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Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer?
mvdwege writes "In the thread on the most depressing sci-fi, there were hundreds of posts but merely four mentions of John Brunner, dystopian writer par excellence. Now, given the normally U.S. libertarian bent of the Slashdot audience, it is understandable that an outright British Socialist writer like Brunner would get short shrift, but it got me thinking: what Sci-fi writers do you know that are, in your opinion, vastly underappreciated?"
Because I can.
I don't think he was the greatest science fiction writer but I think he got the shaft because he wasn't American or British and on top of that he wrote at a time when the Iron Curtain hindered the flow of information -- even fiction. Evidence for this can be seen when he released 17 works in the eight years that followed the "Polish October."
I will admit I don't know Polish and have only read the English translation of his works but I will also say that where I find contemporary authors like Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy to be masters of description, Lem was lacking. His works, however, I often found mirrored in later American science fiction and sometimes what he packed into a chapter could be as deeply philosophical and have as much political commentary as an entire novel by his contemporaries. One of my Polish computer vision professors in grad school saw me reading the Cyberiad and picked up my book and held it up to the class and hyperbolic-ally announced "Every work of science fiction past 1960 is a derivative of this man." He's probably a hero in Poland but I have friends that consider themselves very avid readers and haven't even heard of him.
I have to admit I even stumble upon works of his I never got around to and find pleasure in them.
My work here is dung.
Love the Revelation Space series...
Going for a downvote record!
And so it goes.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Daniel Suarez and his trilogy of Daemon, Freedom(TM), and Kill Decision.
The man who inspired Douglas Adams at an early age.
Dune had a major motion picture, and 20 years later, a miniseries. It's also a fairly hard read and while it's a good book, I can see why it's not popular with the masses.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Just one "SF" novel, "Kallocain", written eight years before Orwell's 1984. Definitely worth reading for the day when technology can easily detect lies and/or force people to speak the truth.
Duh!
H. Beam. Piper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beam_Piper
But then he cut his own life short, so who knows where he might have gone?
I wrote a short story in 3rd grade about being transformed into a sultana. My teacher said my handwriting was too messy. I never wrote again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith
Way ahead of his time.
Isaac Asimov is also my favourite, but I don't think he is under-appreciated. The 3 laws of robotics has been quoted in quite a few movies and he is well known in scientific circles as well, especially astronomy and of course robotics. One of my new favourites would definitely have to be Alistair Reynolds. I picked up one of his books at random at the library, and could not put it down until breakfast the next day, when it was done.
The Illuminatus Trilogy was brilliant, and his SchrÃdinger's Cat Trilogy was pretty awesome too. I guess there's better writers out there, and more prolific ones, but there's something thought provoking about his work. For me , they allow you to see the world differently and they make you ask questions. RIP RAW.
Terry Pratchett and Discworld are almost unknown outside of fandom. He's REALLY popular in fandom, but not seemingly widely read outside. And yes, he is a science fiction writer with The Bromeliad...
I also enjoyed Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Granted, it was a translation, but it was a helluva interesting story about the third world deciding to invade the first, through mass population exodus. I got to read that in a pop culture sci fi English class in college, even though it was originally written in French and translated.
I enjoy some Piers Anthony, even though I didn't enjoy Bio of a Space Tyrant. The Xanth series is fun if you're bored and willing to read 'em straight through, and like puns. Mute was good.
I read a lot of David Weber, though I wish he'd get on with the Honorverse and with Dahak and Safehold. After Robert Jordan's death I swore I wouldn't read any more authors who were living or at least whose series were still going somewhere and weren't done, and Weber is one of the few that fits that. Dammit, finish the stories!
And Bruce Sterling seems under-appreciated these days too.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I read a lot of post-apocalyptic sci-fi when I was a kid, and the author that really stood out was Walter M. Miller, Jr., author of A Canticle for Leibowitz. He's a strong short story writer as well, but he's seldom mentioned in sci-fi lists -- I speculate it's because his prime writing period was in the 1950s.
I think, in his time, he was under-appreciated. But he certainly is appreciated now, if not a cherished part of the science-fiction canon. We are fortunate, as science-fiction readers, that he did not move on to other genres as he originally had intended (or, maybe not, I don't know. In some other reality, PKD was a furnature saleman who never had the inkling to write at all).
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
He was almost unknown while he was alive, I'd never heard of him until I was an adult, and the only reason most people know about him is because Hollywood has been mining his mind-nuggets post-mortem for decades.
I'm sure the Slashdot crowd appreciates him, but I'd still say he's under-appreciated because he deserves to be up there with the likes of Asimov, Wells and Verne.
See what they did with Lewis Padgett's Mimsy Were the Borogoves. Sometimes being just ignored and leaving they great work unspoiled by hollywoodisms is a good thing.
Though honestly he was more "fantasy" than "Sci Fi", I think. Even if you find someone who's heard of him, they pretty much just read the Chronicles of Amber and called it good. His experimental works were a lot of fun. I don't think he was the best sci fi writer ever, but he's one of my personal favorites.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
She's under-appreciated as a sci-fi authour because she says she doesn't write sci-fi, even though that's what she's best at and the rest of her work is mediocre.
Writer of lame fanfiction and sci-fi genre pioneer, apparently:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19949_the-6-most-important-sci-fi-ideas-were-invented-by-hack.html
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Number 1 in print, but he's not the first person you think of!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Because Snow Crash is the first piece of science-fiction I've ever read, and then reflected that it actually predicted its future pretty well.
That would have to be H. Beam Piper. The SF community has been claiming that for a long, long time. But I am sure that Clifford Simak would get some votes too.
Robert L. Forward. An actual physicist.
To those evolved on the surface of a neutron star, you are mere smoke.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
I'll argue for Yevgeny Zamyatin, at least for authors unknown among people who otherwise appreciate Sci-Fi. We is probably my favorite of it's style of dystopian novels (Think 1984 and Brave New World) - it uses a clever mathematical symbolism as a framework for the story, it has an awesome IRL history of copies being smuggled in and out of the Soviet Union, and Zamyatin was an Old Bolshevik disenchanted with later developments in the party. This means it has a little bit different perspective than the similar pieces by western authors, and explains the nifty "There is no final revolution" mantra in the novel.
One of the very strongest sci-fi writers USSR ever produced, and almost completely unknown in the West. IMO, easily comparable with best English/American writers.
I don't hang out much with people who read sci-fi, so I don't actually know how well-known he is. But I've never heard him brought up during a sci-fi discussion, despite his work being amazing. So he gets my vote.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...
One of his more famous stories, Arena, was made into a Star Trek episode, although I liked the story better. My favorite story is a just a few paragraphs about a many who invents a machine to manipulate time.
