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Writers Who Will Stand the Test of Time?
Embedded Geek asks: "Every year, the online version of Locus (a trade magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy) asks the question: "Name the 5 deceased 20th century SF & fantasy writers you think will still be read 50 years from now." The results favored some of the bigger names (Heinlein, Asimov, Tolkein) as well as a few lesser known figures (Simak, Bester). I would like to ask a broader question: What authors (in any genre, fiction or nonfiction) alive today will still be read (hard copy or online) in 2051?" If I had to answer off of the top of my head, I know William Gibson, Charles Sheffield, and Orson Scott Card would be in my list, but that's not all of them. A few authors who I thought would be classics have since vanished (whatever did happen to Daniel Keys Moran, anyways?) aand of course there are a few iffy ones which I could be convinced on (C.J. Cherryh, anyone). What authors do you feel will stand the test of time? Yeah, these are sci-fi authors, but that's about what I read these days.
I don't think I know anyone who hasn't read one of his books, they're so terribly depressing....
Animal Farm will definitely stand the test of time. It has thus far. Why not another 50 years?
Probably my favorite author and still very young. While not at the grandmaster level of Asimov, Heinlen or Herbert, he will probably reach that level. I would like to see more books by him, but only at their contined level of excellence
..........FULL STOP.
I have no particular rah-rah comment, but I'll just say that his writing is some of the most tightly crafted that I have ever read.
Bible of the 21st century? Some bios
No, that dubious award goes to the also silly (but in an entirely different way) Xanth trilogy by Piers Anthony. How many books in the trilogy? 18? All I know is that they make good airplane reading; reliably entertaining, and you don't feel you *have* to finish them.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Guy Gavriel Kay might make the list though. He is actually a decent writer, and has mastered the little things most pulp fiction writers miss - characterization, plot, beautiful descriptive language,broad vocabulary, etc. Books like Tigana, A Song for Arbonne, and The Lions of Al-Rassan have permanent residency on my bookshelf. Kay immerses the reader into his works.
dschl
Anyone who thinks hunting is barbaric should try visiting a chicken farm someday
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Each these writers have written about future in a way that technology improvements by 2051 won't affect the stories they tell.
Vernor Vinge's Queng Ho & Bobble universes are far removed from the day to day tehcnology issues and focus on the role of the individual in changing society in crisis.
Dan Simmons' Hyperion series is a masterful look at religion, technology, and the hubris of humanity.
Larry Niven's Known Universe is perhaps one of the most detailed and consistent future histories created in the last 50 years.
John Varley's Eight Worlds series and Titan/Wizard/Demon trilogy will stand the test of time as examinations of the effects of endless plentiful society on the individual.
While I love Neal Stephenson, William Sterling, and Bruce Gibson, they work is so focused on near future (part of it's appeal!) that they will suffer as technology passes them by.
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Just because someone writes an enjoyable science fiction book doesn't mean that it will be seen as a classic by the literary establishment. Some depth and powerful, original ideas are needed too. [Thinking up some weird kind of planet is not a "powerful, original idea".]
I think it's safe to say that Vonnegut, Heinlein, Asimov, Tolkien, and Bradbury are already widely read in schools and meet those requirements.
Most of the other guys I've seen posted here make interesting science fiction, but don't rank among the best overall writers of our time. I mean, how many science fiction writers from the 1800's are still popular today? H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and not much else. And that's when there were a lot of new sci-fi ideas still left to explore.
Tezuka's is really a comic artist, but he's so beloved in Japan that I think he'll survive the test of time. The majority of his works were of a sci-fi/fantasy genre. He even gave birth to the entire manga phenomenon in Japan, which produces somes of the best fantasy work ever (and some of the worst too :) ).
When once asked in an interview what genre
he thought that his writing fell into, Burroughs
replied 'Well, science fiction, of course.' I have
to wonder if the interviewer even read any of
WB's books.
I think that _Naked Lunch_ and the Nova
trilogy (_The Soft Machine_, _Nova Express_,
_The Ticket that Exploded_) will stand the test
of time.
Star Trek fans would do well to read _Cities of the
Red Night_ in which commanders insure the loyalty
of their troops by getting them addicted and
supplying them with opiates --like the Founders
and the Jem Haddar of DS9, except that 'Cities'
was written ca. 1974.
Mary Doria Russell.
Okay, she's only written two books (you have read The Sparrow, haven't you?), but if she keeps it up, she'll be regarded eventually as one of the true greats of the genre.
Lois McMaster Bujold. ...
Go on. I dare you, dismiss it as space opera. Okay, it is space opera, but all her books are great, widely read, Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning,
Other have mentioned:
Clive Barker
He deserves to be remembered, if only for writing that rara avis: consistently intelligent, well-written horror.
Terry Pratchett
When I worked in an SF bookshop (that's a science fiction bookshop. In Dublin), Pratchett was consistently our best-sellign author. People with no interest in SF or fantasy would wander in for the latest, and even when spouses/SOs were wandering around, eyes glazed, they'd inevitably find themselves browsing the Pratchetts. I don't think anyone apart from Transworld realises exactly how popular he is.
Neal Stephenson
I'm going to commit heresy here. I think Stephenson is great, but not one of the greats. His books are all eminently readable, but most have been surpassed in their respective sub-genres (Read The Bohr Maker by Linda Nagata?). Crytonomicon is an exception, and not just cos it's the first novel I've read with embedded perl.
Aside: I suspect if someone ran the Cryptonomicon manuscript through Acme::Buffy, it'd still be better than all Buffy novels combined.
you should try his apalling "Philiosphical" essays. Complete nonsense. Dick could out think Huxley in every way. And for vision, look at wyndham's "The Kraken Wakes" and "The Trouble with Lichen" for a nice preview of global warming and the burgeoning market in anti-ageing crap, and the ir gene and clone based future.
That was classic intercourse!
I noticed a strange thing at my local used book store - Right after Douglas Adams died his books were moved from the 'Science Fiction/Fantasy' section to the 'literature' section.
..wierd.
I'm wondering what their thought process was on this one? 'Science Fiction/Fantasy' is not 'serious' enough? He's dead now, so his writing is classic literature?
air and light and time and space
Unfortunately relatively few scifi authors will stand the test of time. Not because there is anything wrong with scifi but because "nothing is so dated as yesterdays vision of tommorow." Too many scifi authors are just glorying in a clever "vision of tommorow" (or of the mythic 'past' in the case of fantasy) and are not using that vision as a medium to tell a great story or display any insight into larger truths. They will be entertaining and popular for a day and then quickly fade. I have read many of the authors mentioned in other comments and many were very entertaining but few of them will be read 50 years from now.
I have loved scifi since I was a kid, but I often stand before rack upon rack of scifi novels at the local bookstore despairing of finding anything truly worth the time it takes to read. More and more I have turned to the classics section to find novels that have already proven themselves over time. For obvious reasons there seems to be a higher "signal to noise ratio" in that corner of the bookstore, the writing is better, the stories are less shallow and if many of the themes are sometimes familiar it is because of all the cheap knockoffs I've read before, often from the scifi aisle. I'm sure that there are a few, maybe even a lot of books in the scifi section that would satisfy but finding them is frustrating among so much dreck.
If you havent read any of PKD before, try
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
His most famous novel which inspired Blade Runner. A chilling futuristic story that demonstrates his creative genius.
Ubik
A great story of corporate intrigue where time moves backwards. Intensely psychological with unpredictable plot twists.
The Man In the High Castle
Dick's masterpiece which won the Hugo Award in 1963. A mind-bending novel which takes place in an America occupied by Axis forces. These are some of his strongest characters.
see http://www.philipkdick.com/main.htm
How many authors have an award named after them???
The authors that will stand the test of time are the ones whose stories actually have something to say to the audience of tommorow. Many science fiction authors have a nasty habit of dating themselves. What is incrediably imaginitive today might be stale 50 years from now, and only of literary interest to english majors and literary historians. William Gibson is an absolutely amazing writer. I love his work. However, will he stand the test of time? His work does focus on technology a lot, often at the expense of the characters. While his imagination of the world of tommorow is an amazing experience today, will it be as hard hitting 50 years from now when a good deal of what he has imagined is realized or surpassed? I think some of it will. Neuromancer is still an excellent read despite the fact that much of the technology (i.e. The Net) has been realized, and not precisely as he envisioned. Another science fiction author that stands out in my mind is David Brin. His take on human relations with alien species is unique, and could only be outdated by actual alien contact. His books are filled with the fantastic, but he keeps his work grounded in real science. (He has a doctorate of astrophysics and has consulted for NASA) Besides having some truly origional ideas and real science in his novels, he also builds living breathing characters that are absolutely compelling. Even if you ignore the ideas and science, his books are still a good read just for the characters and conflict. There are other authors I should mention but am simply too lazy to write about right now. =P One thing we should keep in mind is that the classics of today may not be readily apparant to us. Tolkien's work was not well received when it was first published, and there are a plethora of other classics that went unappreciated in their own time but are dear to us today. It's quite likely that the real classics that everyone will be enjoying 50 years from now are books nobody here has even heard of, let alone read.
