R-SPEC March Meeting Notes

Submitted by eDave on Wed, 03/04/2009 - 01:46

Tonight's meeting was fairly well attended and productive. The topic was works we would recommend to someone new to the genre. Below is the list of authors/works I was able to capture, alphabetized and gathered by broad sub-genre. In the course of discussion, it was noted that descriptions of why we like the works we recommend would be very helpful. To that end, I will post stories for individual authors and ask that you use the comments feature to identify characteristics of the author's style and/or of specific works you would recommend. Down the road, we will take the comments and produce a recommendations page. Please also feel free to suggest additional authors and/or works using the comments feature of this story.

Science Fiction:

Piers Anthony

Omnivore/Orn/Ox

Greg Bear

Darwin's Radio

The Forge of God

Eon

Alfred Bester

Fondly Fahrenheit (short story)

The Stars My Destination (short story)

Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

Orson Scott Card

Ender's Game series

Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Arthur C. Clarke

Follow Moon Dust

Childhood's End

Hal Clement

Needle

Samuel R. Delany

Dahlgren

Nick DiChario

Winterberry

Stephen R. Donaldson

The Gap series

David Drake

Northworld Trilogy

Greg Egan

Harlan Ellison

Dangerous Vision anthologies

Lots of award winners in books of sixty stories

With the Bent Fin Boomer Boys in Li'l Ol' New Alabama

Philip Jose Farmer

Riverworld

The Other Log of Phileas Fogg

Robert L. Forward

Dragon's Egg

Life on neutron star - idea book

Karen Joy Fowler

William H. Gibson

Neuromancer

Pattern Recognition

The Spook

Tom Godwin

The Cold Equations (short story)

Space is dangerous enough without cutting it close

Is it recommended? Yes - because most people don't know science and aren't terribly critical

Joe Haldeman

The Forever War

Frank Herbert

Dune

Maker of Gods

Nancy Kress

Beggars in Spain

Ursula Le G uin

The Dispossessed

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ian McDonald - several recommend because is fantastic writer with rich imagination, vivid details, outstanding prose "can smell the curry"

River of Gods

Desolation Road

China Mieville

Perdido Street Station

Beautifully strange, forces fantasy elements into real world

The Tain

Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Canticle for Leibowitz

Richard K. Morgan

Market Forces

Kovacs Series (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, Woken Furies)

Thirteen

Frederick Pohl

Gateway

Mike Resnick

Olduvai Gorge

Santiago

Rudy Rucker

Mathematicians in Love

Mary Doria Russell

The Sparrow

Robert Sawyer

Hominids

Carl Sagan

Contact

Bob Shaw

The Light of Other Days (short story)

Premise is vaguely plausible, but the story is about how the idea reflects the people around them

Robert Silverberg

Lord Valentine's Castle

Hybrid between fantasy and space opera, not deep, not character driven, but fun

Cordwainer Smith

Scanners Live in Vain(short story)

The Dead Lady of Clown Town (short story - part of The Rediscover of Man series)

Allen Steele

Coyote series

Neil Stephenson

Snow Crash

Diamond Age

Charles Stross

Desolation Road

James Tiptree, Jr.

The Girl Who Was Plugged In (short story)

Harry Turtledove (military science fiction)

Vemer Vinge

Singularity

True Names

Kurt Vonnegut

Timequake

Temporal event makes people relive the last 12 years of their lives while knowing that they're living it

Slaughterhouse Five

Sirens of Titan

David Foster Wallace (http://www.davidfosterwallace.com/books.shtml)

Peter Watts

Blindsight

David Weber

Honor Harrington books

Connie Willis

To Say Nothing of the Dog

Doomsday Book

Richard Zelazny

The Lord of Light

 

Fantasy:

Lloyd Alexander

The Book of Three

Piers Anthony

A Spell for Chameleon (Xanth series)

On a Pale Horse (Incarnations of Immortality)

