Fantasy...Sci-fi....what?

[AlistairSim]

Ok, I've never read any fantasy/sci-fi but keep hearing how popular it is, so does anyone have any recommendations?

I'm willing to take aliens, vampires, brave new worlds....so what's it to be?

Flamesparrow.... Dean Winchester is far lovlier than Sam!

I think it's a question of taste. I recently read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (for obvious reasons) and found it the most utterly depressing read. I started A Scanner Darkly but it was so bleak I gave up. Having had a baby I seem to give up more easily now! I used to stick with things more when I was on the tube 3 hours a day...

So I think it's interesting you find Iain Banks a bit nicey-nicey. For me it's about the ideas, and I just love the involvement of the ships as main players. Excession is very good for that. Mind you I did have hysterics when they shut HAL down in 2001 (I was about 10). Maybe my sympathies are a bit wonky!

Also love William Gibson.

Have you read Jeff Noon and Michael Marshall Smith?

Link some Iain Banks stuff but am really struggling with the Algebraist..havent read any of the other 2 but will try anything! Are they science based or fantasy?

Link... Like!!! You can tell I need to get to bed!

I don't think "Do androids dream..." is one of Philip K. Dick's best. It does touch a bit on one of his favourite themes, uncertainty about reality (is she an android? is he? would he know if he was?) but it's not as well developed as in Minority Report (very different than the film version) and Martian Timeslip.

A Scanner Darkly is about drugs and altered perception of reality (through drugs). A police goes undercover as a drug addict to find the source of a killer drug. He has to become an addict. All police wear some invisibility suit that warbles their identity so they don't know each other's real faces/names. He is given the assignment (as police) to spy on himself (as the drug addict). It's very bizarre, and yes, dark

Re Ian M. Banks, it wasn't his 'nicey-nicey' that bugged me. It was the lack of depth. It just didn't ring true. Even 'Player of Games', which had a great premise, was quite shallow. What is the psychology of someone who plays that kind of game? What kind of games would they be? All that was glossed over. Read Dune and you will see what I mean.

If you loved "the involvement of ships as main players", definitely read The Reality Dysfunction" by Peter Hamilton. The idea of ships as living, thinking beings is developed much better than in any Banks novel.

I didn't read any Jeff Noon and Michael Marshall Smith. What are they like?

I just checked my bookcase in the hall and realised that I have the following in there:

William Gibson, Douglas Adams, Alexander McCall Smith, Muriel Spark, Murakami, Isaac Asimov, cooking and gardening. And the Dice-man books.

It's interesting as it's a bookcase you see when you come in with vases etc as well so at some point I obviously thought "what do I want to say about myself" book-wise. Dread to think what that says!

Lyra the Iain Banks stuff is pure sci-fi - space ships and everything. I looked in the bookcase because I liked his stuff but it got darker and more tactical war type stuff and I gave up. Anyway having rechecked the sleeves, the ones most thumbed are Against a Dark Background and Excession (and Feersum Enjinn of course, it doesn't take long to get used to the parts in the boy's writing).

Sam has the shoulders!

Mr Y - I found it weird. I think I enjoyed it, but not sure I'd read it again. It felt like a lot of ideas and theories all being bunged into a book iyswim. The cover swung it for me though

I have made a start at Dune a few times, my ex loved it and had the whole lot, but I just couldn't get the hang of it.

I think that there is a basic difference in taste here. I enjoy the concepts that can be explored when gender, sexual identity, politics, morals etc can all be played with as only you can when it's not earth and it's not our history. And of course I like the robots.

I think you are into a grittier side of things - like now on earth, but worse.

If I liked normal fiction I would only read things with happy endings, maybe you wouldn't. That distinction still remains whatever genre you like.

Jeff Noon is about near future manchester and has a lot of drug taking then goes off at a different and very interesting tangent. Read them in order starting with Vurt. Probably not your cup of tea though.

Spares by Michael Marshall Smith I am absolutely sure you would like. Also What You Make It by the same author - short stories.

Have you read any Neil Gaiman? I enjoyed Anansi Boys and so bought Fragile Things and am finding it a tad disturbing.

What would you recommend for me?

Cote Jeff Noon is awesome! One of my favourite authors. I really love Neal Stephenson too, so I think you will like.... start with 'Vurt'.

Just added Vurt to my Amazon shopping bag. Thanks for the recommendation!

"I enjoy the concepts that can be explored when gender, sexual identity, politics, morals etc can all be played with as only you can when it's not earth and it's not our history."

That IS Dune! Please give it another go. You will not regret it. Then go on to Children of Dune, etc. I think you will especially like God Emperor Of Dune. Stick to Frank Herbert's books.

You are right, I do find dark books and dark films more interesting than the happy endings and sweetness & light themes.

To you, I would recommend "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons. Very interesting, yet not dark at all. Its title sounds like cheesy sci-fi, but actually refers to John Keats' poem 'Hyperion'. Its sequels are even more to your taste, probably. Still, it's all very good.

