I can't believe anyone haven't mentioned everything by Jack Vance.

Especially the Planet of Adventure series is one of my favourites.

I can't help myself but to agree. Just seeing the few shots of the upcoming Star Trek movie makes me cry. Teenagers in space from the looks of it. My guess it'll be some bland action movie just happening to play in the Star Trek universe.

Personally I think Star Trek was at its peak during TNG with Picard preferring a diplomatic solution instead of mindless action or blindly following orders.

Ack. While Star Trek would probably make a good introduction to the world of Scifi, its universe seems limited, especially on the social aspects. If I were aboard the Enterprise (regardless of any suffix), I'd probably die of boredom. A few lousy holodeck hours, lots of time in 10-forward is all they seem to have to do in their spare time.

Where's the fun? Where are the games? The Internet of the 23rd/24th century? Where are the brain implants? Genetic modifcations? Nano technology? While having the technological level for it, these topics are totally ignored by Star Trek (granted, the genetic engineering is explained in DS9 with Bashir, but still disappointing).

The more I think of it, the more I get the feeling that the whole society in Star Trek is based upon some 60's American middle-classes dream of a perfect life. In other words, dull. One might argue that things like Internet did not exist a few decades ago and so the authors didn't know about it, however there have always been authors that did forsee the technical development.

What? You're not looking forward to a movie in which we completely ignore all established Star Trek Chronology, while going back in time to see what a brilliant, albeit rebellious, leader figure Jim Kirk was, even in his youth, which, by odd coincidence happens to have been spent among the exact same people he would later famously command?!?!

I'm particularly looking forward to the *next* movie though, in which the four year old toddlers that will one day grow up to be the most famous starship crew in history defend the Earth, and indeed all history, against the tantrums of a very young Trelane that is left at Amanda Graysons preschool center by Q, having lost a game of chess versus a very young Mr. Spock. It's a wonderful tale of courage, friendship, and unexpected depth that reaches past cultures, species, and indeed the bonds of omnipotent and mortal life-forms.

May God have mercy on our souls.

Jonnan

YMMD. I certainly would die in such a place.

Am I the only one who thinks that Lt. Barkley on TNG was more human than any other character on the show? He at least had some real holodeck fun.

As far as networked holodecks go, it has been done before: Voyager, The Killing Game

Ah, I almost forgot

Try this: William Gibson - Neuromancer

One of the most famous early Cyberpunk novels and start of the Sprawl Trilogy.

Lots of good suggestions here. I’ve taken some notes so I can look for them the next time I go to the used book store!

I quickly looked through my library and noticed a bunch of books I could hardly remember. But a few I remember vividly. Obviously, these made my list:

All books by Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, and Nivin

Bear – Strength of Stones, Darwin’s Radio

Bedford – Great Sky River

Brin – Uplift series

Card – Ender’s Game

Dean Allen Foster – Sentenced to Prism

Gibson – Neuromancer

Haldemann – Forever War

Herbert – Dune (later books not so good)

Robinson – Mars series (loved the hard science)

Saberhagen – berserker series

Scalzi – Old Man’s War

Contest by Matthew Reilley is pretty good. Unusual but action packed. I'm surprised that Michael Crichton's books haven't been mentioned yet. Apparantly they're great.

I actually found Neuromancer to be a difficult read. I don't know if that's because of Gibson's writing style or because actual modern technology has diverged so far from what he envisioned. I thought Pattern Recognition was much better, but that doesn't really eliminate either possibility.

Heard an interesting comment regarding Neuromancer, though. Remember the first line of the book?

"Thy sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Someone mentioned the fact that new TV sets no longer display gray static when there's no signal; they show a bright blue screen instead. From now on, anyone who reads Neuromancer for the first time is going to think it's talking about an awesomely sunny day.

A bit of both I think.

To me, an untuned TV is just grey static. Never thought of younger people might see it as blue instead. Am I that old already?

With Gibson one of his best stories (IMO) is Burning Chrome, which is a short story he published, i think, before Neuromancer. Sadly I haven't read Neuromancer (it's still on my todo list), But Burning Chrome was a very cool read.

/parianoia

For some reason in England, the word Sci fi makes people assume its some awful Flash Gordon style childrens book. I get some very weird look in book stores when i go to pay for a book , its almost as though they think i'm up to no good.

I can almost hear them tut at me ("a grown man reading a childs book what next?")

Good thing they don't know about my Computer gaming.

/parianoia_off

Fight the power People.

Have you ever considered purchasing books sci-fi style?

Going to the book store, picking up a book from the shelves, standing in line at the checkout, paying with dirty coins and crumpled, ripped banknotes is so old-fashioned.

Instead, go to your personal dataterminal and log into the cyberspace. Navigate to the bright presence of the virtual book store and rummage through book collection that makes the British Library look mediocre in comparison. After you've found a nice book, you go to the checkout where you never have to wait. Just leave your contact information in the system. Automagically your band account will get charged even if the book store is across the world. And shortly after, somebody's knocking on your door. You open the door and he'll handle you a small package and contained within is the book. Isn't that kinda creepy? How did that man know what you did online and which book you were so interested in?

The Internet, Amazon.com (or .co.uk) got rid of the awkward physical bookstore experience.

The must read si-fi books

Classics

The Foundation series. this is for si-fi what lord of the rings is to fantasy

The Dune series, dune, the profet of dune and children of dune. After that it kida blew apart, but the first are simply must read.

and as others have stated, check out Nerumancer and see if you like cyberpunk.

Modern

check out thimothy Zhan's starwars books, especialy the to Thrawn series. Grand admiral Thrawn is imo the coolest cat ever!

Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy + sequals. and remember your towel

Ian banks Culture novels. If i had the mony i would hire him to do nothing but write to flesh out that universe even more GIEF.

Last but not least.

The neuturium alchamist + the sleeping god. I simply can not praise this series enough 2000pages of EPIC space opera on an unrivaled scale. Humanity facing the ultimate out of context problem, a must read. and BTW the battles in this series is how all space rts battles should funktion imo, very well thought out.

I had thought of entering a list of some of the authors whose books I have, who have not been mentioned here so far, like Zenna Henderson, Hal Clement, James Tiptree Jr, and many others, but the list became too long, and it's late.

Instead, I'd like to recommend, at least as far as contemporary science fiction is concerned, a set of anthologies, called The Mammoth Book Of Best New SF, edited by Gardner Dozois and published in the UK by Constable & Robinson Ltd and in the US by St MArtin's Press. The latest one I have, number 20, was published in 2007, so there should be a new one out shortly.

It was from these books that I first encountered Alastair Reynolds. They contain what could reasonably be called the cream of modern science fiction, and many of the contributors of the necessarily short stories are already established as novelists.