• Welcome to the new COTI server. We've moved the Citizens to a new server. Please let us know in the COTI Website issue forum if you find any problems.
  • We, the systems administration staff, apologize for this unexpected outage of the boards. We have resolved the root cause of the problem and there should be no further disruptions.

Golden Age Scifi Novels: If you Had to Name 3 Books Everyone Should Read...

R

Rhialto the Marvelous

SOC-13
...which would they be?

And why?

1000 Suns makes me hanker for some classic space opera, and I know the genre Traveller is coming from not nearly as well as the game itself.

I did read Mote in God's Eye, but I assume that's late-ish?
 
Individual books don't jump to mind so much as several authors. H. Beam Piper (Star Viking etc.) and Poul Anderson (the Flandry books or the Polesotechnic League books)... maybe some Andre Norton (writing as "Andrew North" -- the Solar Queen books). Good stuff. Also, A. Bertram Chandler (have to have some Grimes novels) and E. C. Tubb (for the Dumarest books). Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are good too btw... arghh! Too many good books... and now I'm getting the urge to go back and re-read them.
 
Last edited:
Although perhaps not exactly Golden Age: All novels of Ursula LeGuin's
Hainish Cycle series (e.g. "Rocannon's World", "The Word for World is
Forest", "The Left Hand of Darkness", etc.).
 
I would it depends greatly on what you mean by "Golden Age" and whether you are looking for space opera, like Doc Smith's work, or harder stuff.

Some of my favorites are the Flandry series (Poul Anderson), anything of James Blish, the Foundation Trilogy, Dune (but only the first one), John Grimes (by A Bertram chandler), Harrington series (by David Weber), Daniel Leary series (by David Drake), Flinx series (by Alan Dean Foster), C.J. Cherryh's work, and Jack Vance.

For more space opera, though, the Leary series works, as does the Helmsman series (by Bill Baldwin).

What do you like? You really didn't say :)

OOPS! I guess I didn't remember the thread title too well!
I don't think I could pick just 3.

For a Traveller-esque feel, then I would pick David Drake's books on Daniel Leary, Alan Dean Foster's books on Flinx, and James P Hogan's works.
 
Last edited:
Asimov's Empire series (Pebble In The Sky, etc.), Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic League books (Starways, etc.). (BTW, I haven't yet read that last set, but everyone says it is good reading and classic Golden Age SF.)

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is (by definition) from the 30's through the 50's. It saw the dawn of all the classic magazines - Analog, Astounding, etc. I had trouble picking out books, because most of my Golden Age reading has been the short stories. Many are collected in books, now (The Early Asimov, Book One, for example), but I didn't think those would count.
 
If I Had to name Three books everyone should read, to get the feel of traveller.......I'd pick Starship troopers, by Heinlein, Merchanter's luck, by C.J. Cherryh, and Survey ship, By Marion Zimmer Bradley.........Yes! I am well aware that your opinion may differ..........
 
The three I'd pick as "Traveller" are not Golden age, but recent...
Sten (Cole & Bunch)
The Warrior's Apprentice (Bujold)
Star Risk Ltd.
 
Heinein: Starship Troopers, Friday
Pounelle: Anything involving the Co-Dominium
Ursula LeGuin: anything simply because she writes so beautifully.
 
Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (come on...it is just one long book, ain't it Obscure Factoid: it was once released as such called the 10 thousand year plan)

Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth or Imperial Earth captures nicely an alien but familar world.

Harry Harrison's Deathworld Trilogy or Stainless Steel Rat (first couple): As Harry does not do a good Trilogy...books 1&2 are usually better than his conclusions.
 
I think Aramis makes a good implicit point here (I'm guessing, not knowing the authors he's mentioned)--namely that Traveller, being a late 70s and 80s game, is not quite the same as the 40s and 50s genre that inspired it. Presumably because it's technologically too hard-ish?

1000 Suns, OTOH, seems to want to be an unabashed throwback, and that's what interests me right now.

Two questions:

Isn't there a difference between the 30s pulp material (Lensmen) and the postwar stuff? And what is it? Jaws less square?

