In recent years, I've tired of the "hard" science fiction, fascinating though I've found it in the past. I've gotten lazier in recent years, and am seeking entertainment that's less challenging to the mind.
When I saw Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones, I loved the...
...uh, okay, I'll wait for you all to finish groaning. Yeah, I know that lots of Star Wars fans find the prequels to be dumb, untrue to the original trilogy, having cardboard characters and plot holes, etc. I partly agree (although the "dumb" part is harsh, in my opinion,) but they had many good parts too.
For instance, I loved the scenes in Episode 2 with the flying cars in the streets of Coruscant. I often read scenes in SciFi stories with a few flying cars in some wilderness or borderland type of area, but the idea of a fully urbanized area with millions of flying cars boggled my mind.
Sure, I would sometimes read brief passages of SF stories that make a quick reference to taking traffic jams from the streets and into the skies, but I've never seen the idea tackled head-on until Attack of the Clones.
I don't mean to single out flying cars. Having lots of blaster pistols, starships, aliens, sentient robots, etc. would also be examples of the sort of thing I'm looking for. But I'm hoping not to resort to reading Star Wars novels, as I'd prefer an "absolute" novel, written for its own sake, over one that's just part of merchandising. (Although it may come to that.)
So I read a few Planet Stories volumes (and intend to read some more of them, despite the griping I'm about to do...) They weren't EXACTLY what I was looking for, as they were really low-tech, with the high-tech items being few and far between. Instead of blaster pistols, people used swords. Flying cars were few, rarely seen, or only briefly mentioned.
Well, what did I expect? Paizo did advertise that Planet Stories displayed the SWORD-and-Planet genre. And one of the Planet Stories volumes I read actually had the word "Swordsman" in the title. So I can't claim false advertising.
Still, I'd rather not accept the premise that people with interstellar spacecraft need to resort to fighting with swords and riding cantankerous, unreliable animal mounts. I CAN accept it, but I'd rather not.
(And if I went on any more about the various points of Planet Stories books that I liked and disliked, I'd never stop.)
Anyway, can anyone recommend a science fiction book, based on my little rant? I'd appreciate it.
I meant to add, but forgot to mention, that I was once about to buy The Complete Northwest Smith, because I heard that the hero uses a ray-gun instead of a sword. But then I heard that the stories involve fighting ancient, evil, Cthulhuesque horrors, rather than high-tech challenges, so I didn't buy the book.
Hopefully, that will help clarify what I'm looking for, and what I'm not.
Revelation Space and Chasm city by Alistair Reynolds.
Deathstalker by Simon R. Green - (with swords, pulsers, energy shields etc.)
Both series are space opera.
Series flogging merchandise;
Lethal Heritage (Battletech) by Michael A. Stackpole. Fun books about men in giant robots fighting each other.
Eisenhorn (A Warhammer 40,000 Omnibus) by Dan Abnett and Marc Gascoigne.
In the Grim and Perilous future an Inquisitor must root out heresy, kill mutants and eradicate those who want to destroy the Empire of humanity from within.
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The early Lensmen novels were a lot of fun, but after Gray Lensman, the interstellar arms race just overwhelmed my sense of credibility. I'd already read scene after scene of coruscating beams being repelled by coruscating energy screens with superlative adverbs describing the superlative adjectives. Once planets started being used as ammunition, I just unplugged.
One thing you may want to try is David Webber Honor Harrington space opera series. The good thing is you can try them for free (completely official on the editor site) Link. Go there and click on the On Basilik Station link (the first book of the series).
There are quantities of other titles there, both SF and fantasy that may get you hooked on a series.
Thank you all for your answers. I looked into some of the series' listed here, and several of them sound intriguing. In fact, I was planning to go to the public library an hour ago to check out one of those titles, but real life intervened. I may be busy for a while.
But I still intend to check out some of those suggested books some day. Thanks again.
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Your best bet is to go down to your local mega-bookstore and look at the trade paperback anthologies in the Sci-Fi section. buy one or two that look interesting, and as you read the stories single out authors whose style or ideas really appeal to you. I've been buying the YEar's Best Science Fiction (edited by Dozios) for about 15 years. That series is too Hard sci-fi to meet your criteria, but right next to them on the shelves you're likely to find a nice space opera anthology, or one focused on space colonies, or planetary adventure, etc...
Also, you really want to look for a Golden Age anthology or two. Stuff written pre 1960 is basically space opera even if it was 'hard sci-fi' in its day. I can think of dozens of 30's and 40's stories that meet your criteria perfectly. They all seem to have super cities and flying cars.
