AskSaidIt, what are your favorite SciFi books?

submitted by Bitchcraft from (self.AskSaidIt)

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]soyboy77 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Ender's Game. Don't let the movie put you off. When you read it you'll realise it would be a nightmare to adapt and I've got to applaud the filmmakers for even trying. Love these types of posts, keep 'em coming. The enemy's gate is down.

[–]Bitchcraft[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I just don't get what people see in Enders game. You are not the first to recommend it in this thread. I read the first one and currently I'm trying to force myself to read "Speaker for the dead".

To me it stands out as really bad (compared to other sci-fi classics) because there is no science fiction in it. Ender and all the other feel like cardboard cut-outs. If Ender is supposed to be gifted, why is he so stupid? One of the most important rules of good writing is "show, don't tell". Card tells us that Ender is a tactical genius, but his "tactics" are really unimpressive: He gets bullied by a fellow kid, and the only "tactic" he can come up with is to injure it to the point it dies? Or at the academy, when Ender hacks the internal comms system, the narrator simply informs us that Ender hacked the system through pure cleverness, but doesn't bother to illustrate how.

[–]soyboy77 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, I stalled on Speaker for the Dead too. Interestingly enough it's even more highly acclaimed (it won a Locus award). It's possible Ender's Game resonated with me because I read it at "the right time" in my life. If I read it now, it's entirely possible that it wouldn't hold up anymore and I'd be like wtf?