Top 10 New Sci-Fi/SF Authors? 1259
Dukebytes asks: "I am looking for the new RAH/Piers Anthony/Roger Zelazny/Weis & Hickman etc..., of the world. I have read just about everything I could find on King Aurthur, all of the Dragon Lance stuff, and all or most of the 'old school' hardcore. I don't know, I have maybe 4000 books at home, most of them Scifi/SF. I am looking for some new stuff. I haven't bought any kind of book other than techie for more than 2 years. I just keep reading the ones that I have over and over and over. What are you guys reading? If it is a series, please list ALL of the books in it!"
good hard sci-fi stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
I've also found, for things that are sort of out there philosophically, that Greg Egan is pretty cool. I haven't seen any new books by him recently, but I'd suggest Permutation City, Diaspora, and Quarantine as some interesting things to check out.
Vinge, Simmons, Stephenson... (Score:3, Interesting)
A Fire Upon the Deep
Deepness in the Sky
(loosely related)
Dan Simmon's Hyperion/Endymion series (4 books) is excellent.
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon.
Historical Non-fiction (Score:2, Interesting)
Code Book - history of cryptograhy.
Fermat's Enigma - solving Fermat's last theorem.
Genius (Score:2, Interesting)
Highly imaginative, not just the same old reshashed stuff. Alot of the characters in his 'Culture' novels ( the culture is us lot of gibbons a few thousand down the road ) are sentient AI minds with a delicious sense of humour.
The author also writes fiction as Ian Banks, some classic there as well ( The Wasp Factory and so on). Go check him out, you will not be dissapointed.
George R. R. Martin (Score:2, Interesting)
An extremely gritty and realistic fantasy series. So far, three out of the five books have been published: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords (and coming at some point: A Dance with Dragons and The Winds of Winter.)
It is not a pretty world, but it is a riveting one. Best fantasy series I've read to date, and yes that includes the classics.
Not new, but... Julian May (Score:3, Interesting)
The Many Coloured Land
The Golden Torc
The Nonborn King
The Adversary
The Surveilance series (extension of above):
The surveilance
The Metaconcert
The Galactic milieu series (more of above):
Jack the bodiless
Diamond mask
One or two others...
Good writer, good series. These are from the 80's and (very) early 90's. Many are hard to find right now, but maybe there will be another reprint...
My Top Ten (In any order) (Score:1, Interesting)
Octavia Butler
Connie Willis
Orson Scott Card
Roger Zelazny
Gregory Benford
David Brin
Neil Stephenson
Walter Jon Williams
Bruce Sterling
- Actually, this list has just made me realize how little I have really explored as well. Gotta work on that.....
good, recent SF (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway:
There you go!
grib
Re:wheel of time (Score:2, Interesting)
I suggest that people wait until the series ends (no earlier than 2005) before they start reading it. That way, if the ending is a disappointment, at least you didn't have to spend years in anticipation.
Some authors you might enjoy (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that some of these authors are not new, but you may not have gotten around to them (or heard of them) yet:
W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and If Wishes Were Horses, which are sort of "magic realism" fantasy (no orcs, elves, or swords to be seen!).
Stephen King, (bear with me!) The Dark Tower series, which is sort of dark, parallel-world fantasy drawn from contemporary popular culture, and not really like anything else King's ever written.
Tom Holt, Only Human, Snow White and the Seven Samurai, and Ye Gods!, which is sort of similar to Douglas Adams, only with less philosophy and more social skills.
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend In A Coma, which is a complete departure from Microserfs.
Donald J. Skal, Antibodies, a very overlooked little tome on people who want to become machines.
Frank Norris, McTeague, written in 1899 and has probably one of the scariest endings ever written. Ok, so it's not SF, but it might count as horror, and it's definitely a classic book. I love this book and think it's a really great read. Norris doesn't pull any punches, so it's really gritty without any flowery phrases to be found.
Theme anthologies are also a great way of discovering "new" authors, as are subscribing to SF magazines. But I'm sure you knew that already.
Adviso: Keep in mind that I'm heavily into Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen King, and Cordwainer Smith (among others), and I despise Tolkien and all the other sappy fantasists who take themselves seriously, so take with the appropriately-sized grain of salt.
Two more (Score:3, Interesting)
Peter F. Hamilton [virgin.net]. I really enjoyed his Confederate Universe series. Looking at your list above you probably would too.
John Varley [geocities.com]. Very entertaining. Also notice my sig.
Best troll so far this year. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Robert Jordan (Score:3, Interesting)
Note to Jordan: Your fans would appreciate it if, in the future:
Of course, for all the criticism, I highly enjoy the Wheel Of Time series and would reccommend it.
