NEWS: Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Five Books Every Geek Should Read (Yes, it's a Rerun)

I won't supply an alternate list, but I find Asimov relatively bland. Neuromancer succeeds through style alone, and the story suffers for it. Both Hitchhiker's Guide and Ringworld feel painfully out of touch, and normally that would garner points for me, but not here, not now; they're just from a bygone era, and not one that feels especially relevant.

I'd sub in Dhalgren, possibly Nova if i was in a space opera mood, and I don't know what else. i haven't read the fifth choice. Maybe M. John Harrison, Jack Vance, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, Neil Gaiman, J.G. Ballard, early John Crowley (Engine Summer), or a lot of other things. Don't mind me, I'm in thrall to pain, so i'm ignoble.

I think anyone who likes the HHGTTG books should check out Robert Sheckley. Reading a book like Mindswap, it's hard to imagine Adams didn't read it and go "Hmmmm...."

Dune is definitely not a child-friendly book. I was a young heavy reader and my first stab or two at that book left me defeated. I reattempted several years later and was blown away by how good it actually is.

I like Hitchhiker's, but honestly I prefer the Dirk Gently books Adams also wrote. They have a quasi-contemporary setting that I find makes for much funnier jokes.

Hmm. There's a lot of things that are usually tapped, but for something I suspect a lot of people haven't read, and should: Steven Gould's "Jumper" which is a really excellent novel about a young teen with an abusive father who one day, when his father is about to beat him yet again, finds himself suddenly in his safe place - the library. That is to say, he can now teleport. At first it's strictly instinctual, but as the book wears on (and he runs away from home) he experiments more with it and learns to control it and more fully explore the ramifications. Also notable in that one of the things he winds up dealing with is international terrorism, I won't say how. Takes on a different resonance now than in the pre-9/11 climate it was written in.

4 out of 5. Not to bad.

Louis Wu is my hero!

+1 for the Douglas Adams love.

Nice titles - I'll have to look at The Hacker Crackdown, since it's in such excellent, familiar company.

Suggestion for Geek Non-Fiction: Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg; it's his story of how he got into computing and tracked down a hacker in Berkeley's UNIX system. A great true story that reads like a spy novel.

Mars series is really good stuff. Don't know how I forgot about them.

Chronicles of Amber, written by Roger Zelazni. Zelazni sets up an elaborate world that is mysterious and quite involving to the reader. The newly republished book has all 10 books in the series. I didn't feel like I had quite earned my badge of Geekdom until I read this book.

The response list reads like a who's who of the "I got many wedgies in High School" list.

Comments on other's selections:
Chronicles of Amber was the first and only Sci-Fantasy to capture my imagination...

Ender's Game. Is it just me, or were there way too many scenes with naked kids for comfort? And lets pick one of the hardest languages on Earth to mess with in Speaker...

Rama Series. WOW; Intelligent, speculative, unimaginably alien SciFi that works!

New Novels for consideration:
Gateway (and the entire Heechee Saga) by Frederik Pohl. [Not to be confused those wacky Gateway religous stories] Going down never was so... ummm... retrospective?!? And, where is my local CHON fast food joint?

Inherit the Stars and the rest of the "Giants" series by James P Hogan. Current CGI can now do these stories justice in scope, scale and flavor. Why have we seen no Movies (yet)? I want to see a film trailer that zooms in on a dead Astronaut who died 50,000 years ago on the Moon!

Code of the Lifemaker once again by James P. Hogan. A jaw dropping start stuns you so hard you have to finish the entire Novel in one long, adventurous read! Was that Evolution or Intelligent Design? ROFL!!! Check out the Prologue on JPH's Official website: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?cmd=sample&titleID=2

The Collapsium et al by Wil McCarthy. Wil writes Modern Hard SciFi with an older, colorful flavor that truely engages and entertains with a cargo hold full of new ideas! Quick! Someone Fax me to Saturn, I feel like my Lungs need a tuneup after walking up those stairs on Venus!

I'm glad someone mentioned CJ Cherry's ]Downbelow Station. I feel sort of like a subspecies of geek in being huge fan of CJC. I love her conceptions of alien minds, and her device of old enemies learning to talk to and trust one another.

Big fan myself. I think she is very good at taking an alien perspective and bringing the reader inside of it.

I read The Morgaine cycle when I was 11 or 12 and it really shaped the way I understand a well crafted narrative.

Thanks to Will and all the comments for offering such great reading suggestions. I'll be heading to Berkeley with a list so large this weekend that if I find them all I might have to choose which ones I really want to buy (even if I find them all used).

Dune. I actually read it for the first time in my early twenties, and I can understand how it might be a confusing text for younger readers. But I think it's a terrifically complex piece of science fiction. The only warning that I would give to new readers is that they don't read past the first three books; Herbert's subsequent texts really diminished the importance of his earlier Dune stories for me.

The only problem that I have with Dune, however, is that Baron Harkonnen (spelling?) is a stereotypically homosexual villain; I think that the reader's disgust for him is supposed to be further augmented by his sexual desires.