What is your favorite type of sci-fi? For me since Ive always been interested in life in the universe/space exploration, anything regarding that. I love golden age sci-fi and reading what they thought we would do in space back in the 40s and 50s
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Political dialog disguised as sci-fi.
This is mostly the domain of Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), although there's also Yoshiki Tanaka (Legend of the Galactic Heroes), and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5).
Or, if you're not going to deal in politics, then go all the way to the other end of the spectrum: Fashion. This is the territory of Luc Besson (The Fifth Element) and Mamoru Nagano (The Five Star Stories). I'm not here for the story at this point... Kenichi Sonoda and Masanori Ota are incapable of creating believable characters, but their designs are amazing.
Don't be half-in, half-out. Either deal in deep, well thought out scrutiny of the human condition, or go whole hog arthouse futurist. That's why I didn't hate the Alita movie despite it being everything bad about modern writing, because it wasn't afraid to be way the fuck out there visually, on the level of Speed Racer and TRON.
Heinlein is one of my all time favorites. Currently reading Cat Who Walks Through Walls. Loved Babylon 5. Will have to check on the others you mentioned. I do hate how the “it’s always been woke/political” crowd can’t tell the difference between in world politics and a ham fisted diatribe that some fresh gender studies grad writes
I'll give you fair warning...
Legend of the Galactic Heroes is a VERY long run. There's ten books. And two animes. The original (OVA) ran for four seasons and the only practical way to get it is downloads. It's also very crude and has some pacing issues.
The REMAKE (called Die Neue These) is incomplete, only covering about half the material so far, although more is on the way. I got Aaron Claery to do a boomer review of the first four episodes, and he thought it was good but not something he'd continue. "It's better than Baldur's Gate 3." -CaptainCapitalism
The overarching MESSAGE of the story though is whether the benevolent, competent dictatorship is better than the incompetent, corrupt democracy. With the implication at the end that constitutional monarchy is probably the best humanity can hope for long term.
You can stream the ova off 4anime.gg right now. Of course, sites like that come and go, so there's no telling how long it'll be available.
Sounds interesting! What does OVA mean?
Original Video Animation. Means it went direct to sale instead of airing on tv.
Here's the quality of the OVA...
And here's OP2 of the remake.
As you can see, there's about 30 years of improvement in animation. But both versions have their merits. The most important thing to bear in mind, is that the battles are always stupid. The author... wanted Napoleonic war in space.
Thanks!
Hard sci fi that attempts to deal with the implications of greater-than-human intelligence. Not in the sense of 'shucks this blue-head alien temporarily outsmarted us!' but more along the lines of extra-terrestrial strong AI, godlike entities, tech singularity, matter being optimised for consciousness and such. Stuff like Iain M. Banks Culture series (which I actually can't remember very well), but my favourite treatment is by Vernor Vinge in A Fire Upon the Deep, (Vinge being the guy credited with coining the term 'technological singularity' in the first place).
I feel like the more that one's thought experiments veer off in this direction, the more interesting the ideas become for the technological implications for consciousness. This correlates with Vinge being exceptional for writing different-to-human intelligence and aliens who think and see things differently to humans too, eg. in Fire, a race of dog-like pack-mind aliens who only reach human-like sentience when they assemble as a pack of 4-6 doggos. They do this as part of their natural development and each pack is treated as a separate functioning individual. When writing from the perspective of this race, it's as if it's just an unremarkable story that could be from any human's perspective, until elements of their difference leak into it, such as the way they manipulate tools; the impact on their consciousness of losing a pack member; the living status of pack discards and packs with too few members; and the existence of controversial eugenics-like science on their world where packs are torturously pruned and reassembled to create super-soldiers, or where others engage in multi-generational pack incest in order to preserve the pack consciousness.
Have you read "Protector" by Larry Niven?
It is a first contact story, where an alien ship enters the Sol system with a single occupant.
It turns out the pilot is a super-intelligent humanoid on a mission. The alien is soon dead, but the Belter who made contact with him is changed forever and becomes the Protector of the human race.
It is an older book and from early in Niven's career before he discovered swinging and got weird. At the height of his power Niven was a great author, and this is one of his better works.
Nope, thanks for the rec. I see Niven mentioned a bunch, so worth a try for when I finally buy another novel.
