My son is currently absolutely fascinated by the idea of space propulsion systems and orbital habitats. He has just possibly been playing too much Halo.
He’s full of questions and schemes for writing his own stories/future world. He’s got to the point where he’s rapidly out-pacing the knowledge of two admitted SF-geek parents about these things, because we’re not totally immersed in that tech. We thought Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey might be a good start, just because the tech described is generally thought to be within realistic bounds for this century sometime.
What would readers recommend as some of the best novels out there that actually deal with the hard science of space travel, and that are still a rattling good read?
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke (great mystery with some politics too and again hard science)
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (possibly the best SF ever but with hard science propulsion playing a key role)
I Robot by Asimov.
Eon by Greg Bear is not without its charm.
Agree, FDB. I was going to recommend Greg Bear too.
Why “fiction” Why the sex-stereotyping? Try “Earthsea” by Ursula Le Guin! In addition, Australia’s best SciFi writer is a female!
My intro to SF as a pre-schooler was the wartime (that’s WW II) cartoon “Garth” and to SFact, a section of my Christmas gift book on the propulsion of V1 & V2 rockets (so I’d recommend a book on Werner von Braun & his rockets), and magical 1920s “Whirriway”, a trip through what was known of Earth’s great geological, botanical etc ages that meant I was hooked on Darwin.
Let’s go SFact for a while (with the proviso, mentioned below, that my books are old & I keep up through my on-line groups. If your son doesn’t have it, I recommend Paul Davies (2001) How to Build a Time Machine (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press). The next step is to the Large Hadron Collider and the physics of particle bombardment that will take us to the stars. The latest books (mine are a decade out of date – but authors may not have changed & tho a lot of black holes, superstrings, ‘laser eraser’, bombardment pattern etc theories have changed) on Hyperspace (mine’s Michio Kaku’s (1994), Antimatter (Fraser 2000) comet crashes, exploding stars, radio galaxies & the like (Dauber & Miller 1995) and the seminal Hawkings & Kip Thorne texts … all eminently readable. BTW: I love physicists, they write in such plain English I, a LibArts type, can follow them! I understand Thorne & Hawling far more easily than the sociology (esp NeoMarxist & post-modernist), Psychology etc texts I had to plough through as a student & teacher! Davies “Time Machine” is even in big print with lots of diagrams.
SciFi? More an “author thing” than “titles”. Kids tend to read an author’s entire corpus, one after the other. All the usual suspects, starting with A, B, C, D & E. But I’d start trolling Lifeline etc for old zines, which often match fiction with the science behind it. “Film” to “The book of the film” isn’t a bad jump’: from “I Robot” to “Caves of Steel”, to “Naked Sun” etc – tho “Foundation” breaks the social equivalent one of Newton’s Laws, even tho, as any good Ancient History teacher know,s the Law also applies historically. If you want to insert some parental “thinking” guidance, try getting son to reflect on “The Naked Sun” in relation to where the on-line world is going!
Phillip Dick is a step to maturity both as films & words: “Total Recall” to “We can remember it for you wholesale”; “Blade Runner” to “Flow my Tears …” awa “Do Androids dream..” Another step is Harlan Ellison (there’s a great 2005 omnibus: “The Essential Ellison: A 50 Year Retrospective”). I found more literate Yr 10 kids and certainly Yr 11s handle Dick & Ellison well – and I usually taught TechoBlokes & Blokettes.
But you probably know all of the above
“The Ship that Sang” (Anne McCaffrey) was my intro to AMc. Le Guin’s “Dispossessed” & “Left Hand of Darkness” are difficult because she tends to be more interested in social sciences that plot structure.
If he’s been playing Halo, then Ringworld by Larry Niven seems a logical choice. It seems to have been the inspiration for the Halo itself. While set in a more distant future, almost anything by Niven is pretty hard Sci-Fi. I’d recommend Protector too. Gives a good feel for the distances involved in space travel. Read it before Ringworld.
Buzz Aldrin / John Barnes: Encounter with Tiber was rather good, if I recall correctly.
PS, tigtog, if teen son has an assignment somewhere in the future, I’d add Ira Levin’s “This perfect Day” to “Naked Sun” for examination within a framework of where IT is now. Levin (thanks to “Rosemary’s Baby”) was HUGE c1970, and my yr 10-12 classes lapped it up … Until the first articles re micro-computers appeared and it became the epitome of one of the all-time great “discontinuous” technological shifts!
PPS Reread your intro & realised it was personalised to your son. Apologies.
The books that most fit what you’re after are undoubtedly Red Mars and it’s sequels.
Other books mentioned here are great, but not necessaril covering the ‘plausible in the not too distant future’ requirement if you drop that requirement, iI love sephenStephen donaldson’s “Gap” series excellent space opera, but the crux of the story is high level political battle with the stakes as high as you can get. Very good if you like a health dollop of pollitics in tour sci Fi.
My sense of the post was that you wanted what used to be termed hard Sci-Fi centering on spaceflight. Technical and scientific speculation then being the core virtue. If this is the criterion my current recommendation would be Alastair Reynolds. Part-time Astrophysicist, part-time writer of space opera with a very strong sense of current physics.
If speculation outside of the mechanics of space flight might entertain then Charles Stross and Ian McDonald (particularly “River of Gods”) are worth a look.
The RGB Mars books by Kim Stanley Robinson sound just about spot on. Red Mars can be downloaded at http://www.scribd.com/doc/12930958/Red-Mars-by-Kim-Stanley-Robinson-full-book.
David Brin’s Uplift books might suit as well, the first two, Sundiver and Startide Rising I recall as being focusseda bit more on habitats and space travel.
d
It … erm … might not strictly be regarded by everyone as hard sci-fi …
… but Dune is still the best thing ever written in the genre, bar none. Your boy won’t grow up into a true SF nerd if he doesn’t know Dune.
Agree with Dune…but forget the movie
As DeeCee says, he may as well hear about the real world too (though I do not think pop physics is entirely to be trusted; too many books suffer from New Scientist’s theory-of-everything-of-the-month syndrome, and promote every wild, quasi-metaphysical idea that a physicist dreams up as fact; Feynman’s “QED” and Penrose’s “Road to Reality” are more to my taste).
NASA’s Space Settlements page is full of historical fact about the O’Neill space-colony design (the rotating cylinder); see the online books, especially Stewart Brand’s, and those listed below it.
Eric Drexler, at around age 19, was involved with O’Neill’s group at Princeton. He writes here of the thing which made him switch his focus from space colonization to nanotechnology: “it became clear that inadequate launch vehicles had nailed a ceiling on the sky that would stay in place for a generation or more.”
In other words: the high point so far of visionary thinking about human migration into space came after the moon landings, in the 1970s. In that time, grand plans for lunar bases, mining the asteroids, and a circumsolar civilization were produced. But they foundered, primarily on the difficulty of actually getting into orbit. The Space Age didn’t go away, and we’re living in it right now, but it has a more dour and pragmatic character than the 1970s imagined. Geopolitics (spy satellites), commerce (communication satellites), and Big Science projects (Hubble) dominate Earth orbit. The ill-fittedness of human beings to life in space meant that interplanetary exploration has been left to the robots. The one space habitat we have, the ISS, is still flying the flag for a human presence in space, but it seems clear that life in space requires intimate symbiosis between humans and machines.
A novel I’d recommend is Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, a product of the 1980s, which does combine that 1970s vision of space with the impact of computing and genetics on human nature. Human-made space habitats, rather than simply reproducing the pastoral landscapes of old Earth ad infinitum, become the terrain in which the various options of posthumanity are played out. But given the speed of microscale technological development, compared to the slow business of making whole new worlds in the sky, I rather think that playing-out is going to happen on Earth first, rather than in space.
