Cult / Sci-Fi books and movies

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  • Crapaud
    Crapaud Posts: 2,483
    RDW wrote:
    The Demolished Man, 2001, The Day of the Triffids and I, Robot all in one book!
    I'm surprised that it's taken this long for Azimov to get a mention. :?

    I don't understand the popularity of William Gibson:pedestrian, not very inventive and written like a film script. If you like that, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age is far, far superior.

    Other classics (IMO):
      Greg Bear -
    Eon and Blood Music
    Greg Egan: Permutation City and Diaspora
    Stephen Baxter, in particular the Reid Malenfant Manifold books and Coalescent
    Stanislaw Lem
    Stephen Donaldson's Gap series
    A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject - Churchill
  • + 1 for World War Z - a great book!

    If you're feeling lazy, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is currently being serialised on Radio 4 at the moment and can be caught on iPlayer.

    William Gibson's Neuromancer is an obvious classic, but also I loved Virtual Light
  • Crapaud
    Crapaud Posts: 2,483
    nmcgann wrote:
    See how many you score on this list:

    http://scifilists.sffjazz.com/lists_books_rank1.html

    I managed 74 :wink:
    39 for me.

    There ain't half some shite on that list! I mean, L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth??? WTF? I sense skullduggery by the Scientology moonbats. Wankers! It's even worse than the shitty film, but on a grander, epic scale.
    A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject - Churchill
  • Am loving sci-fi books at the moment, keen to get into Iain M Banks Culture series, positive reviews everywhere! There just isn't enough time to get through all these books, what with work and cycling training to do! Like seataltea's idea of listening while riding.

    I tried to read Neuromancer but couldn't understand what the hell was going on, did anyone else think this? I don't class myself as a stupid person either :?
  • phildaw
    phildaw Posts: 49
    Just got into sci-fi myself... well I think it is sci-fi.. so far I have read

    1984 by George Orwell.... great book, a "must read" in my opinion
    Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess... enjojyed it, but it didn't have the emotional clout I was expecting
    Kronk by Edmund Cooper... very funny, very easy to read

    Also picked up 2001, some PKD and a book of Robert Silverbergs short stories, all for 25p each from the local charity shop!!

    Will try to pick up a few referenced in the thread above, thanks.
  • 'Eon', 'Eternity', 'The Forge of God' all by Greg Bear are on my desert island list, 'Diamond Age' and 'Anathem' by Neal Stephenson recently stormed onto the list - best science fiction I've read for years. Read them both immediately a second time right after finishing them. 'Neuromancer' starts brilliantly, and with startlingly good prose too, but fades towards the end; I like Gibson's future vision though.

    Classics - Moorcock's 'Dancers At The End Of Time' series is a hoot, as are many of his swords-n-sorcery series, and they all overlap/interweave too, so once you start you'll prbably end up reading hundreds if them. Arthur Clarke - 'Rendezvous With Rama', 'Imperial Earth' and 'The City And The Stars'. Triffids and 'The Kraken Wakes' by Wyndham - the list is endless!
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  • john_kline
    john_kline Posts: 2,151
    The Night Land - William Hope Hodgeson
    The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury - Also loved the film of this with Rod Steiger. Rarely see it on TV.
  • rick_chasey
    rick_chasey Posts: 72,226
    If you want a crazy, realistic (and confusing) time travel film:

    Primer.

    Rotten Tomatoes has it as one of the best science fiction films "for the thinking man".

    It's only 70 mins long too.
  • scwxx77
    scwxx77 Posts: 1,469
    edited August 2011
    I'm a big Gibson and Stephenson fan. Rudy Rucker's Ware series was fun to read.
    Winner: PTP Vuelta 2007 :wink:
  • chiark
    chiark Posts: 335
    Not a fan of PKD at all, and I don't really know why.

    The Sci-fi masterworks series is an awesome place to start expanding the authors you read... Worked wonders for me.

    Favourite author is probably still Iain M Banks, as you may have been able to guess from my username... Alastair Reynolds is good for modern hard sci-fi. Neal Stephenson is an utter genius, and I've just finished Anathema which is awesome. Cryptonomicon is worth reading. The Baroque Cycle (3 books, at around 900 pages each) is hard going but, if you like that sort of thing, superb.

    Alfred Bester, Joe Haldemann, Ursula Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, James Blish, Olaf Stapleton... HG Wells... George Orwell...

