Originally Posted by amblerman
Any authors besides Heinlein that you still enjoy in the Scifi realm?
Unlike you, I haven't read any of Heinlein's since I was in in high school/college so I wonder if I'd still like those books.
I suspect I would. I do remember enjoying the heck out of them.. I'll have to pick one up and read through them again.
It is interesting how you can return to an author that you once enjoyed and find the experience so different. For me that was Kurt Vonneget .
I tried re-reading his stuff in my 40s and I couldn't get through the books I once found so clever and engaging.
Another series I have enjoyed over and over again is the heechee saga by Fredrick Pohl.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heechee
My sons have read through that as well and liked it. Funny thing is, I'm not sure I've ever read any of his other works. I'll have to find some of his other works.
-A
Amblerman, ditto on Vonnegut; I read several of his novels in Grade 12. The school librarian pretty much insisted I read them. They were probably not what I needed in my life at that time. I've had no desire to reread them.
One author I loved in my adolescence but can't read now is Ray Bradbury. I gobbled up his SF (
The Martian Chronicles,
The Golden Apples of the Sun,
A Medicine for Melancholy, etc.) and really enjoyed
Something Wicked This Way Comes when I was 15 or 16. Thought it was all great at the time. Tried to read a bunch of it a number of years later, and found I couldn't do it.
You'd asked about contemporary stuff; my son put me onto
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu a few months ago. It's very non-linear, and I found it hard to follow, but it all came together at the end, and it made sense why it was written the way it was. A linear progression would have had too many spoilers. Very clever stuff, with lots of interesting concepts. There's a bit where some of the characters are within a complex video game, and Sir Isaac Newton and the great Hungarian-American mathematician John Von Neumann work with the ancient Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang to build a human computer, using 30,000,000 soldiers. From the book:
Qui Shi Huang waved his hand and three soldiers came forward. They were all very young. Like other Qin soldiers, they moved like order-obeying machines.
"I don't know your names," Von Neumann said, tapping the shoulders of two of the soldiers. "The two of you will be responsible for signal input, so I'll call you 'Input 1' and 'Input 2'." He pointed to the last soldier. "You will be responsible for signal output, so I'll call you 'Output'." He shoved the soldiers to where he wanted them to stand. "Form a triangle. Like this. Output is the apex. Input 1 and Input 2 form the base."
"You could have just told them to stand in the Wedge Attack Formation," Qin Shi Huang said, glancing at Von Neumann contemptuously.
Newton took out six small flags; three white, three black. Von Neumann handed them out to the three soldiers so that each held a black flag and a white flag. "White represents 0; black represents 1. Good. Now, listen to me. Output, you turn around and look at Input 1 and Input 2. If they both raise black flags, you raise a black flag as well. Under all other circumstances, you will raise the white flag."
"I think you should use some other color," Qin Shi Huang said. "White means surrender."
The excited Von Neumann ignored him. He shouted orders at the three soldiers. "Begin operation! Input 1 and Input 2, you can raise whatever flag you want. Good. Raise! Good. Raise again! Raise!"
Input 1 and Input 2 raised their flags three times. The first time they were black-black, the second time white-black, and the third time black-white. Output reacted correctly each time, raising the black flag once and the white one twice.
"Very good. Your Imperial Majesty, your soldiers are very smart."
"Even an idiot would be capable of that. Tell me, what are they really doing?" Qin Shi Huang looked baffled.
"The three soldiers form a computing component. It's a type of gate, an AND gate." Von Neumann paused to let the emperor digest this information.
Qin Shi Huang said impassively, "I'm not impressed. Continue."
*************
And it goes on ... they form an OR gate, a NAND, a NOR, XOR, an inverter, and so on. With 30M soldiers, they can make 10M 2-input logic gates.
I thought this was fascinating - and took me back a good many years to studying Boolean Algebra and logic gates and so on.
So you might enjoy that one - it was a bit of a hard read for me, but worth it.
I've read Pohl in the past - can't remember anything specifically. I'll have to check out the series you've recommended. It's time to reread
Childhood's End too. We'll see how it's stood up over several decades.
But I always find myself going back to Heinlein's greatest hits - his early works are all good, and a few of his novels from the '60s (which I listed in my earlier post) are top-notch. He combines credible hard science with likeable and believable characters. Heinlein once said that he wrote for three reasons, in this order:
1. To make a living
2. To entertain the reader
3. To moralize or preach or push his own beliefs
By not letting his beliefs overrun his storytelling, he wrote a lot of very good stuff in the early years. Once he was rich and famous, he was able to write weird stuff with perverted ideas, and get it published, probably on name recognition alone.
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Fear No Evil,
Friday ... yech! No thanks! There's probably a lesson there. (YMMV -
Stranger in a Strange Land is probably Heinlein's best-known work, and a lot of people would disagree with me.)
Happy reading!
