Your favourite fiction recommendations.

Discussion in 'Off Topic Area' started by CrowZer0, Jun 30, 2015.

  1. Langenschwert

    Langenschwert Molon Labe

    Clark Ashton Smith is fantastic. Arthur Machen is on the list, but I haven't read any yet.

    I would of course recommend Isaac Asimov, H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Herbert, and Tolkien to any interested readers, but really there is simply no excuse for not having read them multiple times. I'm only mentioning them for completeness. :)

    Lloyd Alexander's "Taran Wanderer" (aka Black Cauldron) series is great for younger readers, much in the same way as C.S. Lewis. Good for adults too!

    I continually marvel at the prose of Charlotte Bronte. Well worth reading for the technical prowess.

    C.J. Cherry's "Faded Sun" is also a marvel.

    N.B. I would eventually like to get a degree in Old English. Retirement plans.
     
  2. Guitar Nado

    Guitar Nado Valued Member

    I have to say Moby Dick is as good as all the decades of praise say it is. It's super cool on many levels. I liked parts of it that I guess a lot of people don't, like the chapter where different types of whales are described. It's a great book, and if you haven't read it, read it right now. I liked it so much I read The Tartarus of Maids - a short story also by Melville - it's social commentary, but I took it as sort of a Weird Tale. Kind of like The Yellow Wallpaper in that regard I guess - it's considered Feminist Literature, but I consider it also this crazy weird tale like Lovecraft or Blackwood would write. See I have to tie it back in to the weird tales love going on in this thread.
     
  3. belltoller

    belltoller OffTopic MonstreOrdinaire Supporter

    For me it was a book entitled Around the World in Eighty Days. It had been assigned in primary 4 of Glenwood Infants and Junior schools - odd I recall that. It was the first time I found myself carried away by a story - reading for the enjoyment of it and it stayed with me till some 10 years or so ago. Another around that time had been Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. It had an eerie effect on me that planted a seed for things to come.

    At 13 I discovered both James Joyce's Ulysses and DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in my auntie's reading room, with whom I'd been staying. They both had a profound effect on my view of things - I don't quite think I ever saw things in quite the same way as my peers after that - in particular when it came to a mature understanding of adult relationships, the "other side" of the well-mannered and genteel amongst us.

    A year and some later, my best friend had seen a film with his da and was very keen on me seeing it. It had just come out in theatres and I remember there'd been some row about it in the papers about its largesse, enormous cost and so forth. The director: Francis Ford Coppola. The film: Apocalypse Now.

    Nothing before had such a profound effect on me as that film. It was really the first time that I understood the subliminal conveyance of primitive emotion through the abstraction of art. Understanding not in the written academic sense but an understanding of borne of feeling and sense.

    I have to confess, part of that experience, with its opening, sequenced montage of imagery - the first use of overlayed film and surround sound was in no doubt due to a particular ... state of mind ... that I happened to be in as I sat with my secondary school chum in the cinema. We were both in ... induced states of mind, one might say and so, without fracturing the TOS I'm most agreeable to, I'll leave that there.

    When I discovered that the film was heavily based on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, I of course obtained my own copy and devoured the book - I became Marlow, I inhaled Kurtz.

    An agent of the Belgian Empire, of the East India Company or an agent of the Great British Imperial Empire - sent through dark rivers of the Congo. In Kipling's tales, agents of the Empire were off to the Punjab to dwell amongst the British Raj or rouge Army officers who fancied themselves entitled to their own personal empires and set off to enthrone themselves as kings in the distant land of Kafiristan.

    In any case, all roads leading to distance, dark, terrifying and exotic locales had their beginnings in the Empire.
    I was hooked thereafter.


    [​IMG]

    The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
    Ulysses - James Joyce
    Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
    "The Man Who Would Be King" (Novella) - Rudyard Kipling
    Kim - Rudyard Kipling
    King of the Khyber Rifles - Talbot Mundy
    A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
    Tai-Pan - James Clavell
    Burmese Days - George Orwell
    The Far Pavilions - M.M. Kaye
    --------------------------
    Other Genre:
    Troubles - J. G. Farrell
    No Mean City - H. Kingsley Long
    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson
    Junkie - William S. Buroughs
    Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
    One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
    Lanark: A Life in Four Books - Alasdair Gray
    Lithium for Medea - Kate Braverman


    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2015
  4. Karatebadger

    Karatebadger Valued Member

    When I were a nipper I used to get one visit to the library per month as it was a fairly expensive bus-ride away. This being so I used to get weighty tomes out to keep me going for four weeks at a time (juniors could only have two books on loan back then). Lord of the Rings was a favourite as was the Dune series, mainly due to their reading time. I have read the Bible and War & Peace but only out of boredom and a lack of anything else. Getting a Young Adult library ticket in 1981 coincided with the debut novel by Robert Rankin, the Antipope (first of the increasingly inaccurately named Brentford Trilogy). Getting access to six books a month meant I could waste resources on such fripperies and you don't get much more deliciously fripperous than the Sproutmaster himself. I have tried to read Pratchett but he just doesn't hit the same spot for me. I don't read much fiction these days, compared to the piles of historical tomes and archaeological surveys that litter my study but I am still partial to Simon Scarrow's Macro and Cato books (Under the Eagle et al. ad nauseum) for a bit of light relief.
     
