So what would you say are your 5 favorite science fiction novels of all time? These are basically books that you've read multiple times and that have had a profound effect on you at an intellectual and/or emotional level.

My list:

Dune

2001: A Space Odyssey

The Foundation Trilogy

Dune Messiah

Children of Dune

I am ashamed to admit that I haven't read a sci-fi novel in a long time. I was pretty much a Clarke-exclusive reader toward the end, too.

Rendezvous with Rama

Songs of Distant Earth

2001: A Space Odyssey

2010: Odyssey 2

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Honorable mention: The original Frankenstein - it was very different and much more interesting than the movies made from it, in my opinion.

A Hitchhikers Guide To The Universe.

The crystal Singer triology by Ann Macaffery

1)Ilium --Dan Simmons
2)Olympos --Dan Simmons
3)Hyperion --Dan Simmons
4)2001 --Arthur Clarke
5)Dune --Frank Herbert

Cyberpunk bonus!
6)Altered Carbon --Richard Morgan

Pandoras Star and Judas Unchained by Peter Hamilton

RK, you beat me to Altered Carbon...

Agree with the Asimov & Clarke for sure, the Hitchhiker's Guide series is a given as well. Heinlein/Starship Troopers is up there too. One of my favorites however is Joe Haldeman, especially Mindbridge and the Forever War. So I had to choose 5 I guess:

1 The Forever War / Haldeman
2 Foundation / Asimov
3 Hammer of God OR Ghost from the Grand Banks/ Clarke
4 Starship Troopers / Heinlein
5 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Adams

I guess as an alternate I would throw Slaughterhouse Five / Vonnegut although it's not strictly Sci-Fi by "space ships & robots" standards.

Five classics - not to say more recent ones haven't had strong impacts.

Philip K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Isaac Asimov, Foundation Trilogy
Frank Herbert, Dune
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
A.E. Van Vogt, Slan

Honorable Mention: E.E. Doc Smith, The Lensmen series & Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human.

Iain M Banks, Consider Phlebas
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
Stanislaw Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot
Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons

Hey, Alan - just finished Phlebas...about to start the next one in the series.

I like everything you mentioned here, but have never read The Forever War - will now!

Iain Banks - Use of weapons
Alastair Reynolds - The Prefect
Larry Niven - Protector
Peter Hamiton - Night's Dawn trilogy
Peter Hamilton - His latest trilogy, though wasn't as keen on the second book still waiting for the 3rd.

Cool thread so far, stuff to add to my 'must buy' list.

Neuromancer - William Gibson

And others already mentioned, like Dune and Foundation series.

Iain Banks is one of my favourite authors of any genre. His books are automatic must reads for me; his more traditional fiction just as much as his SF.

I've heard that before, I still need to check it out. You'd like the Dan Simmons Ilium & Olympos books and s well as Altered Carbon if you like that.

Some great suggestions here!

All of William Gibson's work is genius Sci-fi. The Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) is great as well as his newer work. He said this about sci-fi:
…I felt that I was trying to describe an unthinkable present and I actually feel that science fiction's best use today is the exploration of contemporary reality rather than any attempt to predict where we are going…The best thing you can do with science today is use it to explore the present. Earth is the alien planet now.

—William Gibson in an interview on CNN, August 26, 1997.
Check out Pattern Recognition and Spook Country for his new style. I for one am eager for more!


I also recommend Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle for a very different but awesome take on science-fiction.

Oh yeah - Neuromancer...Charles Stross/Accelerando...but also Alastair Reynolds/the Revelation Space set. And absolutely, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

I also love Stephenson's work, my favourite being Cryptonomicon.

The Baroque Cycle is great, but MAN, is that ever a lot of reading

I just got Anathem for my birthday, but haven't started it yet, I need to finish the 3rd book in the Baroque Cycle first...

Also, ya, I love all of Gibson's work, and his novels are also an immediate 'must buy' for me.

I will definitely check out the Dan Simmons work.

Cheers!

I just finished "Songs of Distant Earth", been on a bit of a Clarke binge of late. Clark/Niven are usually where I go for hard sci-fi.

The "Evergence" trilogy is excellent, very golden age feel to it.

Thanks so much for all of the suggestions you guys have put in this thread. This has now provided me with a reading list that should keep me busy for a very long time.

The Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton (gargantuan and lengthy space-opera!)

Several books by Philip K. Dick: Martian Time-Slip, Time out of Joint, Ubik, A Maze of Death, A Scanner Darkly, The Man in the High Castle, Eye in the Sky. These are my favourites, but basically I haven't found a book by Dick which is not worth reading at all.

Roadside Picknick by Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki.

The entire Alex Benedict series by Jack McDevitt (unusual setup - an antiques dealer in the future). Eternity Road is worth a reading as well.

The controversial Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.

I definitely want to read that one. IMHO, the film was misunderstood by a lot of movie audiences.

Some pulpy but interesting novels would be the two books by David Weber and Steve White called "In Death Ground" and "The Shiva Option". They're good space battle/tactician books mixed with the political side of things. They are based on the "Starfire" tabletop gaming universe which I've never played but the books are a good read.

Dune - Frank Herbert
2001 - Arthur C. Clarke
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
I Robot - Isaac Asimov
Starship Troopers - Robert A. Heinlein

There are more, but these certainly form a strong list.

Very nice list with some great suggestions I need to check out.

I've been almost totally and exclusively reading Clarke for my Sci-Fi fix, but of course I'm now trying to find other "hard" SF authors.

I read the Nights Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton a couple of years back and concluded that this brand of Sci-Fi was not for me. I ended up giving those books away to reclaim some space in my bookshelf.

Some of the authors I have found to enjoy are;

Gregory Benford's Timescape (I'm thinking of gettig more of his books)
Stephen Baxter's Titan, Voyage, Moonseed, Flux
W.A. Harbinson's Project Saucer Series (not recommended if you're prone to depression)
Buzz Aldrin & John Barnes' Encounter with Tiber

Starship Troopers, Heinlein
Dune, Herbert
The Legacy of Heorot, Barnes, Niven, & Pournelle
Moving Mars, Greg Bear
Any of the Man-Kzin Wars
Psychohistorical Crisis, Donald Kingsbury

ETA The Worthing Saga, by Orson Scott Card

The problem is the movie had absolutely no relationship to the book other than the title, the main character's name, and the fact that "bugs" from Klendathu were the enemy. I wouldn't even say the movie "strayed" from the book, it was more like Verhoeven's screenplay writer wrote a completely different movie and said "hey, I liked that Heinlein book, I'll use the title, main character's name, and the enemy for my screenplay."

• Foundation trilogy - Asimov - but actually I like most of Asimov's stories - even the dated ones like the early Elijah Baley stories.
• Rama series - Clarke
• De sluimerende stranden van de geest - Eddy C.Bertin (only in Dutch I'm afraid... too bad because it's great horror SciFi)
• H2G2 - Douglas Adams
• Tschai -Jack Vance (but it's quite a while since I last read it... maybe I don't like it anymore)

...and a very honorable mention of Chris Foss... when I just had discovered Science Fiction I chose many of the books I got in the library based on his artwork.

I still need to read "Rama" from Clarke and the "I Robot" series from Asimov. One day..one day...

I really liked the first Rama novel, but didn't like the second one very much, I think because Clarke was assisted by Gentry Lee, and the style and some story elements were very different from what Clarke would normally do. Kind of soap-operaish, and just not what I read a Clarke novel for. I didn't read the following novel.

At least he exclusively wrote the entire 2000 series of books. I've only read the first two though. One day I'll get to 2061 and 3001.

Don't bother. 2061 was really not good and I didn't even consider 3001 which I've heard ruins the whole series. 2001 and 2010 were incredible books I could barely put down. I read those in 3 days total. 2061 I endured and read quickly to get it over with.

Ditto, pretty much, except I did read 3001, and yeah, it was a big disappointment for me.

Thanks for the recommendations. It seems that a lot of sci-fi novel series tend to degrade in quality with subsequent books.

That happened with me with the Dune novels by Frank Herbert. I think the first 4 are fantastic but the last 2 were a bit of a bore.

