What series SF books are your favorites?, page 2

As previously noted...

Dan Simmons' Hyperion series - what a marriage of SF and high art! The AI avatar, Councillor Albedo - what a villain.

Iain M. Banks' Culture novels - just finished Matter which I did like but wasn't for me quite up with Use of Weapons - one of the most tragic, elegiac pieces of SF I've ever read - and Excession - a wonderful romp among the Ship Minds.

Peter F. Hamilton... well, I absolutely adored The Night's Dawn trilogy until the lame, all-too-literally deus ex machina ending. HUGELY disappointed. Such a great beginning leading to such a letdown... but the last couple of books were great and the new follow-up looks awesome. Best of all, there's another one to come, making it another trilogy, and still set, at least partially, in the Commonwealth, with many of the same characters percolating through from the two-volume Commonwealth saga.

Orson Scott Card's Ender novels are really fun, too.

Frank Herbert - those first Dune books I came to having had them much hyped to me... and they didn't disappoint. However, I've been ploughing through the prequels as a duty, really, and don't find them possessed of the brio or panache of the originals. Which brings us to

Kevin J. Anderson - The Saga of Seven Suns is rubbish, really, but wonderful rubbish, like eating something sweet and sticky that makes you feel slightly ill afterwards... and then a while later you crave more.

Bruce Sterling, for me, is one of the most wonderful SF authors currently around, and his Shaper/Mechanist saga is extraordinary. This guy can really write where others just move the plot along, and the ideas and depth he brings are amazing. Kind of like Harlan Ellison reborn.

Greg Bear has written some amazing books. The Eon series is truly innovative in its scope, and the Forge of God series, while short, is nonetheless poignant. Almost all of his books have, at some point, moved me to tears. For me, though, his masterpiece is /Slant, in which he effortlessly marries different writing styles in a stunning view of a society not too far into the future that is at once familiar and unsettlingly alien.

I note from his Wiki entry that he's also written in the Foundation, Star Wars, Star Trek and Human-Kzin wars subgenres. Cool.

Harry Harrison's stainless Steel Rat series marry SF with Swiftian satire and are well worth checking out.

William Gibson - I mean, come on! Has no-one read the Sprawl books, Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive? These are genre classics, people. I also liked his books based around the mutated, settled Golden Gate Bridge.

Robert Anton Wilson (RIP!) and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy was not only entertaining, it quite literally changed the way I think. And it was only when I got to the final appendices, and it told me it was changing the way I think about things, that I realised this was indeed the case. RAW was a wonderful, entertaining soul, and his allegedly non-fiction books like Quantum Psychology deserve the widest possible audience.

Richard Morgan's novels about Takeshi Kovacs are great. Ultimately, one of the things I want to escape into is a really cool universe. This one works on that level, and many others.

And finally, Neal Stephenson has a habit of writing things that start out as historical novels and then take an amazing SF twist. As a standalone, I'd recommend The Cryptonomicon but his Quicksilver trilogy, while apparently just a historical novel, is more like an SF novel than you could possibly imagine without its actually being one. Weird and definitely worth a look.

[edit on 17-2-2009 by rich23]