[bartzbrau]

Dune was indeed boring at spots.  All the politics.  I'm not sure why I read as much of it as I did.

If you like what they call "space opera" (as far as I can tell, it's hard sci fi with a big story arc), check out Peter Hamiltion, Stephen Baxter, and Alistair Reynolds.  You can see some of their stuff on Amazon.com

[akr71]

Speaking of stories, how bout Philip K Dick. I really loved Solar Lottery.

I strongly agree with  reading Phillip K Dick - especially "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"  (aka BladeRunner)

Robert J Sawyer is another great SF author - try the "Hominds" series, absolutely amazing.

[majorvices]

Dune was indeed boring at spots.  All the politics.  I'm not sure why I read as much of it as I did.

If you like what they call "space opera" (as far as I can tell, it's hard sci fi with a big story arc), check out Peter Hamiltion, Stephen Baxter, and Alistair Reynolds.  You can see some of their stuff on Amazon.com

Did you only read the first one? If so you missed out. I admit the first few times I tried to read it I had a hard time getting into it - but when it "clicked" I couldn;t put it down. Fascinating Universe he created. Far from boring. If you think that's boring I would recommend sticking to Harry Potter, Eclipse and the like. 

[bartzbrau]

Yeah, for some reason, I read all the way to I think the last Frank Herbert written one.  That last one was almost all politics to me.

I'll leave the HP/teenie vamp stuff for you, man.

Don't forget the king of sci fi, Arthur C Clarke.

[Slowbrew]

The Hells Gate Series by David Weber is an interesting story.  He's only published the first 2 books so far but they are a different take on how divergent populations might develop along completely different lines and what happens when they meet.

The Destroyerman Series by Taylor Anderson is a good read too.  It's a parallel world story where humans end up on an "Earth" without any indigenous humans but some really nasty races.

The Dune books published by Herbert's son really aren't too bad.  They aren't Frank's caliber but they do give a lot of background on how the universe of Dune got so freakishly messed up.

Paul

[denny]

Speaking of stories, how bout Philip K Dick. I really loved Solar Lottery.

ANYTHING by Philip K. Dick will spin your head around!

[bluefoxicy]

BTW, I thought you were dead.

I got better.

[bluefoxicy]

I've got to get the Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide one day.

Science: A systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about nature and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories

Fiction: Any form of narrative which deals, in part or in whole, with events that are not factual, but rather, imaginary and invented by its author.

Compute, it does not

Science Fiction is what happens when you take a variable degree of scientific process and propose new technology for fictitious works.

For example, Jules Verne proposed submarines.  Heinlein proposed Waldos, and the Waterbed.  Donaldson proposed Silicon-on-Diamond CMOS (which, by the way, should offer 10 times faster CMOS switching and thus allow 30GHz CPUs... someone came up with a working SOD-CMOS process 1 year after Donaldson published his books).

On the other hand, force fields, warp drives, and teleporters aren't normally based in fact.  One day we'll have enough physics to propose something.

The disconnect shows up when you have rather brilliant people (they write stories) that aren't scientists.  Lots of stuff makes perfect scientific sense; yet the science between here and there is wholly absent.  Sometimes, a non-scientist will arrange all the pieces we have in a way that looks almost like something cool; and sometimes, a scientist will connect the dots 20 years later and make something cool for real.

Speaking of stories, how bout Philip K Dick. I really loved Solar Lottery.

I've heard Dick is really good.

Dune was indeed boring at spots.  All the politics.  I'm not sure why I read as much of it as I did.

If you like what they call "space opera" (as far as I can tell, it's hard sci fi with a big story arc), check out Peter Hamiltion, Stephen Baxter, and Alistair Reynolds.  You can see some of their stuff on Amazon.com

Thanks I'll look them up.

I found everything beyond Ender's Game to be boring because of the huge amount of philosophy thinly shrouded as sequences of events.  Speaker for the Dead was an age and a half of debating on what to do about an alternate culture we don't understand, what we should be allowed to say about dead people, etc.  Politics I'm not entirely certain on; politics can be boring, or exciting.  I found the politics in The Gap Cycle to be very exciting, but Dune doesn't strike me so much as that.  I'll probably pick it up anyway, since I hear so much of it.

So so far my collection of Sci-Fi is...

• Dick (Androids/electric sheep and some other stuff... his library is HUGE)
  
• Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  
• Dune
  
• Starship Troopers
  
• Any of Alastair Reynolds
  

And a few more.  I've had Isaac Asimov recommended but blah.  Also Heinlein is frequently recommended.

[bartzbrau]

You might also check out Dan Simmons' Hyperion cycle.

[theoman]

The Hitchhiker's Guide is a must.

William Gibson is awesome. Neuromancer is a classic.

[bluefoxicy]

Since I also mentioned Fantasy, I might point out the other series I've found enjoyable:

Harry Potter

Complete box set shipped from the UK (not the US translation-- yes, they drastically rewrote the text for the US market), adult versions. 

Age of Misrule isn't bad either, and I'm a fan of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

[nicneufeld]

Honestly one can hardly even place Douglas Adams in scifi.  He's just a humorist, really, and makes little comic exchanges and observations all throughout a rather silly and outlandish sci-fi flavoured backdrop.  I know "just a humorist" sounds terribly derogatory but it is one of the titles of highest esteem for me!  But sci-fi is just the setting, in the same sense that the Pythons weren't really serious about making a medieval historical movie with "Holy Grail".  It just provided the setting for comedy.  The comedy is quite British, though, if one likes that sort of thing.  And one does, one does.  But it seems borderline unfair to the other authors to place Adams in scifi because he takes such a silly and irreverent attitude towards it all.  That said he's the closest I get to reading scifi and occasionally his tangential insights and twists (more like wrenchings!) of logic are quite interesting on a deeper level than just comedy.

Your best bet is the book, then followed by audiobook read by the author (NOT Stephen Fry or Martin Freeman, much as I like the former), then the original radio play, then the crappy but fun BBC TV adaptation, and last in line, the godawful movie to be avoided like the Arcturan Mega-Plague.

[denny]

William Gibson is awesome. Neuromancer is a classic.

+ a billion!

[redbeerman]

Cryptozoic by Brian Aldiss, it's out of print, but if you can find it, it's pretty trippy and well written.  Kind of sucks you into the story.

[dbeechum]

Good sort of dystopic sci-fi that I read earlier this year:

The Windup Girl

Odd cross between Do Androids..., Thai feudalism and ecological technology. Also introduced me to the concept of crop rust and gave me terrors.