Looking for specific SF books suggestions.

[Arpy]

Thanks so much for the suggestions! I've been looking into the books and'll probably go to the library this weekend to make some final selections.

Some more criteria...

6) Looking for a feel-good story. Not schmaltz but joie de vivre. I believe in the possibility of the future; it's what makes Trek special for me and maybe overall. Plus, it's summer - sue me.

7) Follow the criteria. Don't recommend a book you just think everyone should read or because you think it's very good. If you must, suggest one that's just as good that does fit the criteria.

8) I think I want to stay away from time travel. Unless it's narrative jumps ahead, like in Asimov's Foundation saga. 'Trying to stick to what's realistically probable, though I do hope for some form of/loophole around FTL in the real distant future, should we be so fortunate as to have one.

9) Something showing real social change. We're not the people we were 10,000 years ago and I don't expect we will be 1,000 from now. I don't think a leopard can change its spots, but it can take a dip in the water and show them off better.

 

[SicOne]

8) I think I want to stay away from time travel. Unless it's narrative jumps ahead, like in Asimov's Foundation saga. 'Trying to stick to what's realistically probable, though I do hope for some form of/loophole around FTL in the real distant future, should we be so fortunate as to have one.

9) Something showing real social change. We're not the people we were 10,000 years ago and I don't expect we will be 1,000 from now. I don't think a leopard can change its spots, but it can take a dip in the water and show them off better.

Sadly, my recommendation does involve time travel, but it was unplanned, one-way, and screws up everything. But it was integral to the plot.

However, the book also involves social change, though it was somewhat forced and years ahead of its time, and there is surprising resistance to it, as well as surprising acceptance of it. The title of the last book in the trilogy, "Final Impact", can also be construred as the impact upon the world society of the 1940s, in terms of race relations, women's sufferage, geopolitics, and economies as well the outcome of World War II with the assistance of the uptimers.

 

[Thrawn]

Yeah. Read Alastair Reynolds's "The Prefect".

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

Social change worth reading about in Earth by David Brin, postulating a world 30 years in the future now, having to come to terms with catastrophic climate change, shaken when there is an accident concerning a new, potentially clean energy source.

 

[BaloksPuppet]

I'd like to add a recommendation for any of Ben Bova's "Grand Tour" series of novels. I particularly liked the "Asteroid Wars" sub-series which includes The Precipice, The Rock Rats, The Silent War and The Aftermath.

 

[Arpy]

Any books cover interstellar civilizations that don't have FTL but have to do things the hard way? Obviously they can't be centralized but still...it took explorers in the New World months to get word from the Old and often they were left to their own devices for years - whats a few decades between people of the same species?

I'm curious about this not because I'm a stickler for "realism" in SF, but in what people think about the human soul and overcoming natural obstacles to live good lives. ...Does provincialism forced upon us by laws of nature mean anarchy forever pitting us against those far away? And do differing paths in evolution lead to senseless conflict as peoples who've grown differently come in contact with each other?

 

[Thrawn]

Yep. Alastair Reynolds's universe that I've mentioned is exactly like that.

 

[SicOne]

Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer (forget the TV show, read the book).

Is the TV show based upon this book, or is this book just a media tie-in written after it premiered?

 

[Christopher]

Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer (forget the TV show, read the book).

Is the TV show based upon this book, or is this book just a media tie-in written after it premiered?

The book was written in 1999, one of Sawyer's many original SF novels. The TV series was very, very loosely based on the book, with Sawyer credited as a consultant and as the screenwriter of one episode.

 

[PointyHairedJedi]

Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy.

I'll echo this, plus Icehenge & Antartica if you can get a hold of them. The Memory of Whiteness was interesting too - same universe as the Mars trilogy, but a very very different sort of book and certainly not to everyone's taste.

Deslation Road by Ian MacDonald is really worth a read (I've tried to get a hold of the sequel, Ares Express, to no avail) - it's rather like One Hundred Years of Solitude in some ways, except not, and set on Mars.

Stephen Baxter does have some FTL/other magic technology in some of his books. Lots of hard-science extrapolation though, Jules Verne +100 years in a lot of ways. Raft would be a good one to start with.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner is very much a favourite of mine, it's almost a New Wave vision of cyberpunk with an ending that, first time I read it, actually made me laugh out loud. Very much in the HG Wells vein of socially speculative SF, the only thing that's drastically missing is the rise of personal computing.

Ken Macleod writes some great SF, his books have been a mix of near-future and far-future with some magic tech thrown in. They tend to be more focused on politics and character - his plots are what takes place around those, is how I'd put it. Wouldn't be to everyone's taste though. Star Fraction is a good near-future one (the first of a series of four), or Newton's Wake for a far-future one (a standalone).

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is one every SF fan should at least try at some point. There's also The Cyberiad, a collection of comic SF fables, which I've given to people as a present more than once.

Hmm, okay, that might be enough by now.

I'd like to add a recommendation for any of Ben Bova's "Grand Tour" series of novels. I particularly liked the "Asteroid Wars" sub-series which includes The Precipice, The Rock Rats, The Silent War and The Aftermath.

I would say that stipulation number five rules those out. I like some of Bova's earlier books, but for the last twenty years-ish or so he's gotten into a real rut with the kinds of books he's written. It's at a point where reading something he's written will bring on a sudden bout of deja vu because he'll have done something very similar in a previous book. Reading the same book over and over can get boring after a while, oddly enough, even if he does keep changing the titles.

 

[Starbreaker]

Bova's middle section of As On A Darkling Plain, which was once a novelette/novella, was the basic plot of Jupiter. I got about halfway through Venus when I realized it was just Mars with character's names changed.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Arpy: So are you familiar with Isaac Asimov? You referenced Foundation. His robot stories seem to fit your request, although they have a distinctly retro feel by now. He also enjoyed sci-fi mysteries set in Earth's immediate future, which for him was the late 20th century and early 21st, when people have established industrial posts throughout the solar system to collect direct sunlight or mine gas/rare elements. Most of those collections are out of print, but you might be able to access them in a local library.