Talking space spiders?
Vernor Vinge already covered that surely?
Arthur C Clarke award won by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The book Children of Time by British sci-fi author Adrian Tchaikovsky has been announced as the winner of this year’s Arthur C Clarke award. The award was established by Sir Arthur, who is considered one of the “Big Three” of influential science fiction writers, along with American authors Issac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. …
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Thursday 25th August 2016 19:10 GMT AndrueC
Re: Talking space spiders?
A Fire Upon the Deep
Is one of my favourites. It has a remarkable ability to convey the size of the galaxy. Or at least makes it feel bigger than most other books imply. The idea of it being so big that interstellar civilisations can be born and die all without ever contacting any other species. The last part of the final chapter is haunting.
"Can anyone hear me"?
:-/
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Thursday 25th August 2016 15:13 GMT tiggity
Re: Mysterious World
Agreed, almost an impossibility to pick top lists, off the top of my head others include (not exahustive just got bored) Wells, Verne, Silverberg, Ellison, Le Guin, Brunner, Sheckley, Spinrad, Stapledon, Aldiss, Wyndham, Bradbury, Gibson, Vonnegut, Anderson, Ballard etc.
Then people with less of a "range" of works but focused more on related works e.g. Herbert, Dune fans will shout for him loudly based on that series
Then you get non genre authors such as Huxley, Orwell, Burgess, Shelley who could arguably be added on the basis of a single book.
.. and works that may not be "great" but author has great humour and are easy intros for non genre readers e.g. Harrison, Anthony
.. arguments for authors that engage kids e.g. Norton (she got me engaged with the genre as an under 10)
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Thursday 25th August 2016 16:03 GMT Toltec
Re: Mysterious World
".. arguments for authors that engage kids e.g. Norton (she got me engaged with the genre as an under 10)"
Yes, I hoovered up Norton and Hugh Walters quicker than my local library could get them, Madeleine L'Engle was another favourite. They allowed me into the adult library when I was twelve to stop me pestering them for more books, which is when I really started on Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein, not sure I quite appreciated Lem at that age though. I must have spent over half my pocket and paper round money at the local secondhand bookshop, the library had a habit of missing one or more of a series so I had to hunt them down and buy them.
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Friday 26th August 2016 20:49 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Mysterious World
".. arguments for authors that engage kids e.g. Norton (she got me engaged with the genre as an under 10)"
Captain W. E. Johns got me into SF as a young child of 9 or 10. No, not the Biggles books, never read a single one of them. His Mars books got me into the genre, then I moved onto Norton and many, many others.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 18:04 GMT fung0
Re: Mysterious World
Toltec: " I rate Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny more highly, to name a few."
I enjoyed Larry Niven's work a lot when it first came out - and continue to revere his short stories. However, I recently tried re-reading Ringworld, and was astounded to realize that it's not just bad, it's absolutely dreadful. Shallow characters, ludicrous plotting, very few interesting ideas or concepts. Shows how mere novelty can cause something to seem better than it really is.
But at least authors like Niven and Zelazny were trying to be entertaining. (And succeeding at least some of the time.) These days, a lot of award-winning SF has too many objectives other than entertaining the reader. With endless pages of verbiage where a single sentence would be sufficient, these books are just way too much work to read. And their Big Ideas tend to be far too small to justify the effort.
Another big chunk of SF is really just fantasy set in space, with endless soap-opera plots and no real point. Frank Herbert was a prime offender. Dune is a great work of SF, but the sequels are just progressively weaker fantasy. That model has become dominant. I shudder whenever I see a new book subtitled "Part One of an Epic New Series." Why don't you see if you can come up with one decent book, before you try to sell me several more? Might as well head over to the Perry Rhodan section...
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Thursday 25th August 2016 13:43 GMT deshepherd
Re: Talking spiders in Rama sequels
Was thinking the same .... the spiders are mainly in the later books of the series where ACC was a co-author - Rendez-vous with Rama is a good read, next one is ok as well but series definitely tails off towards the end. I read the whole series after buying it as a bundle for my Kindle and towards the end it defintely felt like reading was a case of "I've started so I'll finish" ... I'm currently feeling much the same reading the last book in Game of Thrones ... with the added incentive that if I finish before book 6 comes out then maybe I won't feel "obliged" to read it.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 12:43 GMT james 68
Highly recommend
I highly recommend "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" by Becky Chambers. Best book I have read in a long, long time. Was very surprised when I learned that it was her first book.
If you get the chance, read it. It doesn't matter what type of SF you like, it has a little bit of everything, you will not regret it.
Oh, and "Children of Time" was indeed authored by Adrian Tchaikovsky, not Andrew. Not a bad book but.... to me a little too much of a rehash of previous books I had read.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 15:48 GMT Toltec
Re: Highly recommend
It is good they are adding independant authors too, more recently I have enjoyed the work of Peter Cawdron, Terry R. Hill and Hugh Howey, the 'Chronicles' collections by Samuel Peralta showcase new talent rather well too and I have bought books based on authors shorts in these.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 18:33 GMT psychonaut
Liu Cixin.
"the three body problem" and its sequel "the dark forest"...and the trequel coming out soon....
greg bear's hull 03 also .
honestly, these are books that i wish i could re read for the first time.
read them now....
yeah, niven is a biot light on plot ./ characters, i read ringworld for the first time, and from what i was told to expect i was a bit disapointed.
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Thursday 25th August 2016 20:07 GMT Petrea Mitchell
Incorrect and incomplete on the Hugos
"All four awards for books at the Hugo Award"
I believe you're thinking of the four *fiction* awards: Best Novel, Best Novelette, Best Novella, and Best Short Story. Of those four, only Best Novel is likely to go to a standalone book.
(There is a second category, Best Related Work, which often goes to books, in which no award was given.)
"were won by women after it was plagued by claims, made by the group Sad Puppies, that it advanced a 'niche, academic, overtly to the left in ideology and flavour' viewpoint."
...and after another group, the Rabid Puppies, engaged in block voting to game a bunch of truly odious works onto the ballot, crowding out many fine possible choices with a variety of authorial genders. (Yes, rule changes have been made.)
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Friday 26th August 2016 16:30 GMT Petrea Mitchell
Re: Incorrect and incomplete on the Hugos
"Seriously? Naomi Novik (female,) Neal Stephenson, Lois McMaster Bujold (Female,) Stephen King, Nnedi Okorafor (Female, POC) These are truly odious?"
Not those. Look up the Rabid Puppies slate. Novik, Okorafor, and Jemisin made it onto the ballot in spite of the Rabid Puppies.
There have been accusations that Hugo voters voted for all women because Hugo voters = SJWs; the bit I quoted from the Register story seems to agree with that. The Rabid Puppies have also been making that accusation, and they have spent the last couple years trying to stuff the ballot with works they deem less politically correct; ironically, the few non-slated fiction works that made it onto the ballot through true organic popularity have been by women and POC.
So I'm not calling the winners odious. I think they are all excellent and deserving. I'm trying to combat the implied narrative of "political correctness has taken over the Hugos".
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Friday 26th August 2016 05:15 GMT Vincent Manis
Re: Dubious award
If you are referring to the claims of pedophilia lobbed against Clarke, no evidence was found to support them (other than some claims in some tabloids). While those accusations were current, Clarke's knighthood was in abeyance. When the Sunday Mirror apologized for publishing those claims, the knighthood was granted. Clarke was definitely either gay or bisexual (regardless of what he said on the subject), and he may well have enjoyed the company of younger men, but there's a world of difference between that and pedophilia.
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Friday 26th August 2016 14:08 GMT James Hughes 1
Re: Dubious award
Bollocks. Newspapers make up all sort of shit. There is clearly smoke without fire when it comes to the tabloids.
And unless you have evidence to support your claims, you should STFU because accusing people of this, even when dead, without evidence, make you a complete lowlife scumbag.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
