>>3522898
Aw, damnit. I was going to reply to OP with just "The enemy gate is down."

>>3522905
He hasn't done anything worse than what Orson Scott Card has already done to the book.

>>3522923
Hey, I fucking LOVE the book... Just not the latest edition that's been censored by OSC due to his increasingly conservative outlook. What the man is doing to Ender's Game makes George Lucas look like a responsible steward of intellectual property.

Guys, there's a mormon conspiracy to destroy art and science so that we will all be forced to work in the mines.

4e is made by mormons, and so are the Ender's novels, and 4E, and 3.5, and WoW, and the nWoD, and TWILIGHT.

TWILIGHT.

>>3522939
my god
it all makes sense

>>3522939
As a professional mormonologist I assure you we have nothing to worry about.

They are currently focusing on the special underwear market, and thus art is safe for the moment.

>>3522881

What the fuck are you talking about?!?!

Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive incoherent?

learn to read.

>>3522939
Well, they've been failing at it. 90% of everything has always been crap, and will always be crap.

Robot Animu
Mekton Zeta+

Super Robot Animu
Mekton Zeta+/BESM 2e Hybrid

what's so incoherent about voodoo alien computer ghosts?

I'd actually say Count Zero and Mona Lisa are better than Neuromancer. Also, the twist in both equals = mind blown.

Did someone say GIBSON?

this.

Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb for low-magic fantasy.

CHRONICLES OF CONAN BY ROBERT E. HOWARD

>>3523638
But expect to have your spirits crushed. Robin Hobb hates and despises both you and her protagonists, and does her best to maximize the emotional pain of everyone around her.

>>3523662
That might be true but i still can't stop reading the series.

The Three Worlds series, three series right now and soon to be four, by Ian Irvine.

Character-driven Fantasy with other races and magic and things, but remarkably realistic for that. Big bonus points for characters with realistic motivations and none of those stupid EVIL AN GOOD characters. All sorts of complex morality and will make you simulatenously hate and love some of the relative villains whereas some of the villains you will want to reach through the page and punch in the face.

Good setting, magic has rules, and eventually those rules are structured and codified like they should be. Nations have different styles, geographies, cultures and people. good potential for makign a setting.

Also, surprisingly grim. With a handful of exceptions things always get worse, and sometimes they get horrifically worse. If things get better it's usually so they can get even worse than before. for example, from the first book of the second series there is no permanent let-up in worsening until the last book of the third series, seven in total. If you need happy endings on a regular basis this is not your set of series. However, it does utterly shatter many of the more persistent and annoying fantasy story tropes. If you have any ability to empathise with characters you will probably end up raging at how unfair fictional life is at several points.

Also, while the main story of each series is self-contained, the fucker spreads some plotlines over multiple series, some of which are going to be over at least fourteen books.

IF YOU DIE IN A CAR CRASH I AM GOING TO FOLLOW YOU INTO DEATH TO PUNCH YOU IN THE FUCKING FACE FOR NOT FINISHING THE FUCKING STORY.

For heroic fantasy you want to look ad David Gemmel. That's all he does, but he's pretty much mastered it.

>>3523752
ALWAYS INJURIES
FUCK MANCERS
MAIGRAITH IS THE NUMENATOR
RULKE WAS AWESOME
FINAL DESTINATION

Also, the Malazan Book of the Fallen series, for being a fantasy series written by an archaeologist and anthropologist. It's a bit hard to get into because Steven Erikson is a fucking madman who writes books in some bizzare 4th dimension where it makes sense to write the first book of the series so that you need to read the next six books to understand what the fuck people in the first one were talking about. Seriously, it's like at least 50% of the first book is people making comments and observations that appear entirely random and nonsesical without information which you won't get for at least a couple of novels.

Of course, it makes rereadign the series very rewarding, because you're constantly discovering that the madman has written a series without a single thing that doesn't have some hidden meaning or import.

For an example, the first book starts chapters by continually quoting some poem by some guy, and the content of the poem is marginally to not at all connected to the plot of the first book. Then, in the FOURTH book, you actually meet this girl, although you already meet her in book 2 but it's not likely you've realized it, and she becomes involved in stuff which the quotations from book 1 illuminate greatly and shed a lot of light on the inner workings of her mind during that time.

