Chula Vista

Rama is pretty one of a kind but all of these are absolute essential Sci-Fi reading with lots of the same wonderment at the premise.

Ringworld
The Foundation Trilogy
The Legacy of Heorot (only book I've read 3X)
Enders Game
Hyperion + The Fall of Hyperion
American Gods
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep
2001 A Space Odyssey (same basic story but so much more detailed than the movie)
The Martian Chronicles
The Forever War
I Am Legend (the movie SUCKED!!!)

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“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

grindy

Thanks!
All books I haven't read yet.

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A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.

LoathsomePete

I really had to stick with The King In Yellow too, and I can see why Lovecraft had this to say about him, "Chambers is like Rupert Hughes and a few other fallen Titans-equipped with the right brains and education but wholly out of the habit of using them". It's kind of cool to have a piece of horror antiquity from 1895 and while the concept of the King in Yellow is a very intriguing one, I just couldn't get into many of his stories. I wonder if it's Public Domain yet, because I could see how a lot of horror authors could take the idea and make something interesting out of it like people have done with Sherlock Holmes.

As for good Sci-Fi I'd recommend The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson





The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror by Thomas Ligotti

Basically if you are curious why season 2 of True Detective sucked so much it was because Pizzolato wasn't shameless ripping this off. All that pessimist philosophy that Rust Cohle spouted in the first few episodes came from this book. A lot of it so far has been a look at an obscure Norwegian philosopher called Peter Wessel Zapffe and has been a pretty fascinating read. Probably not something to read if you're feeling suicidal though.

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