Required reading....

[Artikid]

First thoughts on good reads for Traveller:
Asimov
Bester
Bujold
Herbert
Niven

Also:
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
Clans of the Alphane Moon by P.K. Dick could be a good starting point for a Psi-prison planet adventure...

A

 

[RabidVargr]

The Pride of Chanur
by C. J. Cherryh

Pretty good first contact book and the series that follows. The main characters (but one) are not human though.

RV

 

[solomani_interloper]

We published Bujold in the UK - and I remember some of the stories in magazines - I read one, "Mirror Dance" I think, but my taste in SF ends really around about 1970. Favourite authors... Alldis, Asimov ("Naked Sun" and "Caves of Steel"), Ballard, Bester ("Fondly Fahrenheit" is a superb story), Blish, Brown, Clarke, Clement, Dick, Disch, Harrison, Harness, Kornbluth, Kuttner, Le Guin, Leiber, Miller, Pohl, Reynolds, Sheckley, Silverberg, Simak, Cordwainer Smith, Spinrad.. phew! Comprehensive list, and none of it really travellere material I suppose.

It's a recent passion and it's not SF, but I'd love to do something based on Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin characters.

 

[Fulacin Highport]

The Dumarest of Terra series of novels by EC Tubb (close to 30 novels!) are extreme influences on Classic Traveller; the size of the majority of the starships, High Passage, Low Passage, merc units & merc tickets, the overall 'feel' of the technology, weaponry, body armor.... I could go on & on. Marc had commented on this before (1001 Chararcters?) where a number of fictional personalities from varied sources were written up as game characters.

He had also stated that they used many, many sources when creating Traveller, not just one or two.

I've always enjoyed the novel 'Monument' by James Tiptree, Jr. -- Very Travellerish, if you prefer the non-shoot'em-up campaigns. Beware the tax lawyers!

 

[Takei]

Originally posted by Gatsby:
....Wonder if my 4 yr old and 2 yr. old boys are too young for H.G Wells and Asimov? Maybe Clarke...yeah Rama for bed-time stories...I'll bide my time...

Gats'[/QB]

Well, my daughter was three and a half when I first tried her on "The Hobbit" and she loved it. It was from memory and not read straight from the book, but she prefered it to any other bedtime story for a long time. She could name all of the dwarves and the swords

More on topic, she likes looking at ship pictures in books and on my pc. She even asked me to print out a few of Jesse's pics for her bedroom. I had a big smile and my wife just shook her head.

 

[Vargas]

I haven't finished it yet but Lois McMaster Bujold's "Young Miles" has a definite Traveller feel as the plot is being established.

 

[gardclan]

David Weber's Honor Harrington series. With the exception of the multiple hundred or so G's of accel, the books seem pretty "travellerish". Not to mention the fact that they're a good read.

 

[Simon Jester]

A great deal of my Traveller influences came from the old master, Robert Heinlein. The ones that most readily come to mind are:

Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Citizen of the Galaxy
Podkayne of Mars
The Rolling Stones

Now that I've been reminded of these, and just how long it's been since I last read them, I must dig them out and read them again. Goodbye.

Simon Jester

 

[Takei]

I saw Minority Report a couple of days ago and noticed that it was based on short story by Philip K Dick. Does the short have the same title? If not, does anyone know what it is?

 

[T. Foster]

Originally posted by Takei:
I saw Minority Report a couple of days ago and noticed that it was based on short story by Philip K Dick. Does the short have the same title? If not, does anyone know what it is?

I believe the original story is called "The Minority Report" but I may well be wrong (haven't read it). ISTR also seeing a tie-in edition at a bookstore (i.e. new reissue with Tom Cruise's face on the cover) which may be convenient for one-stop shopping, though I'm sure you could find a used copy for far cheaper with a little searching.

 

[Tom Schoene]

Originally posted by T. Foster:
I believe the original story is called "The Minority Report" but I may well be wrong (haven't read it). ISTR also seeing a tie-in edition at a bookstore (i.e. new reissue with Tom Cruise's face on the cover) which may be convenient for one-stop shopping, though I'm sure you could find a used copy for far cheaper with a little searching.[/QB]

That tie-in edition for Minority Report is printed in the weirdest layout for some reason (vertical and oddly formatted) and is awfully pricy for a book with just one novella. You can find much more readable versions in the various collections of Dick's short works. I have the _Philip K. Dick Reader_, which has "The Minority Report" and a dozen or more shorter stories. Good reading, though not terribly Traveller-inspiring. You do get the sense that Dick's work was often not so much science fiction as first-person narrative of a lunatic filtered through an SF lens. (see especially "The Eyes Have It" and "The Hanging Man.")