Fredric Brown helped me to understand how limited my imagination really was and prompted me to expand it. What is more amazing to me is how well these stories still hold up today.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
Well, being well known and oft-cited isn't the same as being appreciated for what you really are. Consider Adam Smith who wrote *The Wealth of Nations* a book far more cited than read.
Asimov was merely a *good* writer, but he was a *brilliant* thinker. There are, therefore, multiple layers of irony then in the way the three laws are cited. They don't have the kind of scientific validity they have in his robot story universe, where people simply cannot build robots that violate the laws. In the real world we are far from building robots that are capable of interpreting the three laws.
The real significance of the laws is literary. They killed the popularity of the robot-run-amok story, because suddenly everyone expected a more sophisticated -- or at least more clever story than a third-hand Frankenstein retread. Such a story would pose no challenge nor offer rewards to an intellect like his.
The ultimate irony is that while the three laws are the sci-fi trope par excellence, Asimov used them as an excuse to slip numerous variations on the classic locked room murder mystery past sci-fi readers. He wrote a number of great pure sci-fi stories, but I think he was at heart a mystery writer.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What was I talking about again? Oh, yeah! You can find a ton of his stuff on Amazon, definitely worth a look-see!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Frank_Russell
EMA
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
If you extend that to "... underappreciated by modern audiences", I can think of a few.
There's Keith Laumer, who was huge in his day and then largely forgotten until Eric Flint and David Weber (and friends) re-invigorated his work, particularly the "Bolo" series.
James H. Schmitz wrote some cracking stuff, which has also recently been rediscovered by the Tor crowd.
James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon) is better known, but still fairly obscure to the modern SF reader.
Christopher Priest has also had recently renewed interest, almost entirely due to the film version of The Prestige, but he wrote a bunch of other goddamn weird, dark, depressing books.
Lloyd Biggle Jr. wrote some marvellous gently humorous stuff - his Cultural Survey novels are particularly good.
Clifford D. Simak is another acknowledged master of the genre who seems to get short shrift in modern SF collections.
But my own pick for Most Underappreciated would be Janet Kagan, who wrote a heap of short fiction, two utterly superb standalone works, and a Star Trek TOS novel, and then tragically died in 2008. I personally think she's as good as Lois McMaster Bujold, and had she lived to keep writing, she might be better known.
|>
Here be Dragons
He's a rollicking adventure writer and can be very funny as well. All his works to date are on fsand.com as e-books. Here's an excerpt from "AI Wars - the Big Boost" Trent the protagonist speaking to his boss, Melissa:
Trent: Listen,” he said in a confidential voice, “you tell the Elite Commander everything is under control, and he’s not to worry.”
Melissa: “ ‘Everything’s under control, and he’s not to worry.’ ”
Trent: “Exactly. We like the hardware, and the hardware likes us. We have mutual respect and admiration.”
Melissa: She stared at him. “You have mutual respect and admiration. With the hardware.
And this has trimmed seventy-seven days off your completion estimates.”
Trent: "And the new people, of course."
Get the omnibus edition to have all of them.
No, I didn't get paid for this endorsement.
Foster has single-handedly committed all the cardinal sins that Serious SF Authors(tm) must never do:
Movie/TV spin-off novels? Check (See: Splinter of the Mind's Eye).
Crossing over into Fantasy? Check (See: Spellsinger).
Dabbling with humor? Check (Spellsinger, Glory Lane, etc.).
Indulging a disrespected fringe group? Check. (Furries man. See Spellsinger (again!), Quozl, the Icerigger trilogy).
If there is a scale that measures prolific hackery, with Peirs Anthony on the bottom and Stephen King on the top, I would put Foster far, far closer to King. Glory Lane, To the Vanishing Point, and Into the Out Of are all truly excellent reads. They're not life changers, they're just damn good. He's got a fine roster of clever and poigniant short stories. For old school geeks, the most notable of which is "Why Johnny Can't Speed" which has been cited as direct inspiration for the classic Steve Jackson game Car Wars.
And hey, without Car Wars, SJ Games might never have been successful enough to launch GURPS. Without GURPS, there would be no GURPS Cyberpunk, no Secret Service raid on SJ Games in 1991, and maybe no Electronic Frontier Foundation either. How's that for underrated?
Uller Uprising......lots of details and visuals for 1952. And you can dig it up in the Gutenberg Project since its so far out of print !
You should read the short story "... And Now The News." It's truly one of the most eye opening short stories that nobody knows about. In many ways, it's a gloriously alternative view about the sadness of life and the optimism that people can have. Truly one of the best stories I'd recommend to anyone.
Here's the link:
http://books.google.com/books/about/And_Now_the_News.html?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC
Some more commentary:
http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/faq.html
you insensitive clods!
Samuel R. Delany is highly acclaimed but I think out of reach for most readers. His prose is dense and complicated, requiring serious concentration to consume. The themes are complex and subtle despite having obvious presentation, and can make readers uncomfortable. His are the types of books English teachers have a field day with, typically to the dismay of students. Also unlike most they are written as and read like contemporary fiction rather than science-fiction. (I feel like William Gibson's newer works are like this as well, but annoyingly so.)
You misspelled overappreciated.
But he is so badly unappreciated, that he is not even translated to any other language, including English of course. I remember one scene only, in Paris, when the new emperor Caligula (yes, it is science fiction, and yes, it is in the future), declared the day he become the new emperor (read my lips, killed the old one) as a holiday, and increased the social pension with 12 pens, and everybody was happy, because this one is different one, and he will make the difference, and he takes care of the poor people.........Eh, classic scene, don't you agree?
I have no mod points and must troll.
...than hard sci-fi, but Jack Vance is amazing. He has an extensive body of work, with some personal favorites being:
The Dying Earth series
The Demon Princes series
The Lyonesse trilogy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance
His writing wasn't 100% Science Fiction but close enough and since it's either that or Fantasy we'll have to allow it I think.
I'd say first place should go to Cordwainer Smith ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith ) though I have a soft spot for Clifford Simak ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Simak ), not to mention Jack Vance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance ). None of them are exactly unknown, but I don't think they get much credit these days for having influenced FSF.
HP Lovecraft. He generally dismissed as a horror writer by non horror fans but he's not given credit for the scifi nature of most of his work. There are obvious scifi stories like "In the Walls of Eryx" but most of his stories had scifi themes. At the Mountains of Madness was about an alien race that built a city in Antarctica millions of years ago and potentially created human life if not all life on Earth. Even stories like The Whisperer in Darkness dealt with a race of aliens that harvested brains to transport the minds of people between worlds. The old gods were described as very powerful aliens. He talked about alien races, space travel, dimensional travel and engineering lifeforms with science not magic. The magic in his stories was mostly expressed as alien super science even the spells and symbols used were seen as science. Another story Cool Air was about some one preserving life after death with chemicals and refrigeration. People forget the original Herbert West Reanimator was a Frankenstein like story of resurrecting the dead through science not magic. Yes he was a horror writer but the bulk of his world was more science fiction than fantasy.
