So, tell us what you read, what you think, what you get from it, what it means, how it is evolving----whatever. Let us learn from each other.
Harry Turtledove is at the top of the list, as alternate-history is my strong preference. Also John Scalzi, S.M. Stirling, people like this.
I could never really get into Scalzi, although I know several people who are mad about him.
One of my favorite books as a kid was City of Darkness by Ben Bova. I read it at least three times as a junior high student. I couldn't remember the title or author but I could remember the story-----my wife, bless her, scoured the web and found it. It's still awesome. It was written during the mad year 1976 when the kids seemed out of control and our cities were facing bankruptcy and dereliction. Dystopia----what junior high kid wouldn't respond to that?
I'm interested in stories that are considered sci fi by most readers but are not really sci fi----or speculative fiction, if you'd rather, kind of like City of Darkness. Such as "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omerlas" by LeGuin, one of the all-time great short stories. But is it sci fi? Or "It's a Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. Or "Enoch" by Robert Bloch. How are these sci fi?
Okay. Troubling sleeping these days. Gotta go to bed.
Ooooh, yes, let's!
One of my favorites series is Greg Egan's Clockwork Rocket, which has truly alien aliens, and very, very hard science. My understanding is that Egan is a physicist, so when he decides to build a world around 'what if the speed of light wasn't constant', he knows whereof he speaks.
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time was very, very good, and I really look forward to reading the sequels.
Ann Leckie's Ancillary series was very good, although I didn't enjoy her standalone follow-up, Provenance, as much.
Yoon-ha Lee's Machineries of Empire trilogy was great, but I haven't enjoyed his other work as much.
Then, of course, there's Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series, which is . . ?? I guess ??... sci-fi, as much as it is anything. My book group is actually having an emergency meeting tomorrow to discuss Nona the Ninth, which made absolutely no sense, but kind of in a brilliant way that might turn out to be genius once Alecto the Ninth comes out. Discussion is needed.
Scalzi is fun; I like Scalzi fine. But I didn't like his Collapsing Empire trilogy as much as I'd hoped I would, and I haven't made a point of seeking out his newest (The Kaiju Preservation Society), even though it sounds incredibly goofy and fun. I should do that.
I was fully engrossed in all the Expanse books all the way through Book 8, and then Book 9 came out and I haven't gotten around to reading it, even though by all accounts it finishes the series very well indeed. I think I'll need to re-read Book 8 first, but I fully intend to.
I find Ted Chiang writes really, really great concept-based stories (Omphalos and Exhalation in particular, as well as Stories of Your Life), and I loved Arrival (the movie by Denis Villeneuve) so much that when I heard Villeneuve was making an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama I decided it was time to dive into Clarke. But RwR was god-awful. Aged very, very badly.
In general I find that classic golden-age scifi ages so badly that I can't really enjoy it for what it is. There's the social stuff, sure, a patina of mid-century misogyny of varying degrees of thickness, but also there are conventions of what counts as satisfying characterization, which have changed so much that we don't get things like character arcs and inner life in the older books. It's all sort of sterile meditation on concepts, avoiding any personality of characters as if that detracts from the purity of the ideas. Authors! You can do two things at once! (Fortunately, I feel like modern authors have figured that out--although, occasionally, they go too far in the opposite direction, and then I get bored from all the navel-gazing and want some more space explosions.)
I generally like Ben Bova's Grand Tour novels. Mars had too many characters and too much politics for me, but Venus is very good, as is Jupiter. The sequel to Jupiter, The Leviathans of Jupiter was forgettable, though. Mercury also is not my favorite, but it's interesting in that it's like a sci-fi retelling of Othello, except there are 3 Othellos who Iago wants to ruin, and Cassio and Desdemona are guilty this time of the adultery they are accused of. Like the Shakespeare play, it's a tragedy in the end. I hope that's not too much in the way of spoilers.
The best of the series in my opinion are Saturn, Titan, and Uranus. I'd also recommend Jupiter and Venus. I like that in several of these, they discover appropriately alien life on these planets.
Unfortunately, the new Neptune is awful. I'd been looking forward to its release and was very disappointed. The characters had no depth, and their motivations and relationships didn't make much sense. I also found it creepy when the main character's desire to find out what had happened to her father wandered into Electra complex territory. I'd say stick with the good stories instead.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 20, 2023, 11:32:16 PM
I'm interested in stories that are considered sci fi by most readers but are not really sci fi----or speculative fiction, if you'd rather, kind of like City of Darkness. Such as "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omerlas" by LeGuin, one of the all-time great short stories.
If you're not familiar with it, I expect you'll rather enjoy Russell Hoban's
Riddley Walker.
Quote
But is it sci fi?
Definining genres is a thorny issue in the philosophy of literature. At a first pass, I'd say that genres are characterized by clusters of conventions and features which are taken to be
standard for the genre, such that possessing these features counts towards the work's classification in that genre. So, for example, the fact that a story explicitly takes place on an exoplanet tends towards its classification as scifi (although of course this is not a necessary condition, and probably not sufficient, either!). At the same time, certain clusters of properties are taken to be
contra-standard, so that their possession tends to count
against classification in a particular genre--again, for example, the fact that a story explicitly takes place on an exoplanet tends to count against its classification as a biography or as historical fiction. And then a whole whack of properties are
variable for the genre; so, for example, 'takes place on an exoplanet' is variable for the genre 'mystery' (e.g. Alastair Reynolds's
Century Rain, or Mur Lafferty's
Six Wakes [although neither is actually set on an exoplanet, but you get the point]).
