Epic Science Fiction Books

[sqbr]

I was discussing this with Cam: what are the good (or at least halfway interesting) science fiction epics? By which I mean long, somewhat mythic stories with a sense of history and gravitas. All I could think of was Dune and the Gap series (which I never finished due to Stephen Donaldson reaching my "sympathetic portrayal of rape" limit)

Kind of: The Xeelee Sequence and the Foundation Series and Worthing Saga.

EDIT: I'm rather tired and getting all confused in my definitions, so feel free to ignore my qualifiers and mention anything you think deserves mentioning.

gyges_ring has reminded me of semi-epic books which are painted on a large canvas but aren't very mythic or whatever, more like reading a historical novel set in the future e.g C J Cherryh's Union/Alliance books. I realise this is a very subjective thing, and don't think there's anything wrong with a prosaic tone.

Also: A Fire Upon the Deep (how could I forget?)

And thank heaven for Wikipedia (not all space opera is the sort of epic I'm talking about, mind you). *ponders investigating these authors*

Comments

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

Book Of The New Sun - Gene Wolfe (I actually don't like him that much, but other people seem to)
All of those Stephen Baxter books that fit together. Which I also didn't like them much.

If it was sci-fi with a sense of history and gravitas, I'd say John M. Harrison's Virconium books. But it's a bit dodgy to call that sci-fi in the sense I think you mean.

[alias_sqbr]

Book of the new sun! I actually really liked that series, though you have to squint to see the science fiction under all the fantasy trappings. Hmm, the Stephen Baxter books (you mean "Time" etc?) are like a couple of others which are epic in scope but to me feel rather prosaic in tone and vision. But are still worth mentioning.

Hadn't heard of the Virconium books.

[gyges-ring.livejournal.com]

I got more into the Wolfe books the more I read them. But there's a bit at the end of one of them where he threw in an author's post-script that went along the lines of "This came from the future. That's why there are words in it that no one can read. Because they haven't been invented yet." And that just annoyed me. It seemed so unecessarily pretentious.

There's also the Arthur C. Clarke serieses.

And bah! I wrote John M. Harrison. I actually mean M. John Harrison.

Oh, and there's always The Shape Of Things To Come. Can't go past that one for a historical documentation of the future.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, while I liked them some bits were pretentious and others just..weird.