Then again, you had twice the time to collect and read them ;)

Exactly - I started buying seriously about 1972 when I went to uni. One of my friends was a budding SF writer. Another was a friend of Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker fame.

Ming - the mod on Poly is something of an authority too. We seem to have similar tastes in books. He knows Zelazny.

Hmmm, lots of good taste round here! I'll second Frank Herbert (although as Col says the later Dune stuff kind of loses it), John Brunner and Philip K.Dick are also both excellent choices.

some more Philip K.Dick recommendations:

The 3 stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep
A Scanner Darkly
The Man in the High Castle
The Divine Invasion
Flow my Tears the Policeman cried


I have another recomendation from an author you might be surprised by... Doris Lessing's 'Canopus In Argos:Archives' novel cycle. The style changes wildly between novels but I'd say 3/5 of them are absolute classics. The first one is 're:colonised planet 5, Shikasta' and is written as a series of documents by an interplanetry/interdimensional being over a period of 20,000 years. Highly recommended :D

anarres, when you eventually come visit the south coast I can lend you about half the books in this thread ;)

I eat books for a living Col, so I nearly have as many books as you and will never ever let any more go...

I got evicted from a house in 1996 and lost me entire book collection so I been buying and storing them since then...

Wanna read some nice trashy SF? How about the Lensman Series by E.E. "Doc" Smith. Trash, but absolute classics...
I love all that "When the going gets tough, the tough gets going (and the women make sandwiches or faint...)
Super! Cosmic!
Go get em Galactic Patrol!

Or for SF comedy its hard to beat Harry Harrison and his books about Bill the Galactic Hero or the Stainless Steel Rat...
Just the right blend of cheese, heroism and very very big dollops of sarcasm...

Melifluous

Hey - I lurve the lensman series - except for the last one - Masters of the Vortex. What was that all about. A bit of an addon if you ask me. I love the Skylark series too. I reall yenjoy space opera.

Harry harrison too of course. Slippery Jim McGris.

col: finally I saw someone mentioning Alfred Bester! He really writes up to his name!

Best new book a came about was Joan Slonczewski: Brain Plague. This book is everything what Greg Bears' Blood Music was not! It is hardcore SF and still has a very warm feeling and a social concern.

Anyone remember David I. Masson? There was a small collection of his time-travel stories, featuring 'The Two-Timer', about a 16th century man hijacking a time-machine and travelling into our time.

Also, Gregory Benford's Cosm comes to my mind.

And a love David Brin, despite the fact he often goes to excessive length, and despite the fact that the new Uplift book are rather unreadable, his 'Uplift War' is amazing.

(I'll have to browse my shelf to came up with more...)

Bester, that's that psicorps dude from babylon 5 right ;)

As to revive this thread, I finished "Olympos" by the aforementioned Dan Simmons while I was on holiday. It's the sequel to the brilliant "Ilium". It's bizarre, nice for those who enjoyed greek mythology.

[nitpick]Notice that the first title is the roman word for troy and the second title is the greek word for mount olympus[/nitpick]

Didnt find that one in the bookstores yet[aargh]. Still havent found Hard Freeze and Hard as Nails either, guess a major order at the local book store is in order now.