Vonnegut is one of the authors who most influenced my adolesence... I read Cat's Cradle in my early teens, and dreamed about lower-energy molecular states for a while. I also house-sat once for a man who had an extensive library of Vonnegut, so I caught up with a lot of his other books then. It made for an enjoyable two weeks. :) It's too bad they're all printed in that expensive premium-paperback format... I'm all for authors making lots of money from their work, but let's face it, I'm just a broke college student.
One of the best things about Sci-fi is that it takes reality, tweaks it a little bit, and imaginatively runs with the tweaking, creating a whole new world. I think Vonnegut does this as well, if not better, than many SF authors... his tweaks are tiny, and they make his created realities just a little different from ours, creating extraordinarily believable characters in fascinating situations.
:-) I don't know if anyone's going to be reading me in 50 years, and it's relatively low on the list of things I worry about, too.
I'm skeptical Gibson will be read in 50 years -- I suspect anyone writing computer-themed SF is going to seem awfully quaint by then. (Yeah, yeah, I know.)
Who will be read who's being published today? Larry McMurtry, if only because of Lonesome Dove. Terry Pratchett. John D. MacDonald isn't publishing today, technically, but people will still be reading him in 2051. Based on my children's response to Harry Potter (never mind the rest of the world's) J.K. Rowling will still be read in fifty years.
Finally, Ray Bradbury. New novel out at 80. He's my hero.
I've seen Pynchon mentioned in about 2 comments. From my(geek's) point of view, he is my favorite author of "literary" prose. Not only is he deeply familiar with the bulk of Western literature(I caught an obscure reference to Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" in Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon"), but he also knows his science:
In "Gravity's Rainbow", there are passages which make reference to behavioral psychology, organic chemistry, the physics of rocket science, and Godel's theorem.
In "Vineland", there is a passage comparing God to a hacker(correct use of the term). "Vineland" was written in the late 1980's. Most non-hackers still aren't even aware that there's a distinction between "hacker" and "cracker".
In "Mason & Dixon", Pynchon gets into the difficulty of measuring a straight east-west line between Maryland and Pennsylvania, among other difficult surveying tasks, not to mention other astronomical problems from those times.
Additionally, his prose is awesome, complex, and usually hilarious. A sergeant in "Gravity's Rainbow": "'Course, old Blood 'n' Guts handed Rommel his ass in the desert. 'Here's yer ass, General'. 'Ach du lieber, mein arsch!' heh heh heh". Sometimes I think that "Snow Crash" was just a ripoff of "Vineland", and that "The Cryptonomicon" was just a ripoff of "Gravity's Rainbow". Nothing against Neal, it's just that he isn't paving entirely new ground.
Pynchon will certainly be read in 2051.
Other posters have already mentioned the important writers from the early half of the century. Let's not forget the more recent greats:
/.ers love will be remembered by the people who visit the 22nd century version of /., not by the masses. Of course, Tolkein will always be remembered.
Don Delillo (White Noise, Libra, Underworld)
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow, Crying of Lot 49)
William Gaddis (Recognitions, JR)
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, his essays)
Haruki Murakami (already mentioned)
possibly Jonathan Franzen
Kurt Vonnegut (Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-5, Mother Night )
John Barth
Philip Roth
In terms of sci-fi, I imagine selections from Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury will be remembered. All those smaller audience books regular
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
"Jordan's Wheel of Time series, now up to 9 novels, has been, IMHO, more definitive of the modern fantasy genre than even Tolkien."
This is true, in the sense that it is overlong, not well designed, written repetitevly and childishly, and seems to have a financial motivation only. So yes, it is definitive of modern fantasy.
Tolkein is definitive of all fantasy, modern or not. Not only did his book define the fantasy genre (a genre heavily influenced by mythology and ancient cultures) it is a ripping good read as well.