Have any more recommendations? A Fire Upon the Deep and the Culture series are some of my favorite books, but I haven't found much else that tackles the same topic, at least not on the same scale.
The Revelation Space series kind of touches on similar topics though more in the sense of being a clear inspiration for the bad guys in Mass Effect.
That's about the limit of my recommendations myself. I loved Revelation Space and enjoyed the others in the series but found that the more I checked out Reynolds beyond that series, the more hit and miss he got. It's been years since I finished a new fiction book.
Stone by Adam Roberts is an odd story that hints at an AI element as it goes on. Dreaming in Smoke by Tricia Sullivan is a bit 90s-woman-pretentious (a heroine called 'Kalypso Deed' who loves jazz - nuff said) but has some themes of communicating with a greater alien intelligence. I enjoyed both but read them absolutely yonks ago in my teens, when I was much less critical, so I can't promise either one is a recommendation that stands the test of time. Neither's really about the god-like sprawling entities that Vinge plays with, either.
Someone else here mentioned Blindsight by Peter Watts and I know that deals with post-singularity consciousness somehow, but I haven't read it.
EDIT - oh I forgot The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, as a classic depiction of a doomsday strong AI awakening scenario. Read it online many years ago so it inhabits a different part of my mind to paper novels. Some edgy degenerate shit in it on reflection, plus the ending was absurd to me, but it's a well known, well done technological singularity idea if you haven't already read it.
Way back in the mists of time I also started and never finished Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder, because I lost the book. I think I was drawn to it by some sci fi AI elements, but not having ever finished it, I can't say if my instincts were right.
I absolutely loath the "I will explain everything about the world in incredible detail" sci-fi. The kind where they have an unique name for every new thing, and explain how the starship works down to a tiny level, and basically exist just to jerk off how super smart they think they are. And then the rest of the universe is filled with humans but with ridges! and spiders with more spikes! and worms but huge! and "the desert/forest/frozen planet!"
Because that's what type I like, the kind where the universe is actually filled with unique things that have their own biology and life cycles that clearly evolved on a fucking foreign planet instead of just clearly Earth with parts stapled on. And then something is done with that fact, instead of it just being worldbuilding.
Sadly, it seems to only exist in sci-fi horror works. The kind where all the sci-fi isn't a thinly veiled metaphor for the author's politics.
Any recommendations?
None that I can really think of right now sans Alien which I'm sure you've seen. It was more of a preference than something I regularly can get ahold of.
Larry Niven writes great aliens.
Niven and Pournelle co-wrote "The Mote in God's Eye"; the best first contact book ever. The aliens are very alien.
In Larry Niven's Known Space universe there are the Man-Kizin Wars.
There are very good reasons for most aliens having a compatible biology (I'll tell you if you like) and the Kizin are pretty great as an alien species. They have a lot more in common with panthers than they do with humans.
Dune?
That is what turned me off Dune in like the first 30 pages back in the day. I got into some scene with a "gomjabbar" and was just uninterested.
I won't paint it as bad on just that brief impression, but I absolutely hate it when stories are like that. Same with fantasy works that do the same thing.
Makes sense.
Dune is one of my favorite science fiction books--but only the first one.
Now I'm wondering when the trope of "ice planet" or "desert planet" or whatever started. Dune certainly really popularized the concept (and Star Wars really drove that home), but I would imagine it goes back to pulp fiction and the early days.
ChatGPT.... The concept of single biome planets, such as a "desert planet" or an "ice planet," has its roots in the early days of science fiction literature and has been a popular trope for many decades. This idea likely stems from the desire to create exotic and easily understandable settings for science fiction stories. Here's a brief overview of its development:
Early 20th Century: While it's difficult to pinpoint the exact origin, the concept of single biome planets was popularized in early 20th-century science fiction. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, in his Barsoom series (starting with "A Princess of Mars" in 1912), depicted Mars as a predominantly desert-like world.
Golden Age of Science Fiction (1938-1946): During this era, authors like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury began to explore and solidify many science fiction tropes, including unique planetary environments. Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" (1950) often depicted Mars as a desolate, arid landscape, reinforcing the desert planet trope.
Post-War Science Fiction: After World War II, there was a surge in science fiction literature, with writers increasingly exploring the possibilities of life and environments on other planets. This period saw the creation of many more vividly imagined single-biome worlds.
