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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Classic SF Literature

12:17 / 14.12.01

Recommendations, please. It would be helpful and also fun to see how people's hierarchies, if any, are built.

I've read a good portion of Asimov, long ago in my youth and mostly forgotten... one book by PKD, The Man in the High Castle something or other, Dune, and something called The Shockwave Rider.

Fengs for the Memory

12:24 / 14.12.01

Brain Aldiss - anything at random he always entertained me.
Ray Bradbury - Martian Chronicles, also a early on I think called The eyes of Heisenberg(?).

12:44 / 14.12.01

Look, I really need to go home and have lunch, stop starting these great threads, damn it!

Philip K Dick - VALIS, Radio Free Albemuth, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and many, many more.

Alfred Bester - Tiger Tiger / The Stars My Destination (same book, different title)

William Gibson - Burning Chrome, Neuromancer

Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons, The Player of Games, Consider Phlebas, Walking on Glass*

Douglas Adams - Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy

HG Wells - War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Ray Bradbury - Fahrenheit 451, any short stories

Walter M. Miller - A Canticle For Liebowitz

John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids, The
Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes, The Midwich Cookoos

Robert Sheckley - any short stories collection

JG Ballard - ditto

Harry Harrison - Bill the Galactic Hero

Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strangeland**, The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag

*yeah, I know it's not sold as SF, but it is SF.
**confession: haven't actually read this, but it's always in these sort of lists

(Crikey! Not one female writer on that list..)

12:52 / 14.12.01

*All* the Dune books...even the prequels, if you end up getting addicted like I did.
Iain M. Banks - all his SF, but my favourites are 'Use of Weapons' and 'Excession' (which is, however, probably not the best introduction to his stuff). Also, 'Player of Games' is very cool, and I like most of his others, too.
Orson Scott Card's Ender books - 'Ender's Game', 'Speaker for the Dead' and 'Xenocide' particularly. Probably best read in order...

'Voyage to Arcturus' by, I think, David Lindsay, is weird SF from the 20's or 30's, definitely worth a go.

12:55 / 14.12.01

Ooh, yeah, sleazenation is right. Vonnegut. For some reason, I never think of him when I think of SF...

13:59 / 14.12.01

Samuel Delaney's 'Dhalgren' was a good, strange, interesting read.

Anyone read any Ursula K. Le Guin, particularly the 'Left Hand of Darkness'? I hear she and it are quite good.

You should check out Jonathan Lethem, too, and definitely Haruki Murakami, but they are contemporary writers.

07:13 / 16.12.01

Marge Piercy: I've only read 'Woman at the Edge of Time' but it's absolutely fucking brilliant and I can't recommend it enough. 70's-feminist-utopian sci-fi. If you like it you'll probably like Joanna Russ's "The Female Man" as well - I loved it, but not as much as W@EoT.

Ursula le Guin and I have our problems, particularly with 'The Left Hand of Darkness', but I won't get into that here. She's a great stylist and has some fantastic ideas. I like 'The Dispossessed' a lot.

Lisa Tuttle is a pretty good short-story writer.

I like Nicholas Fisk, but I suspect you have to get into him before around age 10 otherwise you notice the flaws too much.

Oh - and I love Douglas Hill, particularly the Last Legionary quartet. Young man with unbreakable skeleton travels the galaxy tracking down the evil men who destroyed his planet, and having a tremendously slashy and odd relationship with a telepathic alien bird-creature along the way. Yowsa.

I dislike Asimov, Aldiss & John Wyndham, hence the many years in which I read no adult male-authored sci-fi at all, before I discovered Vonnegut & PKD.

07:52 / 16.12.01

Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game

Frank Herbert - Dune

Asimov - Foundation

...a PKD short story always sticks in my mind, I think it was called Morpheus with clay feet, search that out it classic, VALIS is good as well, didn't really like Man in the High Castle, quite like Dr Bloodmoney as well

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World

Out of those Ender's Game is indispensible.

