Greatest SF novel of all time? And why?
POSTED BY: FREESOUP
UPDATED: Monday, August 10, 2026 16:37
VIEWED: 25112
PAGE 8 of 8
They all have good and bad points. My faves:
The eponymous Hitch-Hiker's Guide. The movie was a brave but flawed attempt, the best Adamsian feature being the POV Gun. With all due respect to our American friends, you just don't get British humour - any attempt to Americanise it doesn't work. Plus: a two-headed, three-armed guy? A doddle with CGI even back then, Zaphod was cocked up. I would never have survived my 'O' Level exams without the Guide's sage advice: 'Don't Panic'. Thanks to the Guide, I didn't panic and passed 7 out of 8 exams, 3 with As (and History had gotten boring, so I didn't much care about the E).
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel - as a kid at primary school I borrowed it from the library and kept it for weeks. Loved it. Still do. Wish they'd publish it in Kindle.
Altered Carbon - butchered IMO by TV. Takeshi Kovacs (pronounced 'Kovach', not 'Kovacs', as per the Slavic languages it comes from - apparently people get that wrong a lot) is/was a soldier, an Envoy. He lives in a world where death is not final - the cortical stack in the back of your neck records your memories and experiences, so when you die you can be resurrected on the spin of a disc. Cloned bodies can be custom grown, so you can be uploaded into a body's blank stack and live again or live a different life. Wonder what it'd be like to be the opposite sex? Easy - just upload into a clone, a true sex change. Want bigger tits without surgery? Get a clone with bigger tits.
Via needlecast, your digitised personality can be sent to a different world (the only way to travel FTL in this series). Also, if you're rich enough, your stack can be backed up remotely, so you can be completely destroyed even down to the stack and still come back (unless you've been hit by a software virus such as Rawling 4851 - battlefield virus, deadly and infectious). Among other things it means you can avenge your own death if you're murdered, and that's where the novel opens. Dynamite debut, and quite likely given the way things are going.
Honor Harrington - terrific series. Love the treecats.
An obscure one, E.C. Tubbs' Dumarest Saga - Earl Dumarest is a traveller in the far future, living in a declining empire. He's from Earth, but he's travelled far and wide since he was a boy, into regions which after millennia have forgotten Earth - it's a myth, or if it isn't the coordinates are lost...or hidden by our protagonists, the Cyclan. Cybers are trained in logic and other things, undergoing an operation on the thalamus to remove emotion. To the cybers, logic is all. They give advice to rulers et al, but advice which subtly brings them under the domination of the Cyclan. Dumarest just wants to get home to Earth, but he's been given a secret which would give the Cyclan the galaxy in a lifetime, so they want him. Badly.
(Incidentally I have reason to believe the 16th novel, Haven Of Darkness, actually saved my life. I had a stroke in '22, and all I could think about when it hit was one particular passage in the book:
It wasn't just the wound. The beam had missed the bone and he had stanched the blood, but too much had been lost already and he was too weak. His heart pounded like a bursting engine (as, in fact, did mine) and the lights appeared to dim as he fought for air. The tips of his fingers felt cold and, he knew, death was close.
Too close and too soon. He fought it, gritting his teeth, concentrating on the single act of breathing and, slowly, the immediate danger passed.
That's what I did. I just breathed. Never mind the total disorientation, never mind that the right side of my face had apparently seized up, never mind calling for an ambulance for the moment or the fact that they couldn't get in if I did because the front door was locked - just...fucking...BREATHE. Some people don't survive str
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
10 Classic Sci-Fi Books That Should Be Turned Into Movies
https://screenrant.com/classic-sci-fi-books-turned-into-movies/
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
10 More Sci-Fi, Horror, and Fantasy Books to Read Ahead of Their Upcoming Adaptations
https://gizmodo.com/10-sci-fi-fantasy-horror-books-with-adaptations-co
ming-1851466751
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Netflix’s 4-Part Cyberpunk Masterpiece Is Setting the Bar for Apple TV’s 'Neuromancer'
https://www.aol.com/articles/netflix-4-part-cyberpunk-masterpiece-2136
14000.html
NOTIFY: N | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME