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jeffreedy789
Guest
he said ‘mind opening’, not ‘eye opening’.
open your eyes.
just kidding.
open your eyes.
just kidding.
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Antigen
Guest
The ones that have stuck in my mind through the years are:
Harlon Ellison
Frank Herbert
Frederick Pole
Harlon Ellison
Frank Herbert
Frederick Pole
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The_Hidden_Life
Guest
Also, remember that most of the “great” writers of scifi (Heinlein, Asimov, etc.) were writing these stories in the 1940s-1970s when the general wisdom of the publishing world was that you had to include buxom babes and such to attract the loyalty of adolescent male readers. Take a look at almost any cover pre-1980 and it’ll either be scantily-clad woman being rescued by a musclebound man (often in a loincloth!) or the alternative: boring streaky picture of a spaceship alone in space.
Orson Scott Card is a very good writer. I forgot about him. I liked the first two Ender books, but didn’t care much for his other series. He has an interesting book on writing science fiction too. He is one of the few that seems to care more about the characters and storytelling rather than showcasing the technology or such.
Another I forgot: Lois McMaster Bujold. She is another fantastic writer if you can put up with the liberal social agenda ideas that she has woven into her stories. Very good writer and plotter from a technical point and very memorable characters. I love Miles Vorkosigan!
Atheism & SF: I don’t think science fiction writers are anymore atheistic than other writers, but that maybe instead it shows up more in their writing because of the nature of SF. The author often must build a world from the ground up and has free rein to develop any social, economic and religious system he likes so long as it is believable to the publisher! Maybe SF writers are more used to thinking about the world in these pigeon-holed type of terms. “I’ll write about a polytheistic society that has a conflict with a monotheistic one which itself has internal conflicts about the nature of their god’s divinity.” An SF writer must think more in these terms because they are playing God themselves making up a world rather than just dealing with the facts of the world at hand as it currently exists.
Also, you could say that people who write at least “hard SF” (technology and space-oriented stories) are more interested in the hard sciences and these people are usually encouraged by their peers to be atheistic (and thus “more objective” in regards to truth).
Orson Scott Card is a very good writer. I forgot about him. I liked the first two Ender books, but didn’t care much for his other series. He has an interesting book on writing science fiction too. He is one of the few that seems to care more about the characters and storytelling rather than showcasing the technology or such.
Another I forgot: Lois McMaster Bujold. She is another fantastic writer if you can put up with the liberal social agenda ideas that she has woven into her stories. Very good writer and plotter from a technical point and very memorable characters. I love Miles Vorkosigan!
Atheism & SF: I don’t think science fiction writers are anymore atheistic than other writers, but that maybe instead it shows up more in their writing because of the nature of SF. The author often must build a world from the ground up and has free rein to develop any social, economic and religious system he likes so long as it is believable to the publisher! Maybe SF writers are more used to thinking about the world in these pigeon-holed type of terms. “I’ll write about a polytheistic society that has a conflict with a monotheistic one which itself has internal conflicts about the nature of their god’s divinity.” An SF writer must think more in these terms because they are playing God themselves making up a world rather than just dealing with the facts of the world at hand as it currently exists.
Also, you could say that people who write at least “hard SF” (technology and space-oriented stories) are more interested in the hard sciences and these people are usually encouraged by their peers to be atheistic (and thus “more objective” in regards to truth).
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Antigen
Guest
The Hidden Life:
Frederick Pole does a very good job of this in his story “Jem:” where the characters fight all sorts of moral delemmas. There is another aurthor writing under the name Diane Carey who has written several very spiritual Star Trek Novels. She did a very intrigue subploto of the spiritual life of Mr. Spock who is a mystic among Vulcans.
I think is is harder to write about a Godly future and not have your work rejected as rhetoric.
Frederick Pole does a very good job of this in his story “Jem:” where the characters fight all sorts of moral delemmas. There is another aurthor writing under the name Diane Carey who has written several very spiritual Star Trek Novels. She did a very intrigue subploto of the spiritual life of Mr. Spock who is a mystic among Vulcans.