  5. Mitch

    Mitch Lord Mitch of MAP Admin

    Bes reason for reading :)

    Mitch
     
  6. Mitch

    Mitch Lord Mitch of MAP Admin

    Did you ever see The Man Who Would Be King? It covers many of the themes you mention.

    Mitch
     
  7. belltoller

    belltoller OffTopic MonstreOrdinaire Supporter

    Oh yeah, one of my favourites. Who could forget Michael Caine's Peachy?
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2015
  8. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    mitch! you missed my posts!
     
  9. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    go team sci-fi!

    seconding these from earlier in the thread:

    the forever war: slight detail that is actually the key selling point that sets the book apart from 99% of futuristic military fiction: they have no reliabnle FTL space magic macguffins. space travel takes decades or centuries, and the real point of the book is not the war itself, but the gargantuan time lapses between missions and downtime, with all that it implies.

    neuromancer (actually the whole sprawl trilogy, neuromancer, count zero, and mona lisa overdrive): as far as i am aware (the series being from before my birth and all :p) this basically created classic cyberpunk as we know it. it's the ur-emaple and prime reference for the entire genre, more or less. also molly is awesome.

    the elric of melniboné saga: take the above paragraph and apply it to dark fantasy instead. if you are prone to brooding, feel out of place in your normal environment and have a penchant for the cynical, you WILL like elric and take great morbid pleasure in reading of his various misfortunes (i believe he's considered to fall quitre solidly under the byronic hero categorization).

    re: david eddings: i'm much more of a fan of his elenium and tamuli trilogies than of his belgariad and malloreon, although i enjoyed both. they share several characteristics (eddings himself said in his foreword to the two-volume edition of the belgariad that he purposefully wrote formulaic and linear evil-vs-good-with-mcguffin fiction), but the elenium and tamuli are a tad darker perhaps, and have grizzled veterans as protagonists rather than a teenager, which lets the story develop in a slightly different way. there's also some playing aroung with subverted religious themes that i found extremely amusing (just to start with, the protagonists belong to four orders of paladins who follow a proxy abrahamic religion, yet they receive magic power from other gods and everyone looks the other way because it's convenient :p)

    asimov's been mentioned to (a must read for any sci-fi fan), and from him i'd suggest the short story "the last question". why? because it's a witty and elegant solution. as to what that means, i leave it up to the reader to find out :D

    now as for my own suggestions:

    while we're talking classic sci-fi, i can't not mention frank herbert's dune series. dune the book is a peculiar animal. within its classic sci-fi shell, it's actually a political story, with a strong side of philosophy, psychology, religion, environmentalism, and sociology. the story goes as follows: the setting is a feudal galactic empire divided between the empire, the noble houses subservient to the empire but not under its direct control, and the mediating influence of the spacing guild, which controls the only means of interstellar travel. the protagonists, the ruling family of a noble house, who are sent by the emperor to oversee the planet arrakis, only source of the most valuable resource in the known universe, which extends life and is the source of the guild's space travel capabilities (explicitly intended to serve as an analogy to oil). problem is, in doing so they are inexplicably displacing the prior overseers, who happen to be their ancestral arch enemies, and there are other influences at play subtly manipulating pawns from the shadows. the end result is one of the most iconic science fiction works ever written, and a book that is truly mind-opening in its thematic scope.

    now, dune, the book series... there are several sequels (five, iirc, by frank herbert and a handful by his son but which no one likes). like most classic sci-fi, the further you get from the original novel, the more different (but not worse, mind you) they become. i myself am a massive fan of the first four books, and more specifically of the third one, children of dune. i have always seen the second, dune messiah, as more focused on the religious and sociological element, while children is more philosophically-inclined, and the fourth, god-emperor of dune, as returning more to the political and psychological parts, but that is just personal opinion.

    finishing up the classic sci fi theme, there's frederik pohl, from whom i'll mention two books:

    first, the space merchants: picture the general theme of 1984, with society taken over by an all encompassing governing power, only instead of a totalitarian dictatorship, it's big business. now take an ordinary marketing employee, living his life in that bubble, like the probervial human sheep/zombie/robot/whatever euphemism you prefer, and take him out of the matrix, so to speak, where he has to strive to survive as he falls between the cracks in the fabric of his worldview, as his former world tried to drag him back in and end him.

