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Comment by AdamHominem | Hacker News Reader

I recently read Fire Upon the Deep and I think I'd agree that Vinge is great at speculative fiction. I hadn't looked at the publish/copyright date when I borrowed the ebook from my library.

I was shocked just now to see it's a thirty year old book. Zero signs or hints of it, at least to me. The concept that computers/AIs can be affected by the region of space they're in is a nifty idea I don't think I've seen before, and one can find some parallels today (for example, Siri now on a sufficiently new enough iPhone isn't completely useless, but much more capable when within range of a data connection.)

My only complaint about FUtD was that some elements of the plot, namely stuff going on in the planet, felt drawn out and slow.

Thank you both for recommending another one of his books.

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You can kinda tell when FutD originates by the fact that it has, basically, a galactic Usenet. Granted, it's justified by the setting, but still.

It is a bit of a slow burn.

But with these books, Vernor Vinge has now become one of my favorite authors, up there with Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, David Drake, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle (although I don’t care for Niven and Pournelle when they work together).

Larry Niven has introduced me to some new authors that I’ve liked, through his “Man-Kzin Wars” series, but I haven’t read enough of their works to put them in my “favorite authors” category, at least not yet.

Piers Anthony is also great, but I’ve only read his fantasy novels, so I can’t speak for where he would rate on the SF scale. I also wouldn’t consider Edgar Rice Burroughs to be SF. Same for Arthur Conan Doyle.

And Orson Scott Card is just plain weird. I love his work, but I find it hard to recommend to others.

James S. A. Corey is a pseudonym of two authors, so I don’t feel like I can include it on the top list above. But I do love what I’ve seen of their work.

Ironically, while I love the Dune movie, I haven’t actually read any of Frank Herbert’s work. I look forward to seeing the new Dune movie as well, and then maybe I’ll go back and read some of the novels.

I absolutely hated, loathed, and despised Aldous Huxley. The closest I ever came to suicide was while I was forced to read his book. The second closest was when I was forced to read “Madame Bovary”. Both were a result of a sophomore level English class I was forced to take in order to get my degree.

I don’t think I’ve actually read any of Roald Dahl’s novels, same with Cory Doctorow, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman.

And I think I’ll stop there. I’m seeing too many names that I recognize on the list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science-fiction_author... but which I don’t remember reading any of their work. So, I’ve got a few decades of reading to catch up on.

The classics are classics for a reason. Huxley and Flaubert are both wonderful authors, but all the joy was sucked out reading their works when I was forced to do it. I don't know why. Personal failing, maybe.

I thought Herbert's non-_Dune_ works were very good while also being very disturbing. I read _The White Plague_ in my teens and am reminded of it whenever I read about modern gene drive technology. The ConSentiency stories and books have stayed with me to this day, and I periodically re-read them. Both _Hellstrom's Hive_ and _The Santaroga Barrier_ are fantastic utopias crossed over with deep horror; I love them but can't bring myself to re-read them!

Everybody's different. I can't stand Asimov or Clarke or Drake or Heinlein, despite reading nearly all of their respective science fiction oeuvres, but that Ursula Le Guin isn't in your top five is a damn shame. _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is one of my favorite books, and _The Dispossessed_ primed a political conversion completed by Iain Banks' Culture novels years later. Le Guin and Banks are probably my two favorite authors now, and in that order, with Bradbury and Adams a very close third and fourth.

I'm so tired of trilogies and tetralogies and so on and so forth. I wish authors would just finish the damn story. I think that's why I like Le Guin and Banks so much. You can read out of order and it's no big deal. In fact, I read _The Tombs of Atuan_ before _A Wizard of Earthsea_, and all of Le Guin's Hanish stories are stand-alone. The same goes for Banks' Culture novels, where I started with _Excession_ and back-tracked to _Consider Phelebas_ and read in release order (mostly).

Anyway, I heartily recommend giving the literary fiction another chance some day. There's some really amazing stuff out there that doesn't happen in space.

I liked Madame Bovary so much :( I did read it in my late 20s though. It's such a slick book, I loved the... style/aesthetics. True nothing happens in it, but still. I guess I was going through a more lyrically motivated reading phase at the time.

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