Fantasy/Sci-fi Book recommendations revisited

The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell is awesome for space opera / military sci-fi.

Old Man's War is even better but is only sort of a half-assed series .

Timothy Zahn's Quadrail series is one that I liked quite a bit in the space opera/thriller/detective noir type style.
 
Eggi said:
dang its hard to sort through this thread to find some sci fi gems to read.

anyone read some good sci fi space-opera-ish epic books recently they can recommend? i seem to have already read a lot of the good titles by alasair reynolds, peter hamilton, and vernor vinge. some more light douglas adams type sci fi would be good too.

is the culture series from iain banks (RIP) worth reading?
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culture stuff - yes.
dan simmons : ilium /olympus - the iliad mixed w/ scifi
peter f hamilton - The Commonwealth Saga , The Void Trilo, The Night's Dawn Trilogy (imo in that order of goodness)
 
So Way of Kings could have started at like page 800. That backstory was so drawn out. Though I admit I'm looking forward to the next book.

Read Wool after that. Pretty solid.

Not SciFi/Fantasy related, but can anyone that likes John Irving recommend authors/books similar?

I feel like I've read practically every sci fi/fantasy book that is on every list of must reads plus hundreds of others.

And I have zero desire to wait a year or ten for another series to complete or release the next book.
 
I can't remember if James S.A. Corey's Expanse series has been recommended yet.

Very good Peter F Hamilton type of space opera.
 
coombz said:
are the Mistborn books better than Way of Kings?

feel pretty much the same as Apathy regarding Way of Kings, it was nothing special, but perfectly readable for the most part...
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No.

They aren't better. If anything, they're weaker stories.

But they aren't nearly so damn boring, they're easy to read, nothing amazing but it does relate into the way of the kings (his universes are connected)

im not gonna spoil it but there are things dropped in way of the kings that reference the stuff that happens in mistborn
 
I liked the Mistborn books. Easy reads and pretty catchy. I liked the ending. I thought the 4th book was kind of dumb though. I want full blown allomancers battling each other Damnit!
 
I really liked the steam punk or western style allomancer spin-off novel.

Too bad the second in that series isn't out yet.

He seems to have 50 different series going at once at the moment.
 
I have been waiting for like 15 years for the wheel of time series to be finished before i re-read them. I remember them being pretty awesome when I was younger. Pretty tedious reading now, a lot of "she tugged her braid furiously," and every time he mentions a name he also retells the characters back story, as if you can forget after you've read the same info a thousand times. Quite disappointing.

Is it worth staying with it to read the last 3 that Sanderson wrote?
 
I re-read the whole series and very luckily perfectly timed it with the final one. I recommend it if you have the time. It can get repetitive, especially if you're re-reading them in quick succession (after all, they were coming out every few years), so you can basically start skipping descriptions when you know what it's going to say. I also found that skipping Perrin's chapters basically from books 7-12 (provided you've read/skimmed them once before) made the series much more enjoyable.

Sanderson brings some much needed pace to the ending of the series.
 
Problem for me with WoT (is it finished now? I wasn't even aware) is that with the limited reading time I have nowadays, it'd take years to finish... I think I quit when book 9 came out and I couldn't remember much of anything because of the 4-something years gap. It's like should I really waste my time rereading all of those books to see if it was actually worth it? It's a big time risk to take.

and god only knows how many novels Rothfuss plans on turning Kingkiller into, it sure as shit won't be 3 if the second book's pacing is any indication. Such a damn shame, it would have been so much more epic in 3 than 12. So sick of the epically long epics.
 
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Yeah, WoT re-read should really be only if you have time to kill, or if you want to ramp up to the last book. If you intend to finish the series, I would definitely recommend re-reading at least the Sanderson books leading up to the last, since it really is nice to have everything in context.

Also, Foundation was pretty boss. And I just read all of the Ender's series books (read ender's game for the first time during the semester) and they're very enjoyable, fast reads.
 
I had to finish WoT just to find out what happened.

The end was worth it (as in, to get to the end and get some closure), but you'll still be disappointed by a lot of things.
 
So, I started reading Cryptonomicon based off of recommendations in this thread and I dont quite get it. Im getting to where they tie it all together, the past and the present, or at least I figure thats what is going on.

But a 3 page explanation of the perfect way to eat Cap N' Crunch left me a little confused as to what I am really reading.

Also, When there are 2 pages of algorithms and shit, am I suppose to understand that?

Do I need a PhD to read this book?
 
Cryptomonicon is one of those books that could that hurt your brain with the detail and science but ends up being enjoyable somehow in spite of that fact.

I never could understand how the book didn't end up sucking but by the time that I finished it I found that I really liked it somehow.
 
Cryptonomicon is a good read, stick with it buddy

I also really enjoyed Reamde by the same author...and Snow Crash too but a lot of people seemed to hate it just as much as I liked it ;>
 
Just finished Red Shirts by John Scalzi. Pretty fun read, rather irreverent in comparison to most of the sci-fi in this thread, but that was the point.
 
Started on the Honor Harrington series... i don't know. Just not getting into it so far.

Last series i went through was The Lost Fleet... i might drop HH and start Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga.

What do you guys think... Commonwealth Saga or Revelation Space, or stick with HH assuming it picks up.
 
Revelation space was pretty good, go for that ;]

I only read the first book of the Commonwealth series and it was also decent, but I didn't have any desire to read any of the other books in the series
 
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