Steven Erikson also fucking hates infodumping, so you have to constantly pay attention for some throwaway comment or mention that will tell you stuff most writers would infodump like hell about, like WTF is an Eleint or a Azanth House and Aptorians.

>>3523779

Holy shit was Rulke the fucking king of awesome.

PROBLEM: Just got dumped out of a portal from the worst place possible, onto a world with blinding light and crippling gravity

SOLUTION: Go berseker and wipe out an entire fucking village of powerful mancers and warriors and artificers solo and unarmed.

PROBLEM: Chest wound size of head. Lung no longer attached.

SOLUTION: Stick lung back in. Tie up wound with statuary wire.

PROBLEM: Entire world now hunting you because they're fucking terrified of you.

SOLUTION: Sneak to capital of world, onto roof of parliament building, while bleeding so badly the guys can literally follow your blood trail for dozens of kilometres, jump through roof of parilament building, land on equivalents of royalty so hard you burst open a cable-tied wound, smash both ankles, cough up lung, hold leaders hostage, threaten to kill entire planet, pass out, watch as nobody tries to even fucking touch you because unconscious and bleeding to death they don't think they can take you, and scare the fuck out of a planet so badly it basically surrenders itself to you for THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

PROBLEM: Came through portal, have no clothes.

SOLUTION: DO ALL OF ABOVE WHILE COMPLETELY FUCKING NAKED AND UNARMED.

I DON'T CARE IF HE'S A POWER-HUNGRY FUCKER WHO WOULD SACRIFICE WORLDS FOR HIS GOALS, IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO LIKE SOMEONE THAT OUTRAGEOUSLY GAR.

Lovecraft: If you EVER want to play a decent UA, or CoC or AFMBE campaign, you have to read Lovecraft.
However, you also have to understand that there is good Lovecraft, and there is bad Lovecraft.
My personal recomendations are:

The Call of Cthulhu
Mountains of Madness
Case of Charles Dexter Ward (Longest story he ever wrote, and probably autobiographical in places)
The shadow over Innsmouth
The Dunwhich Horror
The Rats in the Walls
Pickmans Model
The Thing at the Doorstep
The one with the Migo in it, whose name I have forgotten.

The rest are all down to personal taste, but those stories are his must reads that most people like. You can drop the Mountains of Madness if you don't like it, but it helps fill in certain references made in later stories.

>>3523834

Also, I forgot.

PROBLEM: Trapped in ethereal wasteland utterly devoid of even matter.

SOLUTION: Build entire fucking PALACE out of nothing and then build MASSIVE FUCKING WAR MACHINE SO FUCKING POWERFUL THAT AN ENTIRE PLANET OF THE GREATEST ARTIFICERS EVER STILL HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE HOW IT WORKS AFTER STUDYING IT FOR FOUR HUNDRED YEARS.

Zelazny's "Amber" books for great intrigue and just as planned. Also quite a lot of fucking shit up with swords and magic, and some excellently weird fantasy locations.

Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun", technically sci-fi but with a fantasy feel, although there is some genuine reality-warping in there but not much. The writing style creates a great atmosphere, and Wolfe throws in some archaic words that really add to that.

Seconding David Gemmell, somewhat predictable but large amounts of gar, manliness, magic and 'orrible fings.

>>3523779

And fucking Maigraith. Goddamn do you want to kill that bitch after the last series.

She spends the first series as basically one of the few relatively good people, and you like her, even though she's both outrageously intelligent and powerful. Like, sees a piece of magic that all the most powerful mancers have only just figured out with months of research and construction of the neccesary apparatus then learns to make her own in days USING HER FUCKING MIND powerful.

Then, later, after you've heard nothing of her for five books, you find out that she's gone batshit fucking insane, taken over the world and handed control over to a bunch of psychotic power-mad fuckers, driven the world into a state of total war that has lasted for a hundred and fifty years and has turned the world into a shithole of 40K proportions, and has done all this to create a planet-wide breeding program to crossbreed hundreds of thousands of people to make the perfect race and then lead them to dominate the known universe.

