No.9273
Post your love for sci-fi and any books you want to attach for others to read.
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No.9278
i find it hard to say that i love sci-fi.
even though, since i like 40k, which is really the biggest mashing of every single sci-fi work you can imagine, so much, i guess i do.
unrelated question, do you guys think that brave new world still qualifies as science fiction even though we reached most of that tech long ago?
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No.9279
Peter Watts is bae 😍 despite his blatant leftism and nihilism.
>>9278
40k is as soft as sci-if gets. It's still a shitload of fun, of course.
And yep, I think BNW qualifies. It still explores the ramifications of technologies.
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No.9283
>>9278
BNW remains under the wing of Sci-fi.
As Orson Scott Card puts it in one of his howto guides, there is a grandfathering clause to the genera classification system. So, things like the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne remain, no matter how far such stories may rove from reality as physicists of today and tomorrow say.
There is a literary movement of more recent vintage that insists on a new classification: Speculative Fiction. This, a reaction against a publisher's requirement to "rewrite it with more jetpacks and resubmit," to a need to be at the forefront of some movement; to be the new standard by which the rest are judged.
Personally, I am happy with the sliding scale, ranging from what would be fantasy with ray guns and spaceships, to something written by an accredited theoretical physicist and peer reviewed by that lab coated crew with few literary pretensions. The scale is a useful tool among the cognoscenti – the fans and readers – yet, the publishers remain indifferent. Hard, soft, silly, or serious. Scifi covers it all.
>i find it hard to say that i love sci-fi.
Similar to the way I could not say that I love fantasy. In my own personal economy of choice between the two generas, of Tolkien or Asimov, the latter won. I still read my share of fantasy, but my preference is clear.
>>9279
>40k is as soft as sci-if gets. It's still a shitload of fun, of course.
I am bemused to see one and a half to three books shelves devoted to the Warhammer franchise in any given bookstore I visit. I stand by your statement and lay claim to being a fan, even if I am rather picky and have no intention of reading the entirety. It is a damned fun mix of tropes and devices, of writers and styling, and everyone should be able to find at least one novel in that pile worth their time.
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No.9286
>>9283
i very much agree with pretty much everything in your post.
but when i said i find it hard to say that i love science fiction it has something to do with the fact that the genre, but genre fiction in general, has produced mountains of crap along with some, in my opinion, very underrated gems.
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No.9518
I read and understood Zelazny's Immortal without knowing mythology. Are his other books the same?
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No.9543
It's been a long time since I read any scifi, gonna try Red Mars tonight. I read a ton when I was younger but for some reason I never read anything written after the mid-80s, it was all golden age and new wave stuff.
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No.9545
Olaf Stapledon
>sexy hair
>predicted genetic augmentation
>married his cousin
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No.9550
>>9543
Red mars sucks after a certain character dies. Gave up on the sequels.
I stopped reading sci-fi novels when I got into sci-fi manga, through Crest of the Stars and Trigun.
Dune, Ender's game, and anything by Heinlein are solid. All you zombies and the forever war were interesting too. I hate the way Asimov's writes, funk him, I've never read a book of his with characters that felt real, and the man had a God complex. The classic Hugo short story anthologies are solid, but the new stuff is mostly trash. That and the new conservatives are neutering the Hugo award and turning it into a popularity award, rather than an award for originality and quality. If the sci-fi was written in the 90's or later it's probably either forget able or terrible.
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No.9552
Looking for jack vance stories. I've read most of his stuff, so I'm trying to hunt down his more obscure work
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No.9573
I love science fantasy, lost world stories, and stuff on the schlockier side, but I can't say I've got much of an interest in more grounded science fiction.
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No.9574
>>9573
does john carter qualifies as science fantasy?
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No.9585
>>9574
The Barsoom books definitely qualify, as do most of Edgar Rice Burroughs' work in general. He was a master of cheeseball adventure. Although most of his storylines are completely predictable (fish-out-of-water main character arriving in a fantastic world, wooing a beautiful native, battling dangerous monsters and evil villains, possibly being captured and maybe forced to fight in an arena, etc.), it's a formula that just werks and you always know what you're getting into when you crack open one of his books.
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No.9591
>>9585
didn't it unsettle you when dejah thoris laid an egg ?
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No.9728
What do you guys think of the theories of Ray Kurzweil, that scientific progress is growing exponentially? I used to think it was very plausible, but I've grown skeptical of historical determinism of all kinds.
