Cool Science

I've been trying to read more, maybe because I'm too lazy to do neurobics. But probably because I used to read a lot in high school and college and it bugs the heck out of me that I lost touch. And no scientist can live without a steady diet of sci-fi pop-culture! I dove back in basically at random but I decided that I would pick out something that had been well reviewed. That turned out to be Card's "Ender's Game", an intelligent and focused sci-fi story about a kid with a gift for military strategy. Interestingly, Ender's Game may be a movie sometime. It was outstanding - a smart read with some complex themes and I still think about it a lot. I read several of the sequels and they were good, to be fair, but not in the same league as Ender's Game which is up there with Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai! which all of us pocket-protector types know were the two brilliant books that marked the beginning of the military sci-fi genre. Troopers (1960) and Dorsai! (1959) came out at the same time as far as I'm concerned and I wish people would lay to rest debates on who was first/better/cooler/etc...

Energized by the success of the foray into the Ender series, I decided to switch to classic Fantasy and read David and Leigh Eddings "The Elder Gods", a massive, brain-numbing mistake. For many passages and whole chapters I cringed in embarassment and looked over my shoulder to be sure nobody could see what I was reading. No, that's not blog-speak - it's really how I felt. But like a train wreck I had to read it to the end. It's really very sad though because I liked David Eddings' earlier writing and who knows what the heck went wrong here. Resolved to wash that bad taste out of my brain, I turned back to a well known fantasy standard that I had never read, Terry Brook's "Sword of Shannara", an unashamedly Tolkien-esque story but written intelligently and with confidence and it was a satisfying adventure from cover to cover. I'll venture into at least one sequel on its strength. But I'll need to try something new soon...

SO - if anybody has some good sci-fi/Fantasy recommendations lemme know...