Every few years I go back and read some of the older stuff in my paperback library.
Some of these rival or surpass anything written today.
Here's some of the best.  As older books they may be hard to find, but I suspect most are now available as ebooks.

"Who" by Algis Budrys.  
A scientist is working on an important secret project near an enemy border.  There's an explosion in the lab and he's "rescued" by the enemy.  
Some years later they trade him back.
But what or who is he?  We get back an unidentifiable man with a metal head and arm.  We need him badly for the project, but can we trust a faceless enigma?

"A Fall of Moondust" by Arthur C. Clark
A transport on the moon is sunk in a bottomless lake of dust.  Frantic efforts to rescue the passengers and crew.

"Killer" by David Drake.
An alien transport crashes near ancient Rome.
It's transporting alien fighting animals to an arena on another world and one of the "animals"?? escapes.
This particular animal is so horribly dangerous no one in their right mind would have tried to transport it but money can over ride good sense.  Now it's loose....and pregnant with a world killing brood of chicks.
The Emperor of Rome orders a Roman animal trapper who traps African animals for the arena to capture this animal for his arena.........or else.

"The I Inside" by Alan Dean Foster.
A seemingly ordinary man sees a woman passing in a limo, and for reasons he can't understand he sets out to find her at all costs.  
Powerful people attempt to stop him and to his horror he finds that he's some sort of superman able to smash heavily armored riot tank-suits and literally leap from one skyscraper roof top to another.

"The Death World Trilogy" by Harry Harrison.
A gambler is hired by the people of a colony world to find out why their world seems to be quite deliberately trying to kill them.  All the life has mutations that are useful for nothing but killing humans.

"Citizen of the Galaxy" by Robert Heinlein.
A beggar named Baslim The Cripple buys and adopts a slave boy name Thorby on a frontier world.  
A classic Heinlein story that establishes why he was the Dean of Sci-Fi writers.

"The Two Faces of Tomorrow" by James Hogan.
The world is getting so complex, even computers are making fatal mistakes from errors in the programing.
In order to determine if a super computer can be trusted not to break down or make fatal errors, it's installed in a space station for testing.
The test: "Attack" the computer by periodically shutting down it's power to stress it and see if it begins to make mistakes.  The trouble: The computer declares war on the station inhabitants.

The Wild Country trilogy by Dean Ing:  "Single Combat", "Systemic Shock, "Wild Country".
In a post-collapse America a secret agent conducts dirty missions for the ruling government.  He has to....he has a bomb in his head.

"The White Wing" by Gordon Kendall.
Earth has been destroyed and the few remaining Earth men and women fight along side other races against the enemy.  The allies hate and fear the Earth people.  
They hate them for the absolutely single minded way they fight no quarters battles and for their insular unfriendly ways.  
The allies fear them because they aren't absolutely sure they didn't destroy Earth and they fear the Earth people may find out the truth.

A Desert Called Peace series by Tom Kratman: "A Desert Called Peace" and "Carnifex".
On a future Earth-like world Islamic terrorist stage a very 9-11 type attack.
Among the victims are the wife and children of former soldier Patrick Hennessey.
Hennessey may not have been entirely sane before his loss, and he sets out to destroy the terrorists with a terrible dedication.
Using a strict adherence to the Rules of War, including executing news media types found on the battle front doing reporting in favor of the terrorists, he sets out to destroy them all.
The Left including the Hollywood types find out what war really means.
There are other books in the series, but these two can be read as a stand-alone story.

The Man Who Never Missed series by Steve Perry,
The Man Who Never Missed
Matadora
The Machiavelli Interface
The Albino Knife
Black Steel
Brother Death
The 97th Step
A soldier is involved in a bloody massacre on a frontier world and decides to bring down the empire responsible.
His weapons: dart guns that stick to the back of your hand and fire toxic darts by simply pointing, and a form of deadly fighting art known as the 97 Steps.

"Ivory" by Mike Resnick.
In the far future, a search for the largest elephant tusks of all time.  Lost, a professional finder is hired by the last of the African Zulu who's fate is tied to the tusks.

"Way Station" by Clifford D. Simak.
A Civil War veteran is today running a secret alien transport station on Earth.  Until outsiders start noticing.

The Probability Broach series by L. Neil Smith: "The Probability Broach, "The Venus Belt".
A hilarious romp in a Libertarian other universe with a well armed American Indian cop blown SOMEWHERE where EVERYONE is heavily armed...even the chimps and gorillas.  
You'll meet people like Marion Morrison, Clint Westwood, and "Tricky Dick" Milhous a burglar.