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No.9732
>>9728
i think that it's becoming more and more likely the fact that we might be going backwards. for a number of reasons…
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No.9738
>>9728
imo it is happening, moore's law moved from CPUs to GPUs, it really took off about 2008/9 with GPGPU computing, just look at raw GFLOPS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units
supercomputers used for scientific computing got a nice kick from GPUs. it's a fucking arms race now.
http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/nvidia-dgx-1-deep-learning-supercomputer/
170TFLOPS is fucking insane, too bad it costs $250k lol. still you can get about 170 tflops by using dunno bout 32? mid tier AMD GPUs, it's the same hardware that was used for mining bitcoins and for a lot less than 250k
so all this computing power? it's really going to power up next gen drug and biotech research. simulations of how drugs interact with all the receptors in the body thus you can pretty much sift off drugs that are downright harmful without ever actually introducing them into the organism.
and protein folding, designing new proteins for specified purposes like chemical reactions, so drug development should become much cheaper and much faster. and in general nootropics, anti-aging drugs it all begins with drugs for fucking dementia and diabetes.
so only thing you really need to take care of is your health right now and money so you'll be able to afford all of these technologies when the right time comes. and hey, why not also help to make them happen in the process.
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No.9740
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>9732
Maybe, it's possible both may happen at the same time. Part of humanity goes forward, the rest goes back. I think this is actually a likely scenario. The MUH SPACE COMMUNISM UTOPIA probably won't happen since the left cannot see what borderless mass immigration does to social cohesion and crime levels. This sort of thing effects how government works.
But full primitivism won't happen either.
The future probably looks like cyberpunk or something like Dredd.
Global-spanning mega-corps, CRISPR, mass surveillance, massive amounts of violence, street gangs, corrupt nominally-left wing as rulers (see Emma Watson who browbeats the planet with her virtue signalling bullshit, while getting caught today being part of the typical globalist money-grabbing elite).
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No.9741
>>9738
i have the feeling that all that stuff will be used for something nefariously bad before actually curing cancer.
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No.9742
>>9591
I was more weirded out by the fact that the people of Barsoom are actually naked through the course of the entire book.
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No.9747
Does someone know a good future method for gaining energy? I'm thinking of cold fusion and harnessing solar energy IN SPACE, but this can't be all there is.
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No.9751
>>9747
using suns for boilers.
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No.9752
>>9747
Asimov used the rather prosaic method of geothermal power for his ecumenopolis, Trantor. Dealing with the waste heat of such a system became a central plot point in Prelude to Foundation.
If I remember correctly, Paul Lucas, in his book Megastructures: Science and Speculation, describes a method of tossing out a long cable from a space craft. Aside from being a means of stabilization, it could be used to generate a modest flow of electricity while orbiting through a planet's magnetic field.
It is theorized that the orbital environment of large planets, such as Jupiter, naturally produce minuscule quantities of antimatter. The concept using this for fuel is called antimatter farming. I don't recall the specifics, but you can look it up yourself.
Warhammer 40k suggests one could get a few more light years travel distance from shoveling surplus crew into the engines, and chanting real hard.
And so on. Anywhere there is an energy, or material difference of some sort there is at least the possibility of an engineering solution that can exploit it.
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No.9765
>>9742
or what about the gods eating gods eating gods thing?
in a way the second book is one of the fedoraest things i've ever read.
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No.9793
>>9765
I thought the religious themes in the second book would have been really interesting if it hadn't gone so heavy on the allegorical elements. The views expressed are nowhere near as extreme as Howie Lovecraft's worldview, but whereas Lovecraft's really added to the atmosphere of hopelessness and dread, the stuff in The Gods of Mars just feels a bit out of place in an adventure-oriented planetary romance story. Tarzan the Terrible had a pretty prominent anti-religion story, but from what I remember it felt far less intrusive and fedora-tier.
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No.9889
Been meaning to read this.
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No.9896
>>9793
>triceratops
>pointy teeth
what?
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No.9938
>>9896
It's technically not a triceratops, they call them "gryf"s in the book. Evidently real triceratopses weren't hardcore enough, so Eddie B. made them carnivorous.
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No.9945
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No.10670
A book series that I have had a lot of fun with is the old man's war by John Skalzi. He puts humans in a hostile environment and shows how the human adapts to it.