    secondly, gateway (which also has sequels, but which out of necessity veer tremendously off the themes of the first novel): gateway is a spqce opera without any grand empires or bellicose themes, or politics. gateway is a story of both personal and impersonal exploration, in which humanity has discovered an alien artifact, the eponymous gateway, actually a gigantic hangar containing hundreds of ships that can be activated and launched, but not controlled. through the gateway and the information and artifacts brought via the blind voyages of its ships, humanity is slowly prospering, but going on such a blind voyage has a high probability of being a suicide mission, and although very handsomely rewarded whenever valuable information is brought back, it is not something lightly undertaken. enter the story's protagonist, as his psychiatry sessions make him retell the story of his stint on gateway, eventually coming full circle to the reason for his being there receiving psychotherapy even though he is now rich and retired from his mission bonuses.

    now onto more modern malarkey :D

    in a similar vein to gateway, i am highly fond of peter watts's blindsight (which he has up as a free downlod for his personal website, incidentally). it's thematically similar, being very hard sci-fi (including many elements of neuroscience) heavily bent on themes of exploration of the unknown and psychological introspection via flashbacks and retelling, but varying heavily in the details, being the story of a post-scarcity earth (that is, every material need successfully satisfied via technological advance) that is inexplicably attacked by alien artifacts, and of the mission that seeks to make first contact and if possible peace with the apparent source of said aggression, from the point of view of one of the crewmen, who as a child was left virtually incapable of feeling emotions due to brain surgery, and during the mission reflects on his life, his choices, his fundamental otherness with regards to most people, and the increasingly apparent alienness of that which they were sent to contact.

    leaving space opera almost completely in favor of psionics and time travel, we have julian may's saga of pliocene exile, and its sequel/prequel, the galactic milieu. in saga of pliocene exile, we are introduced to a humanity which was prematurely inducted into a conglomerate of psionic races, while not having fully awakened into psionics itself. this results in a huge number of cases of humans who are either not psionic or have lost or blocked their abilities through accident and trauma, whose level of discontent is so high that they choose to be exiled through a one-way time loop to the pliocene in an attempt to get away from it all and start anew in a world without psionics. it follows one such group of outcasts as they discover that even in the pliocene, they couldn't quite escape it after all... the series that followed it, galactic milieu, is in turn the story of humanity's gradual development of psionic abilities throughout the 20th century, its eventual uplifting into the aforementioned galactic milieu, and various stereotypically human and eventually nearly catastrophic shenanigans that occur as a result of their uplift being premature, as seen from the viewpoint of one particular family line whose psionic development is so accelerated that they effectively become the standard bearers for human psionics within the milieu, and are at the very forefront of the aforementioned troubles.

    the last sci-fi recommendation i'm going to make is iain m. banks's culture series. before i even start i'll give you an idea of how strongly i recommend these by stating that banks was the closest i've ever seen to what i might describve as enlightened, and is thus far the only person whose death has literally offended me. i like the culture series a lot.

    what is the culture, then? it's a high-technology, ultraliberal interstellar conglomerate of individuals (including AIs), which live in perpetual post-scarcity due to access to nearly unlimited energy. what does the culture do? individually, they frolic in idyllic bohemian lifestyles, mainly either in orbitals (gigantic ring-shaped habitats) or in veritable worldships called general systems vehicles, both orbitals and GSVs in turn being fully autonomous due to housing a "Mind", an incredibly powerful AI. the Minds are, in essence, the culture, but don't lead it, they just manage it and give every culture citizen near infinite freedom insofar as limitless resources permit.

    now, those outside the culture are another matter entirely. many are afraid of the culture, have misconceptions and stereotypes about it, and are often hostile to it. and the culture proselityzes. occasionally, mistakes are made. occasionally, the brown stuff hits the fan. occasionally the culture does it on purpose. the only thing it has that is close to an official organization is Special Circumstances. that is an euphemism. Special Circumstances gets things done, and not always the nice way and almost never bluntly or conspicuously. the novels themselves, which are mostly unconnected stories, deal with this aspect of the culture, quite often from the point of view not of the culture itself or of SC and its official operatives, but of those civilizations and individuals affected by them, both within and outside their official sphere of influence. it is sublime (heh heh heh...).
     
  10. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    i'm with mitch. there's a lot more out there than sci-fi and fantasy. you might like it, give it a shot.
     
