Flatland is of course the archetypal popular math book. Life in 2D has its problems... See also Dewdney's Planiverse and the lesser known sequel Sphereland.
What can I say? Everybody loves Dilbert. Me too.
Includes multiperspective short story that inspired Kurosawa's movie.
Hard SF. The Charon/Sphere series is fun - a physics grad student
screws up and the Earth vanishes. Puts my troubles into
perspective...
The Boat of a Million Years is one of these large timespan novels -
most of it is from a few thousand years ago til now, and the last
section is in the far-distant future. So the it's a nonstandard blend
- the first two-thirds is essentially historical fiction about a few
people who find that they're immortal, and how they both hide and try
to find others like themselves. Then the last part is the hard SF of
their interstellar journey away from a future Earth which they no
longer feel a part of, into the unknown.
A fine book - although I don't quite understand why the friend
who lent it to me thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Chacun a son gout...
I've also read Woman of the Iron People, but wasn't blown away by it.
The Skolian Empire series is a set of interlocking novels about the
members of the Ruby dynasty, key players in a massive galactic
political power struggle. The individual novels are far more
standalone than most series. The telepath good guys are the only ones
who can run the machines of a long-extinct empire that handle
long-distance communication, but their empathic power also makes them
prime targets for their Trader enemies. The backstory is that a few
thousand years ago, Mayans were abducted by aliens and stranded on
faraway planets. By the time of this series, the Terrans are a third
political space-based empire, although they haven't been at the focus
of any of the novels yet.
Which brings to mind the somewhat similar backstory of Patricia Kennealy's Celtic series,
where Terrans of several hundred years from now are exploring space
and are shocked to find an existing empire of Celtic druids that have
both spaceships and magic. But Kennealy's Celts left Earth on their
own ships when threatened by the spread of Christianity, rather than
being abducted.
Unusually, the series progresses non-chronologically, so backstory
gets filled in more often than we find out What Happens Next.
Frustrating, but in a pleasant sort of way.
Alas, the non-Skolian books are awful. The Charmed Sphere is really
bad fantasy, and Sunrise Alley is astoundingly wooden AI/robotics.
I keep meaning to read more by her, but haven't yet.
Another what can I say? Of course you've heard of her. She's somewhat
like Miss Manners, in that she's snippy with maximum politeness.
Mr. Vertigo is a somewhat surreal book about someone who learns
(after much study) to levitate, one of my longstanding unrealized
dreams...
Timbuktu is told from a dog's point of view, but Auster manages to
steer clear of anthropomorphic sentimentality.
In the Garden of Iden is a time travel book mostly set in Renaissance
England. A botanist is surprised to find the contemporaries aren't
all as barbaric as she first assumed, when she falls in love with
one.
Mathematics for a broad audience - one of the best such books on 4D,
with lots of pictures.
Same guy as Iain M Banks, but without the M it's not SF. These books
all have a cruel/macabre streak to them, which somehow hits home more
since they're in contemporary settings.
One of my favorite SF authors. Most of these books are set in the
Culture, a future society with long-lived humans and refreshingly
irreverent sentient machines. The AIs, ranging in size from wasps to
moons, have
great
names.
Although the Culture is a utopia of sorts, the books manage to be
almost unremittingly bleak. I love them, although my mother objects
to the fact that usually everyone's dead at the end. (The same could
be said of Shakespeare...)
Inversions is (mostly) non-Culture, not quite up to the standard of
the others, but with a similar theme - the interwoven stories of two
people in self-imposed exile, dealing with the barbaric culture
around them.
Feersum Endjinn isn't a Culture book, and took me a while to get into
because the half of it in the voice of the main character is spelled
phonetically. It's worth reading anyway, just persevere.
Whimsical correspondence between two people, in the form of postcards
sent to each other between exotic locales. Mostly pictures, but a fun
way to while away an hour.
One for the Morning Glory is an idiosyncratic reworking of the
archetypal fantasy story of the hero's quest. And a must-read for
anyone who enjoys wordplay!
A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass explore the culture
shock of moving from one world to another, when travel becomes a
matter of stepping through a portal instead of decades of ship
travel. Earth's colonies comprise the Thousand Cultures, many of
which are synthetic cultures inspired by works of literature, created
by various eccentrics who sent off colony ships with idiosyncratic
versions of "history" in their archives. The advent of the portals
wreaks havoc with the self-identity of each of these cultures. The
Merchants of Souls is the next in the series, also good.