Modern Popularity: The most iconic example of a single biome planet is arguably the desert planet of Tatooine in George Lucas's "Star Wars" (1977). This and other similar portrayals in film and television helped cement the concept in popular culture.
Influence of Real Astronomy: As our understanding of exoplanets grew, especially with the advent of space telescopes like Kepler, the idea of planets with singular biomes became more plausible, further fueling the trope in recent science fiction.
In summary, while it's challenging to determine the exact moment when the concept of single biome planets started in science fiction, it's clear that it has been a prominent and evolving element of the genre since at least the early 20th century.
The early days, with Borroughs, etc, would have been linked to the early days of planetary study by telescope. The other planets in our own solar system seem to be "single climate/biome" planets, so it was only natural if Barsoom didn't have ecological/temperature regions.
It's also a subtle psychological trick to make Earth still seem "special". Oh, there might be billions of planets, all teeming with life, but Behold! only Earth has multiple biomes, hee-yuk-yuk.
No Man's Sky takes the "single biome planet" to the extreme ....
And it makes sense if you are using Mars as the planet, because we can see it and it basically is in fact like that. But it being like that is because its a desolate wasteland that is inhospitable to any real life, with no ability for life to spring forth and then progress to a point where it remotely reaches sentience under such harsh conditions. Which limits basically all uses of it to interplanetary settlers instead of actual aliens, and if they aren't humans fleeing a dead Earth begs the question of why stop in the shithole planet when the pretty fucking good one is just a hop away.
But a planet with thriving life will have all the correct positions in a solar system and the planetary movements to have at least a handful of biomes relating to their own poles and equator that would diversify them beyond just the Jungle or Frozen planet. Which also precludes any of the justifications like "they are from a desert planet, so Mars is actually perfect for them!" as literally any species would have left the desert portion of their planet for the much less harsh other biome, leaving only the retarded versions behind in the sand (insert Africa racism joke here).
It's funny you say that. I actually like the concept of "humans looking for another habitable planet" despite it being done many times and my inability to think of it being done well. One day I'll find something that nails it!
Honestly, looking for habitable isn't a bad idea. The problem is that it either always ends up with "the literal first stop, a complete shithole" or "something wacky happens, forcing them to land somewhere 'safe' where shenanigans happen."
Probably a billion years ago when Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Uranus, etc. formed. Idk if you've ever looked at them but they don't exactly have diverse climates.
And aliens being just humans with prosthetics.
Just because Jabba reminds you of your mom doesn't make that statement true.
My mother was meth skinny, Checkmate Atheist.
Well you have to give old Star Trek a bit of a break, there. Making a weekly TV series in the 1960s or 1990s didn't exactly lend itself to big budget CGI aliens. Humans with prosthetics was the best you could expect to do.
Basically all of it except "old man writes ham-fisted cautionary tale about technology" type.
Yea, I don’t mind that type of story but that has been way overdone. Kinda like how modern day sci-fi is obsessed with the “ravages of climate change” or how entertainment went into zombie overload a while back
I just love hard Sci Fi. The more scientifically explained the better it is for me. I wish there were more in series form, the only one I know is the anime Planetes which IMHO everyone should check out if hard Sci Fi is in any way interesting to you.
Used to be more into Sci Fi in general but recently fantasy has been dominating my bookshelf.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy are my favorite genres. I’ve read more fantasy in these last two decades than I used to.
Hard Sci-Fi would be like The Martian or or Contact right?
Yep, something with some level of scientific backing. No random light sabers but futurist space drives that are even being worked on now in terms of tech. I still need to watch the Martian never got to it.
Moonlight Mile by Yasou Ohtagaki
Although it has a more conspiratorial bend to it, about a great powers struggle between NATO and China in space.
Appreciate the recommendation, never heard of that one.
Whoof. That's a good question.
...I don't even know if there's a phrase or label to explain it, but the books that tend to really stand out to me - the one's I'm going back to time and time again in the realm of Science Fiction can best be described 'Exotic Hard Science Fiction'.
The one's that put in the effort to do the research and study to make things really exotic and out there yet completely based off of actual science. Stuff like 'Revelation Space' or 'Accelerando' or 'Blindsight'. Stuff with teeth, with actual goddamn cite notes and references.
Yeah, I know. I'm a little bit weird. For added bonus points, my personal opinion of the authors for the last two can basically be summed up as 'Pieces of shit who need to be punched in the throat', but hey, nothing's perfect.