But, because that wasn't personal enough and she still isn't as bad as fucking Faelamor of the Repeated Genocide, Irvine makes it personal by having her chase down the hero of the first series and her only friend to kidnap her child for that breeding program until that friend goes batshit insane herself and kills her entire family.

FFFFFFFFFFFFF

But then it turns out they faked it.

STILL FUCKING HATE THAT BITCH.

Snow Crash, best cyberpunk/hacker book since neuromancer.

>>3523884
Well, gosh. Looks like I don't even need to read it anymore.

>>3523835

>The rest are all down to personal taste, but those stories are his must reads that most people like. You can drop the Mountains of Madness if you don't like it, but it helps fill in certain references made in later stories.

And The Thing was totally based on it.

>>3523893

I used to think this, then I did some research. The Thing (the film) is based on a Book called Who Goes There? Which might have been inspired by the Mountains of Madness.

Certainly, the thing is the best damn representation of a Shoggoth that exists in modern media, and you should definately portray it as such.

In fact The Thing makes a pretty textbook example as how your average game of CoC should go.

Reading Lovecraft's dialog is like jamming red-hot pokers covered in bees into my eyeballs.

Seriously, I can take flowery exposition on the horror outside of reality, and purple prose that never ends, but once I get to some inbred red-neck (and ALL the undesirables in Lovecraft are inbred. No exceptions) speaking God-awful country corn-pone, he's the worst auther ever.

>>3524021

You do realize that Lovecraft is not necessarily a good writer because of his actual writing ability, but rather the ideas and themes he presents that had not been articulated before, right?

Or are you just....gibbous?

>>3524021

Yes, parts where you have people speaking in accents DO require you to squint real hard to stop your eyes from bleeding, but otherwise he's a perfectly good author.

Besides, most of his best stories don't have this (Shadow over Innsmouth is the exception, which is a shame frankly. As the drunkards cry of 'Hey boy! Do ye know what a Shoggoth is!?' is probably what got the government to raid Innsmouth.)

But you should still persevere, as even with this, they do make good stories.

>>3523891
Uh huh. Still.
>>3523884
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
Now I /have/ to fucking read it.

Black Company books by Glen Cook for that gritty stuff/awesome wizards.

Night watch trilogy is world of darkness done right, and Gesar and Zabulon are JUST AS PLANNED incarnate.

>>3523773

Rigante. Fuck yeah. 'Nuff said.

Also, John Shannow.

>>3522881
The 'Prince of Nothing' trilogy is pretty fucking awesome, but it can be a brutally hard read, and I also quite enjoyed the "Memory Sorrow & Thorn" books (aka Green Angel Tower series).

>>3524062
Shit yeah Night Watch.
I just finished reading Last Watch yesterday.

>>3523852
Shit was SO awesome.

I must re read the books now, and buy the second trilogy.

Also the fate of one of the races (forgot the name) yay for double edged swords. And moral ambiguity and back stabbing and awesome.

>>3522881
Even though Gibson has already been mentioned, I would like to encourage people to read also his earlier short stories collected in Burning Chrome. The book has 10 short stories and 7 of those belong to my all time favourites.

Of course, the one everyone /tg/ should read is Dogfight, story about loser who runs into gaming group of ex-soldiers. [spoiler]Story of how he does everything he can to beat them in the game to earn respect, but in the end when he wins, no one likes him[/spoiler]

I have no mouth and I must scream is good, if short.

Anything by Lois McMaster Bujold. DO IT FAGGOTS.

Speaker for the Dead > Enders Game

The Entire Sci-Fi Masterworks collection.

DO IT.

Mage: The Awakening - Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman. Reality-warping karaoke! Ancient malevolent spirits! Ghosts! Accounting errors!

>>3524021

Then I advise you to never, ever read any Harry Keeler. He wrote some fucking batshit crime novels but most of his accents were written phoenetically, so I imagine it'll piss you off good and proper.

Mistborn
Dresden Files
Eyes of the Dragon
American Gods

I don't know why, but Eyes of the Dragon is possibly my favorite book ever. For a while, I would read it once a year. Sometimes twice.