I agree with the recommendations for Michael Marshall Smith, one of my all-time favourite authors. Fantastically imaginative stuff with lots of wit (there's a very funny alarm clock in one of the books, and the neighbourhoods in Only Forward are just genius). There's some massively disturbing stuff in there too (One of Us in particular, actually I think that's also the one with the alarm clock).

I've enjoyed a lot of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's books. I run to the MMS/Jeff Noon end of sci-fi, while my husband (who reads ONLY sci-fi) likes the proper stuff like Asimov and Clarke. We overlap on Iain M Banks (he has all those, I have all his novels without the 'M') and Peter F Hamilton to some extent (he made me read the Night's Dawn trilogy when I was ill after DD was born, to get me back into reading).

I don't like much fantasy, not into the cliched stuff with women in fur bikinis wielding swords on the front of book 11 in a series of 17, but a few things float my boat - China Mieville for one, who is amazing (oh, except King Rat, that's crap). Just read The Life and Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, which was great fun. Galveston by Sean Stewart was excellent, I can't remember which else of his I've read except Perfect Circle which was massively disappointing.

I'm sure there's more but without going and wandering round my bookcases (never did finish my LibraryThing records) I can't think of anything!

Neal Stephenson is GOD!

How can anyone even think of a story like that in "Snow Crash", let alone put it together with no loose ends - from Sumerian mythology to tomorrow's technology, virtual reality, Tower of Babel, etc. It is amazing.

He has a new book coming out next month called "Anathem". Looking forward to it.

I'm saving Neal Stephenson for when I run out of other things to read, I like the thought that there is an entire body of work out there by a really good author, and I have almost all of it yet to read, it makes me feel secure. Well, that and I've read Cryptonomicon and haven't quite recovered from it yet, there's a book and a half.

I read most of Arthur C Clarke's works as a teenager. I did the same effort on Asimov, but he's written just too much to be read by one person. Seriously, aside from his novels, he wrote so much non-fiction (on astronomy, for example), it's quite incredible.

Asimov has a book called Nightfall, written in collaboration with some other guy. It is a very interesting story, which has nothing to do with robots and his Foundation stuff. I recommend it if you like Asimov.

I know what you mean. I recently realized that a lot of people who loved Cryptonomicon on Amazon are also highly recommending the Gap Sequence books of Stephen Donaldson. Looking forward to starting those, too.

Out of Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, I only read the first one, The Reality Dysfunction. It started out great with the ships that think/feel/are born and the hardware you get your brain fitted etc but it turned into a dumb torture/massacre book with all the dead coming back rubbish. Does it get any better in the subsequent books?

I love Kim Stanley Robinson - doesn't read like genre fiction at all. The Mars Trilogy is amazing, amazing stuff, and the Forty Signs of Rain series is also good.

Were those the books about the colonisation/terraforming of Mars? Red Mars, Green Mars, etc. If so, I read the first one about 20 years ago. I wonder how the science stood up to the test of time.

Hm, can't remember Night's Dawn in enough detail to say whether it got better by your standards Cote, I liked it anyway, enough to read the whole ENORMOUS trilogy. The final ending was rubbish though (DH* told me that, and I still read them all). The whole dead-coming-back thing does feature heavily though.

• I realised I posted above with a normal non-MN reference to 'my husband' rather than DH, I think I quite forgot where I was!

I thought of another author you would like: Have you read any Robert Heinlein? He is one of the 'original' 3 best sci-fi authors (Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein).

Start with "Stranger in a Strange Land". Then read 'Time Enough For Love". Both very interesting, and with a happy vibe throughout. I'm quite sure you will like them.

CoteDAzure.. your big 3 were where I started with scifi.. along with Ray Bradbury. Frank Herberts Dune books are wonderful but do take a bit of getting into. I tend to read more of the softer stuff.. more fantasy these days, rquires less concentration from my old and child befuddled brain.

Flamesparrow... so you were seduced by a fancy cover!
Dean has the butt! and the twinkle in his eye!

Thanks that's fab - always on the lookout for SF recommendations it's so hard to find things you like.

Eg A bloke at work recommended Polity Agent (Neal Asher) and Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) but I didn't get on with them at all, just boy's adventures but with spaceships whizzing around.

Have added Stranger in a Strange Land and Cryptonomicon to wish list on amazon. Will go and have a look at Dune in the bookshop maybe I should give it another go!

Incidentally the worst SF book I ever read was called Mars by Ben Bova. Avoid like the plague is my advise!!!

If you didn't fancy "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", try this one which was a lot more fun. In fact, all of John Scalzi's novels are a good time.

Chukky- If you didn't fancy Ender's Game, give Ender's Shadow a whack. Orson Scott Card is really a good author and deserves a second look. It's the same story as EG only from the perspective of Bean. It's a bit less "Boy's Own", as are the other books in the series, for that matter.