I would lean on space exploration only because I found only one great time travel series not ruined for me (Steins Gate) while I have multiple great space themed series to choose from
What is Steins Gate about?
I'll try to explain without ruining it, set in Japan, the main character is an essentric student who has the persona of a mad scientist who creates gadgets of mixed purpose. When attending a conference about time travel, he runs into a girl who moments later is stabbed to death. He sends a message on his phone to find out the message he sent was chopped up and sent weeks ago and that the girl he saw dead is alive again.
The first half is more focused in the experimental side since they find out the time is linked to one of their devices while the second half is dealing with the butterfly effect of messing with time.
It's gotta be about the Journey for me. Have a central ship and a core cast of characters and go from A to B, essentially what Yamato or Bebop is. You can do so much with a journey type story. Encountering phenomena, factions, technical problems, crew issues, firing really big kinetic guns in space.
Otherwise some of my favorite stories are the archeological side ones from Stellaris. There was a mod I used last playthrough that added a bunch and one that stood out was there were 3 archeological sites in a single system. First one belonged to a fleet based raider civ that suddenly became aware of the damage they were doing, then turned inward and destroyed themselves. The second belonged to a coalition of alien races opposing the raiders but who's political leadership had been making strange decisions in the later course of the war. The coalition eventually fell to infighting and the end of the chain was the leaders being long dead, killed in one of the first strikes by the raiders. The third was of one of the coalition races, they were the weakest of the group suddenly coming to prominence because they survived the infighting. The strange thing is that there's little mention of them, it's recorded that they survived but then it just stops. It does mention that they were Psionic however. This opens up a forth site and you learn why. It turns out that the system was inhabited by a Memetic being, able to sway an entire populace that learns of it's existence. It taught the radiers about guilt, made deliberate mistakes in the war to result in infighting and then tried to hop into the collective consciousness of a psychic race before they all committed mass suicide to try and stop it.
Considering I usually go Psionic Ascension, this left me with two choices. Change the civ to a collective hive mind as it takes over my Chosen One Emperor or lose the scientist because they self terminated before it could infect the galaxy-spanning psionic network. I chose the second.
Good guy underdog defeats evil globohomo by doing whatever it takes. Stuff like:
Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series
Michael Z Williamson's Freehold universe
Tom Kratman's Carerra series beginning with A Desert Called Peace
I also like Mystery/Drama that happens to be in a SciFi universe, primarily of course BuJold's Vorkosigan series.
Sounds really good!
Sci-Fantasy. A mix of future tech and the supernatural high fantasy.
I’ve read Piers Anthony books where he combines the two. What’s a good mixture you’ve read?
Star Wars (EU).
But I'm also mostly coming off of video game settings too. Final Fantasy has gone that route often, and there's the Phantasy Star franchise.
Cool! I love the Star Wars EU. I can’t remember if you are the one that liked it up until NJO?
Sounds about right. I never read NJO, and some of the plot synopses I'd read of it and later stuff started to turn me off.
Gotcha. I enjoyed it but I read it after the Disney purchase. I despise Disney Star Wars so all the EU I’ve read since then is much better by comparison. I will never understand why they didn’t continue it as a separate continuity along with their canon. If you haven’t already check out Darth Angelus on YouTube who is doing an animated Heir to the Empire
Can't remember which one's which, but I've heard about two different independent Heir to the Empire animations, and I've seen a good chunk of one of them. The way Thrawn was introduced, THAT is how people want to see Thrawn.
Was that written before or after Piers Anthony wrote a lot of books prominently featuring precocious, nubile tweens?
I think you are talking about the Incantations of Immortality, which I have read, or Blue Adept, which I have not read.
Incarnations of Immortality starts well, but every book is worse than the last.
These were in the 90s. One book was about a guy in a futuristic world finding a portal into a fantasy world and going back and forth. Cant remember the name. Another one was about a person playing a VR game and it had some levels that were fantasy
The first one is the Blue Adept series. I don't know about the second one.
Piers Anthony was not a great author. Eventually he discovered that he got paid by the word and churned out huge tomes of low-effort crap.
His most successful series is a fantasy setting called Xanith or something close. It is about adventures in a magical kingdom where most of the magic is based on puns. Piers writes long, 'educational forwards' that don't age well.