Eragon. Now hold on here, hear me out. This is EXACTLY what a real Mary Sue is. The story does get rather good in the second book, so the guy can at least write decently when he's not dealing with his shitty Mary Sue, so I have hope for him in the future. As it is, because he has mommy and daddy, he was able to punish some thousand pages of his original creation fanfic as a 'epic' fantasy tetralogy.

I can't actually think of anything else. I love books and I love reading them, but I can never seem to find ones that interest me, and I can never seem to find the time to read them.
I like a good fantasy story, except without most of the things make fantasy. Hell, I kind of want to see an interesting fantasy story with SCIENCE! injected into the magic. Mistborn did that pretty well. All of it seems the same after a while. Plus, I really hate that most of them are written in the 'style' of the area. I hate having to piece through that, especially when the book isn't first person. It's hockey as shit.

Daisy... Daisy...

>>3523148
SNATCHERS!

>>3524448

>>3524320
>>3524320
This.

WTF, /tg/? Noone's mentioned Tolkien yet. They might be old, but The Hobbit, LotR and Silmarillion are still some of the greatest fantasy ever written.

The LotR, especially, is awesome for showing how a Quest should be told story-wise.

I'm just surprised noone mentioned Pratchett either. Read it, it's all good.

I think you're all forgetting something.

>>3522898
>>3522898
>>3522898
>>3522898
>>3522898
Whole damn series is win.


Also Xanth series by Peirs anthony, kinda turns into like semi eroitic bitch story at points but that at the least will turn it into a guilty pleasure.

Anything by Sir Arthur C. Clarke

The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton

Applies to two sort of games. It's good for Paranoia because of the secret societies, drugs and general craziness that goes on.

I also got a very CoC vibe. There's a great sense of uncovering forbidden knowledge, Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Plus the liberal sprinkling of Yog-Sothoth's, Cthulhu's and Tsathoggua's help.

I'm going to pull away from posting genre specific books for a moment.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler. A lot of games have mysteries, which sadly devolve into following a trail of bread crumbs where the players inevitably miss something and the DM either hands them the story on a silver platter or punishes them for not grasping his "obvious" clues. The Sherlock Holmes books are great because the main character tells you how he thinks, how he solves the crimes. The Philip Marlowe books are good for having more going on than you originally thought and watching the character (your archetypal hard boiled detective) figure things out, piecing what went on before he even took the case. And bonus points for "pansies got no iron in their bones." I laughed for three days.

>>3523835

To add to the Cthulhu stories list, look for "A Night in the Lonesome October" by Roger Zelazny.


Character SF (as opposed to gun porn):
Brian Daley's "Adventures of Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh" trilogy (Requiem for a Ruler of Worlds, Jinx on a Terran Inheritance, and Fall of the White Ship Avatar)

Post-Apoc of the "gone primitive" style:
Paul O. Williams' Pelbar cycle of seven books.

Post-Apoc of the "Gamma World" style:
Hiero's Journey, and The Unforsaken Hiero

>>3524787
Asimov is good too

>>3524089
>Prince of Nothing
>brutally hard read
This is an understatement. I was suspended multiple times throughout high school for reading, it was the only thing I ever did. I read everything. Last night I started reading the Discworld novels and got through The Light Fantastic and Equal Rites before going to bed.
I finally picked up The Prince of Nothing and made it through the first book easily enough and then went on to The Warrior Prophet. I've had it checked out from the local library for almost two years now because I simply can't get more than 200 pages into it without my brain collapsing.

>>3524089
CNAIUR WAS HERE

ANASURIMBUR MOENGHUS IS A FAGGOT

>>3525224
Thousandfold Thought is awesome and comes with an encyclopedia at the end, which really really helps.

Bumping this

Why the heck isn't there a /b/oo/k/s-board anyway?

>>3525971

>>>/book/

>>3522898
just read it on guard tower : )
>>3523835
Lovecraft=win
most of his work is on wikisource...used to read it in school
>>3524089
Prince of nothing a hard read how?
also khellus(sp) becomes and overpowered jedi thing by the end. awesome books though.

>>3525396
lol NO U!

Black Company
Black Company
Black Company
Black Company
Black Company
Black Company
Black Company
Black Company
Black Company

Not that I'm obsessive or anything...

guize can i get an answer on how the prince of nothing series is a hard read? I remember the books my junior and senior years of HS and they didn't seem that difficult...

