[TheForge] Re: Jean Tijou screens OT

[Rob Fertner]

Find John Scalzi's Old Man's War trilogy of books. Good Stuff.

Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net
[mailto:theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of ries
Sent: Saturday, March 22, 2008 12:42 PM
To: artgawk at thegrid.net; Sponsored by ABANA
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Re: Jean Tijou screens OT

Peter, if you havent read SF in a while, there are a ton of really  
great writers out there right now- not new, exactly, but since the  
publication of William Gibson's Neuromancer, in 1984, the thread of  
good writing mixed with mystical power that Samuel Delany instigated  
in the 60's with Nova and has been revived

Basically, you cant go wrong with ANYTHING by the following-
William Gibson- start with neuromancer, and follow it on.

Neal Stephenson- SNOW CRASH!  How can you go wrong with a samurai  
sword wielding, skateboarding pizza delivering main character, who  
lives in a mini-storage unit and whose name is Hiro Protagonist?

Bruce Sterling- Tornado chasing as it was meant to be. A really smart  
guy.

Iain Banks- Fearsum Endjinn is a masterpiece-  inscrutable and sneaky.  
And his "Culture" series has rapidly become one of the most imitated,  
but seldom equalled, imaginary universes. And, Against a Dark  
Background, with the smart gun- well, it rocks.

Ken MacLeod- a scottish left wing scientist and writer, who also  
invented a wholly different "smart gun".

Charles Stross- smart, crazy good hard SF, with giant evil aliens and  
clever good guys

Ian McDonald- His incredible book about a very near future Varanasi is  
great- River of Gods- its hard to believe he's not Indian- but then he  
follows it with a book, Brasyl- that makes you swear he's Brazilian

Sean McMullen-Start with Souls in the Great Machine-  a future  
Australia, where electricity doesnt work, with huge calculators made  
of  hundreds of people, librarians rule, and trains run on wind power.

Vernor Vinge- he has really only written a few books, but two of them,  
A Fire Upon the Deep, and A Deepness in the Sky, are two of the  
greatest SF novels ever written, incorporating so many complicated and  
great ideas, spanning so much intellectual ground they just require me  
to reread them every couple of years. A Professor of Mathemetics and  
Computer Science, he gets all the details right.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is really good.

David Brin- read it all. Its all great.
Similarly, if you havent already, you gotta hit all the Gregory  
Benford,  and all the Greg Bear,- of course, not missing the two  
blacksmith titles- Forge of God, and Anvil of  Stars- which, though  
great, do not actually feature blacksmithing.

And then, the girls-
The old guard, Ursula LeGuin, Sherri Tepper, and Lois McMaster Bujold  
all write great books- but the new kids, including Catherine Asaro,  
Nancy Kress, Nicola Griffith, Linda Nagata, Melissa Scott, and Sarah  
Zettel, just to name a few, are doing good stuff too.

Thats a start- work thru that, and I can give you another couple pages  
of recomendations.


Ries





On Mar 22, 2008, at 12:21 AM, Peter Fels And Phoebe Palmer wrote:

Thanks for the recommendation. Been a disconcertingly long time since  
i read any SF. Seem to have been abducted by periodicals and time  
online...pf



Ries Niemi
Industrial Artist
http://www.riesniemi.com/





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