Sci-fi novels

Recommend me some sci-fi novels, you puny faggots.

What are some? Please try to only name books with AT LEAST SOMEWHAT decent prose. (That completely excludes Clarke and Douglas Adams, obviously.)

What, cat took your tongues? Huh?

What do you mean by sci-fi? Satire science-fiction like Bradbury or Vonnegut or "traditional" science-fiction?

I would recommend "The Gods Themselves" by Asimov

Ursula Le Guin is basically the only science fiction you ever need to read

Dianetics

Try looking up "To Your Scattered Bodies Go"

I forget who it's by, but it's boss.

k,

The bible

Philip K. Dick

>>9
The bible isn't science fiction. It's historical mythology

>>5
Oh I forgot about Stanyiswav Lem. That guy too

The Dresden Files series

Enders Game

HARLAN ELLISON -> ANYTHING

(specifically The Death Bird, A Boy and His Dog, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream)

He writes short stories, though

C.J. Cherryh writes great books. Also CORDWAINER SMITH YOU GUYS. Ray Bradbury has a way with words, doesn't he? Charlie Stross, good. Everyone should read Richard K. Morgan. I won't name books because obviously anything these folks produce is pure latinum.

Cherryh, Cyteen:
It was from the air that the rawness of the land showed most: vast tracts where humanity had as yet made no difference, deserts unclaimed, stark as moons, scrag and woolwood thickets unexplored except by orbiting radar. Ariane Emory gazed down at it from the window. She kept to the passenger compartment now. Her eyesight, she had to admit it, was no longer sharp enough, her reflexes no longer fast enough for the jet. She could go up front, bump the pilot out of the chair and take the controls: it was her plane, her pilot, and a wide sky. Sometimes she did. But it was not the same.
Only the land was, still most of the land was. And when she looked out the window, it might have been a century ago, when humankind had been established on Cyteen less than a hundred years, when Union was unthought of , the War only a rumbling discontent, and the land looked exactly like this everywhere.

Smith, The Ballad of Lost C'mell:
She was a girlygirl and they were true men, the lords of creation, but she pitted her wits against them and she won. It had never happened before, and it is sure never to happen again, but she did win. She was not even of human extraction. She was cat-derived, though human in outward shape, which explains the C in front of her name. Her father's name was C'mackintosh and her name C'mell. She won her tricks against the lawful and assembled Lords of the Instrumentality.
It all happened at Earthport, greatest of buildings, smallest of cities, standing twenty-five kilometers high at the western edge of the Smaller Sea of Earth.
Jestocost had an office outside the fourth valve.

Stross, Singularity Sky:
Sister Seventh farted smugly. “I have been monitoring the Festival. Not one of the indigines has asked it for information! Artifacts, yes. Food, yes. Machines, up to and including replicators, yes. But philosophy? Art? Mathematics? Ontology? We might be witnessing our first zombie civilization.”
Zombies were a topic that fascinated Sister Seventh. An ancient hypothesis of the original pre-Singularity ur-civilization, a zombie was a non-self-conscious entity that acted just like a conscious one: it laughed, cried, talked, ate, and generally behaved just like a real person, and if questioned, would claim to be conscious—but behind its superficial behavior, there was nobody home, no internalized model of the universe it lived in.
The philosophers had hypothesized that no such zombies existed, and that everything that claimed personhood was actually a person. Sister Seventh was less convinced. Human beings—those rugose, endothermic anthropoids with their ridiculously small incisors and anarchic social arrangements—didn't seem very real to her. So she was perpetually searching for evidence that, actually, they weren't people at all.

I'm gonna go with
C.S. Friedman - This alien shore
(sorry about the lack of formatting. I'm a /book/ noob.

*******************************************************
3.     And then Mankind took his machines and he split the skies asunder, and he sent into God's heavens his ships and his machines and all the unclean things of the Earth.
He set foot upon the planets which God had not meant for his use.

He painted the heavens black with his pride and his arrogance.

He angered the Lord in those and a thousand ways, until the Lord spake unto him, and said,

Behold, I gave you Babel, and you did not heed My warning.

You built a Tower unto the skies and I divided you into myriad peoples, that you might know shame and be humbled before your God.

Now you build something greater than a tower, that intrudes into My very heavens.