14:49 / 16.12.01

quote:Originally posted by Rizla Year Zero:

Walter M. Miller - A Canticle For Liebowitz

Most definitely. The rediscovery of science in a post-nuclear world where the church once again controls civilisation. You're the only other person I 'know' who's read this, Riz. Wondering - what's the sequel like? I've got it somewhere, but not got around to reading it yet.

Repeating people here. Orson Scott Card's Ender saga (the first three books, at least - the 'shadow' series is best left alone), any PKD novels (Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and Martian Time-Slip especially), both the recommended Alfred Bester novels.

Not mentioned so far:

Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human. Centres on the lives of a group of children, the next evolutionary step in the species.

John Brunner - Stand on Zanzibar. A warning about the dangers of over-reliance on computers/machines/other trappings of the future. Impassioned and political. It can be tough going and occasionally seem too cynical, but is well worth sticking with.

Michael Marshall Smith - Only Forward, Spares and One of Us. Manages to write imaginative and exciting sci-fi that's also funny, without ever resorting to the tired Pratchett/Red Dwarf style of humor that is 'taking the piss out of the genre'.

Stephen Baxter - Time and Space. More seriously scientific that those mentioned above, but not overly-so.

[ 16-12-2001: Message edited by: E. Randy Dupre ]

14:55 / 16.12.01

I've said this before, but you could do far worse than getting hold of nearly every title in the Sci-fi Masterworks series of classic novels.

And, checking that site out again, I realise that I've failed to say anything about Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon (a beautiful and haunting moral tale about the perils of absolute trust in untested scientific 'advances') or Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan (another title that is almost too cynical for it's own good, but still worth reading).

Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, also in that series, is an absolute masterpiece. I still have doubts about its inclusion in a sci-fi list, though.

[ 16-12-2001: Message edited by: E. Randy Dupre ]

18:51 / 16.12.01

Contemporary writers are definitely not out of place here. While a lot of the "Golden Age" stuff was good in a fun-with-ideas sense, I think modern writers are putting out a lot better stuff, overall. For example:

A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge, probably the greatest SF novel I've ever read, a mind-boggling space opera featuring *the* most fascinating alien race ever created and a conceptualization of the universe which centers around Zones of Thought (yes, it's as cool as it sounds)...

Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson is insanely popular but a very, very good book, intricately thought out and with a very interesting near-future setting, an cool place to think about, but not one where I'd want to live. And who can resist a novel whose main character is named Hiro Protagonist?

The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe, which is actually four books, five if you count The Urth of the New Sun, a detached sequel I've not yet read: The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch. A far future story about Severian, the Torturer's Apprentice and his journeys, these books are as good as it gets, and as truly different as SF has ever become.

That's my top three, at the moment. I agree with a lot of the other recommendations, *especially* A Canticle for Leibowitz. And be wary of William Gibson--outside of Neuromancer, my experiences with him have been not-so-good. DO NOT read Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Do, however, read anything by Walter Jon Williams you can get your hands on, especially Metropolitan and City On Fire. All right, must do laundry now. Think you've got enough books to keep you busy for a while, anyway, eh?

[ 16-12-2001: Message edited by: Tempus ]

11:44 / 17.12.01

Thanks all, most of these I've never heard of... must get started, I have a six weeks' holiday that a good portion will be spent on the couch with books.

About Arthur C. Clarke, I think it was after reading 2010 that I concluded that sci-fi must be as a rule badly-written, and on to Jane Austen.

I've read everything by Vonnegut--funny, I didn't think of him as sci-fi either. I remember weeping, actually, over the harmoniums... but then I was only fourteen and I cry at everything.

11:46 / 17.12.01

quote:Originally posted by E. Randy Dupre:

Most definitely. The rediscovery of science in a post-nuclear world where the church once again controls civilisation. You're the only other person I 'know' who's read this, Riz. Wondering - what's the sequel like? I've got it somewhere, but not got around to reading it yet.

I've not read it. Wasn't it 'Liebowitz and the Wild Horse Women' or an equally odd title?
I remember reading a negative review of it which claimed that it was cobbled together after Miller's death by another writer, from notes and such like and thus wasn't very good.