As a result, we can see that genres are fairly porous, and can overlap quite a bit, and individual stories will tend to deviate somewhat from expected clusters of standard properties (perhaps even introducing some typically contra-standard properties), all of which explains why it's so hard to classify so many stories. At the same time, of course, deviating too much from a genre's standard properties will land you in another genre--if you start with a cozy mystery but then turn up the violence and sex a notch or two, you end up with a noir, not a cozy.
And we can also get a sense of what the process of genre formation is like: an increasingly robust group of people, authors and readers alike, become increasingly interested in certain clusters of properties, which they take as standard for the stories they're interested in producing and consuming. Often, perhaps even typically, that's as a result of authors playing with the genres of their stories and diverging in some way from the conventions and properties taken as standard or contra-standard from the genre, and then interest starts to attach to new clusters of properties. That's how, for example, we go from the gothic to the female gothic, horror, and fantasy (if you'll forgive the crudity of that sketch).
So: is
Omelas science fiction? Sure, I think so. I think it fits neatly into the utopian/dystopian sub-genre, which we associate with scifi for reasons having to do more with history than content.
On the other hand, I don't think that
Frankenstein is (per your post in the other thread). To my mind, Frankenstein is a gothic novel, and predates scifi. It's certainly a precursor, and helped to establish some of the conventions of the genre, but like Lucian's
True History, it doesn't come out of a historical moment when there's a robust cluster of conventions and properties which are widely regarded as standard for a new genre. And to retroactively classify it as scifi is, I think, to do it an injustice. We don't need to do that to see its influence, or to show how it's related. And if we do, then we lose sight of its actual historical importance--which is as a gothic novel. (Incidentally, I think that the bulk of its association with scifi passes through the 1931 film and its many, many sequels, rather than the novel; that's where the mad science comes from, for example. But it's been a long time since I read it.)
I'm afraid I'll have to return to the technophonia stuff from the other post. I'm out of time for posting at the moment.
And sometimes you have authors like Ryka Aoki, who blatantly mix genre tropes with complete disregard for common clusterings of conventions. Light from Uncommon Stars has both space aliens and Faustian deals with the literal devil who offers magical violin bows.
Quote from: ergative on January 21, 2023, 01:59:08 AM
I heard Villeneuve was making an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama I decided it was time to dive into Clarke. But RwR was god-awful. Aged very, very badly.
NO! No, wait! You can't say that! It's impossible!!! Impossible, I tell you! No...no...head...imploding!!!
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 21, 2023, 09:15:34 AM
As a result, we can see that genres are fairly porous, and can overlap quite a bit,
On the other hand, I don't think that Frankenstein is (per your post in the other thread). To my mind, Frankenstein is a gothic novel, and predates scifi.
OR! Is Frankenstein the
first true sci fi novel?
Of all the genres I am aware of, sci fi is the post protean. Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are pure noir, one of the easiest fits into sci fi; Left Hand of Darkness is very hard to define----is it a pseudo-medieval quest narrative or political novel? The
brilliant and unparalleled RENDEVOUS WITH RAMA is an interesting sub-genre which essentially has no plot, at least not a driving plot, but spends the entirety of the book imagining how an advanced race from another world could negotiate the vastness of space. Clarke was a scientist, after all, and the only person nominated for both the literature and science Nobel Prizes. He had clearly imagined how animals could travel light years in space. Andromeda Strain is a book written by a doctor which has a great opening and then a very dull development precisely because Crichton spent much of the book imagining what a top-secret, state-of-the-art scientific base would look like.
In any event, yes, absolutely, Frankenstein has all the hallmarks of a gothic novel (scary medieval house, tainted bloodline that destroys the family, deadly secrets, love endangered, adventure...but, importantly, the supernatural actually IS supernatural and not the mere appearance of the supernatural----via science).
In Frankenstein we have the first use of science, as understood by Shelley, to create a new thing and extend the borders of knowledge. The doctor uses electricity to reanimate flesh. And, just like H.A.L. or the atomic bomb or the case of Charles Dexter Ward, Frankenstein uses science to create a thing, a monster, that quickly gets out of the inventor's control. That is sci fi. The book comes out right on the doorstep of the Industrial Revolution when machines and their possibilities and horrors both advanced and terrified the Victorian world. Fiction predicated upon science.
There is a lot of stuff out there about Frankenstein as sci fi. The Atlantic has a good article on Google about all the sci fi that predates our common understanding of sci fi. Some critics push back sci fi all the way to Paradise Lost when Milton first conjectured life on other planets. Others push sci fi all the way back to medieval manuscripts and fairy tales.
Sci fi, being protean, perhaps the most protean genre, can take on all sorts of guises.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 11:38:28 AM
OR! Is Frankenstein the first true sci fi novel?
I really don't think so. What we see is that scifi concretizes as a distinct genre, replete with its own conventions, in the early twentieth century (although you could potentially bargain me down to the late nineteenth century). Ccertainly, it's fully-fledged by the 1920s. Frankenstein is at least forty or fifty years too early. It certainly influences the genre's development, and it shares some properties in common with what would become standard properties of scifi. But it isn't itself a work of scifi, even if we like to talk about it that way today (wrongly, in my opinion).