Orbital Resonance is a coming-of-age story, reminded me a bit of
David Palmer's Emergence.
Mother of Storms and Kaleidescope Century are both near-future, but
not related to each other. Didn't like them as much as the others.
Finity is the best novel I've read that uses the quantum many worlds
hypothesis as a plot device, since Barnes doesn't let physics
exposition get in the way of the story.
Apostrophes and Apocalypses is a book of short stories and essays.
The Duke of Uranium series is pretty light, in the Heinlein juvenile
tradition. OK if you're in the right mood, but not up to his usual
standard IMHO.
The Sky So Big and Black is one of his best, and a followup of sorts
to Candle which I appreciate but didn't like as much.
In When We Were Real, the male protagonist escapes a matriarchal
society to become a corporate mercenary, for lack of any better
alternative. Reasonably bleak future despite functional immortality -
people don't die of natural causes, but they can be killed -and often
are, since the corporations don't put much value on human life.
Nonhumans (cyborgs, gengineered "optimods", robots) are legally
chattel, as are some humans. The flavor reminded me a bit of Ian McDonald's The Broken Land or Desolation
Road.
It's not the best book I've ever read, but it's the first book that
I've read that rang true about the bleak psychological implications
of extended lifespans - that it's not just an unbroken wonderland of
eternal happiness, but that you'd often be forced to episodically
rebuild a new life/home multiple times, often through circumstances
not of your own choosing.
Fantasy but not swords 'n sorcery. Gentle is a word that comes to
mind...
The Hammered/Scardown/Worldwired is good cyberpunkish. Carnival and
Undertow are both standalone, very different in flavor. Dust is the
beginning of a great new series. Alas, I was disappointed by All the
Windwracked Stars, too disjointed to recommend.
I've liked everything he's ever written. Mostly it's SF, except for
the fantasy series of Infinity Concerto and Serpent Mage. Many of his
books deal with the possible implications of nanotech. It's the focus
of Blood Music, but forms the backdrop of some of the others.
Fun House is a tour de force, an autobiographical comic. Gripping,
but not happy.
The Galactic Center series starts near-future with Across the Sea of
Suns, but by Great Sky River it's far future where the sentient
machines dominate the galaxy. Humans are barely surviving in the
fringes, like cockroaches, desperately using technology they no
longer understand as they try to avoid total extinction.
Against Infinity (not a Galactic Center book) is set on Ganymede,
about humans trying to hunt an alien artifact. Matter's End is a
short story collection.
I was deeply disappointed by Foundation's Fear, the first in a
trilogy set in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe. The
characterization was just as wooden as Asimov's - I expected much
better from Benford. I'm refusing to read the other two, since Brin
and Bear are also favorite authors that I don't want to have a bad
taste in my mouth about...
Cosm and Timescape are both contemp/near-future accounts of
physicists discovering cool stuff. Classic hard SF, well done. Cosm
is about creating and observing a universelet. (His academic
left-bashing a la Foundation's Fear was a bit tiresome, though.)
Similar subject matter to Lethem's As
She Climbed Across The Table, but of course a very different book.
Your basic fantasy about a long-lived weredragon - subplots include
foiling the bad guys (evil magicians) and finding a mate (after
hundreds of years, after almost giving up hope). But really quite
well done, despite my snippiness (I just finished One for the Morning Glory, so I can't help but be arch).
Everyone raves about how well Bester's books stand the test of time,
and it's true. Much less dated than most of his contemporaries. The
protagonist of The Stars My Destination is a man who can teleport
interplanetary distances when everyone else can only do short hops.
I was certainly surprised to come across this book in the New
section, since both authors are dead. It was a (partially
posthumous?) collaboration. A little zany, but fun. Not as
self-indulgent as Zelazny at his worst.
Winsome meets LA spacey, you gotta love the names: Weetzie Bat, My
Secret Agent Lover Man, Witch Baby. If I say "weetzie bat" five times
in a row really fast, I can't help but to grin for a while...
Fourteen cardboard pages. Big type. A good thing to read when you
need a bit of cheering up. I keep it in my office.
I read the entire Darkover series years ago, but haven't looked at it
much since. I did reread the Heritage of Hastur and Sharra's Exile in
order to remember the background for Exile's Song and The Shadow
Matrix, which deal with Lew Alton's daughter.
Darkover is a world ruled by the comyn, a red-haired feudal overlord
caste with laran - psychic powers which can be amplified by matrix
crystals. Many of the books deal with the conflict caused by its
rediscovery by the Terran Empire, since it turns out to be a lost
colony that's unenthusiastic about being reabsorbed.