'Canticle..' is one of my favorite books ever, though. In a just world it would be high up on the list of 'classic' anti-war novels .. but, alas, it's 'sci-fi'

11:52 / 17.12.01

And, yeah, I so totally add the works of Jeff Noon to my above list.

RANT:
Though I've always had a major problem with Kurt Vonnegut being classified as Science Fiction, or even 'cult fiction'. Why are publishers and bookshops always trying to sell him as a 'weird' writer?
I know at least one person who won't read him for that reason alone, and it really pisses me off.
His books are the most universal, understandable, simple, right-on, moving, funny, ESSENTIAL books that I've ever read.
He really SHOULD be read by 'normal' people, not just sci-fi fans and weirdos..

18:52 / 17.12.01

RANT IN RETURN:

Why should Kurt Vonnegut not be classified as a sci-fi writer just because his books are satisfying in non-generic ways as well as specifically generic ways?

(Rizla, this is a bit of a transferred rant: I'm pissed off with various people telling me that HDM isn't "really for children", and I've started thinking it does genrefic down when you start saying its best practitioners aren't "really" writing SF or aren't "just" children's writers, or whatever. Yes they are, I say, what makes you think that SF can't be universal and simple? what makes you think that kids' books can't be dark and complex?)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:18 / 18.12.01

Yay to most of those... Noon, Bester, Dick, Miller, (as well as Dick Miller the 80s bit-part actor... but I digress), Banks... and a bunch of the others... oh yeah, Vonnegut too...
I'd like to add (if recent stuff can go in) Ken MacLeod's "The Star Fraction", Richard Calder's "Dead Girls/Boys/Things" trilogy, and probably a bunch of other stuff I can't think of right now but will no doubt add later...
and old stuff (though I haven't read it for years, and may never do so again, but when I was ten it absolutely rocked my world- probably why I won't read it again, in case I think it's poo now) Wells' "War of the Worlds".
btw Persephone- "The Shockwave Rider" is by John Brunner (though I've not read it)- sadly he died a couple of years back, but he came to my school once and was a fucking lovely guy- TOTAL fucking hippy, signed my copies of "The Shift Key" and "Traveller in Black" with a big CND logo incorporated into his signature... also, just after he died, Interzone published the last story he'd written, which wasn't sci-fi as I remember, but was fucking brilliant, and involved (I think) a blues band defending a pub against BNP thugs (though not as crass as that may sound- it was really quite lovely).
WHOAH! Went WAY off topic there... sorry.
Back on-topic- did anyone mention Dan Simmons'"Hyperion" quartet yet?

[ 18-12-2001: Message edited by: Moominstoat ]

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:53 / 18.12.01

Oh CHRIST!!! I forgot David Zindell's "A Requiem For Homo Sapiens" sequence... specifically "The Broken God", which is amazing...
and Ballard (I would say "Atrocity Exhibition" or "Crash", but then the whole "is it sci-fi" thing would happen again, and I'd be forced to reply "who cares" and not know whether I was on topic or not... so I'll go with) "High Rise" or "The Unlimited Dream Company".

Whisky Priestess

07:41 / 18.12.01

Greg Bear's Eon was quite good, despite being wrongly spelt.

[ 18-12-2001: Message edited by: Whisky Priestess ]

Whisky Priestess

07:44 / 18.12.01

quote:Originally posted by Rizla Year Zero:

Walter M. Miller - A Canticle For Liebowitz

I've read this, and I seem to remember it being a rather dull and confusing short story rather than a novel: however, I was about 10 and may have missed some of the subtleties . . .

Deva - we seem to have the same taste in kids' sci-fi: I was an avid reader of Fisk (who I think does stand re-reading in many ways - just picked up Time Trap for 10p) and Hill - always entertained that Keill Randor from the planet Moros was, therefore, a Moron (well, I was 12).

