarrassment)
-The Number of the Beast, Heinlein (I've been wanting this for a while)
-The Making of Dune (the original movie, not the miniseries)
I realize it's not a complete cure, but at least it might help treat some of the symptoms.
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For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.
Would that include Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind? I'll admit they aren't nearly as good as Ender's Game, but still better than the Shadow series sequels.
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Planish reminded me of this little secret: I have never been able to finish the LOTR books. I don't like them. I've gotten as far as The Hobbit and then the first book, and just can't get into it.
You lucky one. I actually rather liked The Hobbit and because everybody kept saying that Lord of the Rings was THE BEST FANTASY EVARR!!!1! I read it.
I plowed through the parts where they walked for some time and then they rested. And then they walked again. And then they rested again. Hey guess what, they walked some more.
Then I listened to pages upon pages of crappy elven poetry. And elven songs.
I endured merciless Hobbit inner turmoil.
And when I finally reached the last page I cried: "I suffered through the book for THIS?"
And then I threw it against the wall.
I learned a valuable lesson here, if I don't like a book within the first 30 pages I put it down, no matter how good somebody tells me it is.
It is a good rule and I follow it religiously.
Except when I <a href="http://forum.escapeartists.info/index.php?topic=1271.msg19272#msg19272" > don't [/url].
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Planish reminded me of this little secret: I have never been able to finish the LOTR books. I don't like them. I've gotten as far as The Hobbit and then the first book, and just can't get into it.
You lucky one. I actually rather liked The Hobbit and because everybody kept saying that Lord of the Rings was THE BEST FANTASY EVARR!!!1! I read it.
I plowed through the parts where they walked for some time and then they rested. And then they walked again. And then they rested again. Hey guess what, they walked some more.
Then I listened to pages upon pages of crappy elven poetry. And elven songs.
I endured merciless Hobbit inner turmoil.
And when I finally reached the last page I cried: "I suffered through the book for THIS?"
And then I threw it against the wall.
I learned a valuable lesson here, if I don't like a book within the first 30 pages I put it down, no matter how good somebody tells me it is.
It is a good rule and I follow it religiously.
Except when I <a href="http://forum.escapeartists.info/index.php?topic=1271.msg19272#msg19272" > don't [/url].
You could probably formulate some corollary rule regarding the length of the book...
I'm just relieved that you liked something based on something I said! :D
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For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.
Would that include Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind? I'll admit they aren't nearly as good as Ender's Game, but still better than the Shadow series sequels.
Ouch, I have the Shadow series in paperback but have not read any of it yet. Thought Speaker and Xenocide were good but Children was hard to get through.
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For now, I'll forgive your serious Pratchettlessness, but if you tell me you actually liked any of O.S. Card's 3rd or 4th books in any series, I am afraid I'll have to take to heart you comment of beatings about the head and neck with Gormenghast.
Would that include Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and Children of the Mind? I'll admit they aren't nearly as good as Ender's Game, but still better than the Shadow series sequels.
Ouch, I have the Shadow series in paperback but have not read any of it yet. Thought Speaker and Xenocide were good but Children was hard to get through.
Personally, I think the Shadow series goes up and down. Ender's Shadow was decent, though I think it detracts from Ender's Game by somehow reducing Ender's importance. That and the retcon with regards to terminology stands out. Shadow of the Hegemon, in my opinion, was worse than Shadow Puppets, though my personal library database seems to be missing a..., well, reason.
I will concede that Children of the Mind is the weakest of the original 4 Ender novels.
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Any Robert A Heinlein* - He's hugely influential, enduring popular, politically engaged and provocative. He's right up my street. But he somehow hasn't turned up on my bookshelf.
* Other than The Number of the Beast (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449130703/escapepod-20), which was apparently a bad place to start.
Yeah, I've read most of Heinlein's adult novels and many of the juveniles, and you must have had a little extra negative something on the random number generator to pick that one. It's the only RAH novel I ever failed to finish, and I don't give up on any book very easily. (I have this "thing" about sets and completion.)
My personal favorite is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you can forgive the title -- which I admit sounds like a cheesy romance -- you get a very compelling story and some of RAH's best characters rattling around a fascinating venue. I like RAH's Luna a lot better in this book than when he revisited it The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; the latter suffers from being written after he went off the Libertarian deep end.
Starship Troopers may be the most influential. It's certainly been instrumental in getting lots of people (including me) to join the military. Of course, it was also insturmental in getting me to leave the military, at least in part because the book left me, as my wife puts it, "cursed with the vision of the perfect organization" -- an ideal no flesh-and-blood polity of stinky humans could ever measure up to.
Just some thoughts; I'll do my own confession in a later post.
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Any Robert A Heinlein* - He's hugely influential, enduring popular, politically engaged and provocative. He's right up my street. But he somehow hasn't turned up on my bookshelf.
