Need a new author.

Discussion in 'SciFi & Fantasy' started by Challenger78, Jul 27, 2010.

  1. Mr MacGillivray Banned Banned

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    527
    ja, john varley, for some reason I always make a mix between jack vance and john varley.
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    24,690
    Have you read anything by James P. Hogan or Robert L. Forward (deceased)? They both are/were professional scientists so their writing is very science-oriented.

    Forward's Dragon's Egg and its sequel are set on a neutron star, where he very meticulously and credibly postulates life. Of course the pace of life there is several orders of magnitude faster than ours, so communication between the primitive sentient creatures who live on it and the human explorers of the very near future who discover it is difficult. In a clever scene, the creatures "see" electromagnetic signals coming from the ship and realize that they cannot be natural, so they decide to respond--by using their analog of smoke signals. When the humans receive the signals and see the jagged outlines of the waveforms they are mystified.

    He also has a longer series starting with Rocheworld, about an expedition to a double-planet. The creatures who live there are just as imaginatively--and plausibly--depicted.

    Hogan (oops, I see that he just died a few months ago) is famous for his Giants series, which starts with the discovery of a 50,000-year-old human corpse on Earth's moon. His work is full of hard science too, but also a little more intrigue and swashbuckling.

    Hogan's Code of the Lifemaker is one of my top three or four novels of all time, although the critics' community apparently does not share my enthusiasm. A near-future exploration team discovers, on one of the moons in our solar system, a civilization run by mechanical "creatures." They have invented the technology of creating primitive organic tissue, which they use to build their own machinery. Naturally each race of intelligent beings assumes that the other is the runaway leftovers of the technology created by a now-vanished race of creatures like themselves. I found the philosophical implications so intriguing that I spent almost as much time making notes as I did reading.

    In his longer career he wrote quiet a few other novels as well, with a somewhat broader range of styles and milieux. The multiverse concept certainly intrigues him.

    If you're not familiar with these authors, I'll bet there's a very good chance that you will appreciate at least one of them.

    Happy reading!
     
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