Fantasy with heroes in control w/o much real probs (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, LotR. Nice army Rohan 's got, as does Gondor. But a wee bit underpowered when you look at all those nice, huge armies Sauron has got. Basically hopeless from the beginning.
Many other books keep averting disaster throughout a book by having the main wizard drown the enemy in avelanges, fires and steaming lakes. But without him/her they would be done for.
In come the series by the Eddingses. Especially in their 3-book Tamuli series the good guys have some 100,000 heavily armed knights at their disposal. And a little girl of course
It is eneourmously refreshing compared to the rest of the genre.
If you want to try something of Eddings, beware. There are two 5-piece series and two 3-piece series. The last two belonging together. The most recent book stands on itself though, so that's your best bet. It's called "the redemption of Althalus". It's typical of their genre and mayor fun to read.
Reinout
Iain Banks & The Culture (Score:5, Interesting)
I would also say that if you have not already read Greg Egan, especially his book, Diaspora, do so. This is first-rank hard sf at its best!
Planet P Blog [planetp.cc] - Liberty with Technology
Re:wheel of time (Score:2, Interesting)
Feist/Wurts and Banks (Score:1, Interesting)
A fantasy trilogy: The Empire Trilogy by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts (Book I: "Daughter Of The Empire"; Book II: "Servant Of The Empire"; Book III: "Mistress Of The Empire"). Fantastic read, the scale of the story increases with each book.
Sticking to the SciFi theme more, we have Iain M. Banks (he also does contempory crime, which is also very good). Specifically, "Look To Windwards", "Excession" and so far "Against A Dark Background" seems very good, but I've not finished it yet so I'll reserve full judgement. Banks imagination really is phenonemal (sp?), if you've not read any of his works then read "Look To Windwards" just to read about his "Culture". Seriously.
Have you read David Eddings (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Too obvious? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd also recommend Richard A. Knaak, probably better known 'round here for his Dragonlance stories and books, but he also did a series a while back that was really well done. Can't remember the name of the series (anyone remember the main character Bedlam? anyone?), but they were excellent.
My two groats, (Score:1, Interesting)
Also try Micheal Scott Rohan, Elizabeth Moon and Allen Steels - all enjoyable writers.
I would especially recommend Mellissa Scott. A fine hard SF and fantasy writer, with the sort of off-beat outlook that rivals CJ Cherryh.
Jordan? If he can ever be botherered to finish writing I may take him seriously.
Readable but *very annoying*
some to look at (Score:1, Interesting)
A pretty cool cyberpunk book called Altered Carbon [sfsite.com] came out last summer, and I enjoyed reading it over the Christmas break, although it was a tad obnoxious at times (well... it is cyberpunk I guess).
Sci-Fi (Score:3, Interesting)
It's worth branching out if you've read that much sci-fi -- both because it's important to be well-rounded and because it'll make your reading of sci-fi that much more rich an experience. You'll understand more, you'll have things to compare it to outside of the genre. In the past couple of years, I've started venturing strongly outside the genre -- literary fiction, biographies, history, the sciences, etc. I find that doing this has not only enriched my reading of science fiction but it has re-started my "idea engine" for my own writing. (I hold a degree in English-Creative Writing.) And my ideas are my own, are more fresh than they once were, and I find that I'm much more satisfied with what I have produced.
Try Alastair Reynolds (Score:1, Interesting)
_Revelation Space_ is a grand space opera. Grand in the sense of a very wide scope. It's Reynolds' first novel, so it suffers from a little sketchiness in character development and a few irritating breaks from the overall narrative style. That said, it's one hell of a good book.
_Chasm City_ is a much more personal book. It takes place in the same universe as the preceding book but stands alone and stylistically very different as its focus is on only a few characters mostly on one particular, though intriguing, planet.
I prefer Revelation Space, but Chasm City is well worth a few hours of reading time.
Mostly Non-SF (Score:3, Interesting)
Once in a while, if an SF book has a very good reputation, I'll pick it up, but for the most part I finished my SF reading days when I got out of college. Too much crap to wade through to find the real gems. That said, the only newer books (the former is what, 10 years old?) I've read and liked were Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman's *Good Omens* and Gaiman's *American Gods*.
Non SF: I'd suggest weaning youself from SF with Jorge Luis Borges, *Collected Fictions*, which is top-flight 20th c. lit with some of the same tone you'd find in good SF (though it is more fantastic). If you have the wits to handle really complex narratives, try Rushdie's *Ground Beneath Her Feet*, which has some SF-like elements (alternate universes, e.g.) but is unassailably good lit. Also worth reading would be Eco's *Foucault's Pendulum*, about a group of editors becoming too involved with the occultists they're trying to exploit.