However, I don't think I have ever read a sci-fi novel by a woman (except Colleen McCullough's Creed for the 3rd Millennium, which doesn't really count): not deliberately, but I think that

a) they are (unsurprisingly given the "fanboy" public perception of sf) under-represented as writers and readers of sf

b) sometimes the collections of women's sf - I have an execrable book called Women Who Walk Through Fire - do nobody any favours, least of all the writers featured. I wanted to read it as an introduction to women writers whose novels I might want to read, but gave up in horror and despair halfway through.

Also I once picked up a Women's Press sci-fi book which was about a menopausal woman living next door to an observatory, and was so boring and badly written I sat down and wept for my sex. Horrible scarring experience, flashed back to whenever I read a story that begins along the lines of

"It was another beautiful day at the Mars Baby Collective Farm. Since a rogue virus had wiped out the male sex twenty years ago . . ."

I'm sorry so say that, as a woman who writes sci-fi, all my favourite sci-fi writers are men. I'll try Ursula LeGuin, but can anyone recommend at least ten others, in case I don't like ULG but want to read other women's sf?

Also can I say:
Peter F. Hamilton - the Quantum Murder trilogy (A Quantum Murder, Mindstar Rising, The Nano Flower) NOT the endless doorstopping Reality Dysfunction books.

And I'd warn you off CS Lewis's so-called sci-fi - Perelandra etc - which is short but incredibly boring. (Man wakes up on ocean panet covered in pondweed, goes home. End of story. This from Mr. Narnia.)

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

08:03 / 18.12.01

Sorry... I also just remembered "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell... it made me cry. Twice, at least.
Oh, and as regards avoiding Gibson after "Neuromancer"... I was starting to feel that way before "All Tomorrow's Parties"... his writing has become beautiful, whereas before he was an ideas man trying to write like Robert Stone (which is as good a place to start as any, I guess). There are parts of "...Parties" in which you just love the use of language... and have to go back later to find out just what the fuck was going on.

Regrettable Juvenilia

08:16 / 18.12.01

I dunno, I really enjoyed all of the 'Sprawl trilogy' (ie Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive as well as Neuromancer). I'm less interested in the 'SF' elements than I am in Gibson's ability to create emotionally haunting images and scenes: Turner on the beach at the start and the 'boxmaker' at the end of Count Zero, London in winter and the Factory in Mona Lisa Overdrive... stuff like that.

The short stories are best of all, though. Everybody who hasn't read Burning Chrome should go out and buy it now. If only for 'The Belonging Kind' and 'Dogfight'.

Hvw to say though, I bought Virtual Light the other day and I can't get past the first chapter yet...

The Natural Way

08:56 / 18.12.01

Why are publishers and bookshops always trying to sell him as a 'weird' writer? I know at least one person who won't read him for that reason alone, and it really pisses me off.

I'd be more pissed off with that'one person' than Kurt's perceived brand essence.

"Ooooh, can't read HIM he's WEIRD! Never actually read anything by him though..."

Sounds like an utter pillock (esp. when I put words into his/her mouth).

13:42 / 18.12.01

Cyrano de Bergerac - "Other Worlds: The Comical History of the States and The Empires of the Moon and the Sun"

17th Century sci-fi! Two books, usually collected together (make sure you get an annotated version). Considered blasphemous at the time, and had to be published posthumously.

The plot: French chap goes to the moon by covering himself in beef fat, discovers highly civilised society of horse-people who feed on smells. Returns to Earth, is accused of blasphemy, is forced to flee to the Sun and further madcap adventures.

Similar in style and humour to Gulliver's Travels, it's a satire with loads of cool weirdness and mad theories about religion, society and physics, plus demons, angels, philosopher trees, etc. First book to use rockets for space travel, ramjets and personal stereos. Lots of classical references too (made me want to investigate further).

It's a f**king cracker and I'm going to have to read it again now.

[ 18-12-2001: Message edited by: Saveloy ]

14:24 / 18.12.01

Not sure if it's strictly sci-fi, really, but:

JG Ballard - "High Rise"

Plot: life in a massive new high-rise inhabited exclusively by professionals, nouveau riche types and sophisticated urbanites. In the beginning it's all champagne parties on the balcony, by the end it's territorial pissings in the lift shaft and eating dogs and general savagery. Think Lord of the Flies with adults and a, um, big virtual island (they find themselves unable to leave, see?) Could be depressing, I imagine (there are no sympathetic characters) but bloody great if you're a bitter, jealous f**ker like me with 'issues' regarding status and the trappings of success, blah blah blah... A nice change to see sophisticated urban living getting it in the neck, rather than suburbia.

15:40 / 18.12.01

Arthur Clarke's "Childhood's End" is fucking great.
Anything, and I do mean ANYTHING, by Robert Sawyer. Canadian SF author. One of the few authors I buy hardcovers of. "Golden Fleece" is his first and it's amazing. What at first seems sort of a 2001 rip-off surpasses that idea in just a few chapters. Allegorical novel sequence about the lives of Galileo, Darwin and Freud using a race of sentient dinosaurs, a book in which everyone on earth mind-travels forward in time for about fifteen minutes and the ramifications of such, alien commits murder on Earth and is put on trial in our courts. Everything he's written in good. Everything.

Also, another Canadian resident is Robert Charles Wilson. His collection "The Perseids and other stories" is excellent, particularly if you're familiar with Toronto. "Darwinia" and "Bios" are cool in that I didn't see them going the ways they went, which is so rare in any books these days.

Zoom.

17:10 / 18.12.01

I'd like to put a vote in for Frederick Pohl's The Coming of the Quantum Cats. It's great; ordinary guy discovers all his alternative incarnations (and alternate incarnations of a woman who's significant in a variety of ways in his life) meeting up after a military experiment goes wrong. And it's clever, and witty, and funny, and plays the alternate-realities thing perfectly.

Light, but not insubstantial. Just not full of this (waves hands around head)... guff that gets in the way of good sci-fi. According to me, anyhow.

19:41 / 18.12.01

Some good female science fiction writers include Linda Nagata (Deception Well) and Nicole Griffith, whose Slow River was quite good. I think as a whole women are under-represented in SF because they are, you know, numerically inferior. I'd imagine percentage-wise, though, there are as many good female SF writers as male ones, and undoubtedly as many *bad*. (For the bad are legion, and stinky.)

I seem to recall that at one point Terry Bisson, who actually completed St. Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman after Walter Miller died, said he didn't do a very good job with it. If that's not a non-recommendation, I don't know what is.

Harold Washington died for you

22:14 / 18.12.01

Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

He has some other stuff but this trilogy is by far his best work. Bogs down a bit here and there but Robinson has a real gift with characters and keeps you into it, especially if you have any passing interest in the fourth planet. Free Mars!

16:40 / 19.12.01

Andre Norton was a woman who squoze out a few good novels, if I'm remembering right.

17:17 / 19.12.01

Ooh! Andre Norton! I remember them, dogeared things from the local library "sell-off-old-books" phase. Late 50s? Or something?

06:38 / 20.12.01

Yeah - I quite liked the one I read. IIRC there's one called Catseye, but the one I'm thinking of is called The Crystal Gryphon....

I've just had a look on www.bookfinder.com & there are tons.

07:55 / 20.12.01

Phillip Jose Farmer's Riverworld series is the next best series, IMHO, after Dune. Lyrical, exciting, and well plotted in equal parts, it's a series I keep meaning to go back to.

The there's Ray Bradbury, who I once saw described as a poet who just happened to write in prose. Hi Martian Chronicles bring a lump to this old throat even just thinking about them.

But, to demonstrate how politically incorrect I can be, for rip snorting fun no-one beats old EE. The ' Doc' is out of fashion these days, perhaps because much of his underlying philosophy is ( thankfully ) out of step - but the concepts are so mind blowing, particularly in the ' Lensman ' series that it seems rotten to carp about a man who lived in a time we can scarce imagine.

08:07 / 20.12.01

Greg Egan - Diaspora. Complete 'hard' sci-fi headfuck.