Re: Book Recommendations?
I'm not sure quite what you're looking for by Startrek, mostly for lack of familiarity. A few things that might fit:
Vernor Vinge's stuff, specifically A Fire Upon the Deep. Fast-pased. It has the only 100% scientifically plausible method of telepathy I've ever seen, and truly alien aliens. Basically, there's an effect at the center of the galaxy (I.E. where earth is) that makes all the cool technologies impossible, and as you move away more and more stuff becomes possible. The aliens in question live on a planet just inside the region that makes FTL impossible, and are a medieval society. The catch is that they're pack organisms-small hive minds, 4 or 5 individuals. There's a lot of spoken and unspoken implications about their lifestyle. There's also godlike entities that live in the highest zone of capable technology humans know about, and can only interact with us using agents (because they'd basically die, as I recall). Applied theology is a science, and there are archeologists that dig for stuff right at the border of this zone (which sparks off the plot-oops). The tines, however, do not break laws of physics as we know them, but I don't want to say more because it'd spoil a really, really good book.
Alastair Reynolds. Revelation space series-the first book is revelation space. This one is odd, but good if you haven't read a bunch of sci-fi. Never outright breaks the laws of physics, but it does come pretty close to bending them. People travel around in generation ships, and there's a race of aliens known as the inhibitors (which might or might not be "living", it's hard to tell) who are exterminating space faring species because of a predicted collision (which apparently will really happen) between the Milky Way and another galaxy in a couple billion years. There's str ange alien artifacts floating around, and some minor time travel that--if I recall--doesn't break causality. Basically, the inhibitors aren't "evil"; they're outside our morals and can't be reasoned with. Nevertheless, people fight them. Think evil replicator robots. There's some AI, some immortality through brain uploading, some posthumans with brain implants who stop using spoken language before the books are over. The series follows the same characters over the course of about 100 years, due to time dilation. I've left out some of the other stuff.
Finally, this is a bit of an oddball, but I think it counts as a "novel", and he really aught to try to publish:
http://qntm.org/structure
Fine structure. It's about our universe. Literally. Scientists discover the script, a textbook imbedded in reality itself, which repeats over
and over, through an experiment in possible FTL communication. Someone figures out how to translate it. The problem is that it says FTL communication should be possible, but it's not working. I'm not going to say more than that because I can't summarize it accurately in two paragraphs. This is probably a love it or hate it, but I loved it, as did a few other people I know. In terms of epicness, this tops the list, and basically has everything including actually horrifying horror (what happens when the imprisoning god shuts down teleportation, and your entire building ends up teleported under ground, and you don't even know why all of your scientific theories that worked 5 minutes ago just stopped? hint: takes up an entire chapter). Note that this seems incoherent at first, and that it's one of those things where you get out what you put in; nevertheless, on a reread it's evident that nothing was just thought up on a w
him, and you will need to reread to get everything out of it. O, and the earth gets cut off from the rest of the universe, destroyed, and then our universe goes poof.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=169089#p169089
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