    So many good books in this genre, and so many written off because 'it's sci fi'.
    Synapse Alloy 105 / Rock Lobster Tig Team Sl
  • Crapaud
    Crapaud Posts: 2,483
    chiark wrote:
    ... Alastair Reynolds is good for modern hard sci-fi. ...
    Eh? More space opera, in a similar style to the Dune books, than hard SF, IMO. Entertaining enough with some good ideas, but they never seem to go anywhere.
    A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject - Churchill
  • jswba
    jswba Posts: 491
    I read 'I am Alive and You are Dead' recent. PKD wrote some great books, but he was one weird bloke. Glad I never met him, particularly in the 1970s.
  • richclip
    richclip Posts: 19
    I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Peter F Hamilton yet. His "Night's Dawn" trilogy is a cracker!
  • Crapaud
    Crapaud Posts: 2,483
    jswba wrote:
    I read 'I am Alive and You are Dead' recent. PKD wrote some great books, but he was one weird bloke. Glad I never met him, particularly in the 1970s.
    He was off his tits on drugs most of the time.
    A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject - Churchill
  • How could I forget Slaughterhouse Five...
    "Consider the grebe..."
  • Harry182
    Harry182 Posts: 1,169
    I read a bunch of PKD some years ago. Cool books but they really mess with your head -- Had me questioning what's real and what's not, and walking around in a semi-dreamlike state. Seriously freaked me out a bit.
  • crumbschief
    crumbschief Posts: 3,399
    Fun eh,i bet Keanu felt the same in The Matrix.I saw A Scanner Darkly recently for the third time and still enjoyed it,i like that style of filming,a sort of live comic book feel to it, Sin City is also like that.
  • Kieran_Burns
    Kieran_Burns Posts: 9,757
    One book recommended to me and so I'll pass it on my own recommendation is A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

    Oh, and Friday by Heinlein is a very enjoyable read
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  • RDW
    RDW Posts: 1,900
    Crapaud wrote:
    I don't understand the popularity of William Gibson:pedestrian, not very inventive and written like a film script. If you like that, Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age is far, far superior.

    That's fighting talk on a cycling forum, where of course 'pedestrian' is the worse possible insult! :)

    For my money, both are excellent (though their styles are entirely different), but for the definitive Gibson vs Stephenson post, see:

    http://williamgibsonboard.com/eve/forum ... =711100946
  • nmcgann wrote:
    Going a bit left-field:

    Distraction
    Heavy Weather
    The Zenith Angle
    - all by Bruce Sterling

    I like his non-fiction stuff.. essays and commentary
  • iainf72
    iainf72 Posts: 15,784
    I'd encourage anyone who likes Dune to check out the TV series. I'm a big Lynch fan but I felt the mini-series worked better. It was almost theatre like in parts but felt right to me.
    Fckin' Quintana … that creep can roll, man.
  • CrackFox
    CrackFox Posts: 287
    A measly 3 for Adams, Orwell and Verne (compared to 36 on the 'fantasy' list). I've always had a bit of a love/hate thing with sci-fi tv/movies. Absolutely loved Firefly/Serenity but detested Star Trek. Jayne good, Janeway bad.
  • fluff.
    fluff. Posts: 771
    I haven't read a bad PKD book, even his early not particularly SF ones.

    Stephenson: Snowcrash was great, The Diamond Age I really didn't like with the childrens book thing and the way it just stopped.

    Hyperion, Dan Simmons, hasn't had a mention yet, awesome first book, 2nd part drags a bit.

    No Stephen Baxter mentions either, I liked the hard SF spacey ones he did, and the Time Machine sequel in HG Wells style. His alternate reality series thingy is also worth a read though not very SF.

    Alistair Reynolds, Revelation Space series is a good read too.
  • lifeform
    lifeform Posts: 126
    richclip wrote:
    I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Peter F Hamilton yet. His "Night's Dawn" trilogy is a cracker!

    Yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed it up to the last 20 pages, when I wanted to kill him, slowly.

    I was into the last 100 pages and thinking to myself 'hmm, he's got a lot of plot to wrap up here, and not a lot of pages'

    Absolutely wrecked the preceding 6000 (or whatever) pages and two months of my life.
  • Crapaud
    Crapaud Posts: 2,483
    fluff. wrote:
    ... No Stephen Baxter mentions either, I liked the hard SF spacey ones he did, and the Time Machine sequel in HG Wells style. His alternate reality series thingy is also worth a read though not very SF. ...
    You're not paying attention.
    A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject - Churchill
  • for me it's

    Babylon 5 series tops them all really and it's feature Films
    Farscape
    Chronicles of Riddick arguably one of the best one off scifi films ever made
    Star Trek and it's spin offs
    Next Generation
    Team4Luke supports Cardiac Risk in the Young
  • Ouija
    Ouija Posts: 1,386
    CrackFox wrote:
    A measly 3 for Adams, Orwell and Verne (compared to 36 on the 'fantasy' list). I've always had a bit of a love/hate thing with sci-fi tv/movies. Absolutely loved Firefly/Serenity but detested Star Trek. Jayne good, Janeway bad.

    Should read Chris Wooding "Tales of the Ketty Jay" trilogy if you like Firefly.
    Retribution Falls (2009)
    The Black Lung Captain (2010)
    The Iron Jackal (2011)

    Same setup with a humorous ships captain leading a well fleshed out and interesting (funny) group of reprobates in a sci-fi/steampunk setting. Like Pirates of the Caribbean and Serenity mashed together. Cracking read.
  • Since this thread has been resurected...

    It's not cult yet, but by the look of the trailer Ridley (bikes) Scott is back on form. Roll on next summer...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sftuxbvGwiU
  • finchy
    finchy Posts: 6,686
    Silent Running was a good film.