Quote
Of all the genres I am aware of, sci fi is the post protean. Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are pure noir, one of the easiest fits into sci fi; Left Hand of Darkness is very hard to define----is it a pseudo-medieval quest narrative or political novel? The brilliant and unparalleled RENDEVOUS WITH RAMA is an interesting sub-genre which essentially has no plot, at least not a driving plot, but spends the entirety of the book imagining how an advanced race from another world could negotiate the vastness of space. Clarke was a scientist, after all, and the only person nominated for both the literature and science Nobel Prizes. He had clearly imagined how animals could travel light years in space. Andromeda Strain is a book written by a doctor which has a great opening and then a very dull development precisely because Crichton spent much of the book imagining what a top-secret, state-of-the-art scientific base would look like.
The Left Hand of Darkness is through and through a work of science fiction. That it may also overlap with other categories, or contain elements standard to other categories, doesn't change that. The same is true of
Neuromancer and
Androids. As for
The Andromeda Strain... I wouldn't classify it as scifi, myself. Some of Crichton's works definitely are--
Jurassic Park,
Timeline, and
Sphere, in particular--but
Andromeda hews closer to a thriller, I think; the kind of 'techno-thriller' Crichton was so good at writing. But, hey. That's not a hill I'm gonna die on.
Quote
In any event, yes, absolutely, Frankenstein has all the hallmarks of a gothic novel (scary medieval house, tainted bloodline that destroys the family, deadly secrets, love endangered, adventure...but, importantly, the supernatural actually IS supernatural and not the mere appearance of the supernatural----via science).
In Frankenstein we have the first use of science, as understood by Shelley, to create a new thing and extend the borders of knowledge. The doctor uses electricity to reanimate flesh. And, just like H.A.L. or the atomic bomb or the case of Charles Dexter Ward, Frankenstein uses science to create a thing, a monster, that quickly gets out of the inventor's control. That is sci fi. The book comes out right on the doorstep of the Industrial Revolution when machines and their possibilities and horrors both advanced and terrified the Victorian world. Fiction predicated upon science.
I just don't think that's a sufficient condition for science fiction. It's too broad.
By way of analogy, think of conceptual art. That's a kind of art that was developed in the late 1970s after several decades of accumulated work by Isidore Isou, Sol LeWitt, Henry Flint, Joseph Kosuth, and others. It's doesn't emerge out of nothing--nothing does. But it's not an artworld category until the late '70s.
So: Are Duchamp's readymades works of conceptual art? No. How can they be? They predate the movement by nearly sixty years! They certainly have features in common with it, and that's no surprise because they were significant influences on the development of the movement. And they, in turn, are heavily influenced by cubism and Kandinsky's expressionism, which are in turn heavily influenced by aestheticism, impressionism, and post-impressionism. But we shouldn't retcon them into conceptual art. To do so is to erase precisely what made them so strange and revolutionary, and to force them into an anachronistic mould.
Quote
There is a lot of stuff out there about Frankenstein as sci fi. The Atlantic has a good article on Google about all the sci fi that predates our common understanding of sci fi. Some critics push back sci fi all the way to Paradise Lost when Milton first conjectured life on other planets. Others push sci fi all the way back to medieval manuscripts and fairy tales.
Sci fi, being protean, perhaps the most protean genre, can take on all sorts of guises.
Yeah, but unfortunately they're wrong. They're right to trace the origins of scifi that way, but to call those works science fiction betrays sloppy thinking about the nature of genre formation. That's certainly fine for ordinary discourse, but it won't do for anything more rigorous. (I'm sorry to double down this way, but that's what we philosophers do.)
A social kind cannot pre-exist the network of conventions and institutions which make it possible. Concrete objects come first, social consensus later. Consider cyborgs; were the first people with peglegs or hooks cyborgs? Surely not. Prosthetics are a crucial component of the concept of cyborgness (it is, after all, parasitic on the concept of prosthesis), but that doesn't mean that any old prosthetic body part turns you into a cyborg. Onund Tree-Foot, one of Iceland's first settlers, wasn't a cyborg. He just had a pegleg (which got stuck in a beached whale's blowhole during a fight, leading to his death).
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 10:36:52 AM
Quote from: ergative on January 21, 2023, 01:59:08 AM
I heard Villeneuve was making an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama I decided it was time to dive into Clarke. But RwR was god-awful. Aged very, very badly.
NO! No, wait! You can't say that! It's impossible!!! Impossible, I tell you! No...no...head...imploding!!!
"Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless, but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of an unholstered lady officer through the control cabin."
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 21, 2023, 12:33:23 PM
Sci fi, being protean, perhaps the most protean genre, can take on all sorts of guises.
Yeah, but unfortunately they're wrong.
[/quote]
If the Frankenstein had been written in 1918 instead of 1818 would it be science fiction?
Quote from: ergative on January 21, 2023, 12:51:35 PM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 10:36:52 AM
Quote from: ergative on January 21, 2023, 01:59:08 AM
I heard Villeneuve was making an adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama I decided it was time to dive into Clarke. But RwR was god-awful. Aged very, very badly.
NO! No, wait! You can't say that! It's impossible!!! Impossible, I tell you! No...no...head...imploding!!!
"Some women, Commander Norton had decided long ago, should not be allowed aboard ship; weightlessness did things to their breasts that were too damn distracting. It was bad enough when they were motionless, but when they started to move, and sympathetic vibrations set in, it was more than any warm-blooded male should be asked to take. He was quite sure that at least one serious space accident had been caused by acute crew distraction, after the transit of an unholstered lady officer through the control cabin."
