Books You Should Have Read By Now

Time Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter: Absolutely amazing, be sure to read them in order.



The Collected Stories by Arthur C. Clarke: Collection of almost all of Arthur C. Clarke's stories (not novels). It has a story that pokes fun at biologists and chemists because everyone knows physics is master race. That alone justifies buying the entire book.



The Eerie Silence by Paul Davis: I was in the library one day, looking for a book which described the hypotheticals of advanced alien civilizations. This book was exactly what I was looking for. Very interesting to say the least.



The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil: If you like computers, AI, graphs, the word "exponential(ly)" and things being described as an evolutionary process then oh boy is this the book for you!



The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov: More good ol' fashioned sci fi but with robots everywhere. May or may not convince you that you want a robot. Contains almost all the short stories written by Asimov.



1984 by George Orwell: It's friggin' 1984. You really should just read it. I'm pretty sure it's the only book that ever got passed the "must-not-be-enjoyable" department which decides which books English classes study.



Brave New World by Aldous Huxley: Quite possibly the most disturbing book ever written. May or may not scar you for life.

I need to read Brave New World.

Old Man's War is great. I recommend it highly.

All of the Halo books are good. Very low barrier for entry. You don't need to have played, or be a fan. I would recommend reading them in published order (even though most of them are unrelated to each other).

If you think Brave New World is disturbing, you clearly haven't read A Clockwork Orange. People often pass over 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood when they talk about dystopian novels, but I personally like it better than the two classics by Huxley and Orwell. Handmaid's Tale is more subtle, more nuanced.

Also anyone who can read English sufficiently well should read Hemingway. I f*cking love Hemingway.

Hail for "Brave New World" & "1984".
Awsome books...
Readed a good part of Asimov too.
Missing the rest trough >.<

Personally I don't think Clockwork is nearly as disturbing as BNW. I'd rather not have a debate because this forum doesn't have spoiler tags.

If we're talking sci fi, I think I should mention that my username is the name of a ship in Ian M Banks' Culture novels, and my avatar is the cover of Schismatrix, a fantastically short, dense and brilliant sci fi novel by the legendary Bruce Sterling.

A friend of mine said "That is literally the worst name I've ever seen".

Good piece of info, thanks.

The Revelation Space trilogy from Alastair Reynolds is really good.

Yea, I can understand why someone would feel like BNW is more disturbing.

My favorite book of all time:
Watership Down

Nobody's read Time Odyssey? You should. You really should.

I found it a weird and wonderful mix of fascinating and disturbing. Really a must-read.

Asimov, oh Asimov. I think Nightfall, The Last Question and All the troubles of the World are definitely must-reads (they're short stories, an hour of reading or so). Just google those, they're free to read on the internet AFAIK.

Ah Nightfall. I think he's absolutely right in that particular story.

I'm noticing a very heavy leaning towards sci-fi in this thread.

I've yet to read something that I thought was better written than The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander. Though I really do need to get around to reading Watership Down.

Well then you should read some of these books.

Ender's Game is good, although i've only seen the movie. I haven't opened a proper book in years and i'm just itching to order the book. So yea, gonna see if i can slip any of these in the order (and budget)

unlike pulp sci fi, the unique setting is just to more freely explore the social/ethical/whatever field ramifications.
Sci fi is a way of saying "well this wouldn't happen in real life, but what if it WOULD" while having more restraints than Fantasy.

In my pretentious opinion, there's a very big difference between sci-fi and what you could call speculative fiction, or the magical realism and surrealism of Murakami, Marquez and Kafka. In speculative fiction and magical realism, the impossibilities and unlikelihoods serve a function to the moral of the story or main question posited to the reader, rather than mere entertainment. I personally feel a lot of sci-fi novels are borderline cases, but to quote Chekhov: "brevity is the sister of talent," meaning if an aspect of a story is irrelevant to the main thing you want to say, don't add it. I always feel a lot of sci-fi novels could be set in the present and still say exactly the same thing.

pretentious literature student out b*tches

Well made fantasy can do the same thing with a lot more freedom, and stuff written about a mostly historically accurate earth can do the same thing with significantly less.

As far as sci-fi goes, I tend to prefer the softer sci-fi like 1984 and Kiln People(first half) over hard stuff that is mostly just a good deal of scientific knowledge phallus waving.

This, but in a less pretentious way because I also enjoy some entertainment value in my books. And I'm not a lit student.