Marion Zimmer Bradley

Crystal Cave series

Libba Bray

Great and Terrible Beauty

Max Brooks

World War Z

Terry Brooks

The Sword of Shannara

Jacqueline Carey

Kusheil's Dart

C.J. Cherryh

John Crowley

Little Big

Cory Doktorow

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Stephen R. Donaldson

Lord Foul's Bane

David Eddings

Elder Gods series

Neil Gaiman

Neverwhere

American Gods

Anansi Boys

Terry Goodkind

Stephen King

The Gunslinger

Cathy Koja

The Cypher - hole in closet distorts objects

Garth Nix

Abhorsen

Nancy Springer

I Am Mordred

I Am Morgan Le Fay

Robert Jordan

George R.R. Martin

Terry Pratchett

Philip Pullman

The Golden Compass

Jennifer Roberson

Sword-Singer (Tiger and Del series)

Brian Selznik

Invention of Hugo Cabret

Mary Stewart

Tolkien

Richard Zelazny

Chronicles of Amber

 

Contact

On March 4th, 2009 Jonathan Sherwood (not verified) says:
I will second "Contact." It's barely science fiction as we know it, but it's an excellent book for communicating to a non-SF reader the awe that draws most of us to SF. My grandfather asked me what science fiction book he should read to get acquainted with the genre, and I gave him "Contact." If I'd given him "Dune," he'd have put it down in frustration twenty pages in.

Difficulty with Dune

On March 4th, 2009 eDave says:

I didn't get through Dune until my third try. There's just something about it. On the third try, I whipped through it. I guess my head wasn't ready the first two times. Anyone else have something like this experience?

 On Dune, no: Got right

On March 6th, 2009 escoles says:

 On Dune, no: Got right through it the first time. The stuff that bugs me about it did not bug me at all at the time. I wasn't a very ecological thinker as an 11 year old. 

But there are many other books I've had that experience with, and some of them are among my favorite books. 

Little, Big I had to start three times before I got into it, and now I think it's easily one of my very most favorite novels. Same with Watership Down. Only one false-start on Reservation Blues, though. 

C J Cherryh

On March 4th, 2009 Aharen (not verified) says:
C J Cherryh spans both Sci Fi and Fantasy. It's character driven fiction at its best, and no one does political intrigue better than Cherryh. She understands exactly what drives humanity, both on a personal and group basis. Most of her stories also have great plots with lots of twists and turns. Some people may find her long introspective passages boring, and few of her books are quick reads. Most of her Sci Fi titles contain limited tech descriptions carefully woven into the story and not a lot of the gee whiz factor. Slight more hard sci fi would be Downbelow Station and Cyteen, both of which won Hugos. Her latest, Regenesis, just came out and is a continuation of that story line. (I just started reading it). Other personal favorites are Hammerfall, the first in the gene war series, the Faded Sun trilogy, and her first series, the Morgaine novels, starting with Gate of Ivrel ( All of these latter novels are soft sci fi, with some fantasy elements.) A theme she frequently explores is the adaptability of man, both on a personal and species basis, and how that may be our greatest survival trait. The effects of extended lifespans on the psyche come up a lot, too. With something like 60 novels to her credit, there's a lot to choose from, and most of them are still readily available via the net or libraries.

Excellent - Thank you!

On March 4th, 2009 eDave says:

This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, so thank you Aharen. I ask others to hold off until I have a chance to post articles/posts devoted to each author except where there are other cross-genre authors in the list that I have not included in both fantasy and science fiction. Also, please note that I have not yet subdivided either broader category by sub-genre or age group, and that I've lumped horror in with fantasy. I will break out horror for sure, as well as young adult oriented works. My categorizations are hardly final - I regard this as a recursive process that, with the help of our members and visitors, will eventually resemble opinions in the greater community and that will probably expand to have pages for the broader sub-genres of speculative fiction (fantasy, horror, science fiction). <cliche>Time will tell.</cliche>

Much of the categorization will take advantage of the new tag system we have courtesy of Eric's upgrade of our site to the latest version of the engine. Thanks, again, Eric! :-)