MZB can be a little heavyhanded sometimes, but mostly keeps it under
control in this series (unlike, say, The Firebrand). Some of her
other books like Hunters of the Red Moon aren't really worth
recommending. I bet if I reread The Mists of Avalon I'd put it on the
good list, but it was so long ago that I can't really remember my
reaction to it.
Biographical novel from the climber who made the IMAX movie Everest.
In Dragon Bones the protagonist has pretended to be an idiot for
years to avoid being killed as a threat to his father the king, and
is ambivalent about shedding the mask. Swordfighting, magic and
dragons are key plot elements, and dwarves do pop up in a subplot,
but it's a well done and not derivative coming of age story.
The Uplift series is set near-future where the Earth comes into
contact with galactic civilization only to find that it's a weird
anamoly - all known intelligent species were created by others, in an
unbroken chain lasting millenia back to the mysterious Progenitors.
Startide Rising is very high on my list. The Uplift War is almost as
good, Sundiver (the first one) is not quite so good. The next trilogy
(Infinity's Shore, Brightness Reef, Heaven's Reach) doesn't quite live
up to Startide Rising, but I really did want to find out what happens!
Glory Season is a totally different universe, a seafaring world with
significant gender role differences from our world.
The Practice Effect is somewhat fun - a physics grad student ends up
on a world where one of the laws of thermodynamics doesn't hold. But
it's not up to the standard of the Uplift books. The Postman is also
a decent post-apolcalypse story of one man's effort to bring back
civilization by donning a uniform and delivering mail. I bet if
someone else wrote it I'd put it on the list, it only suffers by
comparison to his other stuff.
Nudist on the Late Shift actually does do a halfway reasonable job at
communicating the flavor of Silicon Valley, which is a hard thing to
do. I was prepared to hate it, since I'd read some excerpts of his
previous book (The First 20 Million is Always the Hardest) and
thought it was absolutely inane, a very second-rate imitation of
Douglas Copeland's Microserfs. But I picked it up in a bookstore and
had to buy it to find out what happened to all the people whose
stories he tells...
Even though it dates back to the 70's, Shockwave Rider is sometimes
cited as proto-cyberpunk, because of the hero living the cracks of
society who hacks into master database to manipulate the system at
will plotline.
The Jhereg series is sword and sorcery, but not at all Tolkeinesque.
The terminally sarcastic assassin Vlad is both a witch and a
sorcerer, and suffers from the handicap of being a short-lived human.
The dominant Draegerans live to be a thousand, have a rigid caste
system, and usually despise Easterners (humans). Since Vlad is also a
member of the criminal caste, he's got yet another strike against
him. Good thing he's got a few friends in high places.
This series is also unusual in that it gets better, not worse, as it
goes along. Even if you aren't totally blown away by Jhereg, give the
next few a try anyway. Soon you'll be addicted.
He's also written some Three-Musketeers-esque books about the same
world, set hundreds of years earlier (Five Hundred Years After and The
Phoenix Guards). I didn't like them at first, but warmed to them
later when I wanted to read the ones that came afterwards.
I'm not overfond of Brokedown Palace, a fantasy not connected with
his others.
As you can see from the number of times I admit to reading the Miles
Vorkosigan series, I'm totally hooked. It could be categorized as
military SF, but a *much* higher caliber than your basic space opera.
I'm not even sure why it's so compelling to me, but I'm not alone in
this. The only book in the series that I'm not rabid about is Ethan
of Athos, which is merely OK.
The Spirit Ring is a quite reasonable fantasy book, but not nearly as
addictive as the Miles books.
The War for the Oaks is in the (larger than you might think) fantasy
subgenre of contemporary elves live among us, music is tied to magic.
Wait, stop - don't roll your eyes and move on - it's the best example
of this genre that I've found, much better than books like Lackey's nonrecommended Serrated Edge
urban elf series or Gael Baudino's vaguely remembered Gossamer Axe,
which give this area a bad name. If you're a fan of the Minneapolis
band Boiled in Lead then you've got to read this one too, since a
show of theirs is a key plot point in the book. (And along those
lines the drummer Robin is the spacey Aibynn character in Brust's book Phoenix.)
Finder is also elf-oriented fantasy, but with a slightly different
twist: it's in the shared Borderlands world, check out also the elf
books by yet another Minneapolis fantasy writer, Will Shetterly. Another note of
encouragement: don't let the phrase "shared world" send you screaming
for the door -- I know that most shared worlds books are just inane,
but I really enjoy these.