Yeah...by our standards most sci fi of the era is incredibly, even unbelievably sexist. Try reading Stranger in a Strange Land.
It's kind of like the comix and video games of today.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 04:39:36 PM
If the Frankenstein had been written in 1918 instead of 1818 would it be science fiction?
I'm not sure. It would be possible, at least, but my intuition is that it would still hew closer to a gothic novel.
But then, like Menard's
Quixote, a 1918
Frankenstein wouldn't be
Frankenstein, would it?
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 04:42:07 PM
Yeah...by our standards most sci fi of the era is incredibly, even unbelievably sexist. Try reading Stranger in a Strange Land.
I've tried SiaSL twice, once as a teen and once as an adult. Both times, I dumped it about 3/4 through (which I otherwise never do), at the point where our friendly billionaire genius tells us why women are responsible for their own rapes.
Misogyny aside, it's almost unbearably woowoo (I hate this
so much about so much '60s and '70s scifi). But that was the final straw. Heinlein's work is all over the place, and most of it has aged poorly. But man, that's a bad one. I don't imagine I'd be very pleased by re-reading
Farnham's Freehold, either (not that I was at the time, but I at least finished it).
Heinlein really has to be split into two groupings. SiaSL led to all the later stuff where he really fixated on Lazarus Long in not a great way. The hard science fiction in the material prior to the 1960s and the YA books were really quite good for that type, and I'd argue that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a true classic.
FWIW I'm lumping Glory Road and Farnham's Freehold into the SiaSL and later material. Starship Troopers is in it's own separate category.
The books I think are under appreciated from that 1960s era are by John Varley.
Author who holds up the best from that time is Phillip K. Dick, hands down.
Is Vonnegut science fiction? I'd argue not.
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 21, 2023, 05:09:25 PM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 04:39:36 PM
If the Frankenstein had been written in 1918 instead of 1818 would it be science fiction?
I'm not sure. It would be possible, at least, but my intuition is that it would still hew closer to a gothic novel.
But then, like Menard's Quixote, a 1918 Frankenstein wouldn't be Frankenstein, would it?
The cultural context would be different, but Frankenstein would still be Frankenstein----mad scientist, pseudo-science, a cautionary tale about taking science too far, akin to horror, an easy transition to cinematic media. Science fiction!
The beauty of literature is that it cannot be codified or categorized like scientific taxonomy.
I am going to take a look at Blazing Worlds by Cavandish.
BTW, I think I found Riddley Walker online. Thanks for the recommendation.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 04:42:07 PM
Yeah...by our standards most sci fi of the era is incredibly, even unbelievably sexist. Try reading Stranger in a Strange Land.
I've tried SiaSL twice, once as a teen and once as an adult. Both times, I dumped it about 3/4 through (which I otherwise never do), at the point where our friendly billionaire genius tells us why women are responsible for their own rapes.
Misogyny aside, it's almost unbearably woowoo (I hate this
so much about so much '60s and '70s scifi). But that was the final straw. Heinlein's work is all over the place, and most of it has aged poorly. But man, that's a bad one. I don't imagine I'd be very pleased by re-reading
Farnham's Freehold, either (not that I was at the time, but I at least finished it).
[/quote]
I only read SiaSL to cover the literature. I found some of its concepts interesting, but it was a very strange narrative.
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 21, 2023, 05:55:03 PM
The books I think are under appreciated from that 1960s era are by John Varley.
I'm not familiar with him, I'll check him out.
Quote
Author who holds up the best from that time is Phillip K. Dick, hands down.
Not J.G. Ballard? Or, indeed, early Ursula K. LeGuin?
(Once we hit the late seventies there's Vonda McIntyre, too.)
Quote
Is Vonnegut science fiction? I'd argue not.
Kilgore Trout, yes. Vonnegut, no. =)
Well...my friend Para seems to have a pretty hard definition of sci fi. Slaughterhouse 5 is many things, war novel, trauma narrative, satire, pacifist literature, even a historical novel to a degree----and it is also considered sci fi, although I think that a good argument could be made that Vonnegut uses the elements of sci fi for the purposes of satire.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 09:53:08 PM
Well...my friend Para seems to have a pretty hard definition of sci fi. Slaughterhouse 5 is many things, war novel, trauma narrative, satire, pacifist literature, even a historical novel to a degree----and it is also considered sci fi, although I think that a good argument could be made that Vonnegut uses the elements of sci fi for the purposes of satire.
I might be misremembering the bulk of his output. I certainly wouldn't deny that he wrote at least some science fiction novels, like
The Sirens of Titan,
Cat's Cradle, and
Slaughterhouse 5. Maybe
Player Piano, too? I don't remember it well. And I suppose I'm not certain how I'd class
Galapagos--intitially, I wouldn't have called it scifi, but as I think about it it does cover, like, a million years or so, so... maybe.
All right, fine. That's a fair few novels. Foremost in my mind when I answered the question were
Mother Night,
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and
Bluebeard. Those certainly aren't scifi.
So, yeah, I'll walk that back.
Anyone want to comment on Jerry Pournelle?
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 21, 2023, 05:09:25 PM
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 21, 2023, 04:42:07 PM
Yeah...by our standards most sci fi of the era is incredibly, even unbelievably sexist. Try reading Stranger in a Strange Land.
I've tried SiaSL twice, once as a teen and once as an adult. Both times, I dumped it about 3/4 through (which I otherwise never do), at the point where our friendly billionaire genius tells us why women are responsible for their own rapes.