 

[kafka47]

My choices for books are:

The Swycaffer Traveller novels
Asimov, especially Foundation & Empire
Harry Harrison's Deathworld series
A.C. Clarke's SS The Sentinel (just change it to an Asteroid in the frontier)

Movies...

Solaris
Dungeons & Dragons (to introduce the idea of mixed party of adventures)
Apollo 13 (for a TL 6 civilization's return to the Stars)
Blade Runner (for a darker look at the worlds in the Core/Rim)

There are more but cannot think of them right now...

Honourable mentions would be:

Lovecraft
Tolstoy (for the 2nd Frontier War)
and many Non-Fiction titles

 

[samdx]

Uller Uprising by H. Beam Piper is very good.

The book is about a revolt by the natives on a colony world. It has that classic traveller feel - antigrav vehicles and starships juxtaposed with recoilless rifles.

 

[solomani_interloper]

H Beam Piper's not so well known in the UK. I've only read "Little Fuzzy", and that was an imported Ace edition.

I started reading the "Dumarest Saga", but being an anorak I tried to buy them in order and in the same binding; I think I got up to Book Eight.

This may be laying down the gauntlet, but I don't think there are any particularly Traveller-ish Brit authors (We do like our cosy catatrophes over here). Perhaps Peter Hamilton, but I've never been comfortable with his particular brand of right-wing religosity. Bob Shaw maybe...

 

[Knightsky]

In addition to the many already-mentioned excellent suggestions, I would add the following:

"Rite of Passage" - Alexei Panshin
'Daedalus' series - Brian Stableford
"The Disinherited" - Steve White

To get back to the original question of what primarily inspired Millar & co., if I had to narrow it down to a baker's dozen, I would guess Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Gordon R. Dickson, David Drake, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, Jerry Pournelle, Brian Stableford, E.C. Tubb, and Jack Vance.

 

[rfxn]

Originally posted by Knightsky:
To get back to the original question of what primarily inspired Millar & co., if I had to narrow it down to a baker's dozen, I would guess Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Gordon R. Dickson, David Drake, Harry Harrison, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, Jerry Pournelle, Brian Stableford, E.C. Tubb, and Jack Vance.

Anyone mentioned Robert Sheckley's 1955 short story collection "Citizen In Space"? The story "Ticket to Tranai" is a tale about the misadventures of a retired bureaucrat - They even have TAS helping him out!

 

[Douglass]

I wouldn't call Dune a heavy influence on Traveller, although it *is* strongly hinted at several times in Traveller canon.

Interestingly enough, the recent Dune prequels (by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson) have a quite Travelleresque feel to them. Since they are set before Paul's Jihad, Imperial politics have a feudal structure *extremely* similar to that in Traveller. I recommend them as a source of inspiration to any Traveller GM, especially those whose campaigns focus on politics.

 

[GypsyComet]

Okay guys, time pump some air into this one and get it to resurface!

I could add a few new sources to this topic, but not all of them are "reading" as such...

 

[ravells]

My choice would be a book called 'Dragon's Egg' by Robert L Forward.

Forward is a nuclear physicist (I think this, and the sequel are the only books he wrote) One of the Amazon reviews has about right when it says:

Start with a neutron star, one of the densest things known to man, send humans out to investigate it, discover life on it (under heavier gravity than you could ever imagine with lifes measured in seconds rather than years), and sit back and read what happens - I couldn't put this book down.

It's better than Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven and Arthur C. Clarke all rolled into one.

I hope that they re-release the sequel as well "Starquake".

Just a quick word of warning - this is not a new book - it was released originally 20 years ago and the sequel 15 years ago. The story doesn't date, but just check to make sure it's not already in your collection

 

[Malenfant]

Both the Forward books are pretty good, I didn't think they were particularly travelleresque though. Similar good-sf-but-not-remotely-Travellerlike are Donald Moffitt's The Genesis Quest and Second Genesis. Again, these are at least 20 years old but have all sorts of great concepts like immortal humans recreated by aliens in another galaxy from genetic code broadcast from Earth, living tree spaceships, galactic extinction events and so on. Fun stuff. But again, not remotely Traveller