Happy hunting!
'Ling
please don't discount the star wars eu books.
eu?
Please don't think that I dismissed the Star Wars novels out of hand. I read a handful of them, years ago. (Of course, "a handful" is a drop in the ocean...) I considered going back to them, but my whim at the moment is to try something else.
DNA Cowboys trilogy by Mick Farren.
Review
I picked them up at a used book store a few months ago and was blown away by the setting and characters.
please don't discount the star wars eu books.eu?
Please don't think that I dismissed the Star Wars novels out of hand. I read a handful of them, years ago. (Of course, "a handful" is a drop in the ocean...) I considered going back to them, but my whim at the moment is to try something else.
EU= Expanded Universe
You kind of have to pick and choose these, IMHO. Personally, I enjoy Michael Stackpole, Timothy Zahn and a few others (the Rogue Squadron series is a particular favorite, but I'm a big Rebel pilot fan. Truthfully, they're just fun reads!) Zahn is better for the large scale action. I'm sure there's other good ones out there, but I stopped reading when they did the New Jedi Order books.
I'll also second the Honor Harrington series above by David Weber, in fact, any book by Weber (but especially the Honorverse). There's places where you can (legally) get nearly the entire series electronically online for free, and if you like them as much as I do, you'll buy two copies of every book, just so you have some to lend out to share. Seriously fun stuff. I've recommended this series to young and old, and they've all had a really good time. It's hard SF, inasmuch as he creates a consistent, believable 'physics' but it's definitely sweeping space opera with a wonderful flavor.
Oh! For sheer fun, maybe try out Harry Turtledove's World War trilogy. It's an alternate history where aliens invade in the middle of World War II and get more than they bargained for. It's ingenious, fun, tense and epic in scope. There's flying cars in there somewhere, too! And skelkwank disks.
Sigh. I need to read some more SF. (I'm in a historical book phase right now).
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I prefer mind candy to 'hard sci-fi.' Robert Foreward seems to attempt 'hard' sci-fi, but succeeds only in boring the ever-living crap out of me, probably because he's ponderous and I'm an intellectual dilettante, at best. :)
Star Trek novels are *great* mind-candy, and there are like, fifty bajillion of them. Some of them, like 'How Much for Just the Planet' are flat-out comedies. Peter David's New Frontiers line are also pretty funny and good 'light' reading. I can usually devour those suckers at 100 pages / hour, which is well above my normal pace. (Although if I read three novels in a single day, I won't have the slightest idea what I read at the end of the day, as it takes my brain 24 hours to catch up...)
For Star Wars, I liked Timothy Zahn's Dark Force Rising novels, but haven't gotten much past those, finding others to be kind of 'meh.'
Zahn's Conqueror's Trilogy is also pretty cool, and totally Star Wars free, if that sort of thing isn't your bag.
Peter Hamilton's got some good stuff, both in his Reality Dysfunction novels and his earlier trilogy (Mindstar Rising, A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower), which is kind of a cyberpunk with psionics deal.
Some of David Brin's Uplift books are fun, and not even a little bit hard science-y, with Startide Rising and the Uplight War being two of my favorites (Sundiver, IMO, was a bit dull).
Greg Egan's novels Quarantine, Distress and Permutation City are all very cool, and he seems very much a transhumanist, detailing societies either already dealing with new definitions of what 'human' means, are becoming introduced to that sort of transformational issue. (According to Wiki, some of his later books, Schild's Ladder and Incandescence, get pretty 'hard,' so they might not be your cup of tea. I haven't read them myself.) He's generally described online as being 'hard science,' but he deals with people skipping into other quantum universes and downloading themselves into computers and other bits of science-fantasy, so I'm a little dubious of the wiki-authors idea of 'hard' science.
Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a cyberpunk, sci-fi, *comedy,* of sorts. It's awesome. His later books are hella boring, freakishly self-referential, and to be avoided, IMO. Just read Snow Crash. Maybe the Diamond Age, but even that one gets a little dense and lacks anyone getting their heads cut off with samurai swords or a motorcycle-riding cyberpunk bad-guy who has wired a grenade-sized mini-nuke to his heart so that if anyone kills him, it goes off and kills everyone within a half-mile, making himself into a one-man nuclear deterrent.
Each of these authors can be looked up on Wiki, and a short description of some of their books can be found on separate pages, so you can 'browse before you buy,' in a sense.
Consider Phlebas by Iain Banks ?
I cannot recommend Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet series highly enough. It's easily better than the last several Honor Harrington books, and I don't say that lightly.