Sci Fi Recomendations please!

[petemaskreplica]

Oh fug, not Keanu fuggin Reeves. :(

[Smiley]

The title's still too clever, they should rename it "I'm Fred Or Am I Bob?" in case it gets mistaken for a Scanners sequel (which will be the excuse trotted out when it bombs like atomic dogshit.)

[Mr C]

"Whoah"

Just a little quote from the forth coming film there.

[Generally Contrary]

Yeah, but, whoah, dude, it's a Richard Linklater movie.

(that's a plus, in my book)

(it won't be Johnny Mnemonic, I'll put money on it)

[petemaskreplica]

well, we can only hope :S

[Dounreay]

If it's recent stuff you are after, Dan Simmon's 'Illium'. The best book I've read in the past year.  Don't believe the cover blurb. It's not a sci-fi re-telling of the Illiad although the Trojan War does feature in it.

Far more accessible than other Simmon's work, it has time travel, enigmatic aliens, Greek gods, smart robots, faxing humans, intrigue, epic scale between the far future and past and a damn good plot.

Other good stuff - Neil Gaiman's 'Neverwhere', Arthur C's 'The Light of Other Days'.

Oh and by the way, Avoid 'March Up Country' at all cost.  

[Tordelbach]

Was thinking about which SF books I would recommend if I was faced with only recommending a dozen or so (all the while pointlessly inputting numbers last night). I was pretty surprised by the list I came up with, 'cos it really wasn't what i'd have  expected.  So, in no particular order, and taking 'sequences' as one entry:

To my surprise, a load by Asimov: "Foundation","Foundation and Empire", "Caves of Steel","The Naked Sun".  Four really terrific books, bursting with ideas, plot and breadth of vision.  If you haven't read these, you really should.

For pure cool-aliens chic, Vernor Vinge's diptych "A Deepness in the Sky" and "A Fire Upon the Deep".  Which order you read them in is probably a matter of taste.  they work either way.

For gripping twisty stories in a rich SF Universe:  Iain Banks' "The Player of Games" and "Use of Weapons".

And finally, my personal favourites for out-and-out mind-expanding brilliance, Ursula Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" and "The Left Hand of Darkness".

For classic space-military-meets-high-concept-aliens, you can do no better than Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye", but DO NOT read the shite sequel , "The Moat Around Murchison's Eye", which is cackhanded drivel.

Oh, and read Pohl's "Gateway".  I only got round to it a few years ago, and it's a really great read.  Sequels are fun too, but diminishing returns apply, donchano.

What I find odd about my considered shortlist is that I don't see many of the books I've been enjoying in quantity over recent  years.  For example, there's no Baxter, no Bear, no K. S. Robinson (alas, a one-trick pony, but it's a damn good trick), no Ian McLeod (ditto), no Hamiltion, no Mieville, no Haldeman - and yet I pick up anything by these guys, and usually enjoy them hugely.  

It's not just that the above dozen are from my 'formative' years or from some 'golden age', some I've only read recently, some I read 20 years ago, some were written 50 years ago, some 5 years ago.  

So what defines an essential SF read?