So I've been thinking about getting into sci-fi lately but I'm genuinely unsure where to start. My reading background is mostly autofiction and the literary canon, so I don't really know what's actually worth reading in the genre versus what's just slop. I've already read some Asimov and the usual dystopias so I'm not coming in completely blind.Went through some guides on here and downloaded Ubik, Neuromancer, Solaris, The End of Eternity and A Princess of Mars. I'll probably start from there. Any thoughts on the list? Am I missing something obvious or wasting my time with any of these?
PKD is great because he (at least later in his career) was a genuine schizo trying to pass esoteric religious messages onto his readers that he thought he was receiving from other times/realities, in contrast to the usual SF author just writing next month's bar tab or tired 'cultural critique'. I got a couple hundred pages into the Exegesis and have always meant to finish it
Everything I've read by Philip Dick has been great. I enjoyed C. S. Lewis' Ransom Trilogy, which is sci-fi infused with Christian theology and a medieval cosmic worldview--if you're into that sort of thing.I hated Snow Crash enough to never want to read Stephenson again, even though I enjoyed some of his essays. I'm going to try Gibson next. Might give Neal another shot.
>>25285070It was the Illustrated I Ching that first got me into sci fi
>>25285079Benzedrine, meth, mental illness and teenage runaway cooter literally spawned some of the greatest and most inventive sci-fi ever. Strange world.
>>25285070Princess of Mars is actual dogshit.Ubik has a rough first half but it's easy to see why PKD has such a cult following when you get to the second part. It's nuts.I recommend reading HG Wells and Olaf Stapledon. I also recommend The Futurological Congress, a comedy by the guy who wrote Solaris, modeled after the stories of PKD.I've also heard good things about A Canticle for Liebowitz.
>>25285083>brown retard still spamming this title for some reason
>>25285092This one’s for (You)
>>25285070imo neuromancer isn't a good book. It's word vomit and the characters suck. It's highly historical though and a lot of cyberpunk steals his lingo so if you're really into the genre it's fine. But if you're just getting your feet wet it might sour your impression of scifi.
>>25285070>My reading background is mostly autofiction and the literary canonKys and get the fuck out of sci fi
>>25285119Filtered. Neuromancer is good, but it's a turbo difficult read. There's a reason Gibson was able to write five similar books in the same universe over two decades while remaining relevant.
>>25285082I gave up on Neal Stephenson as well, all of his writing comes off as extremely smug. The whole time I’m reading anything I wrote I can just picture him smirking at me and saying “heh, aren’t I clever?” I’ve banished him into the Will Never Read Again Bin along with Terry Pratchett and Becky Chambers
>>25285070I’ve found some gems in the purple-spined Penguin science fiction classics series.The Hair Carpet Weavers by EschbachTrafalgar by GorodischerThe Cyberiad by Stanislaw LemIf you like retro/pulpy sci-fi, The Stars my Destination by Bester was quite fun. As was The Space Merchants by Pohl
>>25285545>it's a turbo difficult read.It's not. It just relies on the reader to imagine everything because Gibson actually has a shit imagination. He's just good at inventing slang.>was able to write five similar books in the same universe over two decades while remaining relevant.The only reason he's relevant is because he was the first to write passable cyberpunk. Nobody cares about his other books because they suck ass.
>>25285070Read philip k dick for a while
>>25285070Start with Wells, some suggest Verne but I think he's boringDon't read Gibson, he's a hack
Neuromancer is shockingly poorly written and gibson is the luckiest man in the world
>>25285545>10MB of hotswapped RAM
>>25285070>what's just slopmost of it is slop to be entirely honest. actually good sci-fi is rarer than good literary fiction, and good literary fiction's already pretty rare>Am I missing something obviouspicrel>wasting my time with any of these?more PKD, more Gibson, more Gene Wolfe, more Ursula K. Le Guin, A Princess of Mars is fucking horrible
Strugatsky bros
>>25285709Roadside Picnic is a classic for sure
>>25285070Neuromancer is one of the worst written, over-memed pieces of shit I've ever read. It's more fantasy than it is sci-fi. I'd skip Gibson's works entirely as they will sour you from the genre.
