Slashdot Mirror
Top 10 New Sci-Fi/SF Authors?
Dukebytes asks: "I am looking for the new RAH/Piers Anthony/Roger Zelazny/Weis & Hickman etc..., of the world. I have read just about everything I could find on King Aurthur, all of the Dragon Lance stuff, and all or most of the 'old school' hardcore. I don't know, I have maybe 4000 books at home, most of them Scifi/SF. I am looking for some new stuff. I haven't bought any kind of book other than techie for more than 2 years. I just keep reading the ones that I have over and over and over. What are you guys reading? If it is a series, please list ALL of the books in it!"
Why would we need another Piers Anthony? He shits out more crap ion one year than any 8 other authors!
I've found a rather good liking for some of Gregory Benford's work. If I'm not mistaken, he's a Physicist, so he approaches his work in the same sort of manner. The characters might not be all that great, and his main characters are almost always University professors who end up facing tenure issues, but it's an interesting read.
I've also found, for things that are sort of out there philosophically, that Greg Egan is pretty cool. I haven't seen any new books by him recently, but I'd suggest Permutation City, Diaspora, and Quarantine as some interesting things to check out.
yours,
kbs
Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Diamond Age.
You remind me of a friend. The only books he ever read were fantasy books. That's it. He had no other books in his book shelves. As you can guess, he wasn't exactly the most open minded person in the world (not that I'm calling you close minded). He had the same thing with music. Only listened to heav metal. Wouldn't let anyone play any other type of music.
But I think you deny yourself some of life's pleasures by narrowly defining your interests. It's ok to like reading Sci-Fi books, but I can tell you that you are missing out on a lot if that's all you read. I don't consider Tech books to be "reading" books so I won't address that.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Whatgever genre, you can always hit the Amazon editor's picks list (avoid the topsellers lists, its filled with pedestrian crap) or the NY Times book reviews.
The first step to enlightenment is to be a book snob. Stay away from airport crap (John Grisham, Michael Crichton), and try batting out of your league a bit...you might just expand and learn something.
His books are better than they have a right to be. Don't know about series, but I really enjoyed American Gods, Stardust is a great adult fairy tale, and Neverwhere was the book that got me reading fantasy again after a decade-long break.
demi
For me Orson Card, Terry Pratchett or Dan Simmons are "new" authors, even if the books I like from them have 10-20 years. You can even discover Isaac Asimov, and like their stuff, and being "new" for you.
Gardner Dozois edits a yearly anthology of science fiction that has turned me on to a variety of excellent new (and not-so-new) authors. To name a few whose work I'll read anytime: Lucius Shepard, William Sanders, Michael Swanwick, Robert Reed, Howard Waldrop, Terry Bisson, Ursula LeGuin, Mike Resnick, Kathryn Rusch, Karen Fowler... well, just about anyone he selects. I know there are other interesting yearly anthologies out there, and occasionally I buy one, but I've been purchasing Dozois's every year for the past 8 years. Worth checking out, might even be at your local library.
As much as I hate to do this to the site, check out the Internet Top 100 list. Google it if it's slashdotted.
If you're looking for the best new SciFi authors, check out Analog. It's a paperback magazine, published monthly (www.analogsf.com), with lots of great SciFi and science fact articles. Sometimes its just a selection of short stores, but you'll also find novellas and serials, some of which have been turned into full published novels. Lots of new authors, as well as few older ones, publish great Science Fiction.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
EuroSeti.
I wouldnt recommend which ones to read, as although most can be read without reading any previous ones, its better to read them in order of they were made. Theres some jokes that you will only get if you read them in a previous book first
Anyway:
There you go!
grib
maybe
Winner of 4 Hugo's, 2 Nebulas, and oodles of nominations.
I couldn't tell you who the top ten "new" science fiction authors are, but I can tell you one thing: you've been cheating yourself by consuming a lot of churned-out-by-committee crap, one identical "novel" after the other.
Instead of looking for the next endless, pandering "series" a la Weis & Hickman or (shudder) Piers Anthony, why not investigate some of the actual artists in the field? As about a dozen people above have already pointed out, we have these things called the Hugo and Nebula awards -- we give 'em out every year, and it's usually a safe bet that at least a few of the winners are worth your time to read.
A few authors and books you owe it to yourself to check out if you actually think you like this genre:
"A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge
"White Light" by Rudy Rucker
"Gun, with Occasional Music" by Johnathan Lethem
"The Book of the New Sun" by Gene Wolfe (this one's actually part of a "series", but Wolfe is a strong enough writer to make me forgive that)
"The Shockwave Rider" by John Brunner
"Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" by Haruki Murikami
Any of Harlan Ellison's mid-to-late 1970s short story collections. "Shatterday" is probably the strongest.
Anything by Thomas Disch (start with "Camp Concentration")
Everything by Alfred Bester.
And, god forbid, you could consider reading something other than SF&F occasionally. Non-genre "literature" needn't be a soul-crushing Lit 101 experience: grab a copy of "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter Thompson and go to town...