>>3526482
Lots and lots of philosophical discussion.

>>3526538
ahh maybe I glossed over it...I remeber being engrossed by the battles and the mechanics of the magic in the books, brb rereadin

>>3526302

YES.

Also, Sleeper By Brubaker is an awesome comic that is a must read for anyone playing a low power supers game.

Astro City by Kurt Busiek is a great read and good for high power supers games.

I support Xanth and Anita Blake, however, after the 9th book stop reading Xanth because it gets terrible (9th was supposed to be the last but Anthony was pressured by fans and publisher to make more) and Anita Blake can get old after awhile since there's power creep in the series and the sex can get gratuitously annoying.

That being said, Edward in Anita Blake is awesome. Goes to a battle between two vampire lords and their retinues dressed as the grim reaper and armed with a flamethrower and uzis.

>>3523835
>>The one with the Migo in it, whose name I have forgotten.

The Whisperer in Darkness.

>>3526563
If you just enjoyed the cool battles and magic systems, then that's great. So long as you enjoy the book.

Anything by Douglas Adams.

Pratchett mother fuckers! Do you read it?

>>3524089
Here

>>3526259
>>3526482
Prince of nothing has some terribly political/philosophical stuff in it, and some *incredibly* vague time/plotlines at points, I thoroughly enjoyed all the books, but I'm basing it more or less on if I think people I know could read them without getting horribly confused.

World War Z.

STEVEN BRUST

VLAD

>>3527349
This.

And I know everyone hates Dresden because of Edward (sorry Edward, aside from Flare, I think you're a fairly decent guy) but Dresden Files REALLY IS. VERY GOOD. It's pulp fiction, at heart-after all, what serious series has its protagonist raise a tyrannosaur with polka music to fight the living dead?

Relax. Just because someone you hate likes it, doesn't mean you can't like it too.

Of course, this is exempt for all the works of L. Ron Hubbard. Sure, he might have been a decent guy, but he unleashed FUCKING SCIENTOLOGY on the world. That's kinda like Hitler-sure, he invented the Volkswagen and the turnpike, but he also killed a million jews, and the latter sort of undoes the good on the former.

>>3523886
Snow Crash is an unworthy successor to the cyberpunk mantle. Don't read it, it's not very good.

>>3524771
And why are we forgetting Song of Ice and Fire?

I think that fucking Asimov's Foundation (the original by itself, at least) should be required reading for 40k fags, to help them get over the fact that Blizzard ripped off GW by learning that GW ripped off Foundation.

>>3524089
Did you ever read Otherland? It was pretty neat, imo.

He kind of had so many characters that none of them ended up terribly developed, but OH MY GOD IF HE DIDN'T FLESH OUT DOZENS OF DISTINCT SETTINGS.

So if you want world-building porn and don't mind not caring too much about the characters, then those books are for you.

Also: GORMENGHAST ALL UP IN THIS MOTHERFUCKER.

It's all descriptions, with a little politicking and almost no action but holy shit is it ever worth it.

Now, to get an idea of what it's like to get through, I read seven books in a week this past summer. The summer before, I read the first book of Gormenghast in a week. Yeah. Someday I will read the next one because it's so fucking delicious.

>>3528253
Not to mention Dune.

Lloyd motherfucking Alexander.
Not just the Pyrdain Chronicles, but the Westmark Trilogy to boot.
Good times.

>>3528580

Gormenghast is pretty much everything that you could want when you think fantasy is doomed to be fightan evil overlord shit.

H. Beam Piper, science fiction, Space Viking. It doesn't matter what game you play - if it is slightly space opera, you must read Space Viking or you have an insufficient grasp on the genre.

>>3528754
>Space Viking
Well if that isn't the most awesome name for a book, I sure can't think of one.

>>3528754
isn't that the guy who invented "ewocks"

i 2nd the vote for the amber books, i loev zelazny.

>>3528772
Fading suns had more space vikings you could want to

Also, space maoris

>>3528845
>Fading suns had more space vikings you could want to
Blasphemy! You can never have enough space vikings!

