One of my favorite SF writers when I was growing up was Clifford Simak. I must have read just about every one of his Novels that I could find. I primarily recommend "City" and "Waystation". Recently, I started going back and reading a bunch of Heinlein novels that I never read before, none of which I want to really recommend (none of them were bad, per se, but none were worth mentioning). Instead, I will recommend some classic Heinlein: "Stranger in a Strange Land", "The Puppet Masters", "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", "The Past Through Tomorrow", and "Time Enough for Love". The last two should be read in that order -- "The Past through Tomorrow" is a short story collection that kind of fits an alternate history, and "Time Enough for Love" follows it sequentially. There's a lot more that's good, but you can start with those.
Dune is great, foundation is good but can at the same time be boring, it's not a rivetting read, but an intellectual one. War of the worlds is terrible.
I kinda liked War of the Worlds. Sure, with what we know now it's completely impossible but putting yourself in the mindset of people who didn't know Mars was dead yet or that viruses/bacteria won't be able to do much of anything with extraplanetary creatures; it's quite a fascinating look at what people of the time thought could happen. And it's not a bad invasion story either, if you bellisarios the bits that modern science says are stupid.
For those who like reading books that are... different... I recommend. Jeff Noon: Vurt, Nymphomation, etc. Trippy is an understatement. Mary Doria Russel: The Sparrow, Children of God (read sequentially). Hard sci-fi, with psychological moral quandries. Gene Wolfe: Book of the New Sun(5 parts). That's roughly the order I'd rate them for disturbance factor as well. Note that the protagonist in Book of the New Sun is a torturer's apprentice...
It's not an exciting read, the storytelling is poor. It was novel at the time, with lots of interesting ideas, and now it's only interesting from an anthropologic perspective.
That happens to a lot of books sadly, I had that expierence with the Wheel Of Time. It was just one cliche after the other, though he invented them all
Actually, modern science doesn't know how our bacteria would react with alien life. We haven't found any yet so we can't say. If the panspermia model happens to be true, a lot of life could share the basics and would make it likely that something could happen. (NOTE panspermia is where life is carried throughout the universe on asteroids and meteors and such.) Besides, there are many organisms on earth that "eat" different substances, there could likely be something there that would find something in an alien delicious.
As this is kinda inside my field of study, I must say that it is highly unlikely that any of our bacteria and virus would be able to live of any alien form of life. The organisms that need another living being to survive, some special kind of bacteria, are very much adapted to their host. Extremly so. Else, they'd not be effective in surviving. The fittest is the organism that is best adapted to its host or prey. And no, here are few organisms that eat different substances, most organisms can process only 2-3 categories. From a scientific point of view, any interaction with alien life forms is highly improbable.
Dude, crop circles are fake. I'm the model for the Lady Adventurer. How else would you explain the figure and the hair? Clearly an alien.
Ahem (lol) back to books... When you judge older books, you have to judge them within the light of what was known and/or believed at the time it was written (either popularly, or even within technically knowledgeable circles). But another aspect that I believe is actually fair to judge is that magazines in Wells time (and for decades later) would pay by the word, so there's a kind of wordy style that arose which was, unfortunately, all too common. I tend to prefer a crisper writing style (hence my love of Vonnegut). Even today, I feel there are writers who tend towards wordiness, and if you like that (which apparently, based on some of the writers named in the thread, some of you do) then that's great. I just don't necessarily share that love. Despite that, I actually do like a lot of Wells writing -- at least some of his shorter fiction. "Empire of the Ants" is one of my favorites of his and I highly recommend it (it's not science fiction, and the truly awful/cheesy sci fi movie that shared the name had absolutely no connection to Wells' story).
No no, you judge them on wether they are enjoyable reads. Note: I consider War of the Worlds to be terrible, other books from around that time are eminently readable.Compare: Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, Lewis Carrol, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Lewis Stevenson.
Actually, I was referring to technical accuracy and the comments about Wells getting the science wrong.
Ah. well, so does Edgar Rice Burroughs, but he's a fun casual read. I mean he thinks gravity depends on the atmosphere, and which was known to be false at the time.
Ooh! I'll double down on Bester. The Demolished Man is a great examination of how a world with telepathy would work, and The Stars My Destination is a terrific story (no surprise, the plot is stolen from Dumas). But for my money, where Bester really shines is his short stories: "5,271,009", "The Man who Murdered Mohammed" and "Hobson's Choice" are three of my favorites. Can I confess that I don't like Terry Pratchett? I've tried three of the Discworld books and didn't enjoy them. I didn't like Good Omens either (and here's where I confess that I don't like Neil Gaiman's non-Sandman work either.) At the moment, I'm reading Red Plenty, which I can straight up guarantee is the best novel about Soviet economic development I'll read this year, probably ever! Also recommended is Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King, about King Mithradates VI, maybe Rome's greatest enemy, self-appointed savior of the Greek world, and a guy who made himself immune to poison by taking tiny doses of all known toxins: in other words, a 100% badass. The book is non-fiction, but reads like a novel, and was nominated for the National Book Award. It's really good stuff.
Quite a large number of poisons don't work like that, even for ones that existed at that time. Just a FYI. There's quite a number of them where this would be a slow way to suicide, as they build up in your body. His immunity is a legend, and there may have been some toxins he indeed developed resistance to(and then also likely addiction to some of them), but not all of them, not even all known at his time, by the greeks. /derail.
