Sci-Fi Reading Recommendations?

[b-guy]

I recently read 'The Forever War', and found it surprisingly riveting. I actually burned right through it in a little over a day. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of warfare on a thousand-year scale, with the changes in technology and tactics, even as the main characters only age a few years. I also really enjoyed the glimpses into what future Earth might be like...although it's a future that must keep the American Religious Right awake late at night, chewing their fingernails.

[Star Traks]

Sounds very interesting to read - especially time dilation impacts - minimal room in my schedule for reading the rest of this year

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forever_War

[b-guy]

To revisit this old chestnut, and make a couple of updates:

Forever Peace

Despite the title, this is NOT a sequel to The Forever War. It's about a 'mechanic', in this context a soldier who links his body into a robot war machine, controlling it from a distance. Despite sounding like something from Avatar, the book came before the movie. Oh, and did I mention that he does it while simultaneously being linked to a dozen other soldiers? The book is more about the bizarre effects of this mental merging than it is about the actual battles being fought, and has a number of sci-fi type concepts (including of course an end-of-the-world scenario) and was overall a good read.

Forever Free

This one IS a direct sequel to The Forever War, and picks up with the main character about twenty years after the first book. Basically, he and his wife are not happy with their new life, and decide to use relativity to travel 40,000 years into the future to see what happens to humanity. Of course, things go wrong. The first three quarters of this book was great, though in a very different way from the first book. The ending was...very strange. I don't want to give anything away, but the ending is eerily similar to something we've seen in Star Traks.

Armour

Yet another book where future soldiers run around in fancy, mechanized armour. And yeah, they're fighting insects in this one, similar to Starship Troopers. First, you're following the story of Felix, a seemingly un-killable scout in a series of battles against giant ants. Then you jump to an apparently unrelated group of scientists on another planet, along with a con-artist trying to steal something from them. Honestly, I was really disappointed when the book jumped away from Felix for several chapters. I felt better when the story came back to him, and they tied the two storylines together nicely in the end, but it still a big piss-off. Overall, the book is worth reading.

[borgcrazy]

Armour

Yet another book where future soldiers run around in fancy, mechanized armour. And yeah, they're fighting insects in this one, similar to Starship Troopers. First, you're following the story of Felix, a seemingly un-killable scout in a series of battles against giant ants. Then you jump to an apparently unrelated group of scientists on another planet, along with a con-artist trying to steal something from them. Honestly, I was really disappointed when the book jumped away from Felix for several chapters. I felt better when the story came back to him, and they tied the two storylines together nicely in the end, but it still a big piss-off. Overall, the book is worth reading.

I hate when books do that. When I read "Kahless" and realized they were doing that every other chapter, I started skipping chapters to get to the next part of the story I was interested in at the time, then went back to the beginning to read the other story. But in that case, the two stories were interconnected by only the most tenuous of plot threads (i.e. they were both about Kahless...).