It may depend where in his teens and what his tastes are but a few suggestions:
Brian Aldiss – Non Stop, Hothouse and the Helliconia trilogy
Alfred Bester – Golem 100 and The Demolished Man
Robert Heinlein – Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers (brilliantly written but very militaristic) and many others
Neal Stephenson – Snow Crash, The Diamond Age
I’m gonna be a pedant. SF people; sci-fi is something peddled by Hollywood.
I don’t think a teenager is necessarily going to get into the old hard SF – would recommend younger writers mostly. Also, if he wants to latch onto the newer writers, collections of the year’s best SF will help as will some of the existing magazines, on and off-line.
Alistair Reynolds, Greg Egan both qualify. Baxter. Peter Hamilton – hard space opera. Benford is a scientist, I think Brin might be too (neither young but still writing and up to date with the science), and stick close to the science.
Not hard, but space opera with nice relativist puzzles are early Lois MacMaster Bujold novels that actually tackle what it would like to live in space. Iain Banks imagines interesting universes but doesn’t do the science.
Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle would be of more interest I suspect than her fantasy works.
Second the recommendation for Red Mars
Dan Symmons might be a bit grown up (quite explicit violence) but still bends your mind. I don’t know if I’d call Symmons a brilliant writer and some of it is rather confronting, but it left me thinking a long time
Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series is a tad cheesy but very good for teens given the focus on Xenocide
Tigtog: as others have pointed out, a lot of Niven’s Known Space stories would be suitable. Try the early ones – World of Ptaavs is a good read, and so is A Gift From Earth. As Niven wrote a lot of short stories, you may be able to find anthologies of his work. Even the first collaboration with Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God’s Eye is value. But be careful of a lot of his later work – it’s mixed in with obvious political point pushing.
It sounds like a good time to get your lad on to Terry Pratchett, if he hasn’t already. Start with Wyrd Sisters and Guards, Guards – about the time that the Discworld series started getting good. I know they’re fantasy rather than science fiction, but hey… the difference between the genres have always been blurred.
As for scifi-meets-spy novels-meets-occult novels, I give a nod to the “Laundry” novels by Charles Stross – Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. Good fun, but please take them under advisement – they may be a little too adult for your son. Read them first, and use your own judgment.
Stewie:
“Brian Aldiss”
Yes. And now if only there were a brilliant SF author with the surname Moore, I’d have myself a very different moniker for this comment.
I see I missed the bit about space travel. My bad.
If it’s space travel you want, get “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman.
It’s not fiction as such, but I do remember thoroughly enjoying “A Step Farther Out” by Gerry Pournelle, which is very readable and examines plausible deep space travel technologies.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions so far. I’ve read about half of them, own about half of those, just have to go and dig them out of boxes. The rest offers a lot of names to add to my list for future purchases.
DeeCee, thanks for the non-fiction recommendations as well. Very interesting and useful to point him towards.
DeeCee @5 — Greg Egan is clearly Australia’s best science fiction writer
Specifically space flight oriented SF (it would help to know how old your son is)
Dragon’s Egg, Robert L Forward — Not great characterisation, but very hard SF and good depiction of an alien species.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein
Titan, Stephen Baxter — Getting to Titan and living there.
The Integral Tree and The Smoke Ring by Larry Niven — ‘Space’ habitats in universes with slightly different physics to ours.
Footfall, Niven and Pournelle
Berserker, Fred Saberhagen
I’ll second The Forever War, Protector (especially) and The Mote in God’s eye.
Perth editor Jonathan Strahan put together a fantastic YA sf anthology last year called Starry Rifts. Large number of top-class authors in the genre writing for young adults, lots of great stuff in it.
There’s some space travel in there…
A good space travel yarn, which may suit a teenager’s tastes, is Ken MacLeod’s Newton’s Wake. It’s got strange alients and a generation starship, although it goes a bit crazy with physics speculation at the end…
I wouldn’t really recommend either Greg Egan (easily Australia’s best science fiction author by the way, DeeCee, possibly along with Sean Williams) or Alastair Reynolds for a young(ish) reader, as Egan may go over his head a bit (science-wise – but who knows?) and Reynolds is full of pretty dark characters doing pretty dark stuff.
That said, Al Reynolds is great, and may be the kind of rollicking sometimes-dark stuff that suits him to a tee – but you’d want to take care which ones you chose. Chasm City is a great combo of almost noir mystery and space travel – and he may enjoy piecing together the way the flashbacks fit with the other half of the narrative.
In a sense, I think adult hard sf isn’t that interested in space travel anymore, at least at the level of “the mechanics of”. It’s been explored, and the interesting scientific speculation now is in nanotech, biotech, communications/IT, AI and other areas. There’s other good YA sf around, but again I’m not sure how much about space travel. In which case many of the classic sf recommendations above are very fine.
(“strange alients” -> “strange aliens” obvs)
OOPS! Sorry, third post. ERRORs occurred above.
The Ken MacLeod I’m referring to is actually Learning The World.
And the Strahan anthology is called The Starry Rift. It’s good.
I second Dan Symonds. Get him started on Hyperion. It will take him a while to figure out whats going on, but then he’ll get his mind blown.
You could also try The Science of Discworld
There’s a good list of ScFact books, suitable for USA Sophomore college students The Big Picture: from Particle Physics to the Universe As they’re not in alpha order within sections (& this is a library list from a USA college) they may be in reading order. I’ve read quite a few, & would rate them as “readable at yrs 11-12″.
Gordon Fraser (CERN) Ed’s (2006) The New Physics for the 21st Century is an anthology of fairly easy to read articles by international experts – nothing “pop” about this or any reference except, perhaps, Michio Kaku (a Harvard Physicist) who often takes quite speculative theories into the SciFi world – but this is perfectly legitimate at the top (as in the top international physicists’ web groups) of what one might call “space sciences”, as SciFi has often been the key to inspiring major real-science breakthroughs, and inspiration often comes from outside the sciences (philosophers, writers etc) They’re brilliant!
Google search (Michio Kaku -Michiko) on [link] has a number of downloadable videos & interviews. Site might not work if you’re not on firefox.
There are also some videos on a google secrch of Kip Thorne [link]
There’s an interesting site on the Large Hadron Collider & finding the “god particle” on [link]
Hope I didn’t mess this up, esp the URLs (I’ve put in the search terms just in case). I’ve had a TIA & life (esp print) is blurred & keeps shifting around.
PS: I did mess it up! Sorry!
PLEASE don’t subject your child to Asimov. It will ruin his enjoyment of SF forever. The man who wrote the Foundation series (there are no aliens!) is a killjoy and a bore.
I am surprised no-one has mentioned the obvious spaceflight story, with orbitals and spaceships that think and lots of really cool characters – Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. It was also something of an influence on Halo, I think, and it really has the spaceflight thing more than any other book I have read, and more creatively (there’s a whole chapter devoted to the description of hyperspace!)
But all these books are a bit too grown-up for a 10 year old, I think. Have you tried the Star Wars books? Or considered comics? Warhammer40k books and comics are fun (I borrowed one called Daemonifuge which has italics in the wrong places). If you don’t mind your child turning into a goth or a satanist (which is a good thing, right?)
Is your child into Anime? There are some nice anime stories which have probably got a comic version – Robotech is awesome, of course; there’s the one with the kids questing for Numenor that is perfect for a 10 year old (can’t find the name online because some other author stole the word Numenor); battle of the planets; cowboy bebop.
And have you got him watching firefly yet?
@sg:
He’s a teen (as in teenager), not a ten-year old boy. He’s just turned 16, although on an emotional basis probably younger than that in some ways.
I disagree with your judgement on Asimov, too. Sure, he’s not into flashy narratives. Not the same as boring.