This is all rather difficult prose, but it is worth the effort. And if you have 4,000 books and have nothing but SF + technical books, frankly you're wasting 2/3 of your money, because there's probably no more than a few hundred SF books that are really worth owning (and I have about 600 myself, including most of the great ones except the cyperpunks, which are a little after my time.). [Apply a good filter like a book review to Sturgeon's Law and you just might get down to 66% of everything being crap.]
If you like fantasy, you really ought to look into things like the Chinese novel published in the US as "Monkey" (there was a god-awful adaptation of it on NBC about a year ago whose title escapes me), or some of the Norse sagas, which mix mythology and history. Maybe try Ovid's Metamorphoses (get the Indiana translation by Humphries, it's far and away the most readable; or try Ted Hughes' *Tales from Ovid*).
Too much SF limits you to talking about nothing but ... SF. Not a good way to relate to possible future employers (the more sophisticated your small talk, the more impressive you are in such extra-curricular things as business lunches) and dates (You: 'Hey, have you read the latest Star Wars: New Jedi Order book?' Date: 'Oh, look at the time, I've got to go') - that way even if you don't know anything about the books she's read, you'll at least have a broader range of things to compare what she says about them too (I imagine if you have 4,000 books your probably past this sort of worry, but there are others on slashdot who might not be and might not realize this).
John Varley! (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot of his stories take place in his "Eight Worlds" future history, both short stories (many collected in The Persistence of Vision aka In The Hall of the Martian Kings, The Barbie Murders aka Picnic on Nearside and Blue Champagne) and - to date - three novels (The Ophiuchi Hotline, Steel Beach and The Golden Globe).
He's also written the Gaean trilogy (Titan, Wizard and Demon) which despite their titles are actually SF - wild romps of SF, expressing a real joie de vivre (as many of his stories do)... unless they twist the knife (as many of his stories do).
But some of his best works are standalone - like the Nebula/Hugo winning "Press Enter " (there's suppossed to be a blinking cursor after the 'Enter'), "The Pusher" or "Equinoctial".
Varley's been compared to Heinlein, though personally I never saw it. He's a heck of a lot better in my book.
Honourable mentions to Greg Egan (the earlier stuff like "Learning to be me" is better than the later stuff), Neil Gaiman (his comics, especially his run on Miracle Man, are better than his prose) and Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game and Lost Boys are his two best works IMO - the novel better than the the short story that spawned it in both cases).
Re:Iain Banks & The Culture (Score:3, Interesting)
I was turned on to Banks by one of British friends. Ended up in London at Foyles in Charing Cross. While picking up all of Banks books (about 9 or ten) one of the staff asked me about my selection. Told him I'd read a couple of his books and was hooked. All the books were signed by the author too.
The Brits definitely have a much better selection of Sci-Fi / Fantasy than most US bookstores. Plus, it doesn't seem to be such a "geeky" thing to read the genre.
Turtledove and others (Score:2, Interesting)
He is prolific, thought provoking, and just plain fun. Amongst his release...
The World At War series
Worldwar series
American Empire series
Ruled Brittania
Colonization series
Masses to read there.
Thumbs up as well for George RR Martin and his massive fantasy series Game of Thrones. I like Terry Brooks but his books have steadily shrunk in size and frequency. Even so his Shannara, Landover, and Knight of the Word series are great fun.
Stephson gets my vote (Score:1, Interesting)
Neal wrote a much better cypherpunkish piece called The Great Simolean Caper. It was originally written for an edition of Time Magazine. Very enjoyable.
This is a link to a copy of it [uidaho.edu]
Of course "Snow Crash" is his most popular work and rightly so. Very, very humorous and savvy. Required reading for any punk sf reader.
That being said, his most mature and challenging novel is "Diamond Age". It visionary and extremely challenging from a philosophical point of view. A bit dryer than Snow Crash and not packed with humor, but probably his best work yet.
Be forewarned --- Neal needs help writing endings. If he only wroteendings half as good as an espisode of Gilligan's Island or Scooby Doo it would be a 100% improvement.
Re:Reading List (Score:3, Interesting)
Some others:
Stephen R Donaldson: Very good writing with anti-typical protagonists- Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series, The Gap Series, The Mirror of her dreams, Many short stories.
