Nine Sci-Fi Books That Deserve To Be Films

I referred to Card as a one novel author because he wrote one novel, Ender's Game, for which he became well-known, it was of modest quality at best,

So little of "science fiction" actually has plausible reference to science that it ought to be called fantasy--perhaps future fantasy would be a more realistic term. That is probably what makes it so appealing to both authors and readers, and accounts for the propensity of writers to air both their grievances and their wishes in moralizing homilies within the genre. For sake of balance, i would not that leftwingnuts are as likely to sermonize in their sci-fi works as are rightwingnuts. It's a genre which is attractive to those who want a bully pulpit.

Yup. "Rescue the princess and kill the dragon" set in a space opera.

So little of "science fiction" actually has plausible reference to science that it ought to be called fantasy--perhaps future fantasy would be a more realistic term.

Setanta wrote:

So little of "science fiction" actually has plausible reference to science that it ought to be called fantasy--perhaps future fantasy would be a more realistic term.

That's the main reason I pretty much quit reading science fiction and fantasy around the time I finished high school. (I had been binging on both genres as a teenager.) Science fiction, like all fiction, is ultimately limited by people's capacity to make stuff up. Reality itself has no such constraint. Accordingly, as I took advanced science classes in high school, I found that the real world is stranger, more fascinating, and fuller of mind-boggling details than fiction is. So I concluded that science non-fiction was my thing, and that science fiction couldn't really compete with it. One major project in my current sabbatical is to figure out if this conclusion was a mistake.

Thanks for the tip -- I will. My current plan is to take my own advice I gave years ago in Noddy's science fiction thread, and read the last decade of Hugo winners. I'm sure the approach is not perfect, but it should be a reasonably good proxy for what the science fiction community at large considers good literature.

But I'm sure that will leave enough empty slots in my reading list. What Ian M. Banks novel do you think I should start with?

Thanks again!

By the way -- after we met almost two years ago, I bought Asimov's Complete Robot, read Evidence, and still didn't find the original quote that you said Douglas Adams copied: "Those who most want to govern are, ipso facto, the least suited to do it. [...] [A]nyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." I see the idea of the quote, kind of hovering above the story, but I see nothing remotely similar to the quote itself. Am I overlooking something?

IMO, some of the best print-to-big screen transitions come from graphic novels/comic books.

He did. That short story was "Evidence", published 1946. The full text is not available online. Cycloptichorn linked, I think, to Wikipedia's summary of it.