He’s read quite a few Star Wars books and animes, although more fantasy based than hard SF. Emotionally, I definitely don’t think he’s ready for some aspects of Firefly.
Sorry tigtog, must have misread. Set him onto Iain M Banks forthwith! Start with Consider Phlebas, it’s great. Banks has a great sense of humour too, and the Culture novels are really interesting. Can I also recommend RM Meluch’s Jerusalem Fire? It’s conservative and anti-immigration, but subtly enough that he won’t realise for years, and it’s a really interesting story on a beautifully described planet. There’s an interesting CJ Cherryh trilogy (the Faded Sun trilogy) which is a little deep at times but on the surface is basically a really earnestly written spaceflight/alien encounter trilogy.
My problem with Asimov is not that his narrative is boring or not boring, just that his insistence on the “reality” of SF is really restricting and mean-spirited. The vision he presents in Foundation is of a universe empty of content or joy, and no reason to travel in it. This doesn’t seem like what your son is looking for. I think that stuff is better for older sf afficionados to read for interest than for a kid getting into the genre.
I would also agree with others that he might be well-served reading some of the le Guin Hainish stuff. I think I read the Dispossessed twice by the time I was 17, and the Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon’s world are good. Also the Word for World is Forest. Get him started on the feminism! And of course the Earthsea series are essential reading for all young humans.
I’d be interested to hear what in Firefly you think is not suitable for a 16 year old? Or is it just your son?
I’d suggest http://www.mikebrotherton.com as one useful author not mentioned, and second Ian M. Banks.
Look, ten years old is fine. Some of the sex stuff will hopefully be a bit over his head and the darker death stuff Ian Banks gets into sometimes is a bit icky, but Consider Phlebus is fine (but do the world a favour if you find a copy of “feersum endjin” and burn it). I distinctly remember being ten because some dolt decided that I should finish reading all the children and young dolt books before I got to read the adult section books. So I’ve read Pippi Longstockings, Anne Of Green gables and far too many books about ponies that are not even slightly suitable for a ten year old boy. Let him read what he wants, FFS. I read a Harold Robbins book when I was that age and just sat there going “WTF? This is dumb”.
If you’re concerned, don’t let him read any kind of popular mechanics or basic physical science books, because those are the things that will make it easy for him to accidentally kill himself (or others). Nothing beats a good Desmond Bagley book to fill his head with ideas about making a simple crossbow and some molotov cocktails… far better to have him sit there whining that he doesn’t have even simple nanotechology.
FWIW, my approach is to let kids read what they want to, but not let them have access to horror or other nasty stuff that’ll give them nightmares. It’s bad enough that totally age-inappropriate material is shown on the 6pm news of the front page of the newspaper without giving them gripping scary fiction as well.
If you can find it, Charles Sheffield’s The Compleat McAndrew is full of Solar System exploration stuff.
Definitely “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman.
“Ring” by Stephen Baxter. (he really likes cosmic strings).
In a more socialogical vein.
“Wetwear” and “Software” by Rudy Rucker for artificial intelligence.
“Friday” by R Heinlein.
“A Canticle for Leibowitz” by W. M. Miller. (bleak, and I didn’t appreciate at the time when it was part of my English lessons at school)
“Monument” by LLoyd Biggle Jnr.
Arthur C Clarke is the best sort of author to combine both hard-science and wonder and some good writing in a cracking read, so I second those who have already mentioned his ‘Rendezvous with Rama’.
I don’t think Aldiss bothers too much with the science, but Non-Stop certainly deals brilliantly, and imaginatively, with the *consequences* of long-term space travel, and the likely difficulties to be encountered. It has a wonderful and unexpected conclusion.
Hal Clement’s ‘Mission of Gravity’ is a fun example of a hard sci-fi book with an interesting concept – a voyage by an alien navigator around a non-spherical planet with a gravity that changes depending on the location. I find it quite a charming book, so I’ll make that my special recommendation for this thread.
The Geek recommends the Ringworld novels as well. Personally, I find Niven really dull (and the politics doesn’t do anything for me either!). Not sure I’d give Stranger in a Strange land to a 16yo, especially a youngish 16yo — I think I’d stick with Early Repressed Heinlein instead.
Speak to your local Children’s Librarian and see what they can suggest. Also consider a sub to Aurealis or similar.
And I’d give him plenty of Asimov, who certainly isn’t a killjoy or bore (admittedly, I wouldn’t be starting him off on Foundation — try his short stories).
Vernor Vinge’s “A Deepness in the Sky” is enormous fun and might intersect his interests enough. It’s space opera (wonderfully good space opera) where two human merchant clans are competing to exploit an alien race that’s at a 1950s technology level.
d
Mention of Halo and no recommendation for Rendezvous with Rama and it’s successors?
Hey Darryl Rosin, I suggested doing that in a Traveller campaign recently, but my other players wouldn’t buy into it. Such a shame, we’d have had a whole star-cluster of girls at our feet! Instead we just got killed…
tssk, RWR was mentioned in the very first comment. And has been recommended at least once more since.
Chookie, I agree that Stranger in a Strange Land would be too much for a 10 year old, and I think it’s also too much for my not-so-mature 16 year old. He needs to be led into such things for a few years hence. So far as Early Repressed Heinlein goes, I still think that from his early novellas “The Menace From Earth” is one of his greats, also “Farmer In The Sky”.
Re: Firefly – I’ve never been able to get into it myself, so on that ground alone I’m hesitant to recommend it to my son. There’s also a not inconsiderable amount of strong feminist critique of some aspects, so that makes me doubly want to watch it myself before allowing him to watch it, and so far I have had other viewing priorities.
For a teenage boy?
HG Wells: The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, First Men in the Moon. After all these years, it may not be cutting-edge sci-fi, but it’s still cutting-edge The English Language, which after all is itself the greatest piece of science fiction known to man.
“THB” by Paul Pope. Why not get a little teenage-riot nutty from time ta time? also, “Love and Rockets #1″
“2112″ by Rush. ‘Nuff said. What about the voice of Geddy Lee? How did it get so high? I wonder if he speaks like an ordinary guy. And plus, check those lyrics to “The Twilight Zone.”
“Tales from Topographic Oceans” by Jon Anderson and Friends. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but it MIGHT be sci-fi. You never know until you try, right? Useful for thinking outside the box.
“Primer” by whoever made the movie “Primer”. Not every sci-fi concept has to play out the way you thought it would.
“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Somethingth Dimension” Where are we going? Planet Ten. When? Real soon. ‘So what. Beeg deel.’
“Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” Because every teenage boy should see Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Everything by Mr. Lovecraft. After all, why is sloppy brain grey-matter a better practical computing system than silicon-chip hardware? So, by analogy, why shouldn’t leathery-skinned bat-slash-octopus creatures be better suited to space-time travel than a rocket ship?
and of course, Ficciones, by JL Borges. It’s never too early to start warping impressionable minds. If you really wanna talk propulsion systems and orbital habitats, this is the place to do the necessary prep.
Tig @ 42. Oops! That’s what I get for posting when sleepy. Time for be methinks!
where pray tell is this feminist critique of Firefly? I’m interested! But surely if you want feminist-suitable SF you’re buggered… particularly if you recommend him a bunch of girl-free-zone 60s SF by crusty bearded old “masters” like Asimov and Clarke…
A couple of other (old-fashioned) recommendations — Asimov’s Lucky Starr series (detective work around the solar system), Heinlein’s Rocketship Galileo (teenagers build rocket, fly to the moon, find Nazis), Arthiur C Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust (rescuing a sub-orbital passenger vehicle after a mishap)
These are old, but they have the advantage that they are short and clear. Too many modern science fiction books are (IMHO) both too long and written in a way which requires the reader to figure things out via allusions the characters make to think which haven’t been explained (no doubt there’s a technical term for this).
