Amazon's top 20 SciFi/Fantasy
Posted by xthinker88 9 years, 10 months ago to Culture
What? No Heinlein?
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I prefer sci-fi and police procedurals, not current comedy.
I also have several books by Neal Stephenson in my top 20, including The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and especially Cryptonomicon.
Getting a referral to 'new' authors is a delight and one of the great benefits of being here in the gulch with kindred spirits.
His series got mostly good reviews on Audible and Downpour. Most people complained about the short length (they are 8-10 hour audio books, 100-110K word books) and the second one was deemed as unnecessary. I found you did need to listen to all of them to get all the stuff going on, but I interpreted it as sort of a "Star Trek with different names" type storyline. You have a young brash captain, thrown into command, a logical and analytical XO (complete with emotional detachment), a Russian (not Scot) engineer who can fix anything, and it moves planet to planet with the usual misadventures. I would rate it at a 7-8 on a 1-10 scale, and it seems to get better as you go along. The premise is pretty good, if not standard fare, but RB seems to be growing into the writing role with each book. It is projected to be a series of 75 books, in 3 story arcs, covering a 100 year span. He is at book 14 I think in the first 25 book arc. I would recommend it as a Sci Fi series, but you may also want to look into H.Paul Honsingers "Man of War" series. He does a better job with characters and suspenseful interest, and his bad guys are giant rats who just happen to match human DNA to 98% due to some long ago alien intervention, who are really pissed about it and want to wipe out humanity for it. Much more fun and great, well thought out science to it.
The other religions in there, especially the Fosterites, were definitely scams.
http://studentsforliberty.org/blog/20...
http://www.frontierssaga.com/ryks-log/
Unless I am mis-reading the April 2, 2015 entry, he stopped selling through Apple and Google but still sells on Amazon. The loss of revenue seems to have gone to the Apple/Google connection, perhaps another layer of fees in addition to the Amazon fees?
Thanks for sharing the info. Do you recommend Ryk's series?
In Urban Fantasy: Jim Butcher's Dresden novels are excellent as well.
It is sad that Amazon and CNN are illiterate when it comes to reading good scifi and fantasy books.
by S. Fowler Wright (1928)
would be on my list.
And if they are basing things on popularity (see Harry Potter), they should also probably include the Twilight series and
For more serious consideration, I don't see Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman (Dragonlance world). No David Eddings or Terry Brooks. No Anne McCaffrey. And no Edgar Allen Poe.
A list sorely lacking, IMHO.
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