I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Actually, I'd recommend just about anything Vernor Vinge has written (with a possible exception of his early work The Witling).

I'd also recommend The Ganymede Club by Charles Sheffield. I liked his writing a lot, though I can't recommend everything he wrote.

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The Leif Ericson Cruiser

C.J. Cherryh's Merchanter/Alliance/Etc. stories are gripping psychological dramas with very strong "space" theme.

Downbelow Station, Heavy Time, Rimrunner, Hellburner, and several others are all good, and have the added deliciousness of all taking place along the same over-arching plotline, so that you get to see a several-hundred-year-long saga develop through glimpses or "snapshots" at various points along the storyline. Putting together the pieces into a larger whole is, for me, a huge part of the fun. See also the Cyteen trilogy and Forty Thousand at Gehenna.

Her Chanur and (I think) Foreigner books also take place along the same plotline, but go off on tangents that take them far away from the "main action".

Another one came to mind, and I forgot the author. It is "Slaves of Heaven," kind of like Niven's Fallen Angels, but in reverse.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Little Fuzzy. by H. Beam Piper and "Night of Delusion" in which things get weird but somehow satisfying, at least to me.

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Cold as Ice by Charles Sheffield is another good space-themed story, and has an advantage of being "hard SF" -- if you discount biology.

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The 'Dread Empire's Fall' universe. I have read one novella and the first two novels and I love its military strategy (in which acceleration/de-acceleration are extremely important) it political intrigue, and the fact the aliens are characters. They aren't symbols for humanities this side or that, or of the unknown, they are people. I like that.

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I received m ny recommendations a ways back from this thread:

Looking for rec. books to read

Heck, I'm still reading my way through the great titles people posted. Good luck!

Of Robert Silverberg's works--he's my favorite "big name" SF author--I highly recommend At Winter's End, with The World Inside and Dying Inside close runners-up.

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My picks (as I own these):

2001

2010

The First Men in the Moon

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I calculated the odds of this succeeding versus the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid...and I went ahead anyway. - Crow T. Robot

Godspeed, John Glenn. - Scott Carpenter

And these atomic bombs that science burst upon the world that night were strange even to the men that used them.
- H.G Wells, The World Set Free

To the conspiracy crowd, radiation is a big Boogey Man that inspires terror and death in all who encounter it. - JayUtah

Another kid pick, but the pictures are drop-dead gorgeous, and it's not a half bad story:
Captain Raptor and the Moon Mystery.
"It's a big universe, and I'm in the mood for adventure. Fire up the rockets, Threetoe-
Onward to the stars!"
-Captain Raptor.

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"Carl Sagan sent a message to ET,
Neil Armstrong walked in the Sea of Tranquility
Steve Squyers built Spirit and Opportunity
Dan Haylen upchucked in zero gravity." -Brent Simon, The Space Camp Song

The World Inside and Dying Inside are both excellent books, but they aren't space related - apart from mention of a character being from a Venusian colony.

I read an excerpt of At Winter's End in Asimov's SF Magazine, but wouldn't class it among Silverberg's best.

Back to the OP... I noticed that Stephen Baxter gets mentioned, but not his Xeelee series.

I recommend the Xeelee series for two main reasons: One, it's very good, and gets to grips with some very cutting-edge science. Two, it's a series with a lot of entry points; to some extent you can dip into it in any order, but each story you read will increase your knowledge of the fictional universe, and in doing so will enhance your enjoyment.

The original run went like this:

Raft. Space travellers accidentally find themselves in a universe where the gravitational constant is billions of times bigger than in our universe. Stars are a mile across and last for about a year. Generations of survivors build orbiting mining towns, or (if they are lucky) live on the raft made from their original spaceship and enjoy the remains of their old technology. Luckily oxygen is in plentiful supply, as long as you get into the right part of a nebula.

Raft was Baxter's first novel, expanded from a short story. It does not mention the Xeelee at all, but is clearly part of the sequence.

Timelike Infinity. At the height of humanity's optimism, huge projects are being carried out across the solar system. One engineer, Michael Poole, places one mouth of a wormhole in Jovian orbit, and drags the other end through interstellar space at relativistic velocity, intending to return it to serve as a time tunnel, enabling people to travel forwards and backwards in time by about 1500 years. Unfortunately, in the intervening time, Earth has been conquered twice, once by the Squeem (who have since been overthrown) and now by the Qax, who are harder to get rid off. A group of human rebels decide to use the time portal to travel into the past. The Qax assume it's to prevent them from invading in the first place, but the rebels have other ideas...

Flux. This novel tells of humans who have been miniaturised and made to live inside a neutron star. The physics is well worked out, but I found this the least engaging of the Xeelee stories. Still worth a read, though, particularly as the further adventures of some of the characters are quite entertaining.

Ring. Although Ring refers to a lot of other Xeelee stories, it is best read as a sequel to Timelike Infinity. I'm partway into it now, and am struck by how vivid some of the space scenes are. A Locus review, quoted on the cover, observes that the author "makes E.E. Doc Smith look like a minimalist."

Vacuum Diagrams. This is a short story collection - almost the equivalent of Larry Niven's Tales of Known Space. (There are a lot of similarities between the two authors, at least in Baxter's early days, but Baxter's physics tend to be more up to date, and therefore more exotic.) Here we find out how the Squeem were overthrown, what eventually happened to humanity, where the Xeelee come from and much else. Truly epic stuff, but very accessible.

That's the original sequence. Since then, Baxter has written a series of novels set in the Xeelee timeline. They can be read as standalones.

I enjoyed George RR Martin's Tuf Voyaging, especially the last story.

Hey guys, I was wondering if anyone has ever read this book and know what the title of it is. It's about a group of astronauts or scientist, I dont remember, but they go into space and the earth gets destroyed and they have something on their space ship that makes time go really slow. I remember at the end of the book it said "isnt it crazy that you read a book that went through thousands of years" Any ideas?

I enjoy the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. I really get a chuckle whenever Honor tries to explain the game of baseball to an other world being that has never seen the game before.

fos

I enjoyed Footfall, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It w as sort of a mordern (kinda, well 1985) take on the alien invasion story, with no Will Smith, Tom Cruise, or Bumpy-forehead humanoid aliens.

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Clear skies Maksutov.

It's very hard to tell from this description - that sort of storyline has been done many times - but I wonder if it's Tau Zero by Poul Anderson?

I remember when "The Gripping Hand" came out there was a blurb on the cover from Tom Clancy: "Worth waiting eighteen years for!" I wouldn't have minded waiting a few more decades...

Back in January Jim mentioned The Survivors. I read that as a kid shortly after it was first published (must have been ten or eleven at the time) and it stayed with me more than anything else I read from my youth (with the possible exception of Uncle Einar). Even as a kid I couldn't help the shiver when the transmitter was first built, in the Year 35, and George talked with Bill.

For those interested, this short novel can be found online:

http://www.webscription.net/chapters...436016___1.htm

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I never finished The Gripping Hand, and I can count on the fingers of one, um, hand, how many books I can say that about.

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I must be the only one that actually liked The Gripping hand lol. Yea, it wasn't as good Mote in Gods Eye but it was better then a lot of SF books I've read (Derelict by Robert L. Hovorka comes to mind)

I just started Alastair Reynold's Absolution Gap and am absolutely loving the whole Revelation Space series. Pushing Ice was good, but not nearly as good.

I also have to second somebody's nomination of Battlefield Earth, I've read this book a few times. I tried to read L. Ron's Mission Earth series but couldn't get into it.

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"Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot." --Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot"

I liked the Gripping Hand--and yes, I liked The Mote in God's Eye better.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info