Re: Book Recommendations?
I'm going to have to try that chap nin as well as other recommendations from this thread.
@Fastfinge, Dragon Riders I liked up to a point, however several books in it just felt that Mccafry wasn't advancing the plot or really doing much with the series, just in a formula way marrying all her characters off. I also got a little irritated with some of her character style, because it was possible to pickout who would be the main boy of the plot just by how he was described.
I ddid however enjoy the first ever dragon riders novel, dragonsdawn about how the colonists got to Planet Pern and first engineered the dragons.
Crystal singer however is a very different beast or was when I read it, though I admit that wasn't recently, sinse the setting varies far more than just being Pern, and though it has a single main character she at least has various relationships and adventures throughout the trilogy. I particularly like the fact that she's not the nicest person, and in the third book when the main chracter has lived a long time but has lost her memory and when your meeting people from the first book who she doesn't remember was very nice, plus the series finishes and doesn't drag on forever.
It's not the best sf. There is still too much by way of character safety and the sense that things will work out, and parts of the series lack tention with everyone being nice and a lot of super fun things happening, however in terms of being both sf with a positive take on the future, and having some interesting ideas around it's characters I thought it was a reasonable series.
I've not read the brain ship series though have haeard good things.
While we're on the subject of scifi with interesting series, i'd recommend city of elusions by Ursula leguin. She disa vowed this book a little later in her career when her stuff became a bit grim and feminist, but to my mind city of Ilusions was a far better story than it's related sequal, the left hand of darkness precisely because! it didn't have Leguin's very shady gender politics rammed down your throat. It just concerns a world where a galactic power has been brought low simply by a race who have the ability to lie telepathically, and a man with no past who slowly discovers who his he is.
Very poetic in parts and has a lot of Leguin's better writing styles, plus as I said none of her rather forced talk about gender.
Another Leguin sf I really enjoyed, though a very different theory is the lathe of heaven. this is a little different in terms of sf sinse it involves a psychologist who has a patient who's dreams alter reality./ Things are okay u until the psychologist starts meddling, and hypnotising his patient.
there are some wonderfully whacky solutions to the world's problems caused by a combination of the psychologist pushing too hard and the patient's less than logical interpretation, such as firstly by removing all ratial difference by making everyone have grey skin, and secondly by uniting all the world's countries by having aliens attack the earth.
If we're talking good, not too serious sf with very unique ideas, i'd recommend the two novels by Terry pratchet, Dark side of the sun, and Strata. These were written before he started disk world, and in some ways I prefer them sinse he deals with a very ultimate view of the universe and some very unique ideas about aliens and about the way we think of the world, but he doesn't go overboard into randomness for it's own sake or have his plots resolved by a crazy deus ex.
Strata even features a disk shaped world inside a giant bubb le in space, but one which is more like a giant space station even with machinary and a computer interface that keeps it running.
Lastly, another author I forgot about is Ian M banks, (he also writes some sureal psychological horrorunder the name Ian banks but his sf is purely written under his name with the M). I've only read two books by him, Considder Phlebas and against a dark background.
Both however were set in his culture universe, a world with a completely free society with no laws and highly advanced technology as well as many alien races. I'm amazed that banks can write books with some very traditional high octain space adventure elements, running off exploding space stations, battles to the death about cyber subway trains etc, but at the same time have some really unique concepts that just sit in the middle of the book such as the culture itself or a gun that kills by working on a person's own sense of doom.
My on ly real cryticism of banks is that both of those books I read by him had extremely incomplete, unsatisfying and mostly grim endings, which wasn't good.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=169361#p169361
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