Shout out

[sylvari]

To all my amazingly smart and well read f-list

The Shiny boi is looking to expand his sci-fi reading. So any suggestions for good science fiction books to read would be most appreciated.
 Fantasy books would be appreciated too. Classic "must reads" are at the top of his list of books to start with and I know all you people out there in lj land have some fairly extensive book lists and some excellent taste.

So list me kiddos ...

Comments

[tonysalieri.livejournal.com]

I liked Richard K. Morgan's "Takeshi Kovacs" series. The first one, Altered Carbon, being the most accessible. Broken Angels gets a little weird, but it picks up well again in Woken Furies. Lot of interesting ideas about what society might be like if we could digitally store, transfer, and clone minds and bodies, but we hadn't, as a society, gotten our personal shit together before we started colonizing the immediate galaxy.

Dune, is of course, worth reading. I'm not sure I would bother much past the first book, and I've not heard great things about the stuff Herbert's kid did. But I've always been fascinated by the almost "low-tech" vision of the future, with it's weird Buddhist-Islam-Catholic worldview, and it's moral about the inexorable nature of impermanence.

Fred Pohl's Gateway series is a fun read, although I've only done about two and a half books of it. The Deathgate Cycle is also interesting, it's sort of sci-fi masquerading as fantasy. Maybe the other way around.