How could I forget! Volumes of winning short fiction for Hugo Award (the link “Hugo Awards History” home page RHS lists every finalist in every category ever), and Nebula Award (the home page link “more past winners” has a list of winners)! Occasionally, a rel cracker of a story won both.
Short fiction (short stories, novellæ) was “classic” SciFi’s top form, probably because of the “zine” culture. Polished by their authors to win, they are interesting and very well crafted . Many of the best became were later blown out into novels – probably by editors (& boy did it show). They were also film makers’ standard fare – eg Academy Award winner “Charly” from Daniel Keyes’ HUgo winner Flowers for Algernon, a 1960 Hugo Award winner Award and Academy Award film. The short story & film are better than the book.
The old volumes (haven’t bought one for years) used to contain editorial overviews of “the year in SciFi” type, often blightingly honest. I remember well comments that Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land both “fell apart” in the middle, Dune for a short stretch; Stranger for a lot longer; and Rendezvous with Rama fizzled out (IMO all accurate).
Um, was never much of a sci-fi fan, but around the age of fourteen I really enjoyed reading John Wyndham. Sure its not all space or overly technical – but I really did enjoy seeing how biology was imagined seventy years ago, and in some ways I think Wyndham is just as insightful as Asimov.
Other than that tigtog, all I can say is about that age I started enjoying the real thing and it was about that age I read Brief History of Time. If your worried about being ambitious, I’d start off with a good astronomy DVD.
Suggest for a sixteen year old, the stuff from Elizabeth Moon (Starting with “Hunting Party”) if you are looking for well written stuff with strong women in leading roles (no accessories for grunting conans there). Or Anne McCaffrey in ‘Nimisha’s Ship’.
Apart from the inclusiveness and well written-ness, they are also prolific writers, and if he likes them, you have something to feed him for a while.
Also lots of social issues that you can glean from them for discussion/argument if you like.
Canticle for Liebowitz – can’t remembrer if its at all techno etc but its a classic. Seem also to remember a very good sci-fi about a Jesuit going to a distant planet and encountering a totally different belief system superior to Xanity. It might have been Philip K. Dick. Its 45 years ago now and I really can’t remember.
Ah, Elizabeth Moon and Anne Mccaffery are many things but hard science fiction they are not. Like, say, Ursala Le Guin, they write interesting stories about people, using science fiction to provide the scenarios. Le Guin can at times be considered “hard SF” in the sense that she generally leaves the science as we see it and skips over the bits that we can’t do (The Dispossessed features interstellar travel but only in the “obviously we came here some time in the past” sense). But Moon and Mcc focus on the characters and say “she travelled across the galaxy in her spaceship” without explaining which theory of physics allows her to do so… not hard SF.
Oh, decent short-ish novel “King David’s Spaceship” (Pournelle) that features some of the engineering details behind building your own spaceship as well as a bit of boys-own military daring and Pournelle going out of his way not to be a sexist asshat. Well, any more that usual and he’s a lot better than Heinlein or Asimov IMO.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David%27s_Spaceship
The Dispossessed… possibly not at ten, but on the other hand possibly so. Buy it for him now, let him read it when he wants to. On the gripping hand, by the time he’s ready deadwood books might be archaic. I’ve already switched…
He’s sixteen, not ten.
I’ve never been interested in SF, but I watched Solaris [1972] the other week and enjoyed it enough to be interested in reading the book.
That’s probably James Blish’s ‘A Case for Conscience’, Paul – though a number of writers did works in a similar vein. See, for instance, Clarke’s ‘Childhood’s End’.
Mars Trilogy (Red, Blue, Green) is the best the genre has to offer on those topics. Nothing comes even remotely close to it IMO. Only problem is that he might be a little young for it.
Canticle for Liebowitz is excellent.
Following a quick look at my bookshelves, I also recommend:
Feersum Endinn, Iain M. Banks. (careful with some of his other titles, they can be macabre
The Godwhale, T.J. Bass (may be out of print)
Artifact, Grengory Benford.
Ship of Fools, Richard Paul Russo (this one fits the space travel theme)
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny (Hugo award winner)
LOL Moz you are quite right.
But how much SF is really ‘hard’ in that sense? ‘Dune’? Nah. Hoyle’s ‘Black Cloud’ pretty close. But you have to have a pretty flimsy Brinell test. I figure there is a species of SF literary corollary to Heisenberg – the harder the SF, the closer it is to a physics text book and the less it is readable Sci fi.
There is also the teensy problem that unless someone at sixteen is a little more advanced than the norm, do you think they are likely to have the maths or physics to create a real distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’? Perhaps you might, with a struggle, get a mathematically and physics competent sixteen year old to understand special relativity…maybe…and I did say with a struggle. But anything past that really is a lost cause without serious calculus hardly accessible to your average sixteen year old – functions like Div, Grad, Curl just to start.
I guess what I am saying is that what some people call ‘hard’ SF is really pretty shallow compared to even the physics we know today. It’s like saying someone who knows ten words of a foreign language is not as expert in the language as someone who knows fifteen. It’s absolutely true of course.
I’m totally with sg on the Iain M Banks recommendations (EXCEPT Feersum Endjinn – his only dud).
Also with Marks on the Elizabeth Moon books. Yes, it’s not hard science but they’re a great read, and I think that’s probably the main point. Perhaps you could encourage him to write a letter to EM asking her about the physics of space travel in her books – or is that just the teacher in me?
Please don’t get him to read Asimov or Clarke. I read them as a teen BEFORE I discovered feminism. Now it is hard to look past either the explicit sexism, or simply the blandness of their futures where men are still unquestioningly everywhere, and usually white men, at that. Yeah, yeah, just humourless, I guess.
“where men are still unquestioningly everywhere, and usually white men, at that.”
Ah, too true.
Quick! Let’s go back in time and re-edit the Ramayana, to put more Irishmen in it! And, I don’t think the “Spring and Autumn Annals” has nearly enough Brazilians. And all those aboriginal ‘dreamtime’ texts? Sadly lacking in a Finnish perspective, I’m afraid. They’ll just have to go. Don’t even get me started on ‘Whale Rider’. Where in heavens name were the Sudanese?
“or is that just the teacher in me?”
sounds alarmingly like we’ll have to go back and un-teach everything you’ve ever done.
And:
The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe (a good author, many other of his are good)
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman (a parable of the Vietnam war)
Marks, even at 12 I knew that we knew some things were impossible without a revolution in our understanding of physics. I understood the point, if not the maths, behind “C… it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law”. I was willing to take it as read just like so much else. But the whole point of the hard SF/SF/fantasy distinction is to make that line obvious. Otherwise what distinction are people making by saying hard sf?
I fear that people might think “ooh, they said spaceship, this must be hard sf”, when that’s not even slightly true. “The Ship Who Sang” is perilously close to fantasy, while “Crystal Singer” unashamedly *is* fantasy.
If feminism is a concern, I can only re-recommend Le Guin, and strongly disagree with the Anne McCaffrey series, which feature basically space operas where a lonely but competent space chick finally gets the man she deserves. God help you if he finds th dragon singer series. The only exception is “The Ship Who Sang”, a genuinely interesting look at love between a completely disabled (as in brain in a bath, but more sophisticated) person, and an able one.
Le Guin – sure she’s not hard sci fi, but from the sounds of it he’s into hard sci fi because that’s been his first find – well now is a great time to blow his mind and show him all the other forms of SF. And when it comes to human cultural diversity and evolution, and looking at the principles of societies, no-one does it better than Le Guin. I’m just re-reading Left Hand of Darkness, and what a wonderful book it is.
And for something completely different – Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? It definitely touches on the technology in it’s own unique way!
what is it with this “hard” / “soft” sci-fi distinction? “Hard” sci-fi is universally boring, old-fashioned, and kill-joy. It’s also full of middle-aged academic men who are cool on account of their ability to tell unpalatable truths, just like the authors… and any sci-fi book which seriously attempts to describe the science or treat it as realistic is boring, yawn, boring. Even the most entertaining description of realistic science has to be boring, because there’s no possibilities, no magic in it. FTL travel? Gone. Aliens? Gone. Interesting space battles? Gone. Light sabers? Gone. Instead you have a bunch of middle-aged academic men wandering around an empty universe while their loved ones pine away at home and die – just like the 60s working world where these “radical” men wrote their books.
Robert Heinlein – rape fantasist. Asimov – anti-sci-fi with his empty universe theory. Arthur C Clarke wrote the most boring story in history. Dune – a man with the mind of a war-fixated teenager becomes a god. How boring did that story get once he could do anything he wanted whenever he wanted (mmm, dramatic tension!) Wyndham – middle-aged academic chap saves young pretty girl from post-apocalyptic world while telling her unpalatable truths she had never bothered her pretty vacuous head about before.
Spare your teenage boy the misogynist 60s cadre is my advice,and skip to some real space opera. He needs science-fiction, not science-faction.
First of all Moz, I think you are perfectly correct when referring to a sixteen year old, so I am not really arguing that point.
I was going a leetle off topic.
Perhaps I could summarise by trying the language analogy again. If someone knows five words of a language, then a text requiring knowledge of ten words is ‘hard’ for that person. However, if a person has ten thousand words, the distinction between a five word text and a ten word text is for all practical intents and purposes – nil. ie for them it is ‘soft’.
So, the distinctions between hard sf/sf/sfa are valid as you say for someone who is sixteen. However, for anyone who has done even a little more maths and phys knows that you can pick almost any of those supposed three distinct classificationss and put almost any of them into the fantasy basket. ie most so-called hard sf is, as I said, very soft to the touch with even the most cursory attention to the physics.
Pick even your hardest SF favourite, give it to a physicist and let them take it apart. They will, and into little teensy gossamer soft pieces.
FWIW, I really see a boundary condition only where an author brings up out and out ‘magic’. Otherwise it is just how deep down you need to drill to find the equivalent of ‘the spaceship went to the other side of the universe’.
Mark, I’m aware that the genre has fuzzy boundaries, but honestly, I do see a boundary between “what we think must be false” and “what is just implausible”. Part of “King David’s Spaceship” is great just because it’s such a cool thought experiment – could you really build a gunpowder-based orion ship? No-one sane would try to make a manned, one, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a model at Burning Man o ne year. Much of it falls over where physicists become poor statisticians or amateur biologists (counting the protagonists of “mission of gravity” as biological). Asimov was right in his own way, we don’t have a big enough sample size to know either way. I’m one of the “look for disequilibrium, not chlorophyll” exobiology fans, admittedly, so I accept a lot of the frankly dubious fiction too.
I prefer my fantasy with a “you can’t prove me wrong” foundation, rather than a “coz I said so” one. To me, that’s the difference (albeit my reading stops much closer to “sam and the fluffy unicorn”… too much of that is just “my little pony” with extra magic).
“while telling her unpalatable truths she had never bothered her pretty vacuous head about before.”
Well, I guess you could always just read “The Sea Wolf” and have done with it once and for all.
Marks, your point is well taken: but there is some very good hard sf which can impress scientists (hard sf is not just about physics, btw, or at least shouldn’t be). For example, I first read Greg Egan’s Quarantine around the same time I was taking honours-level courses in quantum mechanics, and it definitely blew me away! Of course it’s still fantasy at some point, but I guess the point is that Egan proves that he knows the rules before proceeding to break them. (Or, in this case, that he knows them well enough to speculate intelligently about the bits nobody knows about.) Whereas when Tolkien has rings that make you invisible, for example, there’s no suggestion that he has any idea that he understands what laws of physics would have to be gotten around in order to do that. Or cares, of course. (Which is not a diss — I love Tolkien too.) I suppose that’s as good a statement of the difference between hard sf and fantasy as any …
“Whereas when Tolkien has rings that make you invisible, for example, there’s no suggestion that he has any idea that he understands what laws of physics would have to be gotten around in order to do that. Or cares, of course.”
Point taken, but invisibility doesn’t have to be strictly a physics interpretation; it could be psychological, or even biochemical, or endocrinal. It could be, for instance, that on some pheronome-type level, the ring encourages you to simply not be able to ‘see’ the wearer, even though he’s plainly visible according to the laws of physics/optics/what-have-you.
Just sayin’.
C’mmon sg, Moz, Mark, Brett, Walter. The lad’s 16. Have you forgotten what it was like to be a print-addicted teen? You indiscriminately read everything you can get your hands on – fact & fiction, high-brow & low-brow – as long as it’s interesting. I thought things might have changed in an X-box/laptop world until friends’ grandkids reached teenage & I discovered that, while they might spend less time reading than I did in preTV Qld, or teens did through the 70s & 80s, and authors might have changed, the patterns haven’t changed.
At 16, I was heavily into ancient history, military history, astronomy, maps. microscopes, space exploration & propulsion, and a poetry phreak. I read Livy, classical Greek lit, bios of Napoleon, “War & Peace” and Heyer’s Napoleonic novels; Canberra War Memorial’s series on WW II, all the many biogs of WW II heroes: rockets & the space race, Shakespeare & Milton; Arthur Upfield, Agatha Christie, Ed McBain (87th precinct), John Creasey & Earl Stanley Gardener; Jane Austen, Dickens, Dumas, Joseph Condard, Scott etc; yet I still re-read my faves as well as the latest from my preteen reading: The Billabong Series, Ethel Turner, the Oz “classics” – and WE Johns!) And I read “Peyton Place” & H V Morton, and smuggled copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Ulysses” … and that’s only the tip of my “Book before breakfast; book before bed” c500pp a day print habit. That’s how most of book-addicts read at that age – irrespective of generation.
It took decades for me to find the cognitive science & psychology to explain why I was a very lucky kid. I’d read Enid Blyton and others (and moved on) before idiot librarians decided to protect kids from her baleful influence. I stopped buying “Children’s book of the year” style volumes when my similarly print-addicted son declared of a few “I don’t like it. It’s boring” and I admitted to myself that, as a kid, I wouldn’t have read them either! IMO Politically correct, petite bourgeoisie [sic], C20 equivalents of C19 religious morality tales (ie indoctrination) utterly at odds with what kids need.
For all it’s flaws, Piaget’s and later theory of cognitive development indicate that such wide indiscriminate reading is the basis, not only of discrimination, but of ability to categorise, systemastise, create paradigms, evaluate them, and create new – knowledge, literature, art etc, paradigms etc … IOW the best preparation not only for university and successful careers, but for personal creativity & self-fulfilment.
BTW, in case you’re wondering … Before I left primary school, I resented the fact that boys/ men had all the adventures and best jobs (tho not in Enid Blyton!) And none of my generation’s activists needed “feminist critiques”, although several I knew from networking & activism (inc Germaine Greer, Miriam Dixon & others) wrote them – I was more into “glass ceiling” smashing.
What DeeCee said.
There is a lot of great hard sf in the market right now, mainly by UK authors. The Fermi Paradox is often front and centre.
Stephen Baxter’s Space would have to be my favourite of these, and deals directly with the Fermi Paradox.
I would also recommend:
Time Future by Maxine McArthur, this one is set on a space station in a universe where humanity did not discover aliens, but were discovered by them, and the political situation is one where earth is the poor, untrustworthy cousin, routinely denied access to the best technology, for fear we might misuse it in our ignorance.
Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Revelation Space and Chasm City by Alastair Reynolds, which can be read in any order. A large part of Chasm City follows a colony fleet on its way to 51 Cygni, a journey of a couple of 150 years or so. Revelation Space takes another look at the Fermi Paradox.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is an excellent novel that puts relativity front and centre as soldiers fighting an interstellar was return to an earth they barely recognise.
The most recent addition has space only as a backdrop, but he might find this interesting. Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber sees humanity utterly defeated by an alien race, reduced to a single fleet of colonists. However the milirary personnel brainwash the colonists to keep them backwards and undeveloped, stuck in a pre-reformation society, in an effort to keep them from being detected by the aliens again. A woman who remembers old earth is revived 700 years after the colony’s founding, and tasks herself with kick-starting industrial development.
I would not recommend Peter F Hamilton for a teenager, and KSR’s Red Mars is a maybe, since it’s not about living in space or travelling through space, but starting a new society on Mars.
Simply stated the Fermi Paradox is: If aliens existed, they would be here, we would be able to detect their presence. We cannot, not in this or any other galaxy. Therefore, they do not exist.
DeeCee@69, don’t mind our bickering, we’re just having fun. Please note that I did recommend letting him read what he will and despite Mark’s claims did suggest not restricting him to things we think he should be able to understand. I too read widely and often age-inappropriately and gained a lot from doing so. The “Swallows and Amazons” series was quite good, as I recall. Enid Blyton not so much after a while (he says, having read the whole lot, as well as The Hardy Boys series).
There’s a classic Barry Crump book where he talks about meeting a guy who read. Voraciously, in the strong sense. “the sort of guy, when he walked into a new room, he’d read the back the cereal packets before he he even said hello. But he read so fast you wouldn’t even notice that he’d done it. Until you noticed him picking up tins off the table and reading the labels”. That was me. I read the Bible (not suitable for children), Kama Sutra (not very interesting), some weird historical account of the Mongol conquests from the point of view of a Chinese captive (interesting), even stuff like Ulysses (incompreensible) and Gyn-Ecology (rivals Feesum Enjinn but contains disturbing ideas). Books about early science were cool, as were books incidentally containing basic science (medieval boys own, these days there’s a whole alternate military history genre).
I assume you have library membership? Even in Australia that’s still incredibly valuable, but if you get the chance visit a kiwi library (you will be surprised).
Short story complilations (“the best of …”) are also a good place to start reading science fiction. This is what got me hooked years ago – I can still remember the first time I read Science Fiction – and it was in this format.
A series of parallel universes, aliens and foreign planets. I was captivated.
Ten short stories in a single paperback are easy to read and provide good ‘teasers’ for future reading.
Many top authors started with a short story in an anthology and expanded it later into a novel.
While I loathe his actual books, Orson Scott Card did write an excellent book on writing sf that’s probably worth a look for your son:
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Writer’s Digest Books, 1990 – not sure if it’s still in print, but it may be around in a library somewhere.
From memory it has an excellent chapter on the decisions SF writers need to make on space travel, use of science, etc.
Agree with Davey’s shout-out for Hyperion & Fall of Hyperion. Both excellent, but perhaps not the best faire for a 16yo. That’s why I suggested “I Robot”, it’s almost a short story compilation.
As for short stories, try one of the Phillip K Dick compilations.
hey DeeCee, we were asked for a recommendation! Presumably tigtog’s recommendations will carry some weight amongst the boy’s general reading, leaving some residual influence when he gets around to thinking. And I’m not recommending necessarily on the basis of politics alone – even if he was as right-on as they come, Asimov remains a boring, soul-destroying old curmudgeon.
I read similarly broadly and formed my own opinions by the time I was 18. But still… we’re just having fun with recommendations…
Putting together a few things:
Yaz @ 58 I recall thinking about Asimov and a few of the others that almost ignore women in the same way as I look at mediaeval paintings…sort of like the perspective is not there since they ignore or distort the contribution of half the world’s population. That is not to say it is not great art.
Myriad @ 62 I agree that Anne McCe is indeed space opera. Lots of us like opera. The brain in the bathtub seemed to me to be a bit like an exercise in ‘How can we get rid of the messy physical bits of dealing with the other half of the world’s population. Sort of like a modern monochrome print. Again, that’s art.
Deecee @ 69 I don’t think Moz and I were really bickering. After all, I did agree with him on the major point related to this thread.
Pulling it together, it would seem that one could read the Asimov and other earlier writers in the same way that we look at the mediaeval perspectiveless paintings, interesting in their own right, but noting the perspective issue. One could then read the likes of Anne Mc and Elizabeth Moon to get a more balanced view. However, overall, really I agree whole in the heartedly that it is how entertaining a writer is that makes the book.
Remonstrating with Moz @ 72 – I didn’t say he should be restricted to things he should be able to understand. What my point was he should NOT be excluded from the E Moon and A McCaffrey book because they were perceived to be soft. Someone with even a smattering of maths and physics should regard almost all SF commercially available as soft.
Heinlein’s pretty dated these days, but his boys-own space adventures – Red Mars, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, for example – took the technological problems with some seriousness. Sure, he’s a sexist fascist, but you can skip those books easily enough.
Ben Bova’s Colony was pretty good, involving L5 orbitals and a serious presentation of space warfare. Fairly entertaining, although the Idi Amin-style dictator in one subplot would be pretty dated itself.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer also involves orbitals and more-or-less near future space travel.
And then there’s Cities in Flight, by James Blish, which, while skipping past the fantastical enablements, doesn’t fail to include realistic elements. Interestingly, the realism sticks as much as the fantastical.
RGB Mars is the best contemporary science-based science fiction I’ve ever read, although less so as you move through the trilogy.
Asimov was a bit too much of a stickler that key plot elements had to be science-based to be a lot of fun, relegating everything else to “social fiction”, but even Iain M. Banks (the M’s important, unless you really want to read the awful Wasp Factory) maintains a scientific element, if only one that’s internally consistent, and I’d say that’s pretty well true of anybody practicing in this genre today.
James Blish was the author of the Jesuit on another planet.@ 50. Thanks for jogging my memory Greg @ 78.
Greg @78 — Iain (no M) Banks has written some excellent books, although I agree with you that ‘The Wasp Factory’ is over-rated. ‘The Bridge’ is my favourite.
‘M’ or no ‘M’, it’s the same dude, as I guess you probably already know.
Well I think The Wasp Factory was awesome. Complicity and Crow Road too. Generally pretty confronting, but I haven’t read anything by either of this guy that I didn’t like.
His use of italics, for example, has been a particular influence on me.
Paul Burns – ahem!
sg#63
“Wyndham – middle-aged academic chap saves young pretty girl from post-apocalyptic world while telling her unpalatable truths she had never bothered her pretty vacuous head about before.”
So which John Wyndham were you reading? Obviously not the 1950s writer who skipped over the hard science in favour of ingenious, acutely observed and often witty stories of twisty human relationships under unusual circumstances.
Many of his novels and short stories feature very intelligent and resourceful female protagonists who are often one step head of the blokes in dealing with the practical, ethical and psychological issues of a world turned upside down.
For example, “Trouble With Lichen” where a very smart bunch of dames realise a colossal scientific discovery would only be screwed up by the menfolk and brilliantly and subversively take charge of it instead.
Or “Dumb Martian” where a humanoid female martian sold into concubinage deftly turns the tables on her male human master.
However perhaps some of the Evelyn Waughish humour would not be suitable for a 16 year old.
However Alfred Bester certainly would be. Especially “The Demolished Man” and “The Stars My Destination”, etc. Packed full of outrageous and thought provoking ideas and characters of all sexes, full of classical screwball comedy dialogue and moving like a interstellar liner on full boost – and without any nosepicking hard science.
Pohl and Kornbulth’s “The Space Merchants” and “Gladiator At Law” are also great fun and if anything have just become relevant with age.
I also second all the recommendations above that I agree with.
Also don’t overlook short story collections by mixed authors. Y’know “The Hugo Winners”, the SF series edited by John Parnell, etc.
And in the interests of starting a good stoush, steer the spawn well away from Peter Hamilton or Scott Orson Card. Especially “Enders’ Game”, one of the most overrated books I have ever read. You could see the final narrative twist coming parsecs off, his characters are clumsy cutouts even by SF standards and he managed to write an entire book about testosterone-hopped up adolescents without a single mention of sexual impulses. It’s basically one of those “revenge of the nerds” stories but without the dramatic power of the film series.
In fact tigtog, point your DNA replicating pod away from anything where a drone, nerd or nebbish is suddenly tapped on the shoulder, told they’re the chosen one and ushered into a hidden world. Especially all those godawful “Chronicles of Fiddlefang Book Five: The Iron Darkening” series.
Oh fuck it, Just give him ‘Neuromancer’ and a joint. Soon he’ll be ready for mid-later period Burroughs. William that is, not Edgar Rice.
And tigtog, if you want to freak him (and yourself out), try Richard Calder’s “Dead Girls/Boys/Things” trilogy or Jack Womack’s “Dryco” series. They go a11 the way to 11 on the WTF scale while still being superbly written and beautifully plotted books. NSFW though. And probably too weird for the rest of you as well.
FDB @81 as you guess I already know it’s probably the same dude, ‘M’ or no ‘M’.
I didn’t hate ‘The Wasp Factory’, but I don’t like it nearly as much as the two you mentioned, ‘Walking on Ice’, ‘Espedair Street’ and more. My least favourites include ‘Canal Dreams’ and ‘The Company’.
“Especially all those godawful “Chronicles of Fiddlefang Book Five: The Iron Darkening” series.”
OK, I think we can all agree that Gene Wolfe is an exception here.
And I read as an excitable, romantic and adventurous teen, “The Fifth Head Of Cerebus” which is the perfect time of life to read it. It still haunts me occasionally not least because Wolfe realised the power of locational ambience in helping form adolescent memories, within and without the text – another thing Scott Awful Card got completely wrong.
I got to this thread late, but only because I’ve spent the weekend at the National Science Fiction Convention (in Adelaide this year), and running the National SF Awards (the ‘Ditmars’).
Lots of the things mentioned that aren’t current (Heinlein, etc) are either good reads, or historically important to the genre, and in only a few cases not really either but still hold a fond memory for folks of a certain age. I read an enjoyed most things mentioned here myself, but not all of them would I recommend to a modern teenage. Even Neuromancer seems weirdly terribly dated today (given their failure to predict mobile phones, their weird vision of the intternet, etc).
I would definitely recommend Alastair Reynolds of the current crop, but particularly his three most recent books The Prefect, House of Suns, and Pushing Ice. All three have the advantage that they are standalone (unlike Chasm City etc), all feature quite a bit of physics oriented space action, and they are all (particularly the first two) particularly excellent reads, even by Reynolds standards. The version of a galactic society based around relativistic speed travel in House of Suns is particularly cool.
To plug an Australian author and friend of mine, Sean Williams is pretty good, and generally his SF books are fun space opera. His fantasy novels are pretty good two, and manage to avoid the typical fantasy novel psuedo European landscape.
“I would definitely recommend Alastair Reynolds”
Yeah but he’s a fuckin’ dull writer. Never mind the hard science and mind-spanning concepts, his prose just trudges along like a bushwalk in bad weather. Like having someone who can’t dance or play any instrument relentlessly explaining the charms of music to you.
I like writers who can use words to waltz, boogie and do the Charleston with big ideas. You know, suck you into a story where people survive problems and not vice versa. Someone above mentioned Sterling’s ‘Schismatrix’. Now that’s a swashbuckling hard science space opera driven by real characters with essential human needs and desires that morph through the oceans of space and time into brain splitting lives – and that gets you into into the yarn from the first paragraph.
“They shipped Lindsay into exile in the cheapest kind of Mechanist drogue. For two days he was blind and deaf, stunned with drugs, his body packed in a thick matrix of deceleration paste.”
Compare and contrast the amount of direct information and subtle implications packed into that with the dull and windy opening of Reynold’s “Revelation Space”.
In Sterling’s case, 33 words tell us a troublemaker is thrown out by a very economically aware society that moved beyond mere mechanical solutions for the hazards of space travel.
Whereas Reynolds spends over 500 words before we discover anything more beyond that Sylveste is supervising some kinda of excavation somewhere not here.
Basically Alastair is off in the damp shrubbery doggedly rubbing two cigarette lighters together together to get a spark. And of course there’s a market for that. Like trainspotting or birdwatching.
Meanwhile back in the real world of imagination…
Nabokov, are you stoned?
I read “Kraken Wakes” and “Day of the Triffids”. Please forgive me if they’re not “real” Wyndham but I stand by my description. Never was a cardigan worn so powerfully in fiction.
I’m still waiting to hear about this feminist critique of Firefly – particularly in a thread where Heinlein is recommended.
Nabakov is right, the political-progressive impulse often crops up in sf, and Wyndham amongst others has good examples of that in his writing. Kingsley Amis’s book of sf criticism, ‘New Maps in Hell’, discusses this at some length. Mind you, it’s been watered down somewhat – Wells was a communist, though he later became more conservative (out of disillusionment with the USSR), and Stapledon seems to have been a sort-of socialist. Nowadays, of course, you often get chaps like Brian Aldiss who are moderate left, and write the occasional cranky editorial for The Guardian. But the tendency is still there.
Nabakov – well, I think Reynolds is getting better. There is a reason I reccomended his later books rather than the early ones.
But point taken – I think Sterling is superb too, and I would recommend all his Shaper/Mechanist stuff as fitting the bill, and a lot of later Sterling is even better written but not space related. Holy Fire is one of my favourite SF novels, though it’s about aging rather than about space.
Ken McLeod is also recommended for anyone who cares about both SF and lefty politics.
Also, I’m not sure how I feel about recommending Gene Wolfe, in particular the Fifth Head of Cerberus. To my mind not so much a book for a teenager who wants to read about space, more a book for someone older who used to read fun books about space but now wants to read something that is more of a literary challenge. A great book, but not the right book here IMO. I like Wolfe a lot too, but he usually isn’t very light.
“I read “Kraken Wakes” and “Day of the Triffids”.
So point out in either where:
““middle-aged academic chap saves young pretty girl from post-apocalyptic world while telling her unpalatable truths she had never bothered her pretty vacuous head about before.”
The female lead in Trifids is a worldly and successful novelist who ends up explaining to the male lead the kind of life they’re going to have to live now.
The female lead in Kraken is a very experienced radio journalist and features producer who’s consistently ahead of her husband in preparing for all the aquatic shenigans.
Dave Cake, I don’t really have anything against Rerynolds. I was just drunk and looking for a stoush last night.
Looking for gripping yarns for teenagers? Try Australian author Christopher J. Holcroft’s Scott Morrow trilogy.
In the first book, Only The Brave Dare, events turn Scott Morrow is into the hero he never thought he would be.
He is a Venturer Scout on a Christmas holiday camp with his Unit when international drug smugglers try to pick up their prize booty that has the potential to turn thousands of Australians into drug addicts.
Follow Scott as he pits his bravery against the might of war experienced drug runners in a race to free his fellow Venturers who have been imprisoned in a Convict jail.
Join the race by Australian Defence and law enforcement authorities as they chase a mother ship believed to have dropped off millions of dollars in drugs off the coastline where Scott and his Unit are holidaying.
Only The Brave Dare is a novel full of adventure and cunning as a teenage boy grapples with his fears and rushes to understand a technology that provides the key to the final climax.
In Christopher’s second book, CANYON, Scott Morrow and his Venturer Unit take a canyoning trip that will pit them against the raging elements and force them to make a life and death decision nobody wants.
The actions of the deft teenager will unite a nation behind him as time starts running out to save both he and his best mate.
Take the journey with Scott and his Venturers as they hone their abseil skills with Army Commandos and go on a trip of a lifetime down a canyon that will be etched into the national psyche forever.
Follow the intrepid Venturers as they are forced to face a daunting challenge that only their bravery and skills will help them overcome.
Join Scott as he is forced to rescue his best mate in a life and death struggle against the canyon in a gripping exploit to keep them both alive.
Once again, the Australian Defence Force joins the fight against time in a perilous race to save Scott and his fellow Venturer from certain death.
Canyon is a novel full of adventure and daring do as a teenage boy comes to grips with staring death in the face in a vain bid to save his best mate and himself.
Both these books are available through Poseidon Books at http{//www.poseidonbooks.com/
Christopher’s third book in the trilogy, A Rite of Passage, will be published late 2009.
In the final book, Scott Morrow and his Venturer Unit organise a scuba dive and a special ceremony to welcome a new Scout into the Unit at a picturesque seaside setting.
All calm is shattered when a vicious war between two motor cycle gangs erupts at the dive site. Follow Scott, his Venturers and hundreds of Rovers as they battle to save a group of Girl Guides who become caught between warring bikie gangs.
Scott and his fellow Venturers are forced to answer questions of courage when the lives of the Girl Guides are threatened: Will they stand and be counted when their own lives could be at dire risk? Will they stand at all?
A Rite Of Passage is a novel showcasing the determination of teenagers who become young men when fate steps in.
More details are available at http://www.christoperholcroft.com
Only The Brave Dare
Review by Christopher Ganert,18, Ramsgate, NSW, Australia
Only The Brave Dare, by Christopher Holcroft, is a novel about Venturers on a camping trip who cross paths with the Russian Mafia.
The book begins with a Queens Scout presentation and then introduces the main character.
The world of Scouting and Venturing is described as the novel incorporates an emotional touch to the characters’ interactions.
The novel switches between different characters in different locations with different roles in a fashion that is simple to understand.
Although there is the occasional violence, the author’s description is acceptable for teenage readers.
Only The Brave Dare portrays the Scouts as an organised, independent unit with some of their feats and routines seeming almost unbelievable.
However, their feats and routines are plausible with the Venturers’ training and experience.
With the novel being set for a younger age, and using younger characters as the main role players, Only The Brave Dare is a gripping read for any teenager.
Although the novel has several corny pages at the start, overall, it is a suspenseful and entertaining read.
The novel is definitely a decent, educational experience for any teenager.
Only The Brave Dare is available through Poseidon Books at http://www.poseidonbooks.com/
When the Brave Dare to Canyon
BOOK REVIEW BY MICHAEL LEE, 18 of Hurstville,
New South Wales, Australia
CANYON by Christopher J Holcroft, is the second instalment in a series that follows the adventures of Scott Morrow and his Venturer Unit. The novel tells the story of a canyoning trip that places the Venturer Unit against the elements and forces them to make a life and death decision.
The book begins with the characters practicing their abseiling skills, as they learn to trust each other, in a controlled environment before they have to put these skills into practice in the most extreme weather conditions.
With meticulous detail the author impeccably describes the scene, painting a picture in the reader’s mind. As the story builds in intensity the author switches between characters at different locations keeping the reader’s intrigue.
The book shows the important connections between the different sections of the scouting family, particularly the bond between Venturers and Rovers.
Like Only the Brave Dare the book is targeted towards teenage readers with a passion for adventure.
Throughout the adventures of the Venturer Unit the author highlights the importance of team work.
The novel is a suspenseful and entertaining read that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
CANYON is an adrenaline filled story that will be thoroughly enjoyed by all teenagers.
CANYON is available through Poseidon Books at http://www.poseidonbooks.com/
Huh, I stumbled over this thread quite by accident whilst looking for something completely different, but it makes for good reading all the same. Never been a huge sci-fi reader apart from the necessary classics, but there’s a lot of cool suggestions here.
But now that I’m wandering round in it again I thought I’d briefly hype my fave latest discovery, the short story/novella “Voluntary Committal” by Joe Hill (spawn of S. King) which can be found in the collection “20th Century Ghosts” which I rather liked. Plus the title story is a real pip too. Still, after most of the other frissons had faded, “Voluntary Committal” sticks with me. Pretty creepy, though not necessarily for teens. Anyway sorry to dredge this up if it’s a bore.
“…Trail of breadcrumbs.” Heh.
Third book in the Scott Morrow trilogy now out!
The long awaited final book in the Scott Morrow adventure series by Australian author Christopher J. Holcroft is now available online.
A Rite Of Passage is available at http://www.buybooksontheweb.com/product.aspx?ISBN=0-7414-5938-8
In the book, Scott Morrow and his Venturer Unit organise a scuba dive and a special ceremony to welcome a new Scout into the Unit at a picturesque seaside setting.
Calm is shattered when a vicious war between two motor cycle gangs erupts at the dive site. Scott and his fellow Venturers are forced to answer questions of courage when the lives of a group of Girl Guides are threatened: Will they stand and be counted when their own lives could be at dire risk? Will they stand at all?
A Rite Of Passage is a novel showcasing the determination of teenagers who become young men when fate steps in.
A Rite of Pasage was written specifically for boys aged 11-18 to encourage them to readand enjoy the great outdoors.
Christopher
A new book directly aimed at Young Adults and Adults alike that explores near death experiences is now out.
Finding Thomas, published by Infinity Publishing, is a must read for anyone that wants to know about dying, where you go and the possible differences in you when you return.
Finding Thomas’s central character Kit Green, is your average teenager except he has had a near death experience.
He ‘died’ on the operating table after a pool accident and is sent back to Earth to complete his life. Kit finds he is changed and now has the ability to see and talk to spirits.
His father works for a politician who is drawing up a list of who will be axed from the civil service if the Opposition party wins government.
The spirit of the politician’s dead son and Kit race to stop their fathers being murdered by the State’s top cop.
Christopher
You wrote that book Christopher.
It is not appropriate that you promote it here without mentioning that.
Indeed, GregM, that one slipped through the net. I’ll refrain from deleting it since your appropriate caution now appears below it.
Just flicked up the thread… looks like he’s been doing a fair bit of spamming!
Has anyone mentioned PK Dick, Micheal Morcock (or the anthologies he organised) and Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat series? And the Bill the Galactic Hero books and Starship Troopers.
Robert Rankin’s Armageddon trilogy? Its kind of sci fi.
Stanislaw Lem.
I think I first read The Stainless Steel Rat nearly 50 years ago, so yes, very suitable for a teenager.
DI(nr)I first read one in late high school, but haven’t read one since I was about 21. Just looked on the bookshelf tho and noticed about 100 Harry Harrison books – and I haven’t read any of them this century. There was one he wrote with Marvin Minsky called The Turing Option, that was ok among them.
There’s one graphic novel I might mention, cos its dangerously close to literature, and good literature at that, and its sci fi. The Watchmen.
Also as others said, Iain Banks , esp the culture stuff, Gibsn, Stephenson, Lovecraft, Borges, Clarke – RWR, enders game all great to read for one reason or another. Did I mention Phillip K Dick?