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jeffreedy789
Guest
i LOVE diane carey! it’s great to find another trek reader. i read about 50 or 60 of the trek novels when i was in high school - and carey was one of my favs.
have you read the ‘phoenix’ books, by culbreath and marshak? they’re some of my favs, too.
have you read the ‘phoenix’ books, by culbreath and marshak? they’re some of my favs, too.
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Bobby_Jim
Guest
I’ll agree - I read a bunch of the Trek novels from the original series, and some of the earlier Next Generation novels when I was a teenager. Looking back, I realize that some of those novels were really very well done, good sci-fi with skillful use of the characters and interesting stories. I remember liking the ones written by Diane Duane.
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TeriGator
Guest
I love just about anything by Cherryh. The way she creates entire universes and cultures just never fails to capture my attention. If I could choose a “just for fun” field of study, I would have gone into something like culture and linguistics, just because she has tapped into my love of them so skillfully.
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jeffreedy789
Guest
she was also a fav of mine, as you can see in my above post.
some of my all time favs were ‘uhura’s song’, ‘the wounded sky’, ‘my enemy, my ally’, ‘the romulan way’, and those books (ii forget their titles) about the first contact between earth and vulcan…
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jeffreedy789
Guest
oh ya! and ‘how much for just the planet?’ was hilarious!!
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brotherhrolf
Guest
Can anyone recommend some good hard science fiction writers? I’ve read Bova’s “Jupiter” and “Saturn” recently and I enjoyed them. But I don’t want to read any series books (e.g. Star Trek). I liked Peter Hamilton’s “Naked God” series- that’s the kind of genre I’m talking about.
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CanonAlberic
Guest
I like Orson Scott Card a lot too, but if you are at all sensitive, please avoid his short story: “Eumenides in a Fourth Floor Lavatory”. Award winning tale, great story, but not sci-fi- pure horror, and one of the most harrowing and disturbing things I’ve ever read. I really like his “Alvin Maker” stuff though…
Peace.
Peace.
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brotherhrolf
Guest
I really liked the first and second Ender novels but they went downhill from there.
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Joseph_Bilodeau
Guest
Top Ten Science Fiction Authors
Number, Name, Notable Science Fiction Work(s)
10, Damon Knight, To Serve Man
9, H G Wells, The Time Machine
8, Anne McCaffery, Dragonriders, Harper Hall series
7, Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
6, C S Lewis, Space Trilogy
5, Douglas Adams, Hitch Hiker, Dirk Gently series, Starship Titanic (with Terry Jones)
(btw, May 25 is Towel Day. Do you know where your towel is?)
4, Isaac Asimov, everything with robots
3, H Beam Piper, everyhing with fuzzies
2, Robert A Heinlein, everything, period.
And…
1, Albert Gore, Jr, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet”
Number, Name, Notable Science Fiction Work(s)
10, Damon Knight, To Serve Man
9, H G Wells, The Time Machine
8, Anne McCaffery, Dragonriders, Harper Hall series
7, Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
6, C S Lewis, Space Trilogy
5, Douglas Adams, Hitch Hiker, Dirk Gently series, Starship Titanic (with Terry Jones)
(btw, May 25 is Towel Day. Do you know where your towel is?)
4, Isaac Asimov, everything with robots
3, H Beam Piper, everyhing with fuzzies
2, Robert A Heinlein, everything, period.
And…
1, Albert Gore, Jr, “I took the initiative in creating the Internet”
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Kay_Walker
Guest
Asimov and Bradbury!
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dirtydog
Guest
Just seeing if anyone would take the bait. I only know him as the founder of Scientology.
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SweetPea
Guest
In the early 80’s my husband and I lived in New York city for a couple of years; we are Mensa members and so was Asimov and we met him on a couple of occasions at Mensa get-togethers.
He was a very nice man and kind of a lecher, but he was never disrespectul of women. He just liked them a whole lot and I’m one of the few (apparently he respected the fact I was married) who never got his fingerprints on her person.
He was a very nice man and kind of a lecher, but he was never disrespectul of women. He just liked them a whole lot and I’m one of the few (apparently he respected the fact I was married) who never got his fingerprints on her person.
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