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Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:22 am
by Trip
Just finishing Starship Troopers. Where to next?

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 1:33 am
by T200
Stranger in a Strange Land.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:14 am
by DrDonkeyLove
Interesting and a quite odd, perhaps unique, guy. I wonder if he and L. Ron Hubbard hung out.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:59 am
by Schlegel
DrDonkeyLove wrote:Interesting and a quite odd, perhaps unique, guy. I wonder if he and L. Ron Hubbard hung out.
I doubt it. Hubbard was a paranoid motherfucker. I know Heinlein was buds with the de Camps.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 10:00 am
by Trip
Thanks T

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 12:11 pm
by Shafpocalypse Now
Glory Road
Between Planets

To be honest, I read most of my Heinlein when I was quite young, and I'd have to go back to check.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 1:08 pm
by nafod
Staying on the Starship Troopers theme, you might want to try Old Man's War by Scalzi. Came out in 2005.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 2:38 pm
by Holland Oates
nafod wrote:Staying on the Starship Troopers theme, you might want to try Old Man's War by Scalzi. Came out in 2005.
Or Armor by Steakley or Orphanage by Buettner or the Forever War by Haldeman, or fuck I can't think of anything else.

Once you read Starship Troopers it ruins most books of the same genre because as you read them you realize that most fail to measure up.

All the books listed above are good and stand on their own but you can't fail to not see Heinlein in everyone.

If you haven't read Ender's Game you need to read it as well.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:00 pm
by Shafpocalypse Now
Ender's Game is, perhaps, the only book in that series worth reading. The rest couldn't hold my interest.

His Alvin Maker series is a bit better, but, like in the Ender series, the following books don't live up to the initial book's premise.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:38 pm
by Holland Oates
Shafpocalypse Now wrote:Ender's Game is, perhaps, the only book in that series worth reading. The rest couldn't hold my interest.

His Alvin Maker series is a bit better, but, like in the Ender series, the following books don't live up to the initial book's premise.
It's the only one I read.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 3:59 pm
by Kazuya Mishima
Trip wrote:Just finishing Starship Troopers. Where to next?
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Time Enough for Love

Those three are the best of his "adult stuff".

I also liked his more juvenile stuff like Glory Road, and Starship Troopers.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 4:05 pm
by DARTH
Kazuya Mishima wrote:
Trip wrote:Just finishing Starship Troopers. Where to next?
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Time Enough for Love

Those three are the best of his "adult stuff".

I also liked his more juvenile stuff like Glory Road, and Starship Troopers.
To those excellent choices I add The Puppet Masters.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 4:13 pm
by tough old man
Gordon Dicksons Dorsai series. Start with "Soldier Ask Not" and go from there.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 5:23 pm
by Shafpocalypse Now
If you want recommendations:

David Drake's "The Reaches" formerly Igniting the Reaches, Through the Breach and Fireships.

Based on the Age of Discovery.
That's the background to The Reaches. I'll now offer three... well, call them caveats regarding the books themselves.

1. I postulated a future in which war had brought Mankind to the brink of extinction. The civilization that returns is based on individual craftsmanship, not mass production (although that's clearly on its way back by the end of the series). Some readers, faced with stories in which the characters fly starships but fight (some of them) with single-shot rifles, were not only baffled but infuriated.
2. Though I didn't use ideologues for my viewpoint characters, the period itself was fiercely ideological. I didn't attempt to hide that reality by inventing characters with modern sensibilities to exclaim with horror at situations which everyone of the day took for granted. Thus the books are deeply steeped in ideology that readers may find not only foreign but distasteful.
3. Finally, I'd intended The Reaches to be light space opera, the sort of thing I later did in the RCN series. Space opera they are, but they're very hard, harsh books. Through the Breach in particular is a more realistic view of what war does to a citizen/soldier than Redliners was. I'm more self-aware now than I was when I wrote the series, but I'm honestly not sure whether more than chance was involved in my choosing to write Through the Breach in first person, which is nearly unique in my fiction.
The "Marching...." series by Ringo and Weber.

The Miles Vorkosigan books by Lois McMaster Bujold.

Military SF has really enjoyed a renaissance in the last 10 years or so. Ringo and Weber are right on the forefront of this.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 5:54 pm
by snatch grip
T200 wrote:Stranger in a Strange Land.
This one, all day. I haven't read many of his books, but they all paled in comparison to SIASL.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Mon Apr 12, 2010 8:09 pm
by Shaun B. O'Murnecan
His best work is a short story:

All you Zombies.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 7:49 am
by vern
Image

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 1:06 pm
by stosh
Image

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 1:08 pm
by Turdacious
Image

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 9:39 pm
by Holeyfraggaroley
Second John Scalzi.

Heilein - Glory Road, Job (Story of Job just a little twisted)

Armour by Steakly is good. It is similar to Starship Troopers, but good.

Cyborg by Dietz

Ever thought about william gibson?

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 10:01 pm
by Kazuya Mishima
If you like Starship Troopers and the whole mobile armor concept, then check out the Posleen series by John Ringo...at least the first two books, A Hymn Before Battle, and Gust Front...the series kind of goes downhill after those, but those two aren't bad at all.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Tue Apr 13, 2010 11:59 pm
by Schlegel
Watch on the Rhine in the posleen series was fun too. They get so low on experienced soldiers they even recall and rejuvenate Nazi soldiers, having left them out of earlier recalls on purpose. The book follows a WWII german tank commander.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2010 1:05 am
by Holeyfraggaroley
Forgot these two by Neil Stephenson

Snow Crash

Diamond Age.

Not really mobile armor type sci fi but cool none the less. I don't know about the rest of Stephenson's stuff because I can't bring myself to read the lengthy tomes.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2010 7:26 pm
by Shaun B. O'Murnecan
Stephenson's first book in the Baroque cycle is great: Quicksilver.

Re: Ok Heinlein fans - what's next?

Posted: Thu Apr 15, 2010 9:01 pm
by Schlegel
Norman U. Senchbau wrote:Stephenson's first book in the Baroque cycle is great: Quicksilver.
I saw his manuscsript for that: a stack of papers 2+ feet high written out longhand in purple ink. Wanted to get into the feeling of the mileau, I guess.