* Other than The Number of the Beast (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0449130703/escapepod-20), which was apparently a bad place to start.
Yeah, I've read most of Heinlein's adult novels and many of the juveniles, and you must have had a little extra negative something on the random number generator to pick that one. It's the only RAH novel I ever failed to finish, and I don't give up on any book very easily. (I have this "thing" about sets and completion.)
My personal favorite is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you can forgive the title -- which I admit sounds like a cheesy romance -- you get a very compelling story and some of RAH's best characters rattling around a fascinating venue. I like RAH's Luna a lot better in this book than when he revisited it The Cat Who Walks Through Walls; the latter suffers from being written after he went off the Libertarian deep end.
Starship Troopers may be the most influential. It's certainly been instrumental in getting lots of people (including me) to join the military. Of course, it was also instrumental in getting me to leave the military, at least in part because the book left me, as my wife puts it, "cursed with the vision of the perfect organization" -- an ideal no flesh-and-blood polity of stinky humans could ever measure up to.
Just some thoughts; I'll do my own confession in a later post.
I wish I hadn't read this post 5 minutes before leaving for work... WindUp: you and I should have a beer and rail against stinky humans some time! I tell some of my stories (appropriately name-changed and fictionalized, of course) on my "Tad's Happy Funtime" blog (http://happyphuntime.blogspot.com), if you care to see how I developed the opinion that the service was like a giant amoeba - no brain to speak of, just a very hungry foot. :)
As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place". I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).
Edit: I fixed the link to point to my original "Tad's Happy Funtime" blog, which has stuff I wrote in 2004-2005. My mother couldn't handle the silly url "happyphuntime", and kept going to "happyfuntime", which was a detailed list of one shallow man's sexual adventures. So, after the Escape Pod <300word story contest, I started a new blog at http://tadshappyfuntime.blogspot.com (http://tadshappyfuntime.blogspot.com), which has more recent stuff.
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As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place". I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).
How would you get that impression? There were almost no female characters in Starship Troopers. Carmen Ibanez appears briefly in one scene I seem to recall, and unlike the film, there were no women in the Mobile Infantry.
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As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place". I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).
How would you get that impression? There were almost no female characters in Starship Troopers. Carmen Ibanez appears briefly in one scene I seem to recall, and unlike the film, there were no women in the Mobile Infantry.
In that case, I am definitely transferring memories of Forever War onto Troopers (and excuse my man-pig moment as I mentally review the co-ed shower scene from the ST film... ah... crap; now I'm seeing Doogie Houser mind-meld with a giant slug. Of COURSE she's afraid, doofus; a bunch of monkeys just fired a nuke into her nest and lopped off her feeding stalk!).
But like I say, the female characters that I legitimately DO recall seemed to take the stage long enough to make the point that Heinlein believes that women do not have to be defined by traditional gender roles... and once that point is established, they seem to sink back toward their allocated two dimensions (along with many puns about their two marvelous dimensions).
Exhibit A: Wyoming Knott: revolutionary, warrior, key conspirator. And yet, much of the strong independence attributed to her is undercut by constant references to her figure, her deferral to the paternalistic Professor, and her eventual subsumption into Manny's family.
Exhibit B: Nurse Jill (from Stranger) who is relatively tough and single-minded, leading a subversive crusade to free the weakened man from mars and her kidnapped boyfriend; at least until Jubal Harshaw is introduced. After that, she increasingly becomes a statuesque backdrop, ending up in a kind of "backup chorus" to Mike Smith.
Now, I am NOT trying to make a case that Heinlein was irredeemably sexist; if there's a flaw here, I suppose it lies in my ability to keep the story in the context of the period in which it was written. But when I read his books, I see these patterns of "flawed, but wise elder" and "brainy, but beautiful female sidekick" and it makes it hard to concentrate on other things.
Like, how nice libertarianism (or anarchy) would be, if only it didn't depend on the good behavior of predatory bullies....
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I wish I hadn't read this post 5 minutes before leaving for work... WindUp: you and I should have a beer and rail against stinky humans some time! I tell some of my stories (appropriately name-changed and fictionalized, of course) on my "Tad's Happy Funtime" blog (http://tadshappyphuntime.blogspot.com), if you care to see how I developed the opinion that the service was like a giant amoeba - no brain to speak of, just a very hungry foot. :)
Tad, I assume that was "Tad's Happy Funtime" (http://tadshappyfuntime.blogspot.com/), not what the URL link spelled so phonetically.... <<icon of guy trying to figure out if that was an intelligence test or a mistake by a guy late for work>>
Do you ever read: An Army of Dude (http://armyofdude.blogspot.com) ?
