Any recommendations for a Book ??

[scorpionx]

 

[Naif al Hilali]

Selection from Flight of the Horse by Larry Niven:

http://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781625791177/9781625791177___4.htm

"Introduction to Larry Niven's "The Flight of the Horse":

When is a horse not a horse? This is a metaphysical question obscure enough to baffle a medieval theologian, let alone Svetz, the hapless, harried, and overworked Time Retrieval Expert who must deal with it in the fine and funny story that follows.

Larry Niven made his first sale to Worlds of If magazine in 1964, and soon established himself as one of the best new writers of "hard" science fiction since Heinlein. By the end of the seventies, Niven had won several Hugo and Nebula Awards, published Ringworld, one of the most acclaimed technological novels of the decade, had written several best-selling novels in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, including the well-known The Mote in God's Eye, and had also established himself as a fantasy writer of some note with his novel The Magic Goes Away. His other books include the novels Protector, World of Ptavvs, and A Gift from Earth, and the collections Tales of Known Space, Neutron Star, Inconstant Moon, The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, and The Flight of the Horse. His most recent books are Ringworld Engineers, Oath of Fealty (with Jerry Pournelle), and the collection Convergent Series.

..."

Also, Who Goes There and other stories can be read at:

The World Turned Upside Down
http://hell.pl/szymon/Baen/The best...e World Turned Upside Down/0743498747_toc.htm

"
The World Turned Upside Down
Table of Contents
Preface
Rescue Party
The Menace from Earth
Code Three
Hunting Problem
Black Destroyer
A Pail of Air
Thy Rocks and Rills
A Gun for Dinosaur
Goblin Night
The Only Thing We Learn
Trigger Tide
The Aliens
All the Way Back
The Last Command
Who Goes There?
Quietus
Answer
The Last Question
The Cold Equations
Shambleau
Turning Point
Heavy Planet
Omnilingual
The Gentle Earth
Environment
Liane the Wayfarer
Spawn
St. Dragon and the George
Thunder and Roses
"

 

[Taygibay]

Thanks Naif for the call, wink at the intuition
and I agree that poetry is everywhere potent;
in the words of Urban Dance Squad,

it's when a piece of the mind connects with the rhythm.​

As such, it can infuse any human production
in any field. High maths are things of beauty
to those with ability enough, prose can flow
and in all corners of the world, policemen dance!

On that piece you gave us, I liked this sentence

The older and greater in the status, the less awareness of the realities of the modern international community and the greater scorn for pragmatists like Captain Keith Laumer, who'd transferred into the diplomatic service from the Air Force.

and again agree with experience based writing
as making a big difference in novels, esp. SciFi.

It brings to mind that you could check out Heinlein.
The youth stories as Space Cadet culminate with
Starship Troopers in 1959. They're as right wing as
you'd expect from a military family son who served
for 5 well filled years until discharged for tuberculosis.

After trying out a couple avenues ( studying and politics )
and quite a few disparate jobs, he married his third wife
- successively of course as this is in the WestCiv zone -.
That woman changed him and even though his writing
had only begun when they got together, a second series
of titles shows more fun and fantasy - compare The Puppet
Masters with The Rolling Stones published months apart-.

And his main production considered now, after having ended,
is comprised of a third series begun before Starship Troopers
as far back as the '41 short story behind Methuselah's Children,
centered on Stranger in a Strange Land & running until the end,
infused with free love and complex relations, etc. talking IMHoO
about what it is to be human and the difficulty of it for all of us.

That man changed throughout his life and so did his writings.
Experience-based indeed!


As for our H!Tch buddy, his call was just too wide for me
( and maybe for you too seeing how you showered him? ).
I'm reading 5 books at the moment with 2 waiting by the main screen,
2 in French ( + the 2 awaiting ones ), 2 in English and one in Deutsch,
about the race for the poles, a diplomatic process spied upon in Europe
circa 1640s, a compendium of bizarre people, a biography of Albert
Schweitzer, human biology throughout evolution, a call for new History
and an anthropological overview of the lutins Bretons, Breizh sprites.
I'll let you guess which is in German ...

Great day to both of you, Tay.

 

[Naif al Hilali]

Thanks Naif for the call, wink at the intuition
and I agree that poetry is everywhere potent;
in the words of Urban Dance Squad,

it's when a piece of the mind connects with the rhythm.​

As such, it can infuse any human production
in any field. High maths are things of beauty
to those with ability enough, prose can flow
and in all corners of the world, policemen dance!

On that piece you gave us, I liked this sentence

​

and again agree with experience based writing
as making a big difference in novels, esp. SciFi.