  11. Fish Of Doom

    Fish Of Doom Will : Mind : Motion Supporter

    *sprinkles sci-fi everywhere*
     
  12. Bozza Bostik

    Bozza Bostik Antichrist on Button Moon

    And the authors can usually actually write.

    I was thinking that we should start another thread called "The Books for Adults Thread". But then I realised some one would probably get banned for posting pics of the cover of Hustler...my guess is it would probably be Mitch! :p
     
  13. Langenschwert

    Langenschwert Molon Labe

    No thanks. for the most part, I have no interest in reading fiction about the real world. The only non-fiction I read is history or MA stuff. In fiction I want to be transported as far away as possible.

    I have no interest in reading about the emotional journey of a girl form the Mid-West discovering the meaning of sisterhood while recovering from the emotional wounds of a distant father, the escapades of gangsters and the moral quandaries of a life of crime, the biography of an overpaid celebrity, a period piece detailing the love lives and witty repartee of Enlightenment period aristocrats, or some gritty, hard-hitting expose on "life on the streets".

    I want spaceships, mutants, wizards, heroes, barbarians, eldritch horror, lasers, explosions, walking skeletons, mad science, and the feeling that there is no way I could have experienced that on this earth past or present. I see the Earth every day. I have no interest in experiencing more of it vicariously. I could just get on a plane to do that!

    :)

    N.B. But whatever floats your boat. If you like reading about the real world, there are plenty of authors to accommodate you. My only beef with modern fantasy is that there are so few good writers doing it. Much like modern music really. I don't listen to much recorded after 1965.
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2015
  14. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    i love sci-fi and fantasy too. but by only reading about aliens, et. al., you're missing out on tons, and i mean tons, of awesome material.

    like a story about a guy fishing: the old man and the sea. yeah, it's pretty much about a guy in a boat that goes on a fishing trip.

    obviously you can read whatever you like, just throwing out something of interest--the point of this whole thread really.

    cheers. :)
     
  15. CrowZer0

    CrowZer0 Assume formlessness.

    Damn that's a lot of stuff to look into from both fish and belltoller.

    As for me personally I don't read "just" fantasy, I read anything and everything. Fantasy just happens to be one of my favourite genres. Recently I've gone through a crime phase of rereading the Dexter books, some Martina Cole and I went through most of the Jack Reacher books. I go through phases, right now I'm thirsty for some more good fantasy!
     
  16. Langenschwert

    Langenschwert Molon Labe

    It would be cool if the old man hooked a kraken, got hauled underwater into a domed city under the sea and discovered all the eldritch horrors lurking therein. He escaped using the city's genetic manipulation machine to give himself gills, swam to the surface, was bagged by x-files type agents and ended up in the equivalent of the Arkham asylum. That would be awesome. Guess I've got some writing to do. ;)
     
  17. Giovanni

    Giovanni Well-Known Member Supporter

    ok, i've got two "classics" for you that i think you might like @langenschwert....

    the iliad: crazy violence and war, especially once achilles rejoins the fray, and some gods.

    the odyssey: may be the first fantasy story, ever! gods, monsters, sex...really, what else could you want?

    the lattimore translation of these two works is the most well known and the ones i've read. but i've read good things about the more recent mitchell translations.
     
  18. Langenschwert

    Langenschwert Molon Labe

    I've read the Odyssey, and am part way through the Iliad. I am a huge fan of ancient heroic literature. My goal is to be able to read Beowulf untranslated one day. Then the Icelandic sagas. Old Norse is mutually intelligible with Anglo-Saxon to a large degree. Shouldn't be too far a stretch.

    There would be no Conan without the Odyssey and the rest. Nor would there be Star Wars. What I love about SW is the blending of the technological and the mythic. The Hero's Journey in space.

    Likewise with Tolkien. A scholar of ancient myths creating a new myth cycle. Fantastic. I'm currently slogging through the History of Middle Earth. Pretty dry stuff really.

    For the record, I hate Dickens with the burning intensity of a thousand suns.

    Beowulf though. Just listen to it spoken! That is English:
    [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGMOKDuY_-U"]Beowulf in Old English (Prologue) - YouTube[/ame]

    Þæt was god englisc!
     
    Last edited: Jul 2, 2015
  19. csoby

    csoby Valued Member

    I did love the 'Sparhawk' series as well...


    I recently read

    Dickens - A Christmas Carol
    Paul Williams - The Shack
    Matthew Quick - The Silver Linings Playbook
     
  20. ap Oweyn

    ap Oweyn Ret. Supporter

    Agreed. I've only read the Zothique Cycle so far. Looking forward to more.

    For Machen, his oft-cited "best work" is The Great God Pan. But I really enjoyed The Little People personally. A very dark take on the origins of folklore about leprechauns, elves, etc.
     

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