Oolite Bulletins

I started reading Doc Smith when I was 9 - I was somewhat precocious - but slid back rapidly into mainstream middle-of-the-road once I hit the UK secondary education system.

My dad didn't have the very beginning of the Lensmen series, starting at Galactic Patrol, and he had most of the D'Alemberts and a couple of the Skylark books, but from the age of 10 onwards (I still look) I hunted down everything in and out of print by Doc - my parents have on their book shelves, all of the Lensmen, D'Alemberts, Skylarks, Subspace, Lord Tedrics and I'm fairly certain all the one offs he wrote too - I even own a book written after Doc's death from his notes written by Stephen Goldin (co-writer of the D'Alembert books) which follows Worzel the dragon-like lizard from the Lensmen series.

Because I read the stuff at a very early age I have a very soft spot for Doc as a true "space opera" creator.

There isn't much space opera out there anymore (that I've found)

Other childhood and now adult favourites were AC Clarke and Asimov, Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and more recently Greg Bear, Iain M Banks, Alistair Reynolds.

As an aside does anybody remember the 100 page throw away efforts in the Perry Rhodan series? The pulp fiction of SF!

I was also nine when I read my first Sci-Fi novel - Heinlein's "Tunnel in the Sky".
Had quite an effect on a young mind.

El Viejo wrote:

I was also nine when I read my first Sci-Fi novel - Heinlein's "Tunnel in the Sky".
Had quite an effect on a young mind.

We can tell

How could I forget Heinlein <slap> shame on me! (although not read the one you mentioned, goes off to Google to investigate...) and how could I also forget Philip K Dick! (Bad DH, Bad DH!) or Alfred Bester (Demolished Man - now there's a book to screw up a young mind!)

I must have been about the same age - I remember buying books from a stall at a fete with pocket money, and the fete was in the grounds of my primary school. One of the books was "Imperial Earth" (needless to say the parts about Calindy were thoroughly lost on me then ) and I think another might have been a Family D'Alembert.

I haven't written any so I take my hat off to many of you here!

I think Galactic Patrol was the first to appear as a book and was marketed as a self-contained novel, so lots of people had that one and not the rest of the series. (Wikipedia is surprisingly thin on Doc Smith info!)

Apparently calling Doc a co-author of D'Alembert is stretching it - Goldin wrote them based on a semi-finished short story (with his blessing.) Is the Worsel one any good (and is there one about Nadreck and... er... the other dude, the Rigellian)

There isn't much space opera out there anymore (that I've found)

Read an interview with Banks in which he said Excession is a tribute if not quite a member of the genre. That one is mostly big ships blowing up big stuff and playing with antimatter, so pretty much...

Hm - antimatter.OXP anyone?

I'm sure you've noticed from other posts that Niven is a favourite, Asimov, Heinlein, Greg Egan, Peter F Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Banks - and Wells and Verne, to get back on to the topic of history. Alastair Reynolds I find a bit more contrived somehow, doesn't do it for me. Have just discovered Eric Brown (which is more cyberpunk, if it's still called that, and that's a whole other bunch of faves.)

I’ll throw in the “Honour Harrington” series by David Weber as an example of contempory pulp sci-fi space opera – think “Hornblower“ in space. Wormholes are used, of course, but all the space battles are like FEII – Newtonian physics. Torpedoes are very popular. Well worked out!

zevans wrote:

I must have been about the same age - I remember buying books from a stall at a fete with pocket money, and the fete was in the grounds of my primary school. One of the books was "Imperial Earth" (needless to say the parts about Calindy were thoroughly lost on me then ) and I think another might have been a Family D'Alembert.

I haven't written any so I take my hat off to many of you here!

I think Galactic Patrol was the first to appear as a book and was marketed as a self-contained novel, so lots of people had that one and not the rest of the series. (Wikipedia is surprisingly thin on Doc Smith info!)

Apparently calling Doc a co-author of D'Alembert is stretching it - Goldin wrote them based on a semi-finished short story (with his blessing.) Is the Worsel one any good (and is there one about Nadreck and... er... the other dude, the Rigellian)

There isn't much space opera out there anymore (that I've found)

Read an interview with Banks in which he said Excession is a tribute if not quite a member of the genre. That one is mostly big ships blowing up big stuff and playing with antimatter, so pretty much...

Hm - antimatter.OXP anyone?

I'm sure you've noticed from other posts that Niven is a favourite, Asimov, Heinlein, Greg Egan, Peter F Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Banks - and Wells and Verne, to get back on to the topic of history. Alastair Reynolds I find a bit more contrived somehow, doesn't do it for me. Have just discovered Eric Brown (which is more cyberpunk, if it's still called that, and that's a whole other bunch of faves.)

Well if we're verging into Cyperpunk territory then W Gibson is god and all others a pretenders to the throne! (although some of the novels based on the Shadowrun RPG were pretty good - author(s) forgotten )

The Worsel one is actually very 'in keeping' with the Lensman series and I enjoyed it, but clearly Goldin and Smith shared some common sense of style because I think the three biggies Lensman, D'Alemberts and Skylark series do have a common thread of styling running through them.

What you say about Galactic Patrol makes sense - I ended up with three different versions of it - in the end I tracked them all under the "Granada" label.

For hard, but still very readable sci-fi I'd reckomend Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series. Slightly off-topic as he doesn't 'cheat' with FTL or hyperspace drives. Light Speed is the limit of his universe, so Lighthuggers with frozen passengers take decades to travel between systems. He cheats a bit by imagining a power source that can keep applying thrust with fairly small amounts of fuel, but the ships are limited by the G acceleration thrust that the crew and ship can take.

LittleBear wrote:

For hard, but still very readable sci-fi I'd reckomend Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series. Slightly off-topic as he doesn't 'cheat' with FTL or hyperspace drives. Light Speed is the limit of his universe, so Lighthuggers with frozen passengers take decades to travel between systems. He cheats a bit by imagining a power source that can keep applying thrust with fairly small amounts of fuel, but the ships are limited by the G acceleration thrust that the crew and ship can take.

I'm in the midst of reading all his stuff, nice and dark
I too like the fact that they go slower than light, opens a lot of story-possibilities.