How did you come to hold the beliefs you have?

[annielaurie]

I have The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The God Delusion among assorted science and history books on my library shelves, and a basketload of science fiction paperback novels ...

[Jovial Monk]

And they led you to what belief?

[annielaurie]

Belief in the resilience and versatility of human thought ...

[Jovial Monk]

Hmmmmm OK

What sort of SciFi do you like? (Oh Lord, at last someone who likes SciFi on this board!

[Lefteee]

Hmmmmm OK

What sort of SciFi do you like? (Oh Lord, at last someone who likes SciFi on this board!

I watch Star Wars: the clone wars with my son. And I even tried to watch Battlestar Gallactica but the new version just didn't do it for me like it did when I was a kid.

[Lefteee]

Hmm. Does "Gallactica" have two L's?

[annielaurie]

Hmmmmm OK

What sort of SciFi do you like? (Oh Lord, at last someone who likes SciFi on this board!

Hi Jovial Monk, and you others,

My favourite kind of science fiction is hard sci-fi - that is, speculative fiction, which is based on real science, and which features a story of human interest - such as an adventure - against a fictional background, often in the far future, and on another earth-like planet in a distant solar system.

There was a great deal of this kind of sci-fi written from the 1930s to the 1970s. One of my very favourite writers is Larry Niven, most of whose novels came out in the seventies, and I'm most fond of a particular novel called Destiny's Road, about the descendants of a colony from earth who settled on a world in a star system some 35 lightyears away.

The descendants' technology has degenerated over several hundred years, and basically they have no access to most of their history and where they originated; that is, they have forgotten what earth was like, and their past has become legendary and mythological. Their concern is brute survival on the lawless world they know now; their enemies are other groups of human beings.

It's an adventure story featuring a young man who sets out on a journey to find the answers. It's a character-driven story, there are no aliens, their ancestors terraformed the planet hundreds of years before so that it is covered with earthlife flora and fauna, and if the novel were ever made into a movie there would be little need for special effects.

I love to read, and I prefer to enjoy stories of all kinds in book form, rather than the movies. There have been some good science fiction movies along the way, but I like the ones that have character-driven scenarios ...

[Jovial Monk]

Yeah, Larry Niven was a great writer (I assume he is dead: haven't seen any new novels by him.)

I reckon you will love books by Neal Stephenson. "Quicksilver" is set in the 17th Century, the time of Kings Charles I to William the silent, Newton and Leibnitz and isn't really scifi. "Snowcrash" is sf set a bit into the future while "Anathem" is set in a world where an alien spacecraft comes into their sky and "avout" live a monastic type of existence and study mathematics. And he is contemporary--new SF books!!!! A wordy bugger, expect 1000 page novels.

[Lefteee]

Actually, when I was down at the Gold coast the other week, I went and watched The surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. A good movie if you don't think too hard about the gaps in the plot

Set in the not-too-distant future, human beings have ceased interacting with each other face to face and instead live their lives through extrmely life like androids. The droids are made to look like each person's ideal self so that billions of attractive, youthfull, perfectly healthy fakes actually go out in the world and do all the stuff that real people used to do while wrinkly, flabby, imperfect men and women lie at home on beds, neuro-wired into remote control automatons that do all the seeing, hearing, feeling and physical interacting for them.

Bruce Willis - a detective - is called to investigate a number of cases where someone has used a mysterious weapon to destroy surrogates which also melted the brains of the surrogates human owner as they lay in their stim-chair, something supposed to be impossible.

As you can probably guess, he uncovers a big conspiracy to destroy the world and purge it of it's sins.

Entertaining and distrubing - until you ask yourself the question "if everyone in the outside world is a robot, how come they still have public toilets?"

But never start picking at a movie, because it goes straight to shit then.

I give it 7.5 to 8 out of 10

[annielaurie]

Thanks Monk, I shall have to get Neal Stephenson's Anathem, sounds just the kind of novel I like. I don't mind a long novel either, I can do that!

I haven't heard that Larry Niven died, but he would be in his late sixties or early seventies by now. Wish if he were alive he would come out with a new one, something like Destiny ...
I also have several paperbacks he and Jerry Pournelle wrote together, Lucifer's Hammer, Mote in God's Eye, and Footfall, and Niven's Smoke Ring series, and some short story anthologies. Good stuff! I especially love Niven's narrative style, it just flows ...

Lefteee, I have also seen the movie Surrogates, and enjoyed it very much, but I know what you mean about certain small details in the story, you can't look too closely, else the movie falls apart! Still it was fun ...