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Originally Posted by rodandy12
Heinlein wrote... my personal favorite "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
This has been optioned for a movie, I think.
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Another genre is "cataclysmic world destruction."
J.G. Ballard's earlier books like the one I mentioned are examples of this.
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Tongue in cheek Sci-fi would be anything by Douglas Adams or something like "Cat's Cradle" by Vonnegut.
A real classic in this subgenre is "The Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem.
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Maybe the most fun genre is "interesting aliens." Niven wrote Ringworld and he does some of the best non-human species in all of Sci-fi.
"The Mote in God's Eye" by Niven & Pournelle is worth a read. There's also the subgenre of incomprehensible aliens - see Lem & many others.
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Yet another is what I call fractured religion for lack of a better title. Stories about races or non-human lifeforms with radically different belief systems or earth-based religions under stressful circumstances. My favorite is "A Canticle for Lebowitz."
If you like this sort of thing, I recommend "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. Also optioned for a movie, but not much progress in that direction - Russell says: "It's not a movie until the cinematographer is on the set eating a breakfast burrito."
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The newest genre is Cyberpunk. "Neuromancer" and "Snowcrash" are the best of these.
And verily, Cyberpunk begat Steampunk which is probably the very newest subgenre... basically, Cyberpunk sensibility set in a Victorian alternate-universe... K.W. Jeter coined the term, Gibson & Sterling's "Difference Engine" and China Mieville's works would be examples of Steampunk (though Mieville inhabits a very strange place indeed, where Steampunk meets Marxism and Lovecraftian horror at the border of Fantasy).
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PKD, as mentioned by vingogly above, wrote a book about WWII ending with America losing... "The Man in the High Castle" and it is also a classic, although I personally don't enjoy PKD as much as others seem to.
Also optioned for a movie. PKD is someone to be reckoned with - can't say I enjoy him that much but he has had a huge influence on the genre.
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I guess you are realizing that I can't do this easily. If pressed, I suppose I'd have to go with "Dune."
There's no way I could pick just one. ;)
Vasily