Alan Dean Foster: Mostly Humourous but some serious- Spellsinger, Dinotopia, Maori, Quozl, The Last Starfighter, Flinx, and many more
Glen Cook: Military Fantasy and Detective Fantasy- his novels of the Black Company and Garret typify his work
If anyone can recommend someone similiar to Glan Cook, I would be grateful.
Marion Zimmer Bradley: Darkover- I think she has written more Darkover novels than there exist Dragon Lance novels. Or maybe I should append that- good Dragon Lance novels.
Brian Lumley- Necronomicon and new Cthulu mythos books. A note, you will probably find his works in horror not SF/Fantasy.
My other suggestion is to google your favorite TSR Authors, and check out thier other works. And your local used book store is a treasure trove. I have found many Authors this way by picking books I would not normally read.
Eric S. Nylund, SF writer & microsoft employee (Score:2, Interesting)
He also did a novelization of the game Halo but I never checked that one out.
If you're gonna mention Greg Bear.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers On My List (Score:2, Interesting)
Lois McMaster Bujold (reread)
LMB simply deserves every accolade she's won. Of all the books of hers that I've read (which I believe with the completion of The Curse of Chalion now includes all of them) only Falling Free felt like it was wrote in haste or lack of care.
Harry Turtledove
Turtledove is the king of Alternative Historical Fiction and when he writes I always get the sense that he's gone to the effort of trying to get a unique or intimate perspective on the people or cultures he's writing about.
William Dietz
Not my favorite, but he's fun for neat explosions and one-liners occassionally I suppose.
Eric Flint
Hit or miss, I think that when he's writing with a co-author he sometimes either shows brilliance or else manages to bring out new ideas in otherwise somewhat tired authors.
Greg Bear
Vitals wasn't his best book mostly because of his insistence of switching viewpoints and thereby coming across like an accomplished conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I think he talks too much, like me. He's almost always dealing with a novel technology or idea though, so I generally read everything he writes.
David Drake
Unless it's yet another anthology of 20 year old stories, Drake is usually a good bet even when he's editing. Lately I've discovered that he's an acquired taste, though I still think that it's a worthwhile taste to acquire.
Laurell K Hamilton
Hamilton's major sticking point with me is that even her fantasy novels seem like they're firmly entrenched in the female romantic fiction market. Simply put, sometimes I feel like I'm reading soft core porn rather than something that I shouldn't be hiding the cover from passerbies.
Nancy Kress
I finished Probability Moon recently, but I had to pick it back up to remember anything about it. After reading through it some, I still don't remember much. I suppose that is a good endorsement that Kress doesn't do a whole lot for me.
Fritz Leiber
Every few years I reread Leiber, who in my opinion epitomizes a lot of good thing about past writers in the field that people don't do much anymore. His work is usually short and concise and complete. Since the present market is dominated by sometimes overly long winded, long running series I don't see how that can be a bad thing.
Charles Sheffield
Sometimes CS seems to have an underlining message to his books that I'm just not programmed to interpret. They're not bad books, they're memorable and mostly interesting. Perhaps it's that they sometimes lack a bit in plot development?
S M Stirling
SMS writes military science fiction primarily. In that, he's competent and worth filling a shelf or two checking him out. If you're out there cruising for new concepts or ideas though in your science fiction, I might recommend that you steer clear of him.
Fred Saberhagen
Another old favorite, like Asimov I doubt I've even begun to discover everything he's wrote to tell you how much I like it all. Every so often I delve into a dusty box of old books and find yet another book he's wrote or has a story in though, and each and every time I'm impressed. Sometimes you can tell that he's writing for a paycheck though, so some pieces are better than others.
Gordon R Dickson
I reread his old books, I buy his new ones. I recommend that everyone follow suit on general principles.
Ann Rice
Sometimes I get a lot of flak for reading her, but there is no denying that she started a trend with her books. Sometimes I wish her work were a little bit more like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who is a much better author of "vampire fiction" in my opinion. I'm always picking up the Mayfair Witches though, picking through it and rereading it. It's either good or I'm obsessive-compulsive.
Harry Harrison
Harrison isn't my favorite writer, but he's a good writer with a healthy portfolio of books to purchase from. If nothing else I think people should be familiar with his work in a sort of science fiction heritage way.
C S Friedman
I read Madness Season after passing the book over for years. I didn't know what to make of it, and I still don't. Part of me wants to like it, the other part insists that it's hokey. Sometimes hokey is fun though, so maybe someone else will enjoy it more than I did.
CJ Cherryh
When Cherryh writes about aliens, they're ALIEN, not funny looking humans with pointy ears or personifications of human traits. At least she tries, and her books set in her weird light speed restricted universe of Cyteen and Hellburner are pretty good too.
