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Your Most Memorable Sci-Fi Book(s)

grey_oneKD

New Member
Although I read them some years ago, the books Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and The Last Book in the Universe by Rodman Philbrick. The themes and ideas conveyed in them will stay with me forever (hopefully; i thought they were amazing!).

So, what are your most memorable Science Fiction Books?
 
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination (aka Tiger! Tiger!).

Philip K Dick - A Scanner Darkly. Ubik is great too.

Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama. Unfortunately, Rama II was terrible, so I didn't continue with the series after that. The first book is still great, though.
 
Philip Wylie - When World's Collide - not for the collision, but for the human reactions to it

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World - the future

Ursula LeGuin - The Dispossessed - a different future
 
I read a short story out of a book while back. The title was Burning Chrome, by William Gibson. I thought it was one awesome story and recommended it to a friend. He didn't like it. I still think it's great.:)
 
Raiders from the Rings by Alan Nourse. It's a pulpy little book published in the '60s. It holds a special place in my heart because it was the first science fiction I ever read.

Niven's Ringworld stands out as one of my most enjoyable SF reads.

The original Dune trilogy, by Frank Herbert.

I love Asimov and Heinlein but I don't know if I could single out just a few of their works.

I haven't heard of a few of the books in this thread. I'll have to see if my library has them.
 
How could I forget Dune??? I first saw the David Lynch film adaption before reading the book, which is of course very different.
 
Well, I only recently redicovered sci-fi, after years of thinking it was all about robots and space wars. Silly, I know.

But I think I needed to read myself into ennui and get all the dragons and wizards and vampires and mystery gimmick series' out of my system before I was ready to give yet another genre a chance. (plus, with 30+ books checked out at a time, I REALLY didn't need another genre to browse. lol)
Thanks to Stephen Eley and his scifi podcast, though, I've lately come to appreciate the genre.
but I digress. and babble. and I'll just shut up and answer the question.

a Scanner Darkly was definitely a great one. I adored that book. I actually read it twice before returning it (that was a first, I usually wait at least a year before rereading)

the novella by Nancy Kress, titled "Beggars in Spain" was really good, too (I have yet to read the adapted/fleshed out novel and it's sequels, but I plan to.)

I also enjoyed "Altered Carbon" by Richard K. Morgan quite a lot.

heh. does "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" count?

I'm sure there are a few more, I went on a huge scifi reading orgy about 6 months ago, but those are the ones that are really sticking with me.
 
Probably my most memorable books were the WoT series by Robert Jordan, simply because he started writing the books way back in like 1985 and I started reading them sometime in high school. I have literally put a decade and more of my life into these books. I usually try to re-read the series just prior to a new release. Now with his passing, I may never know how he intended the series to end.

It's certainly a set of books that I will remember well into old age.

I would also have to say tLotR by Tolkien. I realize this is possibly a generic answer for a lot of people, but for me, the reason is this... I can remember as a young child, my parents would take us to a local video store called Corenos. We weren't exactly wealthy, and Corenos would give 2 free rentals for a report card with all A's and B's. We used to get report cards quarterly back then, and so I always tried to do my best, so I could get the free movie and game rentals.

One of the earliest cartoons I picked out just happened to be "The Hobbit" as put forth by Warner Bros. The cartoon stuck into my head well into middle school, when I finally realized that the cartoon I remember as a younger child was actually based on a book. In 7th grade, I finally read "the Hobbit" as my school read it together as a class. Unlike a lot of the students in the class, I enjoyed it so much I went on to read the whole series on my own.

For a few years I quit reading after that, until a copy of "Sword of Shannara" by Terry Brooks showed up in my Grandmother's attic. I read that book, and have been reading probably a new fantasy book weekly, ever since.

Mathius
 
For me A Brave new world.... it has been so long that I will have to read it again.. but the story rings so true... it is creepy.... I hope humanity is smarter then that....
 
Mine will always be The Ice People by Rene Barjavel. It was published in France as La Nuit des Temps . I read it in the mid 70's for the first time and have read it repeatedly since then. It is an incredibly good story and is definitely a social commentary as well.

Well worth anyone's efforts to track down a used copy from Amazon.
 
Anne McCaffrey's Dragonflight. I was in elementary school and had been given books to read by my parents (my mother kept giving me classics). I was so excited to realize that there were other kinds of books out there - and books way more interesting than what my mother had been giving me to read. This book is part of what ensured that I remained a reader past middle and high school.
 
The first book that got me interested in the Sci-Fi genre was A Wrinkle In Time when I was a kid. Other than that, the most memorable Sci-Fi book for me was probably Enders Game.
 
I haven't read a lot of Sci-Fi or Fantasy. It seems to exist in its own little world and if you're reading from another genré, such as literary, mystery, etc., the whole Sci-Fi/Fantasy world becomes this wispy impenetrable fog. Genré fiction has really siloed the publishing industry.

Anyway, Kurt Vonnegut's early works, especially The Sirens Of Titan and Cat's Cradle, stick out as memorable Sci-Fi books. Though Vonnegut didn't really remain a Sci-Fi author. I did read Lord of The Rings a year or two back, and that was a 900 page turner, though I know a lot of people who, inspired by the somewhat Hollywood-ized movies, tried to read it and couldn't get past 50 pages. For many people books have a hard time competing with the lush sensory experience of movies.

Apart from that I've read some Phillip Dick and of course Hitchhiker's Guide.
 
Gibson's earliest

I read a short story out of a book while back. The title was Burning Chrome, by William Gibson. I thought it was one awesome story and recommended it to a friend. He didn't like it. I still think it's great.:)

Gibson was also great in Neuromancer and Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive - White Light was the only other book he wrote before he started to lose his focus and be overtaken by the tech wave he had helped visualise.

Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End was hard-hitting and really hard to forget and Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon simply has to be an all-time great because it never fails to bring tears to one's eyes even after all these years!
 
William Gibson's Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, plus Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and Phillip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as examples of cyberpunk.

Iain M Banks's Consider Phlebus (the best space opera I've read) and The Player of Games (fascinating utopian society created by Banks – quite communist if one thinks about it).

War of the Worlds by HG Wells and Greg Bear's The Forge of God, which really freaked me.
 
Ender's Game
Speaker For the Dead
All the books by Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams took everything I knew and drew rude pictures on it, then crumpled it up into a little ball, kicked it around for a little while, threw it away, then too the trash bag out and set it aflame, all the while laughing......

It was an adventure reading those books.
 
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