Falcon is SF not fantasy, a little cyberpunkish, quite worthwhile.
A sequel to Abbott's 1884 Flatland,
gets into the questions of curved spaces: the intrepid explorers
strike out into the unknown, come across their own town from the
other side, but insist they kept going straight the whole time.
Topology ensues...
One of these ramblingish Southern novels full of eccentrics and such.
Bury is a pseudonum for the combination of Neal Stephenson and his uncle. The Cobweb is hilarious in a
similar way to Zodiac, but about espionage instead of
environmentalists. Interface is about a near-future presidential
election and mind control of the candidate.
The very best of deadpan humor, both the artspeak and the photos are
impeccably done.
Both Cosmicomics and Invisible Cities are whimsical, but with
slightly different tones. Cosmicomics is several tales about beings
living near the beginning of the universe. Calvino is a great enough
writer to pull this off: it's not hard SF about neutron density, it's
about these often absent-minded characters.
Invisible Cities is an entire bookful of exquisite vignettes, a few
pages each, about different fantastic cities (within the framework of
Marco Polo telling stories to the Khan). I read this book at exactly
the right time and place: right after visiting Tokyo for the first
time, a dense week with a perfect combination of work and play, and
often fraught with a sense of discovery. I was on my way from the
hotel to Narita airport, in a dreamy and somewhat disoriented mood,
about to head to yet another new city for a temporary life of three
months before finally returning home. The perfect state of mind for
these stories, which reminded me a bit of Borges crossed with
Marquez.
All of Card's earlier work is wonderful: Songmaster, Wyrms, Treason,
and the Worthing Saga. Sadly, the quality goes downhill, to the point
where I'm not including his latest on the list anymore (the Call to
Earth series). Pastwatch just barely squeaked on. The Alvin Maker
series will probably make it onto the list when I get the latest one
and reread all the rest.
But back to the good stuff: the original Ender's Game short story is
absolutely amazing. If you haven't already read the novel, read the
short story first for maximum impact. Then go read the novel, so you
know what's going on in the second book of the series, Speaker for
the Dead, which is also excellent. Xenocide and Children of the Mind
aren't as good, but are still worth checking out.
Hart's Hope is fantasy, not SF, quite lyrical. The Abyss is a movie
tie-in, but far surpasses most books in that genre.
Despite the name, it's not cyberpunk. It's an autobiography of being
one of the first black students at an exclusive private boarding
school in the sixties.
Adams, Douglas and Carwardine, Mark
Adams, Richard
Adams, Scott
Akutagawa, Ryunosuke
Albom, Mitch
Allen, Roger MacBride
Anderson, Poul
Angelou, Maya
Anthony, Mark
Armstrong, Kelly
Arnason, Eleanor
Asaro, Catherine
Ash, Sarah
Asher, Neal
Athill, Diana
Atwood, Margaret
Austen, Jane
Auster, Paul
Baker, Kage
Banchoff, Tom
Banks, Iain
Banks, Iain M.
Bantock, Nick
Barnes, John
Barton, William
Beagle, Peter S.
Bear, Elizabeth
Bear, Greg
Beard, Henry
Bechdel, Alison
Benford, Gregory
Bennett, Nigel and Elrod, P.N.
Bertin, Joanne
Bester, Alfred
Bester, Alfred and Zelazny, Roger
Bishop, Anne
Bishop, Terry
Black, Holly
Blish, James
Block, Francesca Lia
Bois, William Pene du
Borchardt, Alice
Borsook, Paulina
Boyett, Steven R.
Boynton, Sandra
Bradley, Marion Zimmer
Bray, Patricia
Breashears, David
Briggs, Patricia
Brin, David
Britain, Kristen
Bronson, Po
Brown, Eric
Brunner, John
Brust, Steven
Buckell, Tobias S.
Buechner, Frederick
Bujold, Lois McMaster
Bull, Emma
Bunch, Chris
Burger, Dionys
Burns, Olive Ann
Bury, Stephen
Busby, F.M.
Busch, Heather and Silver, Burton
Butcher, Jim
Butler, Octavia E.
Caine, Rachel
Calvino, Italo
Card, Orson Scott
Carey, Jacqueline
Carey, Mike
Carr, Terry, ed
Carroll, Jonathan
Carroll, Lewis
Carter, Raphael
Cary, Lorene
Cast, P.C.
Chan, Jackie