He'd written about two dozen novels before his untimely death in 1996, but an amazing writer with both a gifted imagination and gift for words. I was never bored reading any of his books.
My favorites are:
Han Solo Trilogy: The best Star Wars novels, hands down.
Adventures of Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt: Fun space opera trilogy with lots of heart, amazing back story and plenty of action. Sadly, out of print but easy enough to obtain 99cent copies online.
GammaLAW: Epic science fiction series about a group of super soldiers sent to a distant world that has fallen out of communication with the rest of the settled worlds hoping to solve the mystery of an alien race threatening mass invasion. He once likened GammaLAW to 'War and Peace in space, with a cast of characters in the hundreds', he was working on the manuscript at the time of his passing, and his longtime friend and pseudonym sharing author, James Luceno, pulled the final script together which was released in 4 paperbacks in the late 1990's. Sadly, also out of print.
Other fun things he worked on were the novelizations of (and serious improvements on) the Harmony Gold Robotech animated television series, where apparently he and Jim Luceno took turns writing 3 books each of the initial 12 book series and alternating on the 5-book Sentinels novels and writing each section of the final 'wrap-up' novel.
The tongue-in-cheek Black Hole Travel Agency quartet of novels show how far out he and Jim could go in their world building and plot scenarios, which is pretty far out.
I've never found a comparable author that I have enjoyed to read so much, and I sure have tried. Iain Banks is as close as I've gotten, but he still falls short in the storytelling, humor and wit departments.
She blinded me with science, she tricked me with technology. ~ Thomas Dolby
If so, my vote for that is Ayn Rand - especially in this community where her writing has become a handbook for life for many.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Massive Agree. A universe to rival middle earth, a society/back story every bit as detailed and interesting as 'The Culture'. Perhaps only bettered by the foundation series by virtue of it having been written first.
The film was at best a superficial introduction to characters that missed out swathes of story, and appeared to run out of budget half way through (or maybe never had any at the start!). The TV show... well...
You could easily crank out an amazing film(...series of?). I nominate the Wachowskis!
Invaders must die
I started to read sci-fi in the early 1970s, after the Golden Age but while many of the Golden Age writers were still with us. Time has passed and many great (and countless very good) writers are no longer with us are fading into obscurity: C.L. Moore, Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, and Randall Garrett to name a few.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Not hard-science fiction, more like ultra violence in a futuristic space-faring setting with some attached storyline. I've only ever met one other person who'd ever even heard of him, but I love his stuff.
The Book of the New Sun should be considered one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century. It has been aptly described as a work of vast imagination.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Most unappreciated has to go to Poul Anderson.
He wrote so much stuff, and almost all of it top-notch. His name deserves to be right up there with Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein.
The Flandry books. The van Rijn books. The Time Patrol. The Hoka books!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson
http://baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=panderson
His work was nominated for Hugo awards on numerous occasions, but the top names released popular stories at the same time and he lost to those.
Somewhere I saw a discussion of the best SF books to give to SF-hating friends to try to win them over. The Time Patrol books were chosen by several. "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" is fantastic.
Baen collected all the Time Patrol stuff into one mega volume:
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-428-time-patrol.aspx
You can read the first novella and most of the second one for free at the above link (click on "View sample chapters").
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
1) Keith Laumer
2) William Hjortsberg
Laumer really specialized in fast paced, two-fisted adventures that combine humor with sci-fi. Great fun. Try "A Trace of Memory" to see what I mean.
Now for Hjortsberg, he's basically written so few novels that he can't be underappreciated, he's just plain obscure. But he wrote this novel that's gotta be read to be appreciated.
Gray Matters.
The first chapter or so is quite dated, but once you get past that, oh wow.
Is Fred Pohl underappreciated? He's one of my favorites so I think that everyone must have heard of him. Try to find "The Way the Future Was", it's not sci-fi, more of a biography and how he worked with the greats of the Golden Age like Asimov.
Brian Aldiss not only wrote sci-fi, but wrote it well. Some of his short stories are the kind that stay stuck in your mind.
Norman Spinrad? Anyone ever hear of him? Great talent.
Mostly random stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_Russ She's hardly in print anymore. I think the problem she's had is that SF still tends a bit to be a genre for spotty-faced boys (or the imago form of that creature), while her work was intensely feminist. But she's well worth a read and any discomfort she might cause the adult form of the spotty-faced boy.
He's one of the most appreciated ever.
Alas, his I Robot was translated into a travesty of a film .. rather like happened to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He wrote the sequels to Terminator 2 as a trilogy, which was an astounding bit of storytelling in that universe. I would have loved for Cameron to make a 3rd film based on those stories, they were perfect.
He also wrote Island in the Sea of time, Where Nantucket is blasted 2000 years into the past and the society has to learn how to cope.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
Dang you beat me to it.
So many great books. Ringworld, Integral trees, Mote in God's eye.
_Courtship Rite_ is amazingly good. "Shipwright" and "To Bring in the Steel" are also top-tier. He just didn't write enough.
And if this audience here is actually Libertarian, he would have been mentioned well before now.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Great stuff, particularly well done for time travel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beam_Piper
Lots of good stuff, but not very accessible to the masses.
http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphanogenesis.html
That's a great sample, basically describes the birth and development to consciousness of a new digital being. The book that's in extends out to a search for life, and an eventual push to escape the current dimension. Some of his books are easier to find than others, and it seems like only a few have gone digital so far. A lot are out of print, so you have to go used most of the time.
Author of my all-time favourite book "To Say Nothing of The Dog", a Victorian-comedy-mystery-time travel novel. Other notably good works include Passage, Doomsday Book, Bellwether and Blackout/All Clear. However, as a multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner, she does have a fair bit of appreciation.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Hogan
The Two Faces of Tomorrow was my favorite.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
It does not matter how much he is quoted, credited or appreciated.
Asimov was so AWESOME the petty human race is incapable of appreciating him anywhere near enough.
Since humanity can not appreciate him enough he is the most under appreciated Sci-Fi writer ever.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Okay... Next obvious question: where can I download their books?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I don't know if he unappreciated, but his appreciation certainly does not do justice to his talent and the quality of the writings he gave us. A lot of his stuff is available through Project Gutenberg and even librivox.org. I'd highly recommend everyone check out both Fritz Lieber's sword and sorcerer type fantasy as well as his amazing sci-fi short stories and novels.