>>25285070Agree with other anon's, skip Gibson. He admitted he didn't even know how a computer worked when he wrote Neuromancer and there is nothing interesting offered by his work. What one anon said about him being lucky is 100% right. Ridley's Blade Runner (1982) is one of the best science fiction works in any medium produced and it kicked off the cyberpunk craze and Gibson was lucky as hell to release his book just a few months after Blade Runner came out and the publisher ran with it. If he had released it before, or the film failed to capture audience's imaginations as it did, he never would have taken off as a writer. I'd consider Backhman/King's Running Man which is a great cyberpunk novel, sadly let down by its two terrible adaptations. If you like that Firestarter is somewhat similar, anti-system/government agency conspiracy sci-fi.PKD's Maze of Death and Scanner Darkly are good starting points for sci-fi, but he has other work which are good but perhaps outside the genre. I don't actually rate Ubik that high as some people do. His short story, Faith of our Fathers is a great merger of existential horror and sci-fi with a novel protagonist and setting that is short and worth reading from him too. He has many others like it if you enjoy that.Dhalgren someone else mentioned is a great recommendation. It is very queer but it has an interesting surreal quality to it and vivid imagery as a near future somewhat post-apocalyptic circular novel.Ballard's The Drought / Burning World is quiet good, straight forward sci-fi and I don't see it mentioned often. Crystal World is not as good, imo.
just go read gardner dozois anthologies until you figure out what you like, it ain't that deep
Le Guin got me into sci-fi. The one-two punch of The Dispossessed + The Left Hand of Darkness is unbeatable. A lot of her other stuff is hit or miss but those two are untouchable.Octavia Butler writes some real weird shit. I think she's not a great writer of sentences but her stories are pretty captivating and a great example of using your fetishes to worldbuild. The Patternist series comes to mind.There's a lot of fun to be had crossing into the "science fantasy" subgenre. Gene Wolf is legitimately literary, and I like the Dying Earth stories a lot, but these always end up feeling more fantasy than sci-fi.Le Guin in general has great taste. If she's recommended or penned an intro for a book in the genre, it's probably worth reading. That's how I came across >>25285709
>>25285759>Ridley's Blade Runner (1982) is one of the best science fiction works in any medium produced and it kicked off the cyberpunk craze and Gibson was lucky as hell to release his book just a few months after Blade Runner came out and the publisher ran with it. Damn I thought Blade Runner was based on PKD. Or am i reading this wrong
>>25285706>delaney>recommending books from a genuine pedophile
>>25285819based on do androids dream
>>25285770have you read Kalpa Imperial? I enjoyed Trafalgar by the same author, and when I saw that the English translation was by Le Guin I became quite interested. haven't read it yet tho but Le Guin is a great writer
>>25285082>I hated Snow Crash enough to never want to read Stephenson again, even though I enjoyed some of his essays. I'm going to try Gibson next. Might give Neal another shot.You might try Anathem if you feel like giving Stephenson a second chance, it's close to the opposite edge of his range from Snow Crash.>>25285770Agreed with this, Le Guin is a fantastic starting point for someone who is used to literary fiction and not sure they like sci-fi yet.
>>25285819It is based on Do Androids Dream. But Ridley's work took it into a completely different direction and kick started the entire cyberpunk literature movement. Without that movie it would not have had legs and Gibson rode on that.
>>25285823unfortunately the book's good
>>25285613>>25285682Nah, filtered. Gibson's main two themes, plausible non-human intelligence and social dynamics, are woven together in a way that no other writer has done. He builds these Mind of a Dolphin style entities: Tessier-Ashpool and Josef Virek in particular. The adventure story is surface level plot-fag nonsense.
>>25285091>Princess of Mars is actual dogshit.idk how you could say thisthe atmosphere plant chapter alone is amazing
>>25285981>>25285981legit retard im afraid
>>25285070You have Asimov and Burroughs on your list but like another poster said you should also read H.G. Wells, specifically The Time Machine.
>>25286035I bet you think VALIS is dumb too.