It brings to mind that you could check out Heinlein.
The youth stories as Space Cadet culminate with
Starship Troopers in 1959. They're as right wing as
you'd expect from a military family son who served
for 5 well filled years until discharged for tuberculosis.

After trying out a couple avenues ( studying and politics )
and quite a few disparate jobs, he married his third wife
- successively of course as this is in the WestCiv zone -.
That woman changed him and even though his writing
had only begun when they got together, a second series
of titles shows more fun and fantasy - compare The Puppet
Masters with The Rolling Stones published months apart-.

And his main production considered now, after having ended,
is comprised of a third series begun before Starship Troopers
as far back as the '41 short story behind Methuselah's Children,
centered on Stranger in a Strange Land & running until the end,
infused with free love and complex relations, etc. talking IMHoO
about what it is to be human and the difficulty of it for all of us.

That man changed throughout his life and so did his writings.
Experience-based indeed!


As for our H!Tch buddy, his call was just too wide for me
( and maybe for you too seeing how you showered him? ).
I'm reading 5 books at the moment with 2 waiting by the main screen,
2 in French ( + the 2 awaiting ones ), 2 in English and one in Deutsch,
about the race for the poles, a diplomatic process spied upon in Europe
circa 1640s, a compendium of bizarre people, a biography of Albert
Schweitzer, human biology throughout evolution, a call for new History
and an anthropological overview of the lutins Bretons, Breizh sprites.
I'll let you guess which is in German ...

Great day to both of you, Tay.

Thanks Tay. Heinlein's juveniles from the 1950s are my favorite books of all (not a fan of his output after 1960 though - too repetitious and too much free love for my taste).

But could he keep you spellbound with crisp, clean prose and as befits a University of California double Masters in Math and Physics, accurate hard science fiction easily digestible by readers not even versed in basic science, an ability only matched by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Charles Sheffield (Asimov and Niven are also great in this regard). Two of these later four had Ph.D.s, Clarke was the inventor of the geostationary communications satellite, and Niven was a CalTech dropout.

From Heinlein's juveniles, I specially like "Have Space Suit, Will Travel" for an accurate early portrayal of interplanetary travel and spacesuit design;

"Citizen of the Galaxy" for the way the scenery suddenly shifts from... well I won't spoil that part because it was one of the greatest moments of world-building I have ever read along with "Double Star";

"Tunnel in the Sky" for survival in inhospitable environments;

"Podkayne of Mars" for much futuristic technology some of which is only becoming available now;

"Red Planet" for thinking from the perspective of alien minds and civilizations;

Earlier, his 1940s short stories were seminal specially the 1940/41 "Blowups Happen" and "Solution Unsatisfactory" treatment of the philosophical and existential repercussions of the still very secret nuclear program;

treatment of lunar exploration and colonization in "Searchlight", " Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon", etc. - Elon Musk reminds me of his brash protagonist from a later story about a man who would single-handedly build the US Lunar program;

"Universe" and its sequel "Common Sense" about generational ships and inter-stellar travel;

the treatment of four-dimensional tesseracts in that story about a couple's tour of a newly built house (sorry, the name escapes me at the moment);

Being a US Navy man, it would be excusable even if he were guilty of the fascism and militarism people accuse him of.

However, my take from "Starship Troopers" was that citizenship (and the right to have a voice) should only logically ensue from fulfilling the sense of duty, responsibility, and sacrifice everyone is born with innately. It is a shame that people will remember Verhoeven's depiction of the novel when Verhoeven has never ever read the novel.

Heinlein's other (even the early) works clearly show him espousing liberty and freedom for every person and opposing fascism, racism (and his mentor and editor John Campbell in this regard), and xenophobism; and if they did not follow Campbell's 'Heroes Journey' mythos, they would be dull reads.

Thanks for the quotes. Indeed, after the Quran, I see the greatest beauty in the poetry of mathematical and physics equations (reminds me of the Ayah "And Indeed, we have created everything to [with] a measure").

Among English authors from this world, I love the poetry of Laumer, the early Niven, Zelazny, and Sturgeon. Wells, Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Niven, and Sheffield also use language with such facility and ease, it is truly amazing. And, you learn more from some of their short stories than a University course.

Oh, and I recommended Retief to you because I get the sense that you two would be kindred spirits. The stories are great bulwarks against jingoism and xenophobism, and they teach us to empathize with other cultures and peoples, and not to just advance our own agendas and the interests of our nation while dooming the rest of the universe to penury, internecine wars, and destruction.

Thank you for your generous reply.

 

[A.P. Richelieu]

Maybe not fiction, but pretty useful in the average household!