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Forever War is an amazing book. It makes the reader experience the senselessness of war.
I’m reading Cryptonomicon at the moment. It’s a great book: all the intertwined plot lines are fascinating and I want to know what happens to the characters. As usual for Stephenson, there are frequent diversions and a lot of technical details (eg on cryptography, the physical structure of the internet). He has become one of my favourite authors.
As far as classic sci-fi goes, Alfred Bester is great. The Stars My Destination is one of my all time favourites. The Demolished Man got a Hugo award in 1953.
The Machine Stops is an amazing story by E.M. Forster all the way from 1909! It predicts the internet and videoconferencing, among other things.
Some more classics:
- Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966).
- Larry Niven’s The Mote in God’s Eye (1974).
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Heinlein has several phases. There’s the early teen / mil sf stuff (“Farmer in the Sky” etc), the psuedo-libertarian propaganda stuff (“Moon is a Harsh Mistress”) that seems to have come along with his libertarian 2nd (3rd?) wife, then he has a stroke & a bunch of medical problems and starts writing weird huge books: “Friday”, “Stranger in a Strange Land” etc. He was also bright guy who, at least some of the time, was actually satirising the things he was writing about. So there are many Heinlines & people are probably attached to different aspects.
Honestly, I think there’s better SF being written in the modern era though. If you really get into the field, it’s worth going back & reading some of the older stuff, to see what later authors are sometimes reacting against / referring to, but reading SF from the 30s<->50s is not in any sense mandatory.
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Stranger in a Strange Land is great not just because it’s a great story, but again because it’s a window into the counter-culture / free love movement of the 60s. Same warning applies though - walking talking screaming sexism in this book. Doesn’t make it any less of a classic, but being aware is good :)
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Heinlein
I could never get into Heinlein. I finished Starship Troopers, but couldn’t even make it half way through Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I just don’t think he’s that great a writer. I’ve heard good things about Stranger in a String land; might give that one a shot, but from what I’ve read so far, I have several other things I’d rather try to get through first.
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I really enjoyed Forever Peace too, although it isn’t really a sequel.
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The three companion pieces to Forever War would be Starship Troopers by Heinlin, Armor by Steakley, and then pick one of either Falkenberg’s Legion by Pournelle and Stirling or the anthology Hammer’s Slammers by Drake.
Other military sci-fi novels (say, Old Man’s War by Scalzi or a lot of the space-opera-y stuff) to me just feels too…cartoony, I guess? Like, I don’t want to go so far as grimdark 40K “FOR TEH EMPRAH ETERNAL WAAAGH”, but I also want the fighting and fighters–or the politics behind them–to be in focus instead of the technology or cutesy sci-fi tropes.
I may be in the minority in that opinion though. :)
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The Reality Dysfunction by Peter F. Hamilton
Forever War is GREAT. I really enjoyed that one too.
I’m always reading some sort of Sci-Fi and would love to share recommendations: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/25834255-andrew
I really enjoyed, lately:
The Gone Away World - Nick Harkaway Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur Clarke Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Philip Dick The Stars are Legion - Kameron Hurley Pushing Ice - Alastair Reynolds Glasshouse - Charles Stross A World out of Time - Niven
Have you read Iain Banks books? If not, read all the Culture books, and The Algebraist.
It might not be repoducible but I’ve hacked together a little bash script to do this sort of stuff (https://github.com/AndrewVos/box) and I really enjoy using it.
Here’s what my dotfiles look like using box: https://github.com/AndrewVos/dotfiles