As for the military.... It took a while, but I did eventually overcome the curse of the perfect vision. Somewhere along the way, I figured out that in the case of my present (decidedly non-military) employer, the things I love about the organization are mostly the flip side of the things about the organization that make me crazy. So, I've made peace with the whole notion of organizations populated by stinky humans -- they're all we've got to work with. And being something of a stinky human myself, it's the only kind that would let me in, even if there were alternatives. A beer still sounds good, though...
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As for Mr. RAH, I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the way he writes female characters; maybe we are simply products of our respective times, but he seems caught between trying to seem hip to the "liberation" of women and trying to keep them in their 1950's "place". I have the impression that Starship Troopers did a better job of actually treating women like equals, but it's been a while since I read it (and I've read Forever War since then, too).
How would you get that impression? There were almost no female characters in Starship Troopers. Carmen Ibanez appears briefly in one scene I seem to recall, and unlike the film, there were no women in the Mobile Infantry.
But like I say, the female characters that I legitimately DO recall seemed to take the stage long enough to make the point that Heinlein believes that women do not have to be defined by traditional gender roles... and once that point is established, they seem to sink back toward their allocated two dimensions (along with many puns about their two marvelous dimensions).
Exhibit A: Wyoming Knott: revolutionary, warrior, key conspirator. And yet, much of the strong independence attributed to her is undercut by constant references to her figure, her deferral to the paternalistic Professor, and her eventual subsumption into Manny's family.
Exhibit B: Nurse Jill (from Stranger) who is relatively tough and single-minded, leading a subversive crusade to free the weakened man from mars and her kidnapped boyfriend; at least until Jubal Harshaw is introduced. After that, she increasingly becomes a statuesque backdrop, ending up in a kind of "backup chorus" to Mike Smith.
Now, I am NOT trying to make a case that Heinlein was irredeemably sexist; if there's a flaw here, I suppose it lies in my ability to keep the story in the context of the period in which it was written. But when I read his books, I see these patterns of "flawed, but wise elder" and "brainy, but beautiful female sidekick" and it makes it hard to concentrate on other things.
I think most authors with much longevity tend to fall back on a few archetypes, mostly because it is so damn difficult to generate genuinely new, self-consistent, interesting characters to populate imaginary worlds. Particularly if you have to do it across many books, and particularly in genre fiction, which tends to reward aspects of the story other than character development. (Quick: How many super-bright, maddeningly-reasonable, resourceful scientist characters of Asimov's can you name before you fall asleep?) (Answer: Not many, because you can't remember their names and they all blur together, but you know exactly what I'm talking about.)
Heinlein's third wife -- who was eight years or so younger than he was -- is widely believed to be the model for many of those characters, so you can make a reasonable guess as to where the experiential raw materials for the "patterns of 'flawed, but wise elder' and 'brainy, but beautiful female sidekick'" you've noticed come from.
And finally, Counter-Exhibit A: Friday. Bright. Built. (In several senses of the word.) Lethal. (For some reason, I remember the scene where she informs one of her former captors:"You're only alive right now because you let me pee!!") Her relationship with her "flawed-but-wise" boss doesn't break the pattern, but the plot intervenes...
Like, how nice libertarianism (or anarchy) would be, if only it didn't depend on the good behavior of predatory bullies....
Unfortunately, I don't think you even have to go to that extreme. I've come to the conclusion that true Communism and true Free-Market Capitalism are both elegant, self-consistent, theoretically beautiful systems that share a common flaw -- they can't be carried out by actual humans.
<<edit to remove Friday spoiler.>>
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When I saw the "guilty secrets" thread title, I presumed this would be about the worthless fluff SF that we enjoyed, not the classics that we missed.
Enjoying authors like Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks should be a guilty secret.
Not having read all the classics is forgivable. There's only so much time, and there are a lot of classics. And not all of them have aged well. I've never read any Lensmen, but it always just sounded silly and outdated by a modern sensibility anyway.
Put me down among the legion of folks who have never read A Canticle for Leibowitz or Childhood's End. And Childhood's End is one of the things that got me into Science Fiction in the first place. Well, the title and the cover anyway. My older brother was reading it, and I found the image fascinating. He thought I wasn't old enough for it though - I was probably 7. But I started reading a bunch of other stuff, starting with older classics like Vern and Wells. Eventually it became a point of odd pride that I'd never read Childhood's End...
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When I saw the "guilty secrets" thread title, I presumed this would be about the worthless fluff SF that we enjoyed, not the classics that we missed.
Enjoying authors like Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks should be a guilty secret.
Hey, I was only 14! What did I know about anything? :)
But, anyway... I fixed the blog links I referenced above (see editorial note), and Windup, what you say makes perfect sense to me. Ties in with several conversations I've had over the course of the week... but I won't burden you with that baggage!
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When I saw the "guilty secrets" thread title, I presumed this would be about the worthless fluff SF that we enjoyed, not the classics that we missed.
Enjoying authors like Piers Anthony and Terry Brooks should be a guilty secret.
To say nothing of Elron ;D