Discuss science fiction here. Mostly novels and short stories, but film, video games, comics or whatever else as well. Make recommendations, review stuff you’ve read or discuss how crazy the world would be if we perfected cheap teleportation technology capable of sustaining living subjects like in Star Trek. Whatever. :tup:
Dune is the shit.
Right now I’m reading "Heretics of Dune"
Pretty good, but I can’t get over how cool a title “God Emperor of Dune” is.
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is awesome.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
There are thousands I can’t think of right now.
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson reads horribly, but the ideas in it are sweet. Very hard science fiction. If you’re into geology you might want to check it out.
@Kromo: I’m pretty sure my personal favorites are the original and Children of Dune.
Dune Messiah was pretty cool but felt a little strange with the whole Duncan Idaho clone thing.
dune series is a good read although i find it got a little too philosophical for my tastes. Especially chapter house dune. It really built up to an awesome climatic ending but it pulled an empire strikes back and forced you to get the next novel. I never read any dune books written by Herberts son.
i find sci fi short stories most appealing due to them being based around a certain concept and not being crammed with filler.
Total Recall is a good movie. Add in Arnold it becomes a great movie. Total sci fi, total schwarzenegger.
Starship Troopers is another king film. Starship troopers 2 was garbage. Havent seen 3. Hope its good.
I hear if a child is born in space (weightless environment) it will have to live in space for the rest of its days due to bones not developing as they would on a planet with gravity. Also i hear astronauts are constantly vomiting while up there.
If an alien created humans in a lab, would we have to accept him/her/third gender as a god?
Nope, at least I wouldn’t. That would be just as silly as when the Indians considered white men and Spaniards gods. They took advantage of them because of it.
Yeah, white men and Spaniards didn’t create indians, but you get my point.
I would consider an alien-engineered human to be an artificial human, much like an extremly life-like android.
I have only read the first Dune book. I loved it and I have the second one, but I can’t really get into the series as a whole.
You know, up until a few years ago, I didn’t even like Science Fiction. Well, I did, but I didn’t like hard scifi or some of the grittier stuff. Basically, my idea of sci fi was the standard fare that most people are used to, like Star Wars, Star Trek and what not. That stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. The show Lost really got me into some good sci fi though. I plan on reading Slaughterhouse Five soon.
Right now, my favorite sci fi and probably favorite writer right now is Neal Stephenson. Really looking forward to The Baroque Cycle and Reamde. I’ve also been writing much more of my own sci fi which has been coming along pretty nicely. I may share some of it here on SRK as I complete it. :tup:
Quick question: How come science fiction isn’t seen as “serious” literature or media in general? I mean Star Trek isn’t a damned B-movie action series, it’s a pretty good commentary of today and tomorrow with depth. For some reason, Kurt V gets a free pass for some reason. You will never ever see a sci-fi book nominated for a nobel or pulitzer.
Good question. Although there was a sci fi book that won the Nobel literature prize: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/world/11cnd-nobel.html?ex=1349755200&en=d55be55648025ba4&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
There are some VERY good sci fi lit out there. I still don’t think it’s taken seriously enough though, and I think that’s due to a lack of imagination/understanding by common readers. It’s a strange genre, where if you write simple enough for most people to read your work then it lacks the substance it should have as sci fi, but if you write truly legitimate sci fi, you alienate a good portion of your readers. Some writers are good at making a trade off of that, and I think Stephen King is one of them. I really want to read his newest one about the JFK assassination/time travel. :tup:
I think Sparrow means if humans were *originally *created by an alien in a lab.
To be honest I don’t see Vonnegut’s works as science fiction, and if they are they are soft science fiction. Just an opinion. I love Slaughterhouse Five and Sirens of Titan though.
Ooo! Oooo! This thread should be fun.
Things floating through my mind…
- Cities with multiple levels to them. The most recent example in a piece of sci-fi is Deus Ex Human Revolution’s Shanghai.
Is that even feasible? And why would anyone want to?
- And should I read Starship Troopers?
Anybody here read the Martian Chronicles? Ray Bradbury makes me cry over how beautiful Mars was in his stories.
I doubt it’s feasible with current construction materials; that’s a massive amount of weight and you’d at least need more material under there. There are multi-layer cities in real life, but those aren’t skycrapers on top of skyscrapers. Wind and earthquakes would also be problems, due to the center of mass being raised higher on some of the structures.
The reason why such an option is attractive is that it saves space and reduces traffic by putting roads on more than one level. If you’ve ever been to a city like Tokyo, Traffic is a huge problem that the government is trying to solve.
I mentioned it in my first post. 
I remember my favorite story being about the quicksilver being.
Can’t forget Hyperion. It’s probably my all-time favorite science fiction novel. It’s one of the ones that really feels alien and strange and dreamlike. I love everything, from the incredible tragedy of Weintraub and his daughter to the awesome spectacle of the Shrike. I like the other books in the series too, but Hyperion is the best.
My favorite is probably the one with the Catholic priest and the martian lights.
The fantasy/Sci-Fi world I’m creating is like this and yes I’m running into just this problem. Why? Why would you build upward when you can build outward? A lot of my story centers around the different world that exists at the upper and lower levels, so it’s going to take some thought to execute. Or, I can just make it that way “just because.” :tup:
Because it’s fucking awesome.
Or you could make the cities in the middle of an otherwise inhabitable area.
Middle of a lake or ocean perhaps?
Maybe to avoid radiation? That probably wouldn’t work unless it was sealed off in a dome…which would me more expensive than migrating probably. This is the fun part of thinking of ideas.
One of my cities started off as a space elevator and then the world went to shit and it’s a squatter city writ large. That makes sense. At least a little bit.
The other city that I mentioned earlier is a desert city as well as being built upwards. I really have no clue how that would ever happen. But, I have some lore that I could employ to explain it.
Those two cities don’t know that the other exists for a long time because like I said, the world went to shit. :tup:
Not a comprehensive list, but selected works by select authors worth checking out if you want to have your shit together with regards to science fiction (ie. great stuff worth your time):
[LIST]
[]Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (particularly the original short story)
[]Mephisto in Onyx by Harlan Ellison
[]The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
[]Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
[]Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
[]Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds
[]Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card (skip the sequels though)
[]Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler
[]The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin
[]And Now the News… by Theodore Sturgeon
[]Full Chicken Richness by Avram Davidson
[]Burning Crome by William Gibson
[]Distraction by Bruce Sterling
[]The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
[]The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
[]Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut
[]Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctrow
[]Ringworld by Larry Niven
[]Foundation by Isaac Asimov
[]To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer
[]Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
[]We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
[/LIST]
picked up Farscape collection on bluray
fav sci-fi flicks
Starwars
minority report
Alien
Aliens
Robo Cop 1 and 2
Tron Classic
batteries not included-funny how this is sci-fi
terminator 2
Dark City
Matrix 1
Back to the Future Part 1 and 2
Can someone recommend brutal sci-fi in the future? Looking for a setting like Judge Dredd or Riddick or Gunnm where society is extremely cutthroat, and you’ll get reduced to spaghetti paste if you aren’t tough enough. I don’t necessarily want a post-apocalyptic wasteland like Road Warrior/FotNS. I prefer movies, but comics, anime, books are fine too.