OT - I know we've discussed this before...

[Taqwus]

I recently read a translation of Camus's short psychological novel, "The Stranger". Similar genre to Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment", or perhaps (more distantly) to various bits of Kafka ("The Trial" and "The Castle" being interesting reads).

Hrmmm. Time to toss out some highly random items from a variety of genres.

War (theory): Clausewitz's _On War_. Clavell's translation of _The Art of War_ is good.

War/Conflict (novels/serials): Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ (Napoleon's 1812 campaign); Pasternaks' _Dr. Zhivago_ (Russian Revolution), Luo Guanzhong's _Romance of the Three Kingdoms_ (warring states in China, ca. 170 AD. OK, so you're probably NOT going to find this one lying around your bookstore, unless it's damn big or a speciality store).

Fantasy: Haven't read much for a LONG while, but concur on Martin's "Game of Thrones" series. Although the reliance on slightly modified Medieval Europe Fantasy staples e.g. knighthood, "Ser" instead of "sir", and so forth, annoys me a touch. At least it's not plagued with too much Tolkien-derived material; he has the decency to make up *his own* fairly refreshing world.

Morgan Llelywnn (sp?)'s "Finn mac Cool" is a nice retelling of a Celtic legend. So is Nikolai Tolstoy's "The Coming of the King", which IMHO is far more impressive than T.H. White's "The Once and Future King", at least for adults.

Sci-Fi: Kim Stanley Robinson's "Mars" trilogy is darn good "hard" science fiction, IMHO. I'm also partial to John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar", "The Shockwave Rider" (pref. read Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" before reading TSR), and Orson Scott Card's Ender books are also quite thoughtful.

History of espionage: "The Puzzle Palace", "The Man Called Intrepid", and "The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive" are interesting to varying degrees.

Thrillers: Frederick Forsyth wrote pretty good works ("Day of the Jackal", for instance). Others? Perhaps works by Eric Ambler ("A Coffin for Dmitrios"), or John le Carre (quite a few Cold War spy novels).

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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[dogscoff]

Hmm, looks like otherland, Banks or Weber. I was tempted by Nietzsche but I think I need some sci-fi.
I'll go down to the shop soon and see which one I see first=-) (Unless anyone has a better suggestion?)

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Go to my meagre SEIV pages to generate your own code.

[Askan Nightbringer]

For a different sort of sci-fi -
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. (As Taqwus suggested)
Excellent story that, pity about the follow up books

And if Steven Hawkins is a bit much there's this other physics author called Paul Davies who seems a bit more dumbed down for guys like me

Cheers,
Askan


[This message has been edited by askan (edited 27 September 2001).]

[dmm]

If you want to learn how the Middle Ages REALLY were, read "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century" by Pulitzer prize winner Barbara Tuchman. I loved that book. Unless you automatically detest history, you will find it fascinating. (She won the Pulitzer for "The Guns of August," which is about the start of WWI.)

[capnq]

quote:

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Here are some ideas I'm playing with:
Foundation series: Worth the effort?

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Mixed feelings; when I was a teen, the original Trilogy was my favorite novel. (I had a single volume paperback of all three books.) Rereading it as a post-college adult, it hadn't aged well. I thought the 4th and especially the 5th went downhill, but liked the 6th, which was a prequel. Haven't read any of the prequels by other authors yet.

quote:

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Dune: Read the first one, is it worth reading the rest?

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I thought the first four were awesome, and the fifth and sixth much weaker; but a lot of other people hate the 4th and like 5&6. Haven't read his son's prequels yet.

quote:

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That new Tad Williams one: Liked his previous books. Is the latest (forget name) more sci-fi?

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William's very latest is epic fantasy, published Online in bi-monthly installments at:
http://www.shadowmarch.com/main.asp

First five "Episodes" are free, the rest available by subscription only. Episode 9 is due on September 1. I like it enough that I got a Paypal account in order to Subscribe; I haven't read any of his other works.

quote:

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Something by Aasimov that I haven't read yet: Love his stuff, recommendations please.
(Anyone ever read his non-scifi book about a "pocket demon" called Arizaphael? That was
brilliant. What was it called? Would like to own it.)

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I think you mean the collection _Azazel Fantasy Stories_. I've read a few of the stories in magazines, but not the whole book.

I really enjoyed Timothy Zahn's _Conqueror's_ trilogy, which is fairly hard SF with larger-than-life characters.


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Cap'n Q
My first mod! Hypermaze quadrant
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all of its contents. We live on a placid
island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was
not meant that we should go far. -- HP Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

[Deathstalker]

You want some REALLY good sci-fi?? Go try the 'Seafort' books by David Feintuch (sp?), incredible..All done from a 'first person' perspective..all about mans first voyage into the stars, colonization and the first contact of an alien species....loved it!


If you want really good fantasy, go try any book by Michelle West (or Melanie Rawn, or Matt. WoodRing-Stover, damn good reads)....

(or of course you could find the Deathstalker series by Simon Green, for a mixture of incredible sci-fi and fantasy!)

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"We are all...the sum of our scars"....(paraphrased) Matt. R. Stover-'Blade of Tyshalle'.

"Human existance is all imagination...Reality is no more than a simple agreement among its participants that this is where we shall meet, and these are the rules that we shall abide by."- Kevin McCarthy/David Silva "The Family:Special Effects"..

[Dragonlord]

Bit late, but I concur that the Ender books by Orson Scott Card are very enjoyable.

Also, for some interesting sci-fi / cyberpunk try Neil Stephenson.

Some oldies but goodies in fantasy: Feist's first book "Magician" , and Robert Heinlein's "A stranger in a strange world".

Best historical fiction books: all books by James Clavell.