I still remember exactly where I was when I read that bit. Agatha Christie is guilty of it too.
This sort of nonsense is why I just have no use for the 'golden age' stuff. The science is out of date, and the tropes may have been new and fresh then but they've since been developed and reused and discussed either to death (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny) or else made better by the maturation of the field, so that the OG introduction of the idea has none of the originality that it once offered. Combine that with wildly offensive social values and there's just not much there to enjoy. Maybe if I'm interested in the genre as an object of study, it's worth engaging with as a historical object, but if I want an entertaining yarn with space aliens, there's much better stuff that won't make me mad being published these days.
Quote from: kaysixteen on January 21, 2023, 11:50:13 PM
Anyone want to comment on Jerry Pournelle?
I haven't read any Pournelle. Given what I said above, is he worth my time?
Try one Pournelle (there is one pretty good series with Larry Niven), and see.
There are many who are under appreciated. Ballard is very good. I recently reread The Drowned World, and it seems still too accurate in some ways. Brunner is good, and two VERY under appreciated women from that era are Joanna Russ and Alice Sheldon.
What about Harlan Ellison?
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 22, 2023, 08:09:44 AM
Try one Pournelle (there is one pretty good series with Larry Niven), and see.
There are many who are under appreciated. Ballard is very good. I recently reread The Drowned World, and it seems still too accurate in some ways. Brunner is good, and two VERY under appreciated women from that era are Joanna Russ and Alice Sheldon.
What about Harlan Ellison?
I've read both Russ and Sheldon/Tiptree. Tiptree is very impressive, but everything is so dang
grim that I don't want to read any more of her work.
I'm willing to try a Pournelle. Looks like he collaborated with Niven on a few series, but
Mote in God's Eye is the one I've heard of. I'll give it a look.
Quote from: ergative on January 22, 2023, 03:12:39 AM
I haven't read any Pournelle. Given what I said above, is he worth my time?
I haven't read much, but I'd say 'no'.
With one exception:
The Legacy of Heorot, which he wrote with Larry Niven and Steven Barnes. It's Beowulf in a space colony, with some quite good xenobiology for Grendel. Because it's a group project, the misogyny is somewhat more distributed--but because Niven and Pournelle are involved, it's very definitely there. But it's an original idea which you won't find better executed elsewhere in scifi (as far as I know).
The xenobiology of the second novel is its main attraction, but the misogyny is stronger; I'd give it a miss. As for the third novel, Pournelle's decline and death meant he was minimally involved, and so there's
a lot less misogyny. But there's not much new xenobiology, either, so it's not really worth it. But that first one is worth the read.
Pournelle is essentially a libertarian, but one who is also an elitist who hates democracy. His 'Spartans' novels more or less make this clear, though they can be fun, and he is a better stylistic writer than Stirling is (when Stirling pairs up with people like David Drake the writing gets better). I only read 3-5 sci-fi novels a year, save Turtledove, so I have not the greatest sample size.
I've never could get into reading it but later in life I took an interest into the artwork of sci fi and fantasy like Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Giger, Bonestell and Frazetta.
Sci-Fi
by Tracy K. Smith
There will be no edges, but curves.
Clean lines pointing only forward.
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared
Corners, will be replaced with nuance,
Just like the dinosaurs gave way
To mounds and mounds of ice.
Women will still be women, but
The distinction will be empty. Sex,
Having outlived every threat, will gratify
Only the mind, which is where it will exist.
For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves
Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.
The oldest among us will recognize that glow—
But the word sun will have been re-assigned
To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device
Found in households and nursing homes.
And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks
To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,
Eons from even our own moon, we'll drift
In the haze of space, which will be, once
And for all, scrutable and safe.
Many mentions of SF authors who have come to note long after my interest in SF faded. How faded? I have hundreds of SF paperbacks in boxes in the basement, even a few PBs dating to the late Fifties. I don't know what to do with them. Craig's list?
I could recommend a number of authors from the illustrious past, but won't bother. Everyone has his/her [her, not abundant, I guess] favorites.
So. Single recommendation: works of Jack Vance, whose career was extensive. If any SF author wrote of the sociology of distant worlds, it was certainly him. Read his "Demon Princes" series (five novels) or his "Worlds of Adventure (three?), but for a single work, I'd suggest Araminta Station, more social struggle than SF for the book's people. And fun--which SF can't always pull off.
Yes, I've heard uniformly high praise for Jack Vance. I've just been burned so many times by the oldsters I tend to take that with a pinch of salt. But I'll add your recommendation, Juvenal, to the pile that will eventually tip me into one of his books.
Quote from: Anselm on January 23, 2023, 07:06:56 AM
I've never could get into reading it but later in life I took an interest into the artwork of sci fi and fantasy like Wayne Douglas Barlowe, Giger, Bonestell and Frazetta.
Berkey is my favorite sci fi artist (https://www.this-is-cool.co.uk/the-classic-sci-fi-art-of-john-berkey/)
I'm a 'her' who reads lots of speculative fiction, some of it the sci-fi zone. Read lots of "golden age" stuff growing up, little of which I have much desire to re-read with the exception of some Bradbury and some Sturgeon.
To put some more recent to current authors out there
Octavia Butler — wide ranging from believable dystopias Parable of the Sower to flat out aliens Xenogenesis to whatever Fledgeling is.
Nicola Griffith's Ammonite and Suzy McKee Charnas' Holdfast Chronicles for early engagement with what female dominated societies might look like
Neil Diamond, especially for more human focused cyberpunk like Diamond Age
Lois McMaster Bujold for space opera with a personal touch and some thoughts about how science affects things like reproduction and how that might change societies in the Vorkosigan saga
Cathrynne Valente for every book being completely different from laugh ot loud Space Opera to extremely disturbing (though maybe not sci fi) Comfort me with Apples to outstanding climate fiction The Past is Red
Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire's alt for sci fi and horror) especially for the extremely prescient "pandemic + election year + changes to news coverage" in the "Newsflesh" trilogy
Martha Wells for a uniquie AI voice in the Murderbot series (great as audiobook)
Becky Chambers for some actual optimism about humanity in the Wayfarer series
Anyone else out there reading much of the current stuff?
Quote from: onthefringe on January 23, 2023, 07:59:44 PM
Octavia Butler — wide ranging from believable dystopias Parable of the Sower to flat out aliens Xenogenesis to whatever Fledgeling is.
Parable was excellent, but Kindred is her masterpiece, IMO. That book got the best response from students that I have ever seen in teaching literature.
Quote from: Wahoo Redux on January 23, 2023, 08:32:23 PM
Quote from: onthefringe on January 23, 2023, 07:59:44 PM
Octavia Butler — wide ranging from believable dystopias Parable of the Sower to flat out aliens Xenogenesis to whatever Fledgeling is.
Parable was excellent, but Kindred is her masterpiece, IMO. That book got the best response from students that I have ever seen in teaching literature.
I actually think
Kindred is aging least well of all her books, and on a recent reread I found it fairly unnuanced and didactic.
Xenogenesis has some (to me) really interesting things to say about slavery and colonialism that it gets to by making it "about" aliens and humanity instead of overtly about race and American slavery. I think that use of metaphor and symbol is one of the powers of sci fi.
I liked Xenogenesis was great. I manage to miss Kindred, but will probably read it after I've watched the Hulu series.
In my old guy defense, John Varley (who I suggested upthread) and Butler started publishing at the same time. His last book was in 2018.
I freely admit I like a lot of C.J. Cherryh's work just as a fun read. The foreigner series is way more books than I ever want to read but I enjoyed the Chanur series and the Cyteen books.
Quote from: onthefringe on January 23, 2023, 07:59:44 PM
Anyone else out there reading much of the current stuff?
I pretty much only read the new stuff--don't have the patience for the bad science and misogyny of the old. Like you, I quite like Mira Grant (although, really,
Feed was far and away her best--I'm glad someone else connected her to the pandemic, though. It seemed oddly absent from discussions I've seen!) and Becky Chambers.
My current overall contemporary favourite is probably Adrian Tchaikovsky. In terms of great contemporary female scifi writers, I'd add Sue Burke and Ann Leckie. N.K. Jemisin, too, although her work often has a foot firmly planted in fantasy (she's really, really,
really good, though).
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 24, 2023, 11:53:13 AM
Quote from: onthefringe on January 23, 2023, 07:59:44 PM
Anyone else out there reading much of the current stuff?
I pretty much only read the new stuff--don't have the patience for the bad science and misogyny of the old. Like you, I quite like Mira Grant (although, really, Feed was far and away her best--I'm glad someone else connected her to the pandemic, though. It seemed oddly absent from discussions I've seen!) and Becky Chambers.
My current overall contemporary favourite is probably Adrian Tchaikovsky. In terms of great contemporary female scifi writers, I'd add Sue Burke and Ann Leckie. N.K. Jemisin, too, although her work often has a foot firmly planted in fantasy (she's really, really, really good, though).
What do the two of you consider current? 1980s and on? Or even later as a "start"? In my mind things really started to change in the genre in the 1970s.
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 01:01:59 PM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 24, 2023, 11:53:13 AM
Quote from: onthefringe on January 23, 2023, 07:59:44 PM
Anyone else out there reading much of the current stuff?
I pretty much only read the new stuff--don't have the patience for the bad science and misogyny of the old. Like you, I quite like Mira Grant (although, really, Feed was far and away her best--I'm glad someone else connected her to the pandemic, though. It seemed oddly absent from discussions I've seen!) and Becky Chambers.
My current overall contemporary favourite is probably Adrian Tchaikovsky. In terms of great contemporary female scifi writers, I'd add Sue Burke and Ann Leckie. N.K. Jemisin, too, although her work often has a foot firmly planted in fantasy (she's really, really, really good, though).
What do the two of you consider current? 1980s and on?
I would say aughts-on, I think.
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 24, 2023, 01:03:30 PM
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 01:01:59 PM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 24, 2023, 11:53:13 AM
Quote from: onthefringe on January 23, 2023, 07:59:44 PM
Anyone else out there reading much of the current stuff?
I pretty much only read the new stuff--don't have the patience for the bad science and misogyny of the old. Like you, I quite like Mira Grant (although, really, Feed was far and away her best--I'm glad someone else connected her to the pandemic, though. It seemed oddly absent from discussions I've seen!) and Becky Chambers.
My current overall contemporary favourite is probably Adrian Tchaikovsky. In terms of great contemporary female scifi writers, I'd add Sue Burke and Ann Leckie. N.K. Jemisin, too, although her work often has a foot firmly planted in fantasy (she's really, really, really good, though).
What do the two of you consider current? 1980s and on?
I would say aughts-on, I think.