I can recommend other, better series. Try out Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Thanks! I have a few Xanth books but haven’t read them
The very early ones don't suck as much. Eventually Piers Anthony wrote one or so a year and just stuck to a formula.
The aforementioned precocious, nubile tweens show up a lot. They are (relatively) innocent, but there are a couple plot points that revolve around relationships or kissing or something with girls of about ten or so. It isn't filthy, but ... yeah. It hits differently today.
Yikes. I haven’t read that stuff as of yet
I have been thinking about what to recommend for you.
Try Black Ocean: Galaxy Outlaws by J.S. Morin.
It is space opera in the best way. Interstellar travel is made possible by wizards or enchanted star drives.
Imagine if you needed to have a Jedi onboard to jump to light speed, or a FTL drive made and maintained by Jedi.
The magic is great, the tech makes sense and the whole thing takes place on a ship full of interesting characters as they try to make their way. The author was clearly inspired by StarWars and Firefly. They do a great job of pulling it together.
There is an audiobook omnibus if you prefer that or you can pick up the kindle versions for reasonable prices.
Tell me if this hits the spot, because I thought about it pretty hard!
Sounds very interesting, thanks!
I like stuff that is on the harder edge of sci-fi, but I haven't actually read anything that is hyper fixated on being realistic. I also love stuff where they take time to explain how everything works and have a billion proper nouns.
Battlefield Earth is definitely worth reading. Ignore the film and everything else Hubbard ever did. I've mentioned in other posts my fave is mind-bending i.e PKD. But apart from that anything from the golden age of classic sci-fi. But in regards to Modern stuff i'd say my favourite is Iain M. Banks - Player of Games is probably my favourite in the Culture Series, but Consider Plebas , Use of Weapons, State of the Art and Surface detail all amazing - whole series is great.
I recently bought Battlefield Earth. Will have to check out the other stuff as well
I got about 5 books into his other series Mission Earth - but it wasn't a patch on Battlefield Earth so I gave up on it. I remember it was the first series I never completed. What is interesting though about Mission earth is that it could almost be playbook for the WEF and it predicted a few things , the series has some parallels between the events in the books and the current world situation. For example, the series depicts a global pandemic, a nuclear war, a climate crisis, a corrupt media, and a totalitarian regime. It also predicted the rise of cryptocurrencies, social media, and artificial intelligence. But at the same time the writing was shit , it was a barely concealed Dianetics propaganda and very anti-psychiatry. So in summary -Stick with Battlefield Earth ;)
I’ve been wanting to read Dianetics out of pure curiosity since the commercials were always on when I was little
I had a copy when I was younger and it all revolves around the idea that there is something wrong with you that only they can fix. charlatanism at its finest.
How about SF dressed up as fantasy?
"The Magic Goes Away" by Larry Niven. It is hard SF in a magical setting.
Something with weird creatures usually. It scratches the same mystery itch as a good horror movie of wanting to learn more about something unknown.
You ever read Silverberg’s short story The Girl Had Guts? You may like it
Never heard of it and Amazon's listing clearly isn't whatever you're referencing. Any leads on where I could find it?
I have it in an anthology called The Mammoth Book of Extreme Sci-Fi. Should be on Amazon
Cool, I'll add it to my list of things to get around to reading.
For me it's depends on if it's a movie or a book. In books I like the social/political allegory stories as others have covered. In movies I rather survival stories, which mostly take the form of survival horror.
Take a group of people and place them in a location where there's no chance of outside help. Then introduce an imminent threat outside of normal human understanding, while still being based in science, and explore how they function. Alien, Predator, The Thing, Event Horizon, Sunshine, Pandorum, Underwater, etc.
I've not read as many sci-fi books as I'd like, but can definitely recommend The Culture books by Iain M Banks. They're intricately plotted stories with interesting main characters and themes. The universe follows a number of mostly standalone stories from people mostly at the fringes of a borderline utopian, highly libertarian civilization. Consider Phlebas and The Player of Games are great character-driven introductions to the universe.
I also find first contact stories interesting, though I haven't found as many good ones as I would like. Contact by Carl Sagan is pretty solid, though I'd love to hear recommendations.
As for TV and movies, I like a wide variety of things and have a huge variety of tastes. If I had to pick a favorite type though, I'd say very dark and somewhat political shows, namely Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica. But I'm also down for more light-hearted stuff like Firefly, Star Trek and Star Wars.