Jack McDevitt
Not a lot of people seem to know about Jack McDevitt, but more people should. I'm not sure how to classify his work, possibly because I haven't finished reading all of it. It seems like science fiction from a non-science fiction writer, which may be true. In any case it's usually fun and fascinating.
Poul Anderson
Anderson's Flandry novels always move me for some reason. Perhaps it's my father's deep affection for them. In any case, I reread one or two of them on occassion.
Steven Gould
A newer science fiction writer, of the "one gimmick" school. Boy though, does he write the gimmick well. Even as I sit here writing I can't help but look forward to his next book.
Dan Simmons
Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion might be the best science fiction books I've ever read. Carrion Comfort might be one of the better horror stories I've ever read. The Hollow Man is right up there in the top ten "literature disguised as science fiction" books...So, if you haven't read ANY of those, please go do so.
Joe Haldeman
Haldeman's talent seems to be slowing down, but every time I read something new that I don't entirely like I find myself picking up The Forever War and reading it again. The Forever War and Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) ought to be required reading in high school I think.
David Weber
Honor Harrington lines the bookshelves, and since everyone else was buying it I didn't for a long time. Then after I read some of his other series, I turned around and gave it a try. Weber writes the equivalent of Science Fiction action flicks, but he does it well.
Bernard Cromwell
Cromwell doesn't really write science fiction or fantasy, but his Winter King series (I believe that is the name - the books are on loan right now)is good enough that I think he deserves mention. It's really one of the most interesting retellings of the Arthurian Legend I've ever read. I liked it so much I went and bought and read The Archer's Tale, which was quite good as well.
Gary Jennings
Gary Jennings bothers me sometimes. He writes too much, he bores me to tears, he makes me wonder if he'll ever finish his internal monologues and conversations sometimes. I still think he's worth reading, his Aztec books are so out of the ordinary that they read like fantasy.
I could continue, but is anyone really still reading now?
Sometimes Truth is Stranger than Fiction (Score:2, Interesting)
Colleen McCullochs First Man in Rome series is awesome. i am on my third reading now. she has the largest collection of history books in the southern hemisphere and she tells the story so well. sulla is cooler than marius and julius ceasar is the man! She also wrote the Song of Troy which is an excellent story about Troy. taught me more about the history of it than i learnt in school.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Breakfast of Champions is a funny book you can knock over in an afternoon. kilgore trouts story ideas are priceless.
James Clavell is pretty good. i really loved Noble House and King Rat and Shogun are also damn good reads.
Read some military history like Julius Ceasars Gallic Campaigns or the history of the french foreign legion or rommels book on tank warfare (i bet he wished he never wrote that!)
and the best book EVER is Dr. Suesses Sleep Book. The news just came in from the county of kek, tht a very small bug by the name of van vleck, is yawning so wide you can look down his neck. now this may not seem very important you know, but it is so i'm bothering telling you so.
tip: when you go to a bookshop, check out all the other sections!!
Re:Saturated? (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple decades later (not coincidentally, about the time I began writing myself, therefore viewing all written material with a more-critical eye) I realised that a great deal of SF/F didn't interest me anymore either -- mainly because a lot of the "classic" authors really were frankly not as good as they'd *seemed* when I was younger, and hungrier for new material. As a result, I've become much more selective about what I read, and more prone to *re-read* those that I still find really good and truly interesting.
Re:You forgot some... (Score:2, Interesting)
Gordon R. Dickson (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too obvious? (Score:3, Interesting)
You must have stopped 10-pages short of the end of Diamond Age then!
Stephenson has a wonderful ability to write about technological concepts in a way that is interesting and informative to the casual reader while (at least to me) engrossing for the long-time professional as well. I read Cryptonomicon and Applied Cryptography back-to-back and I have to say that he did a good job of capturing the really interesting parts of cryptography.
The end was standard Stephenson drop-off. He's turned on by the IDEA, not the story. To him, it seems, the idea is all that's worth writing about, and when he's done, the rest is a chore. I'm just guessing, as I don't know the man, but that's the way Diamond Age came off to me, and Cryptonomicon to a lesser extent.
I still find his idead compelling enough to keep reading. I see him as sort of the Arthur C. Clarke of this generation. A friend pointed out that while many engineers in the 50s would have said that Clarke didn't know "enough" about their field, he knew enough about several and had the vision to put them together in a way that told the story that the engineers could not.
I don't know that any of us in the trenches are telling the story that Cryptonomicon told in a way that will ever get to as many people. It's not a hugely important story, but certainly one that I think should be told.