Lafferty specialized in science fiction that was more folk-tale like, or as I see Wikipedia puts it "shaggy characters and tall tales". His short stories, in such collections as Lafferty In Orbit or Nine Hundred Grandmothers, are more approachable than his novels, especially for someone new to his style.
Disch wrote both horror and science fiction. If you're literate you owe it to yourself to read Camp Concentration. His first novel, The Genocides is an easier read, if a bit heavy-handed in its message.
If you're deeply religious you might want to avoid Disch, especially The Genocides.
I've read some of his actual mystery stories once: they were fantastic. Unfortunately, I've not been able to find another copy and was only able to read them for a short while a few years ago at a house I was visiting. I don't even remember what the collection was called.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
This is a silly question. There are many science fiction authors that are under appreciated. By the person asking the question at least. By the public at large? Who can say. Do you intend to interview every person on Earth to find out?
The 'League of Peoples' books are great.
Silence is a state of mime.
Terry Dowling's science fiction could be said to verge on the mystical (and I'm a hard sf person myself), but full of amazing ideas and imagery is so intense that you can see his distant future lands. You *know* they exist, that great sandships ply the deserts of an Australia transformed by a resurgent Aboriginal culture, where Nationals are restricted to the coasts, and where artificial and non-human intelligence struggles to survive. I cannot recommend his books highly enough, though as he uses small publishers they can be hard to find. He also writes horror, and again though I'm not generally a fan of the genre, his writing transcends this.
http://www.terrydowling.com/
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
James Alan Gardner has written a number of short stories (two of the "novelette" length ones have been nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula award) and the League of Peoples series. The basic premise, at least at the start, is about the "Explorer Corp", a component of the space navy intended to to travel to newly discovered planets and, well, be professional Redshirts. The books are both very funny and very dark. ("Trapped" could be a contender for the most depressing book question yesterday.)
:)
Apparently some other people have read him (John Scalzi says a number of people asked him if he'd heard of the books when his own "Redshirts" book was published) but i've never actually met anyone who's read the books and wasn't introduced to the author by me. It's rather hard to find new copies of the books at this point, but he's looking into getting them republished as ebooks, and of course there are plenty of used copies around.
And along the lines of people who are appreciated but still not as much as they should be, i'd like to mention Lois McMaster Bujold. She was tied with Heinlein for most Hugos for best novel (up until he passed her again from the grave by winning a Retro Hugo) but doesn't get mentioned anywhere nearly as often he does. Her Vorkosigan series has some space opera and some adventure and some mystery and some romance, all excellently done.
And just to throw out a list of other lesser-known authors whose stuff i like: Lynn Flewelling, Martha Wells, CS Friedman, Glen Cook, Taylor Anderson, Jack Campbell, Ellen Kushner, Gail Carriger, and Robin Hobb. And finally Seanan McGuire is still relatively unknown, but her "Newsflesh" series (as "Mira Grant") recently got optioned for film, so if you want to get in before she does become well known now might be the time to do it
And all else failing, look at the list of people nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards, particularly those for best novel. There's sure to be a ton of people in there that you don't recognize, and it even acts as a guide to what's considered to be some of their best work. (Just double check that it's not the middle book of a series or something before you grab a copy and get started =)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
The guy invented Cyberpunk as we know it (or at least pioneered it), and nobody credits him for it. He had avatars in the Crystal Wind (his vision of the VR net) and AIs doing battle with and against genetically engineered soldiers and telepaths, all set against a backdrop universe of UN Peacekeepers keeping a fascist regime in place with orbital lasers and a greater background spanning the whole of time. Internet addiction, flying cars that nobody was allowed to drive manually for safety reasons, and near future military equipment that makes sense (with drawbacks and idiot proofing). His universe dates back in magazines to 1983, a year before Neuromancer, but his novels were published a year later.
Plus he's been included in collections like "Star Wars: Tales from Jabba’s Palace" and "Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters".
And almost nobody has heard of him.
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
You have to be able to cope with his Canadian inferiority complex though One look at his website and you won't think he's underappreciated. I wish people would stop giving me his books.
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" never seems to have been lauded, but I think it is one of the best stories around, specially for it's time.
His stuff is dark, complex, deep (no pun intended), and philosophically best described as brutally objective.
You can download just about all his backlist for free from his blog at rifters.com too.
Alfred Bester didn't publish very much science fiction, but his novels are amazingly good, and the short stories are also wonderful.
Jack Chalker's series featuring Nathan Brasil is a good read.
According to one wise man, "Belief is premature cognitive committment." NO AMOUNT OF BELIEF ESTABLISHES A FACT.
While you're shilling for the "Author's Guild of People Who Are Not John Brunner", am I right?
Just tell us the synopses of those stories that you remember and I'm sure someone here will be able to put a name on them.
Ezekiel 23:20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_at_the_Well_of_Souls This link is to Jack Chalker/Nathan Brasil. #18 in the 1978 Locus Poll Award for best science fiction
According to one wise man, "Belief is premature cognitive committment." NO AMOUNT OF BELIEF ESTABLISHES A FACT.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand_on_Zanzibar
Truly, though, the greatest two works in the last several decades are Iain Banks' classic work of incredibly elegant future fiction, Player of Games (although all of Banks' stuff is ultra-superior, although a bit dark for recreational reading at times), and Stirling's Drakon, a classic sf action/super-tech opera par excellence!
True hacker fiction today is written by Daniel Suarez, with Brian Falkner's Brain Jack, although ostensibly in the "young adult" cateogory, is highly recommended. (Special Flesh by Michael Olson reads like a book, written by investment bankers, for investment bankers --- a resounding thumbs down on that pseudo-hacker book)
Pournelle's military fiction is wonderful, Niven's hard SF is magnificent and when writing as duo it's great entertainment.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
He just does not get enough hugs. I really encourage everyone to go to his book signings and appearances and give him a big ol hug.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Maybe I roll with the wrong crowd but I never hear anyone mention Andre Norton. There were plenty of pulpy scifi stories in her books, along with the magic stuff in the Witchworld series. But honestly, what in Prometheus or the Alien mythos wasn't already done 40 years ago in Norton's Forerunner stories?
Norton's concept of a 'distort' still sticks with me as a gadget I'd like to invent. And I am surprised nobody else has. Or have they? That's probably the point.
Ah well, I may have bad taste in books or something. Loved Douglas Adams, loved Gordon Dickson, Clarke, the "Starwolf" books by Gunnarson was it(?) and even sort of liked Battlefield Earth -but as an 11-year-old who had no idea who L.Ron was or what he was all about. 11yr olds want to read about blowing up planets with nuclear bombs, not about religion or whatever.