>>3528777
Think of the Fuzzy books as The Sarah Jane Adventures and Space Viking as Dr Who or Torchwood - far darker and edgier without going all the way into GRIMDARK.

>>3523796
>The Malazan world was co-created by Steven Erikson and Ian Cameron Esslemont in the early 1980s as a backdrop to their GURPS roleplaying campaign.
Cool. Maybe gonna have to check this out. Plus he's Canadian!

>>3523886
shit was SNOW crash.

>>3525396
JESUS CHRIST I WAS GOING TO POST THAT LIKE I ALWAYS DO.

DRUSAS ACHAIMIAN WAS HERE, YOU'RE ALL FAGGOTS. ESPECIALLY YOU, ESME.

I like the plot and writing in the Malazan Book of the Fallen but the primary magic system is kind of fucking stupid. Them shapeshifters are pretty badass though.

>>3529280
Drusas was fucking awesome... he gets smacked around most of the story and you're going "Wtf kind of fucking pansy is he"... then out of no where you see him get into a fight with the *OTHER* mages, and he damn near brings down half a fucking school by himself...

Then through some serious JUST AS PLANNED-ing while he's imprisoned he gets free, and proceeds to stomp all-fucking-over the other mages again, completely fucking raping them this time cause they didn't see it coming at all...

And apparently he wasn't anywhere even close to being one of the strongest of his school.

Drusas fucking Achamian FTW.

>>3529389
The ending of Thousandfold Thought only made me love him EVEN MORE.

John Meany; Paradox
Terry Pratchett; Everthing he ever wrote
Peter F Hamilton; Pandoras Star-Judas Unchaned
Steven Baxter; time, space and origin
Frederich Pohl; eschaton trilogy
Eric L Harry; society of the mind

Too much Khellus MUST overshadow everyone in those books. He's the ultimate mary sue.

He wins every battle. He fucks every chick.

In the first two books the author sets up Conphas as an awesome character. Then by the end of the third he's revealed as yet another worthless, impotent nothing to be sacrificed to the living awesome that is Khellus.

I hope he doesn't bother writing any more books in the series, as I can predict the ending: "Then the No-God turned to Khellus and said 'Then who was phone!?'.

Because nothing is going to stop this lamest of Mary Sue's

In response to OP (rest is tl;dr)

genre: cyberpunk/modern

The Bobby Newark trilogy by William Gibson as well as Burning Chrome. Bruce Sterling's Ascendancies and Holy Fire. Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, The Big U, Snow Crash.

Basically anyone from the original Mirrorshades group that was the concrete foundational basis for Shadowrun.

double post

Also: I see what you did there with that image.

Altered Carbon

It's the best Cyberpunk book I've ever read, and I've read all of those mentioned here. It's brilliant. I hope when some shmuck makes a movie of it they do it justice (ie don't hire will smith)

>>3529389
his school is better then the other two... lol analogies are fail, even though theire impressive
>>3530342
yea...conphas' death was kinda disappointing, his uncles was entertaining though
>>3530462
takeshi kovacs is the shit

>>3522881

agreed OP, Count Zero was fucked

For SF I would suggest the work of Alastair Reynolds, the redemption space novels, chasm city etc etc

>>3523891

The Maigraith sideplot is tiny compared to the main plot. She shows up for a few dozen pages each of the last two books of the last series and gets mentioned three times in the second last series.

>>3524163

You mean the Faellem? Fuckers Pied Pipered an entire sentient species into a hellish nightmare realm because they weren't eco-friendly enough, accidentally creating the Charon, the biggest badasses and inevitably responsible for creating the secondary biggest badasses in the set of series. And then it turns out that doing so unlocked their world to the Void and the whole thing got Warp-style fucked over and their species devolved Planet of the Apes style.

And by fuck did Faelamor deserve it. She basically started the whole 'forced crossbreeding to produce superpowers' shtick, triggered a planet-devastating war that knocked back civilisation by 2000 years, genocided the Aachim, genocided the Charon, and unleashed a Void invasion of Aachan for no other reason than she could. Then she gets home which is what she did all that horrible shit to do and sees the planet she's spent thousands of years trying to reach in flames and her species utterly lost and is so fucking depressed she self-immolates. Normally that earn some pity, but fuck me she was such an evil bitch you can't help but scream IN YOUR FUCKING FACE at her.