And how does "Planetary Romance" fit in there (Demon Princes)? Not enough technobabble?

Of course there's always overlap, but I'm interested in distinctions.
 
Essentially, Traveller doesn't feel like ANY of the golden age stuff to me. But the 80's & 90's stuff shares the same source influences and shaped my views of traveller, whilst also being informed by traveller, so that they are inextricably linked together.

I love lensmen. But it's nothing like traveller.
Little Fuzzy could be traveller. But the sequal takes it in other directions.

Heinlein's Starship Troopers provides one of the tropes done to death in traveller: the battlesuit infantryman. But the rest of it is way too anti-traveller. Much of RAH's works are, well, also not compatible with what traveller became.

Never having read Tubbs, fnding Asimov generally lame, and not likeing Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat... I can't recommend what I don't know &/or like. (I did like HH's Bill the Galactic Hero, but not the sequels... and it did feel vaguely like traveller. But not in ways that I could recommend it in re Traveller.)

Essentially, Traveller outgrew its sources. And those works with the same sources tended to grow in similar directions... and are closer to what Traveller is now than the sources....

But then there are those, like Whipsnade, S4, and a few others, who ignore the growth in traveller, purposefully, to keep that golden age feel in their games. More power to them.
 
Last edited:
In terms of being Travelleresque, as in, like game situations, it's the more recent stuff that does it best. So things like the Vorkosigan saga, or almost anything by Peter F Hamilton (some of who's work captures a little Heinlein flavour). A model example would be "The Nano Flower", which has a stand out 4 chapter sequence featuring a running gun battle aboard a 21c airship between mercs in 'muscle armour' and a psionic private eye. I've lifted that straight in several games. Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels also seem Travellery, notwithstanding the 'download/sleeve' sf conceit. Ancients and mercs; though possibly the most violent tales I've read in the genre.

But for Golden Age stuff, I'd vote for Demon Princes, The Stars My Destination, and any of Heinlein's youth orientated work (I like most of his canon, though I do balk at the most extreme of his self indulgent quasi-libertarian fantasies - most of these were post-stroke, I think).
 
Wha came to mind immediately...

* Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (a real classic)

* Harry Harrison's Deathworld Trilogy (before he got sarcastic)

* F. M. Busby's Trilogy (Cage A Man, The Proud Enemy, End of the Line)--somewhat space-opera ish

(I know, he wanted 3 books...I have read all of these in one volume formats...does that count?)

Darn it, I thought of another one...
* James Blish--Cities in Flight tetralogy...not really Traveller orieted but a gread read
 
Last edited:
Rhialto the Marvelous said:
I did read Mote in God's Eye, but I assume that's late-ish?
Click to expand...

Yep. The Mote in God's Eye was published in 1974, whereas the Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally considered as running from the late 1930s to the end of the '50s. I.e. The Mote is fifteen years after the end of the Golden Age. In fact, you'd have to say that Mote was an example of the "Hard SF Renaissance", in which the tradition of Robert Heinlein bounced back strengthened by what it had learned from the "New Wave" of the 1960s to 1970s.

Anyway, I'm not clear what you are looking for. Great SF of the Golden Age: that's one list. SF that I think everyone ought to read: different list. SF that gives the feel of Traveller: different list again.

And another thing: you say "novels", but a lot of the very best stuff of the Golden Age was short stories and novellas. Do you actually mean to dismiss them, or was that an oversight?
 
Last edited:
For me, it would be Asimov's Naked Sun - the first sci-fi book I remember reading. It has a lot to answer for! It's an on-world mystery suited to a Traveller plot, too.

Any of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian series (also early reads)

and from a later genre, Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat.

If they really must be Golden Age, swap the Rat for a story called Blast Off For Mars. I forget the author - it's been nearly forty years. :nonono:

Having said that, the Golden age for me is all about Dan Dare and Flash Gordon! :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

S
Making Something with the tools that CT gives you...
2
Replies
21
Views
3K
the angle
T
W
  • Locked
MT compared to CT (quite long)
Replies
10
Views
2K
Vargas
V
Back
Top