>>25285981Gibson fans are so braindead the only intellectual discussion they can have is "le filtered"Very sad
>>25285981I don't deny it was groundbreaking with its cyberpunk themes. I just think it's not interesting to read. Back when I first read it in college I thought it was a great book, but then I read his other shit and I realized neuromancer is all slang and dude cyber he picked up from talking to hackers. Everything I liked about it was the world I imagined in my head. When I read it again I realized I hate all the characters and don't care what happens. It's just not a good book for beginner scifi. It's a deep cut you read for historical purposes. btw you should try reading his newer stuff. It really exposes how unimaginative he is. Now that cyber or tech or whatever is "figured out" his biggest strength (which is forming slang sentences about stuff he doesn't understand so you can fill in the gaps) is completely gone.
>>25285070https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pubseries.cgi?9
>>25285070ended's game and the rest of the series. they're not hard sci fi exactly but card's prose is direct and compelling. unfortunately prose is the downfall in much of the genre, that makes large swaths of it unreadable.
>>25286699ender not ended
I would recommend to you The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton.
>>25285070
>>25286734That's a youtuber lil zoom zoom
>>25285070Neuromancer is cyberpunk and suffers from a bad case of zeerust but it and the books set in the same universe, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, are good reads. Regardless of how Gibson himself changed.Snowcrash is similar and near future, while Diamond Age is teeeechnically the same universe and a terrifying look at a potential future.Peter F Hamilton is like Brandon Sanderson only he has a modicum of talent and is able to poke fun at himself - 'sweaty, middle aged scifi authors writing about the wonders of zero gee sex' comes up in a book or two. And he's definitely guilty of writing too much sex as a word count filler but it almost makes sense in context. He's written everything from near future psychic scifi to sweeping space opera and it's all okay.There's Iain M Banks of course. Consider Phlebas and the Excession are two very different novels in the same universe. Consider is more human based, The Excession is about the ai ships themselves, mostly. I believe The Algebraist is also his and that's an independent novel, self contained, different universe. Good fun.Stephen Baxter is sort of like Peter F Hamilton if you took out the sex, through in hard mathematics and then ripped that out too. I like his work but it's a bit rough on the brain, sometimes. Nemoto remains my favourite of his characters, I believe I read Manifold Space first and didn't realise it was a trilogy. Give it a shot.Alistair Reynolds had written a lot, but I think House of Suns is a good and independent jump off point into his work. It's well paced, exciting and almost futile. "But then, I must really be on my way."
>>25287416Oh, and Arthur C Clarke, of course. Forgive me, I'm an old man writing from my morning toilet and remembering all the good authors or books I forgot to list. Rendezvous with Rama is probably a good starter but it suffers more from zeerust than Neuromancer. His short story about the monastery calculating the names of god stays with me, similar to Zappfe's essay The Last Messiah.Starship Troopers is only vaguely scifi but it's there. More of a pamphlet on Heinlein's political views. It's quite short, you might like to try it. His other stuff is, well, not as great. Lots of cuckoldry as I recall in Lazarus Long. Good quotes about lazy men though.More speculative but Neal Stephenson, as I mentioned earlier, wrote Anathem. I think that worth a read. And Reynold's Terminal World. I'll come back as I remember more accessible scifi and dump into the thread.
Well since we're on the topic of sci-fi, anyone here an /int/fag? What sci-fi books from other languages would you recommend? Assuming there's an English translation. Then again, I could just use AI to translate for me if the book entices me enough. It's usually Americans and Japense making the cool sci-fi stuff, Brits be damned.
>>25287433uh doomguy looks like THIS?
>>25287424And Richard Morgan writes near future gritty scifi. Try Thin Air, a novel about a genetically engineered corporate 'sleeper' aboard interplanetary cargo ships. They activate in case of a mutiny and hibernate a few months a year. Except this one now lives and works on mars as a private detective. Surprisingly fun.
>>25287435yes~
>>25287424>Starship Troopers is only vaguely scifi but it's there. More of a pamphlet on Heinlein's political views.This is hard to believe. He wrote The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: a super left wing fantasy. He even made one of the main resistance characters a super smart professor anarchist so that political scientists could self-insert.
>>25287908I would encourage you to read up on his stated views throughout his life and his relationship with his brother as well as his own attempts to enlist.
>>25286032The problem with A Princess of Mars is that it's a pulp magazine story written by a complete novice for an intended audience of 12-15 year olds, but it gets recommended to grownups as a sci-fi classic without any disclaimers. It would get less hate if people were forewarned about what it actually is.