The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we're uncool. -Crowe
Frank Herbert ! surely not. Frank wrote the magnificent "Dune" yes but the sequels were more or less derivative and hackneyed. Frank wrote some real junk, the "The Heaven Makers", "Whipping Star", "The God Makers", etc. He wrote three good books, "Dune", "Under Pressure", and "The Eyes of Heisenberg" but the rest of his output was very ordinary.
Clarke, Wells, Heinlein yes. Asimov, no. Maybe Greg Egan (ie "Permutation City", "Quarantine") ?. Clarke for his vision, who can knock "The City and the Stars" ? Heinlein for making future worlds different but approachable ("Starship Troopers").
Unfortunately because sf started in a literary ghetto even the "greats" produced quite a lot of dross or pure bilge, to wit Heinlein's "planetary" novels. Nowadays sf is terribly hackneyed, the plots, characterisations, etc have been re-worked so many times.
Robert Heinlein
C. J. Cherryh
A. E. van Vogt
Vernor Vinge
E. E. 'doc' Smith
Frank Herbert (just for Dune, since they make kids read it nowadays)
David Drake
S. M. Stirling
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Well I guess I look at science fiction and literature a bit differently. So here are my authors whose work will be read and appreciated 50 years from now.
JACK VANCE - Crossing science fiction and fantasy Vance writes great stories which are not tied to science closely. His stories of the Gaien Reach are wonderful. And "The Last Castle" is a true classic.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON - I'm thinking less here of his Mars trilogy than his Orange County Trilogy and "A Memory of Whiteness." Again, not too closely tied to any given technology.
LARRY NIVEN - One work: "Ringworld" because it will last. No galactic core explosion but who cares? Perhaps it's a bit too '60s.
URSULA LEGUIN - for "The Left Hand of Darkness" and "Earthsea" if nothing else. She writes very well indeed.
GREGORY BENFORD - this one is riskier but Benford is more than a "hard science" writer.
GREG BEAR - just for "Blood Music" if nothing else.
I have a few picks that are sort of "off the beaten path"
LUCIOUS SHEPARD for "Life During Wartime"
CONNIE WILLIS for her short stories. I think "At the Rialto" will appear in many anthologies.
THOMAS PYNCHON for "Gravity's Rainbow"
and the staples:
ALFRED BESTER for "The Stars my Destination"
ROBERT HEINLEIN - the early juveniles were well done. His later work was self-indulgent crap and he desperately needed to be edited - hard - as he was in his early career.
I'm not sure about Arthur Clark. I don't think his work has legs.
My top authors for "Still good in 50 Years"
Sci-fi
Bujold - (start with Cordelia's Honor ) MARVELLOUS
Moon - fantasy and sci-fi
Cherryh - Cyteen / Chanur / etc
Mystery
JA Jance
Hillerman
maybe list
Niven's Ringworld series may last
Weber is good ~
Clive Barker
and whever wrote Phule's Company
Hmm-
We create our society each time we interact with another person.
What kind of society did you create today?
Richard C Bond, Sr. 1986!!!
We create our society every time we interact with each other. What kind of society did you create today?
It seems that most of the writers mentioned so far are genre writers, so at the risk of being too obvious, I'd like to nominate John Steinbeck.
The transcendent East of Eden may be one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century. A tragic and yet beautiful retelling of the Fall from Grace in a modern setting, the story manages to be simultaneously heart-rendering and uplifting by exploring the themes of destiny and freewill, righteousness versus callousness.
IMO, it competes with Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath for the title of Steinbeck's best work.
I think not. These three are chiefly remarkable because they found a parade and got to the head of it or, at best, appealed to some very specific, topical part of the zeitgeist. The world hasn't quite turned out like they thought (Japanese ascendancy for Gibson's example). I'm willing to bet that they don't speak to anything as common to the human condition as, say, Ring Lardner, O. Henry, or Runyon. And who reads them any more?
If any of today's popular writing survives it will probably be Dr. Suess.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Contemporary authors who will still be read 50 years hence: Vonnegut Pynchon Pratchett Adams Seuss Asimov Heinlein Clarke Rand Ones who will drop from sight over time: Stephenson King Herbert Hawking plus all the great but obscure SF writers that would get mentioned only on a /. list - 50 years is a ong time for tastes to change, especially for niche artists. There's no justice or accounting for mass tastes.