Just writing about this is somewhat painful. The teenage me used to read books constantly. 20 books checked out on Saturday and I would be lucky to have them last a week. Now the adult me barely even owns any books. And no, no e-books either. I have managed to make a life with no time to focus and read. Always have to do two or three things at once. Watch TV and work on a computer and have a radio playing. But the big problem is that my attention span is gone and my memory is going. Shrug.
Sig for hire.
I know, right? The U.S. Libertarians were all too busy citing George Orwell, 1984..!
I thought Dune was a wonderful story by read the rest of the series with an increasing sense of disappointment. I guess Herbert IS underappreciated. I don't appreciate him as much ad I could.
Theodore Sturgeon also predicted the mobile internet in the 1950s and its possible social, political, and military implications. And much, much more. That one story inspired Ted Nelson and project Xanadu and Hypertext (so, ultimately the World Wide Web), as well as many other technologists (like for nanotech).
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Although I'd agree with others that Stanislaw Lem and Ursula K. Le Guin are awesome.
And my person favorite is James P. Hogan, who predicted the difficulties with a transition from scarcity thinking to abundance thinking:
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
"In the meantime, Earth went through a dodgy period, but managed in the end to muddle through. The fun begins when a generation ship housing a population of thousands arrives to "reclaim" the colony on behalf of the repressive, authoritarian regime that emerged following the crisis period. The Mayflower II brings with it all the tried and tested apparatus for bringing a recalcitrant population to heel: authority, with its power structure and symbolism, to impress; commercial institutions with the promise of wealth and possessions, to tempt and ensnare; a religious presence, to awe and instill duty and obedience; and if all else fails, armed military force to compel. But what happens when these methods encounter a population that has never been conditioned to respond?
The book has an interesting corollary. Around about the mid eighties, I received a letter notifying me that the story had been serialized in an underground Polish s.f. magazine. They hadn't exactly "stolen" it, the publishers explained, but had credited zlotys to an account in my name there, so if I ever decided to take a holiday in Poland the expenses would be covered (there was no exchange mechanism with Western currencies at that time). Then the story started surfacing in other countries of Eastern Europe, by all accounts to an enthusiastic reception. What they liked there, apparently, was the updated "Ghandiesque" formula on how bring down an oppressive regime when it's got all the guns. And a couple of years later, they were all doing it!"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Would mod you up if I had points. And add:
Harlan Ellison: ""Gene Wolfe is engaged in the holy chore of writing every other author under the table. He is no less than one of the finest, most original writers in the world today. His work is singular, hypnotizing, startlingly above comparison."
The Left Hand of Darkness is a fantastic book, from a great series about the Hainish Cycle.
... a massive must-read, Drakon --- first-rate sf entertainment!
Daniel Galouye Richard MacKenna J. T. McIntosh A.E. van Vogt Cyril Kornbluth Henry Kuttner C. L. Moore James H. Schmitz Cordwainer Smith
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are as good as it gets. I could've had Hugh Hefner and all subordinates beating furiously upon my door, but with Strugatsky and a few Warsteiner dunkels, nothing could stop me until the final word. I was thrilled.
PS: Thanks Kolyma!
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
LOL --- good one, as he is one of the most complaining creative genius mofos out there --- Demon With a Glass Hand (one of the earliest Outer Limits shows starring Robert Culp and some really great actress whose name I always forget) truly ruined SF for me for many, many years --- once you've seen such an awesomely futuristic sf classic, way back when, nothing came forward for many years even remotely comparable.!
http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/5/7/7/138577.jpg?v=1
Loved the Journeys series
She's definitely underappreciated!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
There's a two volume set of Asimov's short stories. There's a bunch of his mysteries in there.
Invented a new class of scifi with nueromancer. Still considered the best cyberpunk novel. After all these post and still no mention.
Michael Moorcock, hands down. He wrote mostly fantasy, but a fair amount of scifi too. The Dancers At The End Of Time series, the Jerry Cornelious books, the Nomad Of The Time Stream series, all unique and different, yet all tied to each other. Moorcock has won plenty of awards, I just don't think anyone gives him proper credit anymore.
nobody's perfect
one of the better hard sci-fi writers.
Lincoln's Dreams. To Say Nothing of the Dog. TheDoomsday Book. Passage. Etc. Oodles of Nebula and Hugo awards, but her name rarely comes up in general discussions about sci-fi. So despite her literary successes, she qualifies as underappreciated (in the Slashdot venue).
Will
The Black Cloud is one of my favorite novels ever, and it appears to be out of print, at least in the States. October the First Is Too Late was quite an interesting idea, though I think I like it more in retrospect than I did as I was reading it.
Dune is a masterpiece. The masses don't know it exists. The award-givers looked him over. And only the first book got any real acclaim from critics.
I think Dune is wildly popular with the masses (of people who would ever consider reading sci fi) and that it doesn't live up to the widespread hype.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Unfortunately, I've not been able to find another copy and was only able to read them for a short while a few years ago at a house I was visiting. I don't even remember what the collection was called.
Asimov was so prolific that I don't think he ever did anything "just once".
A Whiff of Death and Murder at the ABA were mystery novels, but he also published five collections of mostly science fiction mysteries. In addition, there were six collections of the Black Widowers mysteries. For all the gory details, see the bottom of his bibliography.
His earlier stuff is average pulp scifi, but he improved so much. I love Harry Harrison with every part of my body. I held hope that Deathworld might be made into a movie... but Avatar has kind of kicked that idea in the guts, it would be seen as derivative now.
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
And my person favorite is James P. Hogan
I have to second this. He is one of the better "hard" sci-fi authors out there that most people don't know.
Dune is a masterpiece. The masses don't know it exists. The award-givers looked him over. And only the first book got any real acclaim from critics.
It's a good book, but it's just not that interesting in terms of ideas. It's just desert Islam in space. Plus some worms to provide action.
Seriously, just ask "who would I want to be in this book?" About the only answer is Paul or maybe one of the tech-geek mentats.
Bummer if you're a women too: you get some soft power if you happen to be in the elite court and get your Bene Gesserit training, else you are pretty much a non-entity.
If you think Dune is great, you'll like many of the available historical novels out there.
...namely the Firebird series. I really like the way she control of information and reveals plot-lines. That and she tackles some very interesting moral issues associated with human augmentation.
I concur. Excellent author. Two excellent series (the Patricia Hutchins series and the Alex Benedict series), as well as several stand alone novels and short stories. I've never read one of his books I didn't enjoy.
