Why am I passionate about this?
I like science and math. I’m better at science than math. I grew up reading books from the early pioneers of sci-fi when imagination trumped hard science. Oh, the science was around, there was just a lot more leeway to make up the physics when you needed something to work. As science advanced, authors got more into the technical and theoretical aspects of what they were writing about. I usually skim over technical writing, so when I began to write, it was natural for me to limit what I found to be superfluous to the story. The recommended books are the kind of books I like to read and write.
Leon's book list on for readers who don’t think they like science fiction
Why did Leon love this book?
This was one of the first science fiction stories I remember reading on my own and it is one of the books I have reread most often.
It had everything to capture the imagination of a teenage mind. A story featuring two humans, a three-legged, two-headed alien, and a cat-warrior. Throw in a spaceship with an indestructible hull and the title structure and you have a great adventure story with minimal hard science. Even Mr. Niven got it wrong and had to correct it in later stories.
7 authors picked Ringworld as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of…