A Jolly Good Read

[Psychosplodge]

Not the Star wars EU black fleet trilogy? There's another series of the same name?

[Kirsten]

nope, not Star Wars, it is by Joshua Dalzelle

[Erik Setzer]

Favourite sci-fi book at the moment is The Martian.
...
It's also hilarious, I was laughing my backside off at some parts.

Well, you'd expect that, for the novel that a comedy movie was based off of.

For those who hadn't heard that story:

[url]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-martian-best-comedy-twitter_us_56932dade4b0a2b6fb70a7e0[/url]

[Asymmetrical Xeno]

Just found out Forward has written more hypotehtical alien culture based books, this book series sounds AWESOME :
[url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocheworld[/url]

And the main aliens are described :
Flouwen (the Middle English word for 'flow') are the alien creatures in the book. They are the sole inhabitants of the planet Eau, which makes up the watery half of Rocheworld. Flouwen are blob-like, happy-go-lucky aliens that spend their days surfing waves and working on difficult mathematical problems.

Flouwen appear to be giant, colored jellyfish in the ammonia oceans of Eau. Like Earthly jellyfish, they are amorphous, colored blobs of jelly. Flouwen are highly intelligent, sexless, and do not appear to physically age. They are able to communicate and see in the water by means of sonar. They are also able to see outside the water by morphing their jelly bodies into crude lenses, which they use to methodically track the stars. Flouwen are also capable of morphing themselves into a hard, rock-like substance when they feel the need to think about a difficult problem for an extended period. They do this by excreting much of their body water, thereby bringing their silica-gel-based cells closer together, which allows quicker processing of information.

----

I know what I'm reading next! A shame he died in 2002.

[Psychosplodge]

nope, not Star Wars, it is by Joshua Dalzelle

Hmm looks interesting, might have to grab those at somepoint

[Al Shut]

I'll have to admit I've never read much Science Fiction besides Adams but of his books I prefer Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency over Hitchhiker's Guide. Can't put my finger on why, maybe because the plot is much more convoluted.

Fantasy it's clearly the Zamonia series by Walter Moers the best being Rumo & his miraculous adventures. Brilliantly illustrated it has the most *** kicking in the series and, at least in my opinion, the best handling of the very digressive nature of these books.

[CoffeeGrunt]

I'll have to admit I've never read much Science Fiction besides Adams but of his books I prefer Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency over Hitchhiker's Guide. Can't put my finger on why, maybe because the plot is much more convoluted.

Fantasy it's clearly the Zamonia series by Walter Moers the best being Rumo & his miraculous adventures. Brilliantly illustrated it has the most *** kicking in the series and, at least in my opinion, the best handling of the very digressive nature of these books.

I read a bit of his Dirk Gently work in The Salmon of Doubt. I need to look up the rest of it, as it was as entertaining as Adams always was.

[grimmas]

An interesting mix of stuff coming out good to see. Slightly off topic but something I found quite interesting. I was reading another forum (Sorry, but it was MWO so related) and someone raised the point that only hard SciFi was actually science fiction, as it was science based fiction, and anything else was just fantasy. He didn't give any ratio or definitions but did suggest that if the premise realised on a certain amount of hand wavery to explain it then it was fantasy. So 40K fantasy as is Star Wars and the Battleetech universe. Thoughts?

[Asymmetrical Xeno]

I think he is right to an extent. I personally call stuff like Star wars, Dune and flash Gordon "Space Fantasy" and never really saw any of that sort of stuff as SF even when I was a kid it was "fantasy in space".

[CoffeeGrunt]

I thought it was more that Hard Sci-Fi is technically feasible and thought out. So, for example, a novel about a Generational Ship and the struggles of society aboard it could be entirely based on factual knowledge of such a design and does its homework on the mathematics, etc in order to make it seem like it could be real.

Whereas soft sci-fi would be the same story with a bit more hand-waving, i.e., the ship is stated to travel at a certain speed and fuel itself indefinitely, but this isn't clearly explained, and nor is food production. Not to say that soft sci-fi is inherently 'lazier.' A lot of soft sci-fi has become reality over the centuries, after all.

WH40K and Star Wars are very much Science Fantasy, though. They are generic Fantasy settings transposed onto a galactic scale. They have wizards and magic, nothing is explained in any scientific capacity and basically none of it is possible with the current understanding of physics.