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Cyrptonomicon, The Diamond Age)
:-)
Guy Gavreil Key (The Fionavar Tapestry)
Lois McMaster Bujold (the Vorkosigan books)
Mercedes Lackey (the Valdemar novels)
Michael A. Stackpole (Dragoncrown cycle)
Spider Robinson (the early Callahan books)
and a must read:
Terry Pratchett (Diskworld novels)
Those should keep you busy for a while
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
I know how you feel. I own about 2000 books, so there are a lot of times when I go into my local second-hand bookstore and don't find anything I want to read at all. The posters who suggest you branch out have a good point, and I can provide some input as to "Mainstream for Science Fiction Fans" (remember that anthology, "Science Fiction for People Who Don't Like Science Fiction"?)
:)
Note that some of these authors are not new, but you may not have gotten around to them (or heard of them) yet:
W.P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe Comes to Iowa, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, and If Wishes Were Horses, which are sort of "magic realism" fantasy (no orcs, elves, or swords to be seen!).
Stephen King, (bear with me!) The Dark Tower series, which is sort of dark, parallel-world fantasy drawn from contemporary popular culture, and not really like anything else King's ever written.
Tom Holt, Only Human, Snow White and the Seven Samurai, and Ye Gods!, which is sort of similar to Douglas Adams, only with less philosophy and more social skills.
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend In A Coma, which is a complete departure from Microserfs.
Donald J. Skal, Antibodies, a very overlooked little tome on people who want to become machines.
Frank Norris, McTeague, written in 1899 and has probably one of the scariest endings ever written. Ok, so it's not SF, but it might count as horror, and it's definitely a classic book. I love this book and think it's a really great read. Norris doesn't pull any punches, so it's really gritty without any flowery phrases to be found.
Theme anthologies are also a great way of discovering "new" authors, as are subscribing to SF magazines. But I'm sure you knew that already.
Adviso: Keep in mind that I'm heavily into Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen King, and Cordwainer Smith (among others), and I despise Tolkien and all the other sappy fantasists who take themselves seriously, so take with the appropriately-sized grain of salt.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
If you're using "SF" to refer to Science Fiction, which is the most common breakout, rather than Speculative Fiction, you're missing the boat entirely with the books you have mentioned. Sounds like you want FANTASY books.
If you are looking for unusual well-written fantasy, check out Storm Constantine. The Wraethu omnibus edition is usually available, and it's a stunning piece of gothic fantasy alternate-reality post-apocalyptic gender-bending writing. Can't get enough hyphens.
For science fiction work, of course there's Neal Stephenson, and the recently feted Cory Doctorow. You can't go wrong with the classics of Heinlein and Asimov, of course.
Beyond that, as others have said, try something outside the F&SF realm. Or, if you can't bring yourself to do that, subscribe to Analog, Asimov's or F&SF to get a taste of new authors. Short fiction is like the snack before you dig into a big meaty novel.
Illegitimi non carborundum
...is dear Roger Zelazny twirling about beneath the ground as a result of being separated by a mere comma from Weiss & Hickman.
That being said, allow me to throw my support behind the Tad Williams fantasy and SF, mentioned elsewhere, as well as the standalone books by Guy Gavriel Kay: "Tigana," "A Song for Arbonne," and "The Lions of Al-Rassan." These are all self-contained, yet have the "epic" feel that most authors only achieve in trilogies or better. (If I'm not mistaken, it was Kay that was tapped to finished off some Tolkien fragments prior to their posthumous publication; when you read his stuff, you'll understand how he got that gig.) Kay also wrote something called "The Fionavar Trilogy" which I tried and couldn't get through, but which the reviewers said was a modern re-mixing of Arthuriana, so maybe you read it and are familiar with him...
Even though cyberpunk is so-o-o-o-o 1994, you should probably hit up the Gibson 'Sprawl Trilogy," or at least "Neuromancer."
Baen Books has just released David Weber's newest Honor Harrington book, "War of Honor," and for the price of the hardback you get the print version, and the entire rest of the series that preceded it on CD-ROM, along with artwork and a bunch of maps and stuff. I highly recommend the series, and supporting Baen's brave and innovative efforts in digital distribution.
The Goerge R R Martin trilogy (kings... thrones... swords... sump'n like that) is better than most (I've only read the first one so far).
Look, we could be here for days. "Fantasy and SF" covers a lot of ground. You want to narrow it down to Sword&Sorcery, Cyberpunk, Empowered Lesbian Telepaths, Space Opera, or some other popular sub-niche, we can really get down to brass tacks...
MODS AND READERS: Please note that this comment is a duplicate -- the original appears somewhere below, and was posted without formatting because of a slip of the mouse. In that state it was unreadable, so I had no choice but to repost. (When, oh when, will we be able to edit our posts?)