"Hard Wired" by Walther Jon Williams.
The first and by far best novel in what became known as Cyber punk.

The Sci-Fi novels of  F. Paul Wilson.
"An Enemy of the State" .  How does a Libertarian system fight off a hungry Progressive state out to find someone else to tax, or else?  
Introduced "KYFHO" or "Keep Your F-ing Hands Off".  There are two schools of this.  The Toliver Worlds version is KYFHO, or we'll move away.  The Flinter Worlds version is KYFHO...Or we'll KILL you.

"Wheels Within Wheels".  A wealth man and his daughter investigate the death of his son on an alien world.  They encounter man who can literally kill with his mind.

"Healer".  An immortal man and the parasite in his brain battle a sickness of the mind that destroys people.  Introducing the Ibisan Double Barrel, backpack fed shotgun firing end-over-end slugs.

"The LaNague Chronicles" gathers all his Sci-Fi novels under one cover.

"Cobra" by Timothy Zahn.
The first and by far best in a series.  
In the future humanity is loosing a war against an alien people.  In desperation they develop super soldiers with unbreakable bones, a nuclear furnace where their stomach was and a host of powerful weapons all carried internally and controlled by a computer.
The problem: After the war is over how do you send a super strong soldier home with enough un-removable weaponry to level a neighborhood, all controlled by a computer embedded in his brain that can decide for itself when to open fire.

"The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester.
A near animal man is left to die aboard a wrecked space ship.  Surviving he remakes himself to find who left him to die.  A classic Sci-Fi Count of Monte Christo.

"The Demolished Man" by Alfred Bester.
How do you get away with murder when the police can read your mind?

The Belisarius series by Eric Flint.
This is one of Sci-Fi's great adventure series, largely unknown.  Roman general Belisarius is recruited by an intelligence from the far future to battle a cyborg sent back in time to stop humanity from rising.
Filled with many memorable characters and a sweeping war fought to the knife.

"An Oblique Approach".
"Destiny's Shield"
"Fortune's Stroke"
"In the Heart of Darkness"
"The Tide of Victory"
"The Dance of Time"

All gathered together in a three book set:
"Belisarius I: Thunder at Dawn"
"Belisarius III: The Flames of Sunset"
"Belisarius II: Storm at Noontide"

Did you ever read Heinlein's Starship Troopers or John Steakley's Armor (a direct ripoff).
 

Right now I am reading Peter Hamilton's The Great North Road.  It's an interesting premise, but I am not sure if I like the execution so far...only about halfway into it, though.

This is of course apocryphal but I had heard that Steakley was talking trash about ST and was dared by a friend to write a better book.  So he wrote Armor.  Which was pretty damn good if you ask me.

 

Yeah, I read "Starship Troopers".  I was a big fan of Heinlein when I was a teenager.  Read everything that he wrote.  As for "Armor" I was only able to get about half way thru it
before I lost interest.


Vulcan94

I once asked Steakely if he was influenced by Starship Troopers.  His response:  "Influenced?  Hell, I stole it outright."  Steakley wrote Armor on a bar bet that he could write a sci-fi novel that people who don't normally read would like.  He also said that Heinlein loved Armor.

Maybe I'll dig it up and finish it one day.


Vulcan94

just finished The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
good book, even if they did call each other comrade

I reread the Honor Harrington Books(by David Weber) that I had, and am now reading for the first time Crown of Slaves and Torch of Freedom - a spin-off series from Honor Harrington.

Bump for MOAR!

I just re-read Lucifer's Hammer. I first read it as a new issue. Still good.

Also read the cover book Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi. He did a good job on the H Beam Piper series.

Next in my reading pile is Vampire$ by Steakley and Bloodline by F Paul Wilson (A repairman Jack series).

Armor and Starship Troopers are two of my favorites.  I always felt like Armor was a love letter to Starship Troopers and I'm glad to hear that Heinlein loved it..  time to dig it out I guess..



 

I'm currently trying to finish it and failing.



 

Reading Children of the Stars right now, the sequel to A Fire Upon the Deep. I love this story line so much...

Vinge is a great writer.

By the by, don't bother with Great North Road by Hamilton.  Very disappointing book.

I don't know if I've already mentioned it here, but the "Orphan's" series by Robert Buettner is pretty good.

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If it makes you feel better, Steakley says he was never happy with Vampire$, and hated the ending.  Personally I prefer it to Armor.

Recently read "Flashback" by Dan Simmons.  U.S. (mostly Denver and L.A. areas) about 2030.  One of the better books by Simmons.

Currently reading "eye of the storm" by ringo. Ive been waiting about 2 months to read this. Started at lunch yesterday and i'm at pg 130 today. I wanted to take it slow but, damn it, I can't put it down.

The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.  It was good.  Very little violence, though, and not a satirical comedy like a lot of Pratchett's work.

The Illuminatus trilogy is proving to be just as sci fi as it is wacky conspiracy theories.

Armor

"Shadow of Freedom"  by David Weber.

Trying to not read as much though, because I'm in the middle of trying to write a book.

I am on at all costs by David Weber. I have set it down three times to read Jim butchers Dresden Cold days and Larry Corrie's Hard
Magic and Spellbound.

I am about to pick up Dan Abnett's Enisenhorn Trilogy and re-read it.

I need a new book series to wade into. Weber's Harrington series is beginning to become repeative.

What kind of book?

If it's the one about Aztec chinchilla's that can teleport - dude, I called 'dibs' on that one years ago.


OB BOOK EDIT: Rereading "All The Colors Of Darkness" by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
There are several of his books out on Amazon, now.

BTW what did you think of Cold Days?  I didn't care for it and I think I may hold off buying the next Dresden Files book because I don't like the direction Butcher is taking the series.

So THAT'S the reason I haven't seen a book about teleporting Aztec chinchillas....

I just got done reading Term of Enlistment by Marko Kloos.  It's an e-book on Amazon and apparently this guy is a regular on some gun boards because he's a friend of Larry Correia and Oleg Volk.  That probably puts him on TFL or the High Road or wherever Oleg is nowadays.
Anyway, I loved the first part of the book.  The guy really paints a picture of a dystopian world with claustrophobic slum cities that riot at the drop of a hat filled with underfed drones who'll do anything to survive...even join a military that chews them up and spits them out.

Then the main character goes to basic training, and after spending what seemed like 2-3 chapters on inprocessing, he proceeds to skip over most of basic straight to graduation where the guy is assigned to the Terrestrial Army while his girlfriend is put in the space navy.
His second mission in the TA is in Detroit, where there's a massive riot where the rioters have gotten ahold of military weapons---it's implied they got them from the Sino-Russian alliance, but that is never followed up on.  There's a Blackhawk Down style story---really the whole bit is lifted almost entirely from Blackhawk Down---and then afterward, the main character is in trouble for some collateral damage.
Then...he's transferred to the navy and winds up on his girlfriend's ship.  Then there's aliens all of a sudden and the whole thing kind of goes to hell.  Shame too, it was a really good book before and even during the Blackhawk Down bit.

I also read ToE. The space between the covers was too small.

I've read that book 2 is done & coming out later this year, and book 3 in "in progress."

I liked it - I didn't expect a "Dune", and so I wasn't disappointed there. Thank Ghu it wasn't Battlefield Earth!

I wasn't expecting Dune, which is good, because Dune bored the hell out of me.
I just had my expectations raised by a really good first part of the book and I wished the rest of it was as focussed and realistic.

Fantasy of the sword and sorcery type.  But the book's not really about sword and sorcery.  It's about people that have to live in that world and how they deal with the really bad stuff that ends up coming down the pike.

Cool.  I have a sword and sorcery trilogy plotted out that I want to write someday.  It's got all the classic elements, but its real focus is faith, or the lack of it, and how that relates to the "magic" they use.

I just finished reading Malazan book of the fallen, great series, but damned if it didn't eat up alot of time, 11 book, all over 1000 pages

this is a tag to find a new series to read

I'm going to go full sappy on you here.  While this book will have plenty of armies clashing, and some truly apocalyptic badness confronting the protagonists this story will be, at its core, a love story.  The rough arc I have planned out spans 5 books, and my goal is for it to be very difficult and trying for both the characters and the readers.  The tone of the low point will essentially be "we're all screwed; everyone's going to die."  There's method to that madness however; it makes the eventual triumph more valuable.

The 5 books thing isn't set in stone...depending on some decision I have to make about the plot arc, it might end up being a trilogy.

I read the first 3 books of the series, have the 4th and 5th sitting on my shelf, but can't bring myself to read them.  I have nothing against long books, but the first 3 seemed to drag on forever.

 

for those who enjoyed "READY PLAYER ONE", check out "Snow Crash".  great fun and an interesting view of the "future of the internet" from the 80's / 90's when it was written.

I agree the aliens were a bit strange, but how else are you going to write 3 books about being a neural network tech aboard a ship while worrying about your pilot girlfriend?

I guess he could have done a trilogy without them and then introduced them at the end of book 3 to give him another out for another few books, but I'm not really sure what his plans are for this universe. He has a short story on his site that talks about a drop ship pilot and the fun times she has battling the SRA (aka the commies + Chinese).

And I didn't think it was too BHD, but it had that flavor, which isn't all that bad really. Worth the $2.99 on Amazon; I'd be happy paying $5 for it.

And Marko is an old school TFL person, before the first shutdown; we are talking the same era of the forums here being forum.ar15.com and UBB as a platform and before we had to re-register for this one.

TR

I would have wanted to have the first book be all him as a TA NCO finding out that the Sino-Russians are supplying the rioters with guns and facing down that problem.  Then, as a coda to that book, he could have run afoul of JAG and had the MOH winner get him transferred to the Navy.  Then the start of the NEXT book could have been the alien story and it wouldn't have felt so truncated.

Just read The Forever War, and Old Man's War in the last week. Both 5 star reads.  ARFCOM approved for sure.

bump for more good reading!

I'm currently reading The Empires Corps by Christopher Nuttall.  It's military SF and the idea is cool but his writing is not that great.  Very amateurish in his descriptions, tells more than he shows, repeats phrases and adjectives over and over.

Slogging through David Brin's "Existence"



His extrapolations are entertaining and insightful, but the pace is glacial.  I hope the payoff is worth the hike.



In other news, my favorite author announced he has terminal cancer.

Currently rereading The Road to Damascus, by John Ringo.

It's the story of how a somewhat unimportant planet gets run into the ground by some liberal demagogues. They gain power through lies, deceit, and playing on the fears of the urban populace, during a post-alien-invasion recovery. It also chronicles the start and rise of a resistance to the ruling class, led mainly by the farmers and ranchers. The story is shone partially through the eyes of a giant sentient war-machine known as a Bolo, who is under orders to crush the resistance. Orders he follows until a certain set of circumstances and heuristic programming force him to reconsider what he's doing...

I first read through this several years ago and recently picked up my own copy. It's one of the only novels I've read where some of the political goings-on had me ready to start throwing things. A lot of the politics seem like an accelerated view of what's going on today and where things are headed: downhill. I highly recommend it.

I'm also rereading In Fury Born, by David Weber.

The book covers a young woman as she moves through phases in her life, moving from the Imperial Marines to the Imperial Cadre, who are the Emperor's elite drop commandos. The Cadre are the best of the best, so elite that with hundreds or thousands of worlds under Imperial control, the Cadre are limited by law to have less than 40000 (IIRC) soldiers in their ranks for fear that the Emperor would have too much power at his personal command. The standards are so high that they can't fill that limited roster, not even by pulling the finest of the millions of Imperial Marines. The drop commandos, augmented mechanically, electronically, and biologically, are fitted with power armor that makes that used by the Imperial Marines look like a cheap Chinese knockoff by comparison. These commandos take the impossible missions, the ones that can't be done, and do them anyway. This is the story of how a woman rises through the ranks of the Cadre, only to retire after being betrayed by those who she trusted. In retirement she remained, until an event shocked her world so much that she went looking for vengeance...

This is one that I also read through years ago and recently picked up again. This is really a personal story about a woman and the events she goes through. She just happens to be a total badass, and the drop commandos are the coolest soldiers I've read about since Starship Troopers' Mobile Infantry. Highly recommended. The story moves at a good clip, the battle scenes and technology are well written and described, and... it's pretty much awesome.

On Basilisk Station

I have a feeling I'll now have to go through the whole series

That series gets long and repetitive.  I liked it a lot for about the first eight books, then the books turned into three hundred pages of recap followed by 100 pages of real new content.  That's with regards to the main story arc.  I haven't read any of the side-arc books set in the same universe yet.

I prefer David Drake's RCN series.

I read the first 5 or 6 of the Harrington series before setting them down.  Maybe I'll get back to them one day.

I love David Drake's RCN series!  Whenever a new novel publishing day is announced, I preorder it on Amazon.  I actually met David Drake once.  Really nice guy!

Right now I'm rereading Mike Shepherd's Kris Longknife series.


Vulcan94

Read "No Worse Enemy" by Christopher Nutall, the sequel to his book "The Empire's Corps."  It was a bit better but still not that great. It's an okay read, but I wish it had been 99 cents.  Paid $3 and I felt like I overpaid.