Also, if you like Space Opera, Read Peter F. Hamilton. He's very, very good at it. It's also relatively hard for operatic novels, to the point that you don't even realise you just read a book in which the dead come back to possess the living and gain super-dead-powers and then Al Capone comes backto take over the dead and someone's about to unleash hell on earth literally until the main character talks to a god and makes them cut it out until you try to summarise it for someone else.

Anybody who can write that shit and well enough have it taken seriously deserves some kind of medal.

>>3530730

I didn't like the Redemption Space ones so much. Chasm City and Pushing Ice were very good, though.

Dean Koontz's stuff is also good for horror campaign inspirations. It's much more paranoia than scare horror, so it helps you to write that stuff better too.

Also, even though it's a children's series and I don't have the 'started as a child' excuse, the Keys to the Kingdom series is actually very good. It's basically 'the universe is run by a massive shitty bureaucracy and the entire thing is starting to collapse', but damn does it have style to it. It's one of those books you can't read without it ending up as the seed for a caompaign setting.

The Stars' My Destination

Gully Foyle is my name and Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place and death's my destination

Post Apoc:
A Canticle for Leibowitz (shit is SO illuminated blueprint)
by Walter Miller, Jr.

>>3530944
the only problem I have with his writing is the time hops...the fact that he always gives the date when he does is good. I enjoy the style where he gives a bit of the past, then the current, and then the past again so it all makes sense

Timeskips tend to be jarring.

Except in Joe Haldeman's Forever series, where the fact that timeskips are jarring is in fact much of the plot. You go off to fight against an enemy nobody even understands, come back with a century past and socity has irrevocably changed to the point where you can't take it, so you head off to war again with a bunch of kids who don't even undertsna dyou because you're from that many generations ago, and eventually after an objevtice thousand and a half years of war you get home for the last time to find out that the whole thing happened because of a communications fuckup and political shenanigans and that you're so out-of-date you're a danger to modern society.

Good stuff. Read it.

Fantasy, of a sword & sorcery or weird tale style:

The inspirational reading lists in AD&D1E's DMG and the Moldavy edited Basic D&D (or Expert).
Derived from with some updated works is Kellri's reading list: http://www.orbitfiles.com/download/id3203196838.html

Jack Vance's Dying Earth books (D&Ds Vancian magic isn't terribly Vancian)
Clark Ashton Smith esp. the Zothique stories, free at:
http://www.eldritchdark.com/
M.A.R. Barker's Tekumel novels, non-European based lost planet sci-fantasy
Terry Pratchett's Discworld books
Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar books
Karl Edward Wagner's Kane stories, he's like an undying and cursed Conan on 11

>>3530961
>The Stars' My Destination

This, and Bester's other works (great psionics stuff). I like the original title Tiger! Tiger! better.

Other essential sci-fi I'd recommend?
H. Beam Piper, Omnilingual's a good starter (free audiobook and text at Librivox.org along with a bunch of other Piper works)
Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun et al
Jack Vance, Demon Princes
Issac Asimov Empire & Foundation (The Mule stories)
E.C. Tubb, any of the Dumarest of Terra books (Traveller got so much from this)
Cordwainer Smith, Nostrilia or the Rediscovery of Mankind short stories
- esp. Scanners Live in Vain and Game of Rat and Dragon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith#Published_fiction
- some of his stories are online for free, esp. at Baen

>>3528834
Amber, thirded.
Also recommend Roadmarks for time travel, Lord of Light for transhumanism, posthumanism, and religious type themes.

Also:
E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series for pulp sci-fi.

Everything by Geary Gravel.

Everything by David Gerrold.

>>3530342
Khellus was pretty cool at first, but turns out to be an absolutely loathed character though, I preferred Drusas because they humanized him, where-as khellus was raised/trained to be/do specifically what he does.

But really, using the term mary-sue in fantasy is a bit retarded no, especially when it was actually a well written and semi-likeable one like Khellus, you should really only reserve that term for horrible aborted fetuses of books like twilight.

bumpan for moar stories