Lemme see.. Some other authors for you all:

Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Absolution Gap (all his other books rocks too)
Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski - The Killing Star (probably only found in used bookstores). A book that makes you really sit and think of the issues raised.
Steven Donaldson - The Gap Series. One of the most twisted, and evil series ever written.
Jerry Pournelle - Falkenberg's Legion (and followup books)
Larry Niven - Ringworld (tho I didn't like the followups that well)

Øystein

I thought the Alastair Reynolds novels were among the best of recent publications, along with the Charles Stross and the Peter Hamilton novels. Robert Sawyer can be compeeling as well.

Stanislaw Lem. Read him. Be him. Love him. Laugh your can off.

Can`t add anything new to the list, as my favourites are already listed.

I`m a huge fan of Iain Banks (love his culture universe) and I think I have read every book from Asimov and Clarke.

Some of the novels of Timothy Zahn in the SW series were good too, IMO the best author writing SW.

I have to agree here. His "Heir to the Empire" trilogy is still considered by many fans to be the best SW novels.

I think my favorites may have been "The Black Fleet Crisis" trilogy, by Michael P Kube-McDowell. But HTTE was very good, Grand Admiral Thrawn may have been the most interesting character introduced in the Expanded Universe.

You read my mind! Thrawn is definitely the most interesting expanded universe character IMHO but there are a few other good ones too like Mara Jade and Kyle Katarn.

Garm Bel Iblis comes in a close 2nd, IMO, and was also the only flag officer in the New Republic who had a chance of fighting Thrawn to a draw. Talon Karrde was another character who received a fair bit of development in the EU novels.

I started reading the Yuuzhan Vong novels, but quickly got bored with them. IMO if you can't finish a Star Wars story in a trilogy there's no sense writing it. Perhaps 3 or 4 separate trilogies covering different parts of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion would have been better. As it was, it was more like a never-ending Star Wars soap opera.

I like the classic Battletech novels, although the Dark Age stuff is pretty weak other than maybe the first couple of novels.

I also enjoy the Forgotten Realms series of books if you enjoy fantasy.

Actually, most feel the first couple of Dark Age novels are weak, but once you hit "The Scorpion Jar" they pick up.

I thought "Ghost War" was pretty good but it was the only one written by Stackpole I believe, after that everything just sort of wandered around not making much sense to me, maybe a couple others were ok as well

My favourite science fiction novel... is actually by an amateur.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/251974/1/New_World_Order

It's set in the Battletech universe and takes off slightly from the beaten canon path. Highly recommended for anyone looking to do some casual reading on the comp.

"The Scorpion Jar" is the 13th of the Dark Age novels, and from there on the quality was mostly good. Before then it was very hit and miss. Dark Age went on to produce 30 novels, before WizKids/RoC stopped producing them. And they are being picked back up again by Catalyst Game Labs which are continuing the storyline.

Here is a site (okie, so it's mine ) with some of the maps published in the Dark Age novels, giving ya a little overview of how the story progresses.

http://home.ifi.uio.no/~oysteint/btech/MWDA.html

And for those wondering what we're on about, here is a small list of the Battletech/Dark Age novels:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BattleTech_novels



Øystein

Good thread. As a result of reading these posts I checked out Dune from the library. I haven't read it since the early '80s so it is very fresh for me. I plan to read at least the next two or three Dune novels after this.

On a side note, I haven't read a book in years and have forgotten how completely absorbing it can be.

Good for you LB. I've read Dune twice and I'm sure I'll read it several more times before I leave this world. The first 3 Dune books are classics in my opinion while the last three are still very good but not quite on the same level as the first three.

So far this year I've finished the Saga of the Seven Suns by Kevin J Anderson which interested me enough to finish all seven books but never really sucked me in, or left me caring much for the characters.

Seeds Of Earth by Michael Cobley which is the beginning book of a series. It was quite good though a tad confusing with a multi stranded plot and lot's of characters. Much more techno sci-fi than the Suns saga.

I followed that up with my first Iain M. Banks book the " Algebraist ". I found the writing style very hard to follow at first but after the first hundred pages I really grew to appreciate it and enjoy the story.

Having seen " Hyperion" by Dan Simmons recommended in an earlier post I read that next and was blown away by it. It's just sucked me in from the beginning. I really look forward to reading the next book in the series.

My favourite sci-fi series are the Night's Dawn and Commonwealth sagas by Peter F. Hamilton. I don't think his current Void books are as good as his previous work.

