10-22-2010, 09:58 AM | #16 |
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10-22-2010, 10:05 AM | #17 |
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I'd like to third (fourth) Old Man's War, by Scalzi. I've read it before, but this would be a good opportunity to re-read it.
I'd also like to nominate "The Player of Games" by Iain M. Banks Spoiler:
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10-22-2010, 10:12 AM | #18 |
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10-22-2010, 10:32 AM | #19 |
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According to Wikipedia, it's the 2nd "Culture" novel, but I'm pretty sure they don't need to be read in any particular order. I've read others and they have totally different characters and plots, and are simply set in the same universe.
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10-22-2010, 10:34 AM | #20 |
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Take Discworld for example. There is a rather lame chart floating around showing alternate reading orders for the series. But if you do not read in order, you may very well miss out on thinks referenced back to other books published prior to the one currently being read. So really (IMHO), it's best to read a series in order.
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10-22-2010, 11:42 AM | #21 |
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I'd like to nominate The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. 2009 Nebula Award and 2010 Hugo Award Winner.
From Wikipedia: The Windup Girl is set in the 23rd century: Global Warming has raised the levels of world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices. Biotechnology is dominant and mega corporations like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar (called calorie companies) control food production through 'genehacked' seeds, and use bioterrorism, private armies and economic hitmen to create markets for their products. Frequent catastrophes, such as deadly and widespread plagues and illness, caused by genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage entire populations. The natural genetic seed stock of the world's plants has been almost completely supplanted by those that are genetically engineered to be sterile. |
10-22-2010, 12:01 PM | #22 |
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I'll second The Player of Games.
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10-22-2010, 12:03 PM | #23 | |
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10-22-2010, 12:27 PM | #24 |
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I would like to nominate "News from Nowhere" by William Morris.
Available for free at MR. From Wikipedia: News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work. The book explores a number of aspects of this society, including its organisation and the relationships which it engenders between people. Morris cleverly fuses Marxism and the romance tradition when he presents himself as an enchanted figure in a time and place different from Victorian England. As Morris the romance character, quests for love and fellowship-and through them for a reborn self, he encounters romance archetypes in Marxist guises. Old Hammond is both the communist educator who teaches Morris the new world and the wise old man of romance. Dick and Clara are good comrades and the married lovers who aid Morris in his wanderings. The journey on the Thames is both a voyage through society transformed by revolution and a quest for happiness. The quests goal, met and found though only transiently, is Ellen, the symbol of the reborn age and the bride the alien cannot win. Ellen herself is a multidimensional figure; a working class woman emancipated under socialism, she is also a benign nature spirit as well as the soul in the form of a woman. The book offers Morris' answers to a number of frequent objections to socialism, and underlines his belief that socialism will entail not only the abolishment of private property but also of the divisions between art, life, and work. In the novel, Morris tackles one of the most common criticisms of socialism; the supposed lack of incentive to work in a communist society. Morris' response is that all work should be creative and pleasurable. This differs from the majority of Socialist thinkers, who tend to assume that while work is a necessary evil, a well-planned equal society can reduce the amount of work needed to be done by each worker. News From Nowhere was written as a response to an earlier book called Looking Backward, a book that epitomizes a view of Socialism that Morris abhorred. |
10-22-2010, 12:44 PM | #25 |
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I would like to nominate The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams. http://inkmesh.com/ebooks/hitchhiker...+Douglas+Adams
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10-22-2010, 01:03 PM | #26 |
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I second "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
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10-22-2010, 01:17 PM | #27 |
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10-22-2010, 01:22 PM | #28 | |
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Quote:
Nominated Last edited by twobits; 10-22-2010 at 01:27 PM. |
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10-22-2010, 01:50 PM | #29 |
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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis.
Like Doomsday Book, Blackout, All Clear, and Firewatch it features Oxford's time travelling historians, though the major characters in the other books are minor characters in this one. From Booklist-- What a stitch! Willis' delectable romp through time from 2057 back to Victorian England, with a few side excursions into World War II and medieval Britain, will have readers happily glued to the pages. Rich dowager Lady Schrapnell has invaded Oxford University's time travel research project in 2057, promising to endow it if they help her rebuild Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by a Nazi air raid in 1940. In effect, she dragoons almost everyone in the program to make trips back in time to locate items--in particular, the bishop's bird stump[though they are unclear about what it is exactly].... Time traveler Ned Henry is suffering from advanced time lag and has been sent, he thinks, for rest and relaxation to 1888, where he connects with fellow time traveler Verity Kindle and discovers that he is actually there to correct an incongruity created when Verity inadvertently brought something forward from the past. Take an excursion through time, add chaos theory, romance, plenty of humor, a dollop of mystery, and a spoof of the Victorian novel, and you end up with what seems like a comedy of errors but is actually a grand scheme "involving the entire course of history and all of time and space that, for some unfathomable reason, chose to work out its designs with cats and croquet mallets and penwipers, to say nothing of the dog...." --Sally Estes It won both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1999, and was nominated for the Nebula Award in 1998. http://inkmesh.com/ebooks/to-say-not...+Connie+Willis |
10-22-2010, 01:51 PM | #30 | |||
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I am nominating:
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke (Large Print but easily adjusted via a Calibre convert) Quote:
Quote:
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Last edited by seagull; 10-24-2010 at 05:14 AM. |
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