Books: For the avid reader

[Crazy]

They didn't have this in the old fourm did they?

Anyway, lets discuss books all sorts....
Did you like them?
Do you like the author?
What other books have you read by the autor or that have the same story?
Would you reccomend it?
or whatever questions you want to answer...

Yay, finally lets talk books.

[Jefff]

Isaac Asimov's probably my favourite author. Forward the foundation was really good, but I didn't care for most of the rest of the foundation series.
His short stories are good too, kinda amazing how accurate they turned out to be :/

[Crazy]

lol I have never heard of that author or those books, want to share what they are about....

[Jefff]

He's a SciFi author, from the fifties. He wrote i,Robot too.

The foundation series is about this guy who invents this math/science that can accurately predict how a large group of people will act (like, you can use it to estimate what a group of people will do, and it will be more accurate as the group gets bigger), and with that discovers the downfall of the galactic empire, followed by 20'000 years of anarchy and chaos in like five hundred years.
But, since he discovers this, he makes a plan to reduce the 20'000 years to one thousand.
The original trilogy was about him discovering all this, forward the foundation was 500 years into the anarchy.

He also wrote a lot of short stories. My favourite, can't remember what it's called, was about these people who made a computer that answered questions you asked it, and throughout the story people kept asking it how they could stop the inevitable end of the universe (after all the suns die out, there is no more energy in the universe, so therefore no life), and as it becomes more and more powerful, it still does not know the answer, until eventually at the end, long after everyone dies, it figures it out.

Hmm.. rereading that description doesn't sound very good :/
I'll see if I can find the story, it's not too long

[edit] Here it is! The Last Question (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)

[Pink]

It's an incredible series really and Asmov was a very good writer and a scientist as well. He created the three laws of robotics as a matter of fact.

[Crazy]

It's an incredible series really and Asmov was a very good writer and a scientist as well. He created the three laws of robotics as a matter of fact.


The "three laws of robotics" is that real or from Irobot

[Jefff]

The "three laws of robotics" is that real or from Irobot

From his robot books, but I imagine when we do get actual thinking robots, those would be used there.

[Shellie]

He's a SciFi author, from the fifties. He wrote i,Robot too.

The foundation series is about this guy who invents this math/science that can accurately predict how a large group of people will act (like, you can use it to estimate what a group of people will do, and it will be more accurate as the group gets bigger), and with that discovers the downfall of the galactic empire, followed by 20'000 years of anarchy and chaos in like five hundred years.
But, since he discovers this, he makes a plan to reduce the 20'000 years to one thousand.
The original trilogy was about him discovering all this, forward the foundation was 500 years into the anarchy.

He also wrote a lot of short stories. My favourite, can't remember what it's called, was about these people who made a computer that answered questions you asked it, and throughout the story people kept asking it how they could stop the inevitable end of the universe (after all the suns die out, there is no more energy in the universe, so therefore no life), and as it becomes more and more powerful, it still does not know the answer, until eventually at the end, long after everyone dies, it figures it out.

Hmm.. rereading that description doesn't sound very good :/
I'll see if I can find the story, it's not too long

[edit] Here it is! The Last Question (http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html)
Ah, yes, I remember reading quite a bit of his work. i, Robot was something I rather enjoyed when I was in elementary school. :>

As for The Last Question, I remember pastor Steve using that as a sermon illustration once, telling us the story and then <spoiler>that if the computer had really been God, he wouldn't have even needed to say 'let there be light' - it would have just been.</spoiler> Though it may be a different story than the one you linked.

Uhm... SciFi and Fantasy have been my favourite genres for a long time. I like authors like Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (I got into them with The Death Gate Cycle in 6th grade), Mercedes Lackey (Valdemar series), Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time), Brandon Sanderson (TWoT, and there's another series that's specifically his that I'm reading as well...), Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern, Pegasus, Acorna), Piers Anthony (Xanth - though these get a bit dirty...), Terry Pratchett (Discworld) and a plethora of others.

One story I remember reading as a child was one called Nightfall, but for the life of me I can't remember the author. It's a story about a world with six suns, and archaeologists find that every few thousand years there's this city that's burnt down and been rebuilt in this same spot. There's this cult talking about the coming of night (which nobody knows what it is, because when there's six suns, they're never all down...) and this interval that they found at the city is about over, calculated to be right when this cult is saying that night will come...

[Jefff]

Didn't God say "let there be light" in Genesis though? I thought that was the point of the AC saying it.

Also, Nightfall is a short story by Asimov too, I really liked that one, forgot about it.

[Shellie]

Ah, I read a whole novel that was Nightfall. Maybe it was someone expanding on Asimov's short story? o3o I do remember reading it once as a short story and once as a full novel.

Though true, scripture records HaShem saying "Let there be light.", but he also says "Let there be..." about other things too. :>

[Hantsuki]

Nightfall is actually a book by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg based on the short story. According to Wikipedia, "The novel significantly expanded upon and updated the original premise."

[Jefff]

I'll have to check that out, that sounds good.