Science Fiction

[NowyouhaveDunnett]

Can anyone recommend a good book for my dad?
I wanted to get him something more modern. He loved Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin and Arthur C Clarke back in the day.

When I google I seem to be getting mostly fantasy or the ubiquitous Piranesi which I'm not sure would be his cup of tea having read what it's about.

I'm not really a sci fi reader so it's hard for me to judge.

He's read Andy Weir.

Many thanks!

If he enjoys Stephen Baxter, he may enjoy A Time Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke and SB. It’s a trilogy.

Does he listen to audio books? There’s lots of short story SF to download. Imo SF is a perfect genre for the short story.

What about Ursula K. Le Guin?

Has he read any Margaret Atwood? Her sci fi divides people and she calls it 'speculative fiction' but actually the science in the Oryx and Crake trilogy is decent.

Ken MacLeod might be worth looking at, and seconding Becky Chambers.
Charles Stross possibly, although probably not the Laundry books.
Elizabeth Moon has written some quite lightweight space drama type stuff if that appeals as the odd bit of light relief?
Sheri Tepper might also be worth checking out.
Orson Scott Card's Ender books too.

OP when you say ‘hard sci fi fans’ do you mean fans of the hard sci fi genre, or hard fans of scifi?

The two are quite different.
If he likes hard sci fi, I’ll retract my recommendation for Rosewater. 🙂

It’s quite difficult to find new hard sci fi, I find. The genre has changed focus.

Someone else said that the things he liked were hard sci fi, so fans of that. I dunno, I don't read it myself!

It's fine anyway, it was for Father's day and I bought Dark Eden.

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. His birthday and Christmas will also be covered from this thread!!!

I am very much enjoying the archangel and odyssey series (same universe and time) from Evan Currie. So much so that I'm re reading them all at the moment.
They're earth based space exploration / alien space fight / invasion etc sort of stuff.

I also recommend rr heywood's extracted. He's also done an absolutely bloody massive zombie series which is very good if he might like that?

I don't want to play this game. It's a gift for a man from a field where men and women's tastes seem to differ substantially. Don't pretend you don't know what I mean, don't pretend that men and women have identical tastes, and don't pretend that women here know absolutely everything and should never look beyond MN.

Well then stop playing it. Plenty of women read hard SF.

Men and women's tastes on average. Yes.

If she'd said "I want to get a book for my dad, what's the best book you've read this year?" and picked the most popular response, that would be unlikely to be a good approach, and she'd get a better (though still very chancy) answer from Pistonheads .

But she's not said that. She's said (effectively) "my dad likes reading X/Y/Z. If you like X/Y/Z what else do you like?". That's a perfectly good approach as long as she reaches enough people who like X/Y/Z.

The reason I'm not letting it go, is that the inability to distinguish between "on average women/men don't like/aren't good at X" and "women/men who like/are good at X don't really exist" is a big fucking deal.
It moves on to "they're only given those jobs due to tokenism, they're only pretending to like X because they want to impress a girl/boy".

Speaking as a woman who is actually good at a "male" job, reads "male" books for fun, and is interested as "male" subjects, and speaking as someone who cares about logic and statistics (see above), this is invalidating bullshit. And that's why I'm apparently overreacting to a throwaway stupid comment on a thread about books.

The fact that women / men with certain characteristics are rare doesn't mean you shouldn't recognise them when they're standing in front of you. And there are a load of (presumably) women on this thread who've given useful relevant advice. So coming in half way down saying "you should ask men because the advice you've been given by several women who seem to know what they're talking about isn't good enough" is sexist invalidating bullshit.

Just a minor point, but "back in the day" he used to read what would generally be defined as hard sci-fi. Tastes change, and sometimes it's nice to be introduced to something a bit different. I went through a period of reading mostly hard sci-fi, but my current reading is Jade War by Fonda Lee (after recently finishing Jade City) which is one of those is it sci-fi or not? sort of books.

The only thing I'd be cautious of introducing to someone coming from hard sci-fi is steampunk, but only because so much of it is so terribly written it's easy to make the mistake of picking up something unreadable.

It might be useful to know what he reads now, if anything.

He hasn't been reading sci fi for years apart from the two Andy Weir books I mentioned. Not because he didn't like it anymore but life just got in the way and he was reading a lot of non fiction.

I bought him a kindle a couple of years ago because he's lost his sight in one eye (they are brilliant for this)and he asked me to put his favourite Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury on it and he's been rereading those.

I don't read it, not my genre so I wouldn't have known where to start. It was for a Father's Day present so it's all sorted now.

Thank you

Marking place to come back and re read this thread as I am also an Asimov, Bradbury and Le Guin fan. I wasn’t familiar with the term hard SF, I think of it as conceptual SF ie based round a “what if” concept.

"Hard sf" is more rockets and physics orientated, aiming at scientific accuracy. Clarke, Asimov and Andy Weir are normally seen as hard sf. Bradbury and Le Guin would be seen as softer: nobody's reading either of them for the physics, just as nobody's reading Asimov or Weir for the beauty of the prose.

Ah ok. Yes makes sense. Bradbury and Le Guin are based more on an ethical or social “what if” rather than a scientific one.

Anything by Peter F Hamilton, one of the best SF writers ever. The Commonwealth Saga is very good and his Salvation series is inevitable of the best things I've ever read in over 50 years of reading SF.

Another Peter F Hamilton Fan here- recommend highly like the previous poster

I never said they didn't, @ZazieBeth . Surely you understand there's a difference between

Many women read SF
and
SF seems to attract mostly male readers with somewhat different taste from women

Those aren't necessarily contradictory.

I, of course, understand that they are not necessarily contradictory.

However I also do not understand why you deemed the opinions of the women who read hard SF insufficient for the OP’s purposes, and why therefore it was necessary to refer her to the (seemingly) larger male readership for advice.

Robocalypse and Robogenesis by Daniel H. Wilson -- written in 2011, possible now in 2024, unputdownable by this LeGuin Heinlein fan.