eslapion wrote:
Then you are much more of a nerd than I am.
I am a different kind of nerd. I don't enjoy the Ringworld novels after Engineers. I like early Niven stories because of their simplicity.
I like Protector, World of Ptavvs, and A World Out Of Time. There's less of the deus ex machina fantasy tech in there (although plenty of improbable stuff), just a simple story with a character whose motivations are clear. The early Niven stuff also seems fascinated by psy power stuff, like it was fashionable in the '60s and '70s. Like Teela's luck... It makes it less hard sci-fi and just a bit more fun. I like the '60s flavor with the warp drives but computers that are still mainframes in the ARM's basement. It really shows that few people knew just what computers would become. Niven suddenly shoehorns in sprayable computers and webeyes in his newer novels and it just sticks out like a sore thumb to me.
The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring are also books I like to re-read every so often.
I am not a big of fan of this modern trend of overly long and sprawling sci-fi epics with 12 books weighing in at 800 pages each... Just to re-spin the same basic stories I've read before. 9600 pages to say "Oh wow these guys live inside a black hole and are re-engineering the entire universe!" Yawn, read all about it in Pohl's Gateway novels and it at least had some fun and wonder in it!
Although now and then I find longer novels that are very fun to re-read, simply because I have no idea what's going on and each reading is fun in a different way. Kingsbury's "Psychohistorical Crisis" is one such novel, and I don't like it just because I worked with his son...
I also like humor in my sci-fi, and action... Keith Laumer and Rudy Rucker novels are great entertainment.
The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.