Excellent Author. Excellent book, but I feel is underrated. Anchor for a good series that he wrote that deals with politics, martial arts, and fighting oppression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Never_Missed
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Agreed. Excellent author.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
It's perhaps more fantasy than sci-fi, but his space trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength) is vastly underrated.
The trick is to probably to skip the first volume. It's not as inspired as the other two and can be a little bit preachy. Perelandra is brilliant-- Lewis thought it was the best thing he'd written at the time, and Jorge Luis Borges apparently was a fan (he quotes from it extensively in his Bestiary of Imaginary Animals). That Hideous Strength is deeply eccentric and contains some mildly horrifying philosophical asides about the proper role of women. It's still worth reading, for the good bits.
It's unfortunate that Lewis is remembered today chiefly for his Narnia books, which hardly represent him at the top of his game. I'm pretty sure Lewis would feel the same way.
Dune is great, as long as you don't include anything his kid wrote. I read some of those, thought they were bad. Then they had the final chapter - supposedly from notes left from his dad. I think they pulled a blair witch with a fake finding of something. It was bad. Bad is putting it nicely, it took all the philosophical bent that dune had and wrapped it up into something that was dreary to get through. Also they had to write a few trilogies of mediocre at best sci fi to explain the old couple characters in the last chapter of chapterhouse. Not a good way to wrap up the series and the cliffhanger Herbert left with his death wasn't solved adequately.
Awarded, his works turned to a movie, and Sci-Fi channel did a remake of Dune as a series. ...I would consider the author as well regarded, not underrated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_herbert
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
"In the thread on the most depressing sci-fi, there were hundreds of posts but merely four mentions of John Brunner, dystopian writer par excellence. Now, given the normally U.S. libertarian bent of the Slashdot audience, it is understandable that an outright British Socialist writer like Brunner would get short shrift
Or because he wasn't truly depressing. For me, a lot of dystopian stories simply tried to hard to beat down the reader (and punish those ideologies that the author opposed) to be taken seriously. Brunner did a bit of that and doesn't stand out from the crowd on that basis (especially compared to dystopian specialists such as Harry Ellison, Thomas Disch, and Damien Knight). But he did at times come up with remarkably creative works. "The Shockwave Rider" (1975), for example, is a very interesting work, due to its introduction of concepts such as a prediction ("delphi") market and being an early "cyberpunk" novel. That incidentally probably makes it a significant work to any sort of study of libertarian works of science fiction.
They don't have the kind of scientific validity they have in his robot story universe, where people simply cannot build robots that violate the laws.
It wasn't that they couldn't build robots that didn't obey the three laws, they wouldn't. In fact, there's a story in which the problem is to find a robot made with a modified form of the first law: "A robot shall not harm a human being" for reasons that seemed good at the time.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Pick up Kristine Smith's Code Of Conduct, and you'll be in for a very pleasant surprise. Then you'll want to get the other four books in the series: Rules Of Conflict, Law Of Survival, Contact Imminent, and Endgame.
Clearly the answer is "No"
-
Hogan's "Code of the Lifemaker" is a great read
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
Recommended to me by Vernor Vinge. Great "classic" SF, but not dated.
Also, Keith Laumer, and Mack Reynolds.
Steady, folks. We're one step away from Godwin here.
OK, he did picturebooks for kids, but my challenge to you is to recommend more authors with positive views of the future!
Okay, you want to know how many ways the world can end? Pick up a collection of Ballard. Drowning. Drought. Giant crystals. On and on. Each the despair and hopeless of mankind at its final moments.
Funny, this thread reads like "the great writers of the previous generations..."
I Robot is not nearly as bad as some people whine and Starship Troopers was clearly not meant to be a straight adaptation.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"The Caves of Steel" is one of his mystery novels. Hugely enjoyable, and once adapted for TV (but now lost).
Looks like it was Asimov's Mysteries, I very clearly remember The Singing Bell (only one I do clearly remember). I'll have to try to find some of them: I must admit my classic Sci-fi is a bit lacking, aside from Jules Verne.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Verhoeven's Starship Troopers adaption was a brilliant parody of the original material and made a pointed joke of everything Heinlein claimed to stand for.
If you consider the original novel to be profound I can't imagine you would have the sense of self-awareness required to enjoy the film, anyway.
If you're talking "hard" science fiction, you can't forget Hal Clement.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
E.E. "Doc" Smith, if you're in that era.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's because they've never actually read Rand. So they think when she wrote about "selfishness" she really meant "greed".
Rand may have been a bit over the top at times, and her books were stuffy and difficult, but she did a pretty good job of illustrating how real greed and powermongering can be disguised as "helping your fellow man".
I'd almost have to agree since I was reading "Docs" work in the early 40's, it was I believe, the first non-educational material I read after mastering McGuffy's, so I guess you could call me as being from that era.
But more recently, as in the last 40 years, an alias, Jack Williamson sticks out in my memory. There was enough stuff in "Fire Starter" to make a trilogy, but I never saw that name on the shelves again. And of course we shouldn't forget Orson scott Card and Spider Robinson (Callahans Bar among others), two more rather widely read names that haven't been mentioned.
Cheers, Gene
John C Wright - "The Golden Age"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Age_%28novel_series%29
Hardly anyone I've met has read those books and they will blow your God damned mind. Usually a scifi author has some gimmick like "in the future, people can download their minds into computers" which has been done before... but Wright takes it to such an extreme. The depth of thought he put into the implications is staggering.
Fire Upon the Deep & Deepness in the Sky should have a special spot in anyone's library of sci-fi. True Names, Peace War and others are also standouts.
This fall, the non profit Library of America will publishing two volumes of American sci-fi novels from the 1850s.
Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Leigh Brackett, The Long Tomorrow
Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man
Robert A. Heinlein, Double Star
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
James Blish, A Case of Conscience
Algis Budrys, Who?
Fritz Leiber, The Big Time
The Tripods trilogy (now in four books) is a good set to get your 10-12 year old boys hooked on the genre.
And I enjoy the "cosy catastrophes" of John Wyndham's works - The Day of the Triffids and Chrysalids are his two best known, but the story of the Troon family in "The Outward Urge" is wonderful as well (one of the best SF examples of bluffing at a national level in one of the stories), and my personal favourite was his first posthumous work, "Web" - unlike its predecessors, there's no "Well, things are getting better" at the end...
---
Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
Verhoeven's Starship Troopers adaption was a brilliant parody of the original material and made a pointed joke of everything Heinlein claimed to stand for.
If you consider the original novel to be profound I can't imagine you would have the sense of self-awareness required to enjoy the film, anyway.
