BooksWe love books. Tell us about your favourite books and authors, and why they are so good. And while you're at it - having dined out for years on the time I threw Dan Brown out of a train window - tell us who to avoid.
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Scaryduck LIKES EGG, Thu 5 Jan 2012, 13:40)
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Childhood's friendMust have been about 30 years ago, a few of us who'd just met that weekend began a conversation about favorite authors from their teens (we were in our early 20s) and SF came up as a genre.
A couple of the guys couldn't remember the most ripping author's name and everyone else gladly chimed in to help them out: Heinlein. Robert Heinlein.
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Squilliam but . . . . *I'm* the one with all the talent!, Sat 7 Jan 2012, 3:20,
5 replies)
totally agreeI'm in the process of working my way through the top 100 science first books but keep getting distracted by reading the authors complete works if the book in the list was any good.currently reading through all of Heinleins work at the moment.got to say alot of his characters are similar but hey if you got a good forumla don't break it. Best books have to be stranger in a strange land and the lazers long books. Starship troopers is wayyyyy better than the movie as well.
(, Sat 7 Jan 2012, 9:06, closed)
Outgrew HeinleinAll his books have a character who is a cypher for his fairly right wing political views and they are always a thinly veiled self portrait. Once you read enough of it it gets a little tiresome. Sails over one's head entirely when under ten.
Revisited a few Golden Age authors and wondered what the hell I saw in them. A.E VanVogt for instance. Awful stuff. Some Arthur C Clarke has held up ok and I still like Asimov in the main so not all bad news.
(, Sat 7 Jan 2012, 23:52, closed)
"The Moon is a harsh mistress" is one of my all time favourite booksAlso love "Glory Road" for a good adventure romp. Many of the others start so well but degenerate into Authorwank - using SF as an excuse to get all his characters from other books to
(, Mon 9 Jan 2012, 13:45, closed)
The problem was exacerbatedBy arriving at Heinlein via Stranger in a Strange Land, which gives a false impression of his worldview despite the obvious cypher of Jubal Harshaw.
Oh and thanks for the reminder about Number of the Beast. Could easily have gone through life and not disturbed those neurons again. Mind bleach please
(, Mon 9 Jan 2012, 18:16, closed)
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