I was thinking "author still alive and actively publishing", which probably amounts to the same thing, but also interested in authors bridging that critical 70's to 2000's period
I've managed to miss Tchaikovsky — what's a good starting point?
I left out a bunch of favorites who are currently pretty deeply in the "fantasy" camp
Quote from: onthefringe on January 24, 2023, 01:30:03 PM
I've managed to miss Tchaikovsky — what's a good starting point?
I doscovered him through
Children of Time, which was just fantastic. (It's the story of a terraforming project gone awry.)
If you like space maze stories, then the novella
Walking to Alderaban is great. Also novella-wise, The Expert System's Brother was great, too (colonization project gone awry).
If you prefer a space opera, then
Shards of Earth is a solid entry into the subgenre. But I'd start with
Children of Time, which was just fab.
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
I love him though if I focus I can see numerous reasons other people might find him annoying. I choose not to do that as it would interfere with the "I love him" part. But while most of his work falls in the broad speculative fiction category, I would say very little of it is strictly sci fi.
That said I have liked all versions of Sandman (graphic novels, audio performances and Netflix series). I also quite like
Anansi Boys and
Neverwhere.
Quote from: onthefringe on January 24, 2023, 02:45:53 PM
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
I love him though if I focus I can see numerous reasons other people might find him annoying. I choose not to do that as it would interfere with the "I love him" part. But while most of his work falls in the broad speculative fiction category, I would say very little of it is strictly sci fi.
That said I have liked all versions of Sandman (graphic novels, audio performances and Netflix series. I also quite like Anansi Boys and Neverwhere.
Thanks! I'm in!
I think trying to define science fiction is futile. Since the 1970s I've preferred just SF, i.e. speculative fiction. That was the only way I could meaningfully process a "genre" that included Dick, Heinlein, Bradbury, McCaffery, Delaney, Zelasny and Vonnegut, and why I liked them all in what seemed like the same way.
After all this time, btw, I still have no idea what
Dhalgren was about.
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 03:21:42 PM
Quote from: onthefringe on January 24, 2023, 02:45:53 PM
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
I love him though if I focus I can see numerous reasons other people might find him annoying. I choose not to do that as it would interfere with the "I love him" part. But while most of his work falls in the broad speculative fiction category, I would say very little of it is strictly sci fi.
That said I have liked all versions of Sandman (graphic novels, audio performances and Netflix series. I also quite like Anansi Boys and Neverwhere.
Thanks! I'm in!
I think trying to define science fiction is futile. Since the 1970s I've preferred just SF, i.e. speculative fiction. That was the only way I could meaningfully process a "genre" that included Dick, Heinlein, Bradbury, McCaffery, Delaney, Zelasny and Vonnegut, and why I liked them all in what seemed like the same way.
After all this time, btw, I still have no idea what Dhalgren was about.
Agreed re definitions — I only brought it up because the definition of "sci fi" was discussed earlier!
I think Jo Walton (another "broad SF" author I adore) has some interesting things to say about
Dahlgren though they largely boil down to she doesn't understand it either but thinks it's interesting. Which is more than I got out of it.
Quote from: onthefringe on January 24, 2023, 02:45:53 PM
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
I love him though if I focus I can see numerous reasons other people might find him annoying. I choose not to do that as it would interfere with the "I love him" part. But while most of his work falls in the broad speculative fiction category, I would say very little of it is strictly sci fi.
That said I have liked all versions of Sandman (graphic novels, audio performances and Netflix series). I also quite like Anansi Boys and Neverwhere.
I tried to read Gaiman's
American Gods once, but couldn't get into it.
Stardust is really good though.
Quote from: Larimar on January 24, 2023, 05:08:56 PM
Quote from: onthefringe on January 24, 2023, 02:45:53 PM
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
I love him though if I focus I can see numerous reasons other people might find him annoying. I choose not to do that as it would interfere with the "I love him" part. But while most of his work falls in the broad speculative fiction category, I would say very little of it is strictly sci fi.
That said I have liked all versions of Sandman (graphic novels, audio performances and Netflix series). I also quite like Anansi Boys and Neverwhere.
I tried to read Gaiman's American Gods once, but couldn't get into it. Stardust is really good though.
The first two volumes of Sandman were really disappointing. I think Gaiman was still finding his feet. Everyone keeps raving about them, so maybe it's like ST:DS9, which took four seasons to get good.
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 24, 2023, 01:03:30 PM
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 01:01:59 PM
Quote from: Parasaurolophus on January 24, 2023, 11:53:13 AM
Quote from: onthefringe on January 23, 2023, 07:59:44 PM
Anyone else out there reading much of the current stuff?
I pretty much only read the new stuff--don't have the patience for the bad science and misogyny of the old. Like you, I quite like Mira Grant (although, really, Feed was far and away her best--I'm glad someone else connected her to the pandemic, though. It seemed oddly absent from discussions I've seen!) and Becky Chambers.
My current overall contemporary favourite is probably Adrian Tchaikovsky. In terms of great contemporary female scifi writers, I'd add Sue Burke and Ann Leckie. N.K. Jemisin, too, although her work often has a foot firmly planted in fantasy (she's really, really, really good, though).
What do the two of you consider current? 1980s and on?
I would say aughts-on, I think.
Yes to all of this. Current = aughts-on to me, and all the authors named above are some of my favourites. Also Martha Wells, whose Murderbot books are just so much fun.
My students loved Murderbot. We only read the first one, but several students told me they immediately bought the entire series on Kindle. I thought it was okay.
