Science Fiction and Fantasy Thread
 

I thoroughly enjoy Science Fiction and Fantasy literature and movies. I love the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert, and the movies. The epic movie Star Gate with Kurt Russel and David Spade is amazing. I also love Tolkien particularly LOTR, the books and movies. 2001: A Space Odyssey gave an ominous look into our future with the murderous AI, HAL 9000. What do you enjoy?

The first Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology should be required reading for literally everyone.

I'm currently reading my way through Foundation. At first I thought it nailed the fictional-history-book conceit in a way that other attempts (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Frank Herbert never did. And then I realized that it wasn't constructed like a history book; it was constructed like a stage play based on a history book, and that's why it works so well. Among the predictions it's made that have come true? Messages encrypted with biometrics (called "characteristics" in the books).

I started with fantasy before there was any such genre! In those days there was only Tolkien and his creation of a completely different world was such a weird idea that hardly anyone had read him. If you met another person at school who had, it was like finding yourself a member of a secret club.

Science fiction in those days was mostly hard SF and I thought that was just for boys. I did like the Foundation trilogy though, because the books were more about people's reactions to social forces and events than gee-whizz rocketry stuff. And I liked C S Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet.

I'm currently rereading Lord of the Rings, just finished The Kraken Wakes and The Day of the Triffids in succession. Also like Robert Asprin's Myth and Phule series and Inferno by Niven and Pournelle.

Those are my current favourites, but the list will probably change when I start my next binge of James White or Arthur Clarke (or Agatha Christie or Ellis Peters or R Austin Freeman if I decide to return to crime instead...)

Niven (Ringworld…but everything). Heinlein. Dick.

Grey lensman by EE. Doc Smith
Chung Kuo series by David Wingrove
For vampires it was Necroscope series by Brian Lumney
Read all his books

Conan, Krull, Solomane Kane, Imaro, Wolf of the Steppes. The reluctant swordsman for the scooter tramp in me.

I was an avid reader of science fiction when I was a young 'un, but, when it took a dystopian turn in the mid-1970s, I drifted away from it. Real life is dystopian enough, thank you very much.

Asimov is easily my favorite science fiction author. And I think the LOTR is a masterpiece and I find it fascinating how Tokien drew on Norse legends in constructing it.

I would also suggest not to ignore the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, many of which are available from Project Gutenberg and Librivox.

I can also recommend Frederick Pohl's Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, though I must confess it's the only one of that trilogy I've read; it was forced on my by a friend of mine and I'm glad she did.

Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World is also a fun read. I wouldn't call it a masterpiece, but Doyle was an excellent writer.

Yes, I liked those. I was fascinated by the idea of China conquering the world and then changing recorded history systematically so that everyone would think it had always been that way. Of course he got that idea from Orwell. I never got to read the last book in the series but apparently that's no loss; Wingrove had to write it in a hurry because of a contractual obligation and it's supposed to be dreadful.

There's also a prequel called Dawn on Iron Mountain if you're interested.

I'm a huge fan of the Star Trek, Star Wars TV shows and movies. I'm currently enjoying the Mandelorian on Disney +. You're a fan if you grok my signature. :)

Been a few years since I've read them but I enjoyed Anne McCaffrey's "Dragonriders of Pern" series very much.

Yes, I loved them too. They're an odd crossover because they read very much like fantasy (lords and dragons) but they are actually science fiction (life on a planet that was originally colonised from Earth and then reverted to a more primitive state).

Ms McCaffrey is dead now and her heirs have taken over the narrative, but I don't much like what they have done with it. It's gone "woke" with a lot of polyamory and too much time travel. Yes, we know that dragons can jump between times but when they do it too much, things just get confusing.

I'm probably older than most here as I was born in 1946 so Sci Fi was all around me in the 50s and onward and by 1950 I sought it out in its' numerous forms. I was a rabid reader of Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Clark, Silverberg, Niven, Andre Norton, G. Harry Stine (who was a rocket scientist at White Sands) and many others including those regularly published in the "Amazing" periodical but I soon grew out of the Fantasy related and also gravitated away from books and movies that included a lot of Horror usually at "Science gone wrong". I prefer hard Science Fiction. For example, "Star Trek The Next Generation" and some of the movies were great to me while "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager" were not compelling at all. "Star Wars" and I mean all of the episodes not just Jar Jar, is for children. I loved both "2001" and "2010". I dearly loved Andre Norton (even under her early pen name, Andrew North) early on when she concentrated on imaginative but rather hard Sci Fi but after a few years she evolved into more of the "Sword and Sorcery: sub-genre and I b egan to lose interest in her work.

Currently the best Sci Fi I've recently witnessed in Pop Culture is "The Expanse".

**** This will be the year of the Linux desktop **** :D

Haha! An epic fantasy!
I love reading Ray Bradbury.

I tried a few of Bradbury's books but couldn't make sense of them. Weird, poetic but definitely not science.