I thought the novel was a very interesting perspective piece. I thought the film was about as faithful to the book as Jurassic Park (film) was to Jurassic Park (novel). Most books suffer in the translation, but I found Verhoeven's whack at the film an extremely dullwitted action film, based on eye-candy CGI affects - which too many films are all about anymore. Would have been much better if they'd have made the film more in the vein of the book, punching up things a little bit and sticking with the view of the soldiers going into combat. A similar treatment to Ender's Game I'm half expecting. Hollywood doesn't do deep sci-fi, or any fiction for that matter, they do know what their audience demands, dumbed-down films.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ok, so I know he's fairly well known, but good god y'all Jack Vance is awesome and is underappreciated imo.
I also have to agree with those above who say Cordwainer Smith.
Cyrano de Bergerac
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
I read an essay by Asimov once where he laid the groundwork for sci-fi mystery. I was still in elementary school at the time, so I don't remember much of it, but you certainly nailed his point of view when you said, "such a story would pose no challenge nor offer rewards to an intellect like his." I do remember one thing in particular that he said (although I don't claim to do anything more than a rough paraphrase). The gist of it was that a sci-fi mystery writer could not pull a "deus ex machina" to solve the mystery. In sci-fi, there are very few limits on the author. Since you are writing about *possibilities* that have not yet occurred, the author could easily inject some tidbit of information that anyone living in the imagined world would know, but that no reader could possibly no about unless the author told them about it. For example, the hero could claim he knew one of the characters was lying when he claimed to have participated in some war because the character would only have been two years old when the war took place. To Asimov, that was cheating -- the author had to give the readers all of the information needed to solve the mystery, otherwise it wasn't fair to the reader.
;)
So yes, I think you are correct. At heart, Asimov was a mystery writer, and a darned good one at that
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
I agree with you on the first point (while the story has very little in common with any of Asimov's stories, it wasn't a bad film), but while you are technically correct on the second point, "Starship Troopers" has got to be one of the worst film adaptations ever (at least in my typically not-so-humble opinion, lol).
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Those stories have stayed with me better than most other SF, over a period of 45 years. I bought a compilation from those New England folks that republish not long ago and read them all again.
Imagine a world of dinosaurs!
Aweseome!
They're using their grammar skills there.
Vernor Vinge anticipated most of the cyber-punkish ideas there with his 1981 Hugo- and Nebula-nominated novella, "True Names", first published in 1981. But he's hardly underappreciated (though that particular story is), and Moran is worth recommending. :)
Top 5 all time. Easily as funny as Wodehouse and he set the bar. I'm half-way through the Disc World series and have enjoyed every single one.
Unfortunately his humor does not translate well into movies.
Robert A. Heinlein. Because no matter how much he's appreciated, he's still underappreciated.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Absolutely! He's the first name that sprang into my mind when I saw the topic. And I've been reading a lot of SF for a lot of years. McDevitt's been a runner-up for the Hugo and Nebula so many times, and it doesn't seem to have ever translated into wider popularity. I'm hoping that his actual Nebula win last year will help. We'll see.
Though I must admit that Space Archaelogy was a strange thing to specialize in. At least until you realize that that's what you'd get if you mixed Indiana Jones with Star Wars. :)
The film was at best a superficial introduction to characters that missed out swathes of story, and appeared to run out of budget half way through (or maybe never had any at the start!).
Production on the 1984 release of Dune technically started over a decade earlier (although it was halted, studio's rights ran out, rights were sold to another studio, writers dropped out, etc) and then was a 4 hour epic, before post-production effects, so they cut more than a butcher does in a year, and rewrote scene after scene after scene until it was as short as it is. That's (IMO) mostly why it feels half-assed.
as for the Wachowskis, let's not get carried away, remember The Matrix Reloaded? Cause I wish I didn't...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
In a sense the British van Vogt, with a unique mind and approach, but even less well-known. If it weren't for Wollheim appreciating his work he would be almost unpublished in the US.
Lots of other worthies have been named above, and I would add Rudy Rucker, but to be honest nearly all of them were/are better-known.
Gene Wolfe is easily the best sci-fi writer from a technical perspective. There is no comparison. Unfortunately, the depth of his books and their technical complexity also make them difficult for some newcomers to approach. His Solar Cycle (New Sun, Long Sun, Short Sun) series' have entire sets of supplementary books devoted to trying to identify all the hidden meaning, subtle lies, and even Easter eggs of his creations. His devotion to unreliable narrators is a device that is highly under-utilized by other authors, and makes every book into a brilliant maze of layered stories and selective truths. It is almost a bonus that he also writes masterful prose that sweeps you away and breathes life into grim days near the end of time, where humankind spins down the last windings of the spring.
I'm not sure that it was everything Heinlein did stand for in the book, he usually took a few ideas, stuck to them for the story of the book and made a good story of it. But he's hardly under-appreciated.
If you need an under-appreciated author, try Bertil Mårtensson.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
David Gerrold gets my vote. Oh, he's around but his master work is largely unheard of. He wrote the Trouble With Tribbles episode of Star Trek, and one of his books was made into a movie (Martian Child) which I haven't seen...
But his Chtorr series is *amazing* and, sadly, out of print. The Chtorr series is about an alien invasion except the invasion isn't a war in the traditional sense. It's an ecological war and the Chtorran lifeforms are about half a billion years older (more evolved) than our's. Their microbes have been replacing our's and it's gone increasingly further up the food. There seems to be no obvious sentient intelligence in any of the aliens, and there's been no evidence of anything like starships. No one knows where it's coming from, they just know it's not terran.
I really enjoy the writing style. It feels like the author is enjoying himself when he's writing these books, and that makes you enjoy it even more. The books are all from the perspective of the main character. It can get introspective (fine by me) and also it can be preachy at times with the author preaching his ideas. A lot of which I find fascinating regardless of whether I agree with them or not, but there are definitely times when it can get tiresome.
4 books have been written, with each book being superior to the previous book. For something like well over a decade, the 5th book has been marked as "coming soon!". No one really believes it anymore, but hey, duke nuke 'em 3d is out, GNU/Hurd is more or less usable, so why not?
Dune is great, as long as you don't include anything his kid wrote. I read some of those, thought they were bad. Then they had the final chapter - supposedly from notes left from his dad. I think they pulled a blair witch with a fake finding of something. It was bad. Bad is putting it nicely, it took all the philosophical bent that dune had and wrapped it up into something that was dreary to get through. Also they had to write a few trilogies of mediocre at best sci fi to explain the old couple characters in the last chapter of chapterhouse. Not a good way to wrap up the series and the cliffhanger Herbert left with his death wasn't solved adequately.