Now I shall divide you again, but not merely by speech, or by color.

Now you shall be not one species but many, and each shall hate and fear the others, and the seed that is shared between them shall be barren. So shall you be divided until the end of time, that you may remember My wrath.

And he set the mark of Hausman into their flesh, so that all might know their shame. And those who were loyal to His name, who remained upon Earth, were untouched by his curse, and might bear children as they chose, for such was the sign of His favor.
 
           Colonies 11:21-30
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It's not REALLY God, though. And I kinda find it hard to find quotes and excerpts. But another one here:

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 The Guildsman pulled out a chair and settled into it; his full sleeves fell upon the table top as he leaned forward, his posture stiff with tension.
    "One hundred and ninety E-days ago, a Guild outpilot was badly injured while returning to port. Analysis of his personal log shows there was a malfunction in his brainware at the moment of transition. It lasted only seconds, but that was long enough. In that instant he believed himself to be an alien creature, surrounded by beings whose brains didn't function like his own. He believed that these beings had fed programs into his brainware which would make it impossible for him to think clearly ,and that they had surgically implanted a mechanism in his arm which would feed drugs into his bloodstream, altering the very essence of his identity. With only seconds in which to act, he did what he could to disable the perceived mechanism, and then attempted to smash his skull open so that he could tear out his wiring. Fortunately for him, the latter effort failed."
    "Since his basic assumptions were correct," Masada said quietly, "I find it hard to comprehend your objection to them."

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Cool novel, nice action, cool universe, cool tech.

Any of Stephen Baxter's works. I started off with Manifold: Space, part of a trilogy of novels that each occur in their own universe and attempt to answer the Fermi Paradox. Other awesome works are the Xeelee Sequence, which covers a vast war throughout time and space with the highly misunderstood Xeelee, and a currently unnamed disaster series which covers the end of the world and what happens after. Hit his wiki entry for the proper order of most of his works--though for the Manifold trilogy, order isn't important, and the Xeelee Sequence covers such vast tracts of time that you may as well hit in whatever order you can find them.
He also wrote, with Arthur C. Clarke, A Time Odyssey, three books that are a kind of alternate universe Space Odyssey--they were the very last things Clarke wrote before his death.
Oh, and he wrote an authorized sequel to The Time Machine, called The Time Ships, which was epic. So--let's face it, authorized to write a sequel to one of the greatest time travel stories of all time, worked with one of the biggest names in science fiction. He's worth your time.

>>17 here
I'm gonna start up with a Warhammer 40K book soon, just for larks. Think it's the Space Wolf Omnibus.

Any good recommendations in the WH40K series?

>>12
Never read Le Guin yet, but you recommend Lem? Whoa, you've got taste, dammit.

Please elaborate on Le Guin, then. Isn't she a fantasy writer or somehting? What should I read?

>>18
OP here again,
looking into this Baxter dude. Thanks, sounds good!

Thanks everyone, too. Please keep your recommendations coming.

>>22
The reviewer is right, "Lovecraftian fiction" is fanfiction level ALWAYS, and is even more retarded than vampire fiction sometimes. If somebody wrote decent stuff in the "genre", that would be great. Too bad nobody talented ever wrote in it.

Imagine a world where Lovecraft is good with words. Or ACTUALLY is a good writer. HOly fuck, that would have been glorious.

>>20
The Left Hand of Darkness is what you'll want to read

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yeah but it's got jack kerouac battling cthulu in it.


honestly what more do you want.

>>25
something that isn't retarded maybe/

>>25
I'll read it. I hope it's good.

In fact, it starts out kinda interesting, although there's a really stupid horror-movie shoggoth right in the middle, and he's treated seriously and not as a joke, even htough all it amounts to in the scene is comedy.

I recommend all of Michael Crichton's books.

I'll just list some worthwhile books I've read recetly

The Mote in Gods eye
Beautiful Red
Metagame
The Gripping Hand
Tokyo Zero
Metropolis

Beautiful Red and Metagame are really good examples of modern cyberpunk


Happy reading

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Dune

>>24
seconded.

Also, Hyperion is amazing sci-fi. Stranger In A Strange Land is good but a little...mystical, might be the word. Fantastic book, anyways. The entire Foundation series is great but of them the first book is one of my all-time favorites.

The White Plague.