Books - What are you reading?

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ltc

I just finished 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke. I enjoyed it a lot, not far off some lesser known Philip K Dick stuff in tone. Are any of the follow ups worth reading? Any other suggestions for his books that are worth a go?

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moocher in reply to @ltc

Rendezvous with Rama is a classic. I enjoyed some of his short story collections too.
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itsbruce in reply to @ltc

2001 the novel is the book of the film, not a Clarke original. The film was based on a Clarke short story called "The Sentinel", but that only dealt with the discovery of the alien artefact on the moon. I read the book Clarke wrote about the film and it was clear that most of the film was Kubrick's ideas, not Clarke's. Clarke just turned the result back into a book. His touch but not really his work.

The sequels are terrible.

Of his own work, "Childhood's End" is worth a read. I enjoyed "Rendezvous with Rama" well enough, although I thought it ran out of ideas. Mostly I preferred his short stories, which had more humanity to them. "The 9 Billion Names of God" is a classic, even if it is a bit of a shaggy dog story. "Tales from the White Hart" is explicitly humorous and not at all bad.

If you want more of the same but a little more modern, Greg Bear probably has the best claim to being his successor. Same huge scale, a bit more humanity (and more sex). I don't know who has written in Clarke's style more recently; I stopped reading that kind of SF.