I regard to how sci fi has evolved, Murderbot is far more sophisticated in how it frames and portrays its first-person narrator (the killer / guard robot him/her/itself----gender is one of the very interesting debate points about the narrator) but I gotta say, here we have the same old story----technology on the verge of being out of control (the humanoid Bot has already killed a host of people and has to figure out why not to kill more) and so a little technophobia and horror (the uncanny valley for sure), alien planet, space ships, and scientists who are not entirely sure what is going on ever. Throw in our contemporary paranoia about corporations and a specific techoparanoia about AI and we have our formula.
The coolest thing about Murderbot is that Wells declined nomination to the Nebula Awards because she felt that the Murderbot series had received enough attention already and she wanted some other writer to get their share of the limelight. She must be an extraordinary person.
I read above, from more than one, about a distaste for "golden age classic SF." As you see, I'm a cranky septuagenarian (and only a handful of months from octogenarian crankiness). I think I might have bought my first SF paperback about 1957 (I believe it was Clarke's Sands of Mars). High school, college, and some years after I read on and on. As I said above, I've hundreds of pbs moldering in the basement, many of which I have no memory of reading, nor much desire to do so again.
But some remain green in memory and have been read again, and more than once. So, just one recommendation: Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956) considered, here and there, as one of the best SF novels. It's actually a kind of play on The Count of Monte Cristo. A story of revenge and transformation.
Stephen King must have liked it. He used a trope from the novel in one of his short stories.
Quote from: Juvenal on January 25, 2023, 09:00:09 AM
I read above, from more than one, about a distaste for "golden age classic SF." As you see, I'm a cranky septuagenarian (and only a handful of months from octogenarian crankiness). I think I might have bought my first SF paperback about 1957 (I believe it was Clarke's Sands of Mars). High school, college, and some years after I read on and on. As I said above, I've hundreds of pbs moldering in the basement, many of which I have no memory of reading, nor much desire to do so again.
But some remain green in memory and have been read again, and more than once. So, just one recommendation: Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956) considered, here and there, as one of the best SF novels. It's actually a kind of play on The Count of Monte Cristo. A story of revenge and transformation.
Stephen King must have liked it. He used a trope from the novel in one of his short stories.
Sorry, Juvenal, I noped out of that one when I got to the bit about the woman so traumatized by witnessing a murder that she reverts to infancy (complete with goo-goo ga-ga speech patterns), but inside,
underneath the trauma, you understand, she's actually in love with the investigator.
Edit--Oh, woops, I think that was actually
The Demolished Man, by the same author. The point stands; I don't want anything to do with him. I'm glad it worked for you, though. There is a lot of good stuff in the old sci-fi, and it's important for people to recognize what worked, even if it's not for me.
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
I think his children's novels are fantastic. I don't much care for his adult stuff. (I don't actively hate it, I just think it's kind of 'meh'.)
American Gods annoys me because its fanbase seems blithely unaware of what it owes to Terry Pratchett (but that's a problem with them, not the book).
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 03:21:42 PM
I think trying to define science fiction is futile.
I dunno about that. Philosophers have made good progress on definitions of 'art', 'game', and 'knowledge', and I know that philosophers of literature have done some work on 'fiction', 'non-fiction', 'genre', and 'fantasy', at least. (The SEP is down at the moment, so I'll edit links in later.) I even know of two preliminary stabs at 'scifi': 1 (https://philpapers.org/rec/EVNBII), 2 (https://philpapers.org/rec/TERSFA).
So, I'm optimistic. At the very least, we should be able to give a pretty robust sketch of what such a definition might look like, even if the conventions underpinning it are constantly shifting. But a philosopher's patience for this sort of thing is, if note infinite, tolerably close to it!
On 'speculative fiction', I tend to agree with Peter Watts (https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Atwood.pdf).
Suvim's "novum" is the result of pseudoscience in the sci fi novel, from Frankenstein's monster to the Murderbot.
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
One of my favorites. I second the votes for Neverwhere and Anansi Boys. The audio books are excellent. I wouldn't call any of it sci-fi however (more fantasy, but really doesn't fit neatly into any genre), but what does it really matter?
Quote from: jimbogumbo on January 24, 2023, 02:27:23 PM
What do we think of Neil Gaiman? All I've read of his fiction (currently reading the View from the Cheap Seats) is American Gods. Thinking of purchasing the Sandman collection.
I tried
Sandman and some of his other comics back in the day, and found them massively overpraised in my opinion. I decided I wouldn't even try any of his novels.
I used to work in science fiction publishing (one of the Big Five in New York), and still work in it part time. And my husband was a science fiction novelist. And many of my friends are SF novelists. So this is all very interesting to me, but many of my opinions would out me and are unwise ("So-and-so wrote a great first book, but then had a life crisis and wrote garbage again until Such-and-Such, and also he is a bastard"). But there is some great stuff out there, both old and contemporary. Incidentally I do love The Stars My Destination. People are big on Becky Chambers right now, but although I acknowledge she has a gift, it's a little too quiet for my taste. I have been trying for some time to get in to Leviathan Wakes (late to the party), but I am just chronically distracted — no fault of the writing.
Quote from: Hegemony on January 26, 2023, 01:13:52 PM
I used to work in science fiction publishing (one of the Big Five in New York), and still work in it part time. And my husband was a science fiction novelist. And many of my friends are SF novelists.
!!!!
You're very cool.