Oh I think his kid really did find something... But I doubt he'll ever have the guts to release the 30 or so pages of notes that were found. Kevin Herbert's ending to the series was clearly not where Frank Herbert was going. Oh I'm sure some of it is accurate, but certainly not the major points.
Duncan is the true Kwisatz Haderach (or something like that) and so he merges with an AI that only existed in his Butlerian Jihad books? What about one of the most important themes to Dune that a central and charismatic leader is terrible for humanity because it results in stagnation? And *SPOILER ALERT* what about the whole thing where the Bene Gesserit decide to work with Leto's golden path and bait the Honored Matre's into destroying Arrakis to fully erase Leto's conciousness to free humanity from the trap of prescience? *END SPOILERS*.
All that said, Frank Herbert was certainly going somewhere with Duncan, but I personally have no idea where.
Frank Herbert *is* underappreciated, but he's no where near being the most underappreciated. That said, I feel like something has to be said here.
The problem is that the masses tend to only like the first book, or at least like it the most without really understanding what the series was supposed to be about...
This is the 1st time ever that I'm replying to myself but I didn't mean to post this anonymously. Ugh.
Stith is best known for the novel "MANHATTAN TRANSFER" which starts with Manhattan being cut out, domed, and lifted into an alien spaceship.
http://www.neverend.com/bibliography
Firelance and Night Rider are still two of my favorite books.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
Thanks! His books are providing a perspective that stands out and the only comparable author with a similar perspective is Murray Leinster.
Other authors that I feel are under-appreciated:
Øyvind Myhre
Bertil Mårtensson
Mike Resnick
Iain M Banks
Richard Morgan
Piers Anthony
Jack Vance
Christopher Anvil
Björn Kurtén
Leigh Brackett
Karel Capek
Roald Dahl
Steven Gould
John M Harrison
A.A. Attanasio
Franz Kafka (If you have the stamina, no wonder that people refer to him when describing public services)
Henry Kuttner
Keith Laumer
Fritz Leiber
Ken MacLeod
Jack McDevitt
John Scalzi (See Whatever
Timothy Zahn
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
everyone else is - the most under-appreciated SF writer is... Dan Brown. Clearly. Huh, what? Sure he's fabulously wealthy and successful, but so are most of the other writers being mentioned. Unlike many of them he's never - NEVER - won a Hugo or a Nebula. How under-appreciated is that? Very. Not a science fiction author? Have you even read "The Digital Fortress"? That had science in it and it was fiction.
Obviously the real most under-appreciated Science Fiction writer is John Steakley, who wrote the book "John Carpenter's Vampires" was based on. The sequel had Jon Bon Jovi in it.
I kid. John Steakley also wrote "Armor", which is one of the best armoured mobile infantry books ever written. No longer with us, sadly. Bit of a drinker.
Brian McNaughton - "Throne of Bones". A collection of short stories about ghouls and the ghoulish, set in a world very similar to Jack Vance's Dying Earth though a good deal more venal and depraved.
"For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home. They are seldom alone, not through love of one another's company, but because a lone ghoul is suspected of stealing food. Their copulation is so hasty that distinctions of sex and identity are often ignored."
I don't know. I've read a good deal of what she wrote and was rabidly into her for quite some time. Then I came to realize that basically she was rather one dimensional and her model of the world is not very realistic. Yes, of course humans essentially perform better when motivated by self-interest, but human beings are so much more than little drones of capitalism. We're very complex and our motivations vary from day to day. For someone who actually looks at the complexity of the world Rand starts to look a little simple.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
It appears to me that the only thing Rand had going for her is that she was a local writer and thus appeals to some in the USA more than other things written elsewhere on the same topics.
For example, I was less politically and socially naive than what she has written by the time I was 16, even though I was an introverted geek that mostly read Asimov, textbooks, technical manuals and newspapers.
Haven't tried the Sea of Time books yet, but his Dies the Fire and subsequent books (7 or so I think) are brilliant fun and probably my current favorite books, although they verge on Fantasy of course. They are tied to the Sea of Time series of course, since they relate what happens in this world when Nantucket is sucked back in time.
Emberverse I:
Dies the Fire
The Protector's War
Meeting at Corvallis
Emberverse II:
The Sunrise Lands
The Scourge of God
The Sword of the Lady
The High King of Montival
Tears of the Sun
- with 2 more books to come, next one this September
They are sort of a retelling of the King Arthur myth as well as others, in a world where technology suddenly stopped working - but only some technology, and our ancient myths start coming alive again. Set in North America, primarily the former USA, and initially at least mostly in Oregon, with bits told elsewhere, including Britain. I absolutely love these books, and I think they are greatly underrated to be honest.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I gave up after Duncan Idaho turned up again for the sixth or sixteenth time.
"Dragon under the Sea" is probably not seen as SF anymore but is ten times better than anything Clancy ever wrote with a submarine in it. Even "whipping star" was good.
i would think that shockwave rider would be popular among slashdot-types, despite being a bit cheesy and dated.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
yeah, but being over-the-top about it was the only original part of her work, and definitely the source of her popularity, so what would you expect?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
If you like real "hard" science fiction rather than fantasy, then Charles Sheffield takes some beating.
Norman Spinrad - varied novels and intriguing people
Lloyd Biggle Jr Monument is one of my favorite novels.
Eric Frank Russell - Look for And then there were none
James Hogan - Sometimes accused of telling the same libertarian story over and over. There might be some truth to that, but he does it so well.
Donald Kingsbury - The Moon Goddess and the Son and Psychohistorical Crisis were intriguing. Amazingly detailed new worlds.
Tim Powers - Perhaps drifting into fantasy but well crafted stories.
Great author, but has had plenty of recognition.
"Floating Worlds" - interesting scifi book, that nobody seems to have read.
Nowadays folks know his Bolo works, but Dinosaur Beach, Worlds of the Imperium, End as a Hero, and the Retief series were pretty unique for their time. One of my favorite authors.
Dinosaur Beach has to be one of my favorite novels, its a cracking good time travel novel with transhumanism before such was known.
http://www.dinosaurbeach.com/
"Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability in the opponent." --Sun Tzu
That's all great, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the point I was making.
Ray Nelson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nelson wrote Eight O'Clock in the Morning which became the wonderful John Carpenter film: They Live. But, he also co-wrote the first P.K. Dick book I ever read [and which would make a fantastic shoot-em-up big-budget film] in the 1960s, The Ganymede Takeover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ganymede_Takeover that was our first introduction to Dick, autonomic darts, robots that own human beings, the rather ridiculous Vugs etc. etc.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
The Quintaglio Ascension books are well written, and I would recommend them for anybody who wants to introduce SF to kids with dinosaur fixations. However, I found that most of his follