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from the In-just-over-three-months-it-would-be...-Mars-Ho-Ho-Ho! dept.
Want to read some books? Many of our users have shown interest in having a book club. Now it's finally time to kick it off.
Your soytyrant has pre-selected the first three books so that you have more time to read them, should you choose to do so:
September: Mars, Ho! by Stephen McGrew
October: Foundation by Isaac Asimov
November: The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
The plan is to read a book, and discuss it on the 1st of the following month. Suggestions for new books (of any genres, not just "science fiction") will also be collected at the same time. You can start listing some of your suggestions right now in this comment section. We'll pick up to eight of them and run a poll on September 15th to decide the book for December. And so on.
The first book is Mars, Ho! by Stephen McGrew, one of our more literary users (not to be confused with Mars Ho! by Jennifer Willis). The book is available for free on McGrew's website, although there are some purchasing options available if you want to support him. From the description:
Captain John Knolls thinks he's just been given the best assignment of his career -- ferrying two hundred prostitutes to Mars. He doesn't know that they're all addicted to a drug that causes them to commit extreme, deadly violence when they are experiencing withdrawal or that he'll face more pirates than anyone had ever seen before. Or that he'd fall in love. A humorous science fiction space novel, a horror story, a love story, a pirate story, a tale of corporate bureaucracy and incompetence.
All book club posts will be in the Community Reviews nexus, which is linked to on the site's sidebar. You'll likely want to click on that link once the posts fall off the main page.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @02:01PM (5 children)
If you're going to read the outstanding Foundation series, shouldn't you start with "Prelude to Foundation"? It was written many years after the three original Foundation titles, but it is starting point of the series.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 02 2018, @02:06PM
No. Always read by date published, not in-story timeline.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by takyon on Sunday September 02 2018, @02:16PM
I agree with the other AC. Might as well read it in the same order that readers encountered it. Doing otherwise will likely spoil plot elements from the initial books, even if the newer books are prequels.
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(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday September 03 2018, @01:23AM (1 child)
Coincidentally, I re-read Foundation last year, after having read it the first time in 1974 (I think). It has not aged well. Everyone smokes all the time. Ashtrays must be mentioned about a dozen times, as if they're really important.
The idea behind the story is, of course, fantastic. The characters not so much.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday September 03 2018, @01:50AM
We're living in the Juul renaissance, bro. The world is our ashtray. 🎄🎄🎄🚬
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by darnkitten on Tuesday September 18 2018, @08:00PM
Naw, you should start with The End of Eternity, followed by I, Robot, The Positronic Man, the Lucky Starr series, The Robot series, (including the Bailey/Olivaw novels and The Rest of the Robots), The Stars Like Dust, The Currents of Space, and Pebble in the Sky, before moving on to Prelude and the others...