Despite his wacky first name (just say "Ian"), Banks is really worth a try. He isn't originally a sci-fi author by trade; his first book (The Wasp Factory) was a contemporary novel, but we've seen some of his very best work since he started writing his Culture series of novels. And Iain Banks, even at his worst, is better with prose and with ideas than many sci-fi authors at their best.
His primary science fiction offering is a series of novels set in the distant future (perhaps 10,000 years from now), chronicling the adventures of humanity's descendents. The Culture is a vast interstellar civilization, a pseudo-anarchic meritocracy comprised of dozens of humanoid and nonhumanoid races -- it's unclear whether homo sapiens were founding members of the Culture, or if they joined the Culture sometime after its development, or even if they exist at all. Members of the Culture are referred to as "human" throughout the books, but Banks follows the panspermia hypothesis, so many of his races share the same basic biochemical and physiological traits.
The Culture has spread to perhaps 10,000 systems, filling space with planets, starships and Orbitals -- immense, ringworld-like structures that house as many as 100 billion people. In all, the population of the Culture is probably around 500 trillion (that's 5.0x10^14) souls. Of these, a sizeable fraction are plain old biological humans, and the rest of them are digitized people, Minds, or group minds.
The lifespan of a human is somewhere from 200 to 500 years; Culture citizens, the result of thousands of years of genetic tinkering, could conceivably extend their lives indefinitely. But human existence is seen as a sort of gestation period, and after a few hundred years of life, most biologicals get bored and euthanize. After death, they are converted into electronic form and continue to pursue an active and vigorous life in the collective virtual reality that forms the real meat-and-bones of the Culture.
Many of the Culture's most powerful citizens are Minds, vast, artificially-created intelligent constructs with dozens or hundreds of threads of consciousness. Typically, any structure or vehicle larger than a personal transport is inhabited by a Mind.
The Mind doesn't merely control the machine, the Mind is the machine, able to interact with the physical world using its "body" which is the ship, or house, or city, or Orbital, or whatever. Of course, a Mind could also be simultaneously inhabiting a dozen different android "avatars," manifesting itself as a holograph in front of an audience, and corresponding with other Minds in a virtual reality.
OK, all this is well and good -- but what can you expect from a Banks novel?
Banks isn't entirely new, but he remains largely and undeservedly undiscovered. You can read all about him on my Iain Banks website.
I would also say that if you have not already read Greg Egan, especially his book, Diaspora, do so. This is first-rank hard sf at its best!
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology
www.enthea.org
Why "ask slashdot"? Wouldn't it make more sense to check out some SF related web sites for information and suggestions about SF?
Now I have an unfair advantage in that I live near not one, but two, high quality stores specializing in SF (Other Change of Hobbit and Dark Carnival, both in Berkeley CA), and I get a lot of recommendations by going in there and looking at their recommended shelves, or asking people who work there what's new and good.
If you aren't lucky enough to have a good SF bookstore nearby, then you might want to try some SF websites. This year's Hugo voting included the category of web site (a "one-shot" category that I hope will become permanent in future).Locus Online, the Hugo winner, and SF Site, which came in third, are my two favorites. Both are full of book reviews (and author interviews, and links to other interesting sites. (The second place Hugo vote went to the SciFi Channel's website, which is more oriented towards TV and movies than written SF, but still might be worth a look).
And speaking of awards, the various SF & Fantasy awards are a great place to look for recommendations. Check out the nominee list, not just the winners (it really is an honor just to be nominated), and don't forget to check out other works by the same authors. If you don't like short stories, you should still check out the winners (and nominees) in the short-story categories; they may have written some good novels too. Locus Online (link above) has extensive listings of the major SF awards.
That said, here's a few authors who have been high on my must-read list recently: Lois McMaster Bujold, David Brin, Orson Scott Card, C. J. Cherryh, Greg Egan, Tom Holt, Guy Gavriel Kay, Nancy Kress, Jane Lindskold[1], Ken McLeod[2], Wil McCarthy (yes, one 'l'), Jack McDevitt, Patricia A. McKillip, Robert Rankin, Allen Steele, Neal Stephenson, and Connie Willis. I probably included a few that qualify as "old school", there, and left out a few thinking they were "old school" that you may never have heard of, but such is life.
HTH
[1] Lindskold is an associate of, and collaborated with Zelazny, and is well worth checking out if you like Zelazny, IMO.
[2] MacLeod is the only SF writer I know of who has mentioned Linux in his SF. Others, most notably Stephenson, have mentioned it in non-fiction writings, but only MacLeod so far has embedded it in his fictional future.
That weekend, I went to the local Barnes and Noble and picketed in front of the "S" section. I posted several scathing reviews on Amazon.com under various pseudonyms and spent most of Sunday digging up Neal Stephenson's home phone number, after which I prank-called him for a good six hours straight.
I wrote a letter to my congressman as well, and I strongly urge you to do the same! If we don't fight the rising tide of inaccurate astronomical navigation references in modern science fiction, then who will?