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No.10676
>>10670
Scalzi is fucking awesome. I read Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades, can't wait to read the next book in the series. Or rather I can wait, because my list of shit to read is way too long.
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No.10677
>>9728
>>9738
>>9740
Humanity faced technological singularities reshaping who we are and how we live several times over.
Widespread adoption of agriculture was one. I'm sure our hunter-gatherer ancestors did not envision the subsequent rise of city-states, extensive long distance trading, and the rise of vast empires.
Basic literacy is such an expensive and tedious skill set to acquire that many a successful ruler left it exclusively for priests, or scribes to handle. Most of humanity, for most of our history, simply could not afford such a bizarre luxury. Along came the printing press. Now, the ability to read is invaluable for one's survival.
The society changing impact of computers is still playing itself out. To get a feel of what it was like back when personal computers became widely available, one might take a look at a little known book: Electronic Life by Michael Crichton. I wonder if a similar book exists from the introductory days of moveable type? Arguably, computers aren't the absolute forefront of technologically forced change right now. Global communications — the Internet — is what it's all about.
It's typical for even the homeless to carry a smart phone.
Much is made today of bots and drones as the latest, greatest way to fight our (or more often others) wars. They're hardly new; pic related. In the Terminator film franchise that pic is what should be called a model T-zero. To conceal the potential of its electromechanical kill-bot brain, it was called a Mark 24 mine. Today, we call it a homing torpedo. We might just as well call it a drone. It was first used successfully in combat back in World War Two. Humanity has been living with kill-bots — drones — for more than seventy years.
Where we are going, and how far science may extend its reach of understanding is not for me to say. An answer to the question of what we are doing with all the technology we have access to now, is a better predictor of our future.
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No.10705
I'll probably be seen as a basic bitch on here for saying this, but I love Dan Simmons. The Hyperion Cantos was one of the best series I've ever read.
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No.10706
One of two recommendations. This was a past read from /lit/.
Next up …
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No.10707
>>10706
… and second of two.
I'm still digesting this one, and will post a review in the WHYR thread when complete.
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No.10824
I just started reading a few weeks ago and I finished Fight Club today, I'm not sure if pic related is some pleb bullshit but where is the mention of it.
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No.10826
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
Anyone here read anything by that Ted Chiang fellow who is the new Andy Weir, except that this guy has been publishing for years, but so little stuff and most of it is short stories, but apparently folks go ape. His actually-almost-novel-sized story is being turned into a film.
I've read a couple of his insanely-short stories, and I'm not doing cartwheels. Anyone read the novelette? Worth the praise and uncountable awards?
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No.10830
>>10824
if you expect it to be like the movie you're be sorely disappointed.
actually it's almost more politics than a novel.
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No.10831
>>10826
never heard of him.
and i must say your appraisal made him kinda unappealing in my eyes.
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No.10845
>>10824
It's pretty top tier
check out The Forever War when you're done with that one
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No.11179
I'm not the biggest fan of sci-fi literature, I prefer video games with visual representation of emptiness and spaceships. However, I liked H2G2 a lot and am struggling to find similar novels. I'm on my way to get The Restaurant though.
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No.12520
>>9574
Poul Anderson seems like a minor player in "softer and more adventurous" SF compared to Edgar Rice Burroughs, E.E. Smith and Alex Raymond. I'm thinking about checking out Poul's Conan novel one day by the way.
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No.13754
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No.13775
>>10826
I really like his work. Good explorations of good ideas.
I guess it depends on the exact thing that draws you to science fiction.
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No.13783
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No.13787
>>13783
It's light on the pew pew.
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No.15983
>>9278
Best classification guide I've come across is that science fiction portrays futures/worlds that are improbable, but possible. Fantasy portrays impossible worlds: so C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, although ostensibly sci-fi, is most definitely fantasy because they portray breathable atmospheres on Mars and Venus.
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No.15984
>>9550
You should check out Iain M. Banks. His writing can be a bit clunky, but there are some good stories among his Culture works.
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No.16280
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No.16408
John Norman's Gor series has been a recent discovery of mine
>inb4 'incel' comments
the usuals, Phillip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Harlan Ellison (despite him being a prickly kike), Ray Bradbury, etc
never checked out Orson Scott Card, but I hear soys are boycotting him for hating on queers. his adaptations seem to be popular. I dunno is he fluff?
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No.16409
>>9550
Asimov as far as jews go, is more tolerable than Ellison, I heard that dude went through friends like women go through tampons.
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