'The Algebraist' is a terrible introduction to Iain M Banks' books. I probably wouldn't have read any more of his books if that had been my first.

Dito that.

There is a worse Iain M. Banks book to start with, and thats "Feersum Endjinn". Only one of his books I haven't finished..

As for Dan Simmons, I felt very let down by "Hyperion". It starts well, but the book ends without being finished. It's like it's chopped in two, and you have to read the followup to finish the story. Most multi-part books are much better written in that regards.

Also got the last (two) books of the Saga of Seven Suns. I'm thinking of just skiping the second-to-last, and just read the summary in the start of the last, and finish the series.

Øystein

Ugh .....
Kevin Anderson should be banned from writing, full stop.
He seems to have a target audience of pre-teens, his writing standards are extremely poor compared to the likes of Banks, Hamilton, Reynolds, etc.

IMHO the two best Banksian novels are 'Use of weapons', and 'Consider Phlebas'. Great story, fantastic imagery.

Interesting, I have yet to read anything from Kevin J. Anderson but I've heard other people say similar things about his writing style.

If our paths ever cross, I will kick him in the nuts so hard he'll have three Adam's Apples for what he did to the Dune novels.

Yeah, I don't know how I made it through the first 3 prequels, and book 1 of The Butlerian Jihad.

Those were all co-written by Anderson and Brian Herbert correct? I'll have to read one of those myself to see what I think. I've only read the original 6 Frank Herbert Dune novels.

One novel I read years ago and would recommend is "Fade-out" by Patrick Tilley.

Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

The most underrated author of all time, IMO.

Thanks for the advice on those authors. I might try another Iain M. Banks story sometime though Kevin J. Anderson is off my reading list.
I've just finished Ring by Stephen Baxter which I liked. However be prepared for alot of scientific terms and descriptions.

Starship Troopers - Heinlein
Voyage - Stephen Baxter - A very compelling alternate history of going to Mars using Saturn 5 technology
Footfall - Niven and Pournelle - An alien invasion but with plausible technologies
Kim Stanley Robinson - The Mars series - a trilogy of novels about the colonization of Mars
Ministry of Space - Warren Ellis - An alternate history graphic novel about early space exploration

FC

I'm reading one right now called "The Dark Beyond the Stars" by Frank M. Robinson, excellent.

Well, that book gave me a late night. HAD to stay up to finish it. Absolutely great.

That does look good, added to my Amazon wishlist.

The really strange thing about reading the book, is that it is about an amnesiac who discovers the truth about his identity through the course of the story. As I was reading I had a vague feeling of familiarity, then when got to the end a lot of it was very familiar, so apparently I read it before or part of it and forgot it, very strange parallel which added to the mood of the story, tee hee.

Just about to start reading Richard Matheson, I Am Legend.

I have listened to the good radio play version, and seen the various indifferent to atrocious films made. (based loosely upon... and usually completely missing what seems to have been the point).

I suspect that the text will be much more like the radio play which had some complexity, depth, poignancy and irony.

Over the weekend I finished The fall of Hyperion. I took my time reading this as I'm really enjoying the saga and wanted to absorb as much detail as I could. My only criticism of the series so far is the abrupt ending/beginning of each of the books.

Greg Bear; Eon, The Forge of God, both reminding me of Clarke's Childhood's End

I just finished Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card which was good and I'm into Speaker for the Dead now which I like better so far. I got the whole Ender series as a gift last year and just recently started into them.

I couldn't find Ender's Game in the library so I bought it over the weekend and look forward to reading it after seeing it recommended here. I've just finished Infected by Scott Sigler which I enjoyed. It reads somewhat similar to an episode of Fringe or the X files.

Try the Conqueror Trilogy (Conqueror's Pride, Conqueror's Heritage, Conqueror's Legacy) by Timothy Zahn.

The best Sci-Fi trilogy that should be a movie series, but will never be made into one.

I'm currently re-reading the "Foundation Trilogy" by Asimov. What a great series of stories.

I started reading that tonight but not sure how its gonna go.

I just finished "Time Travelers Never Die" by Jack McDevitt, and it was probably the hardest book to put down in a long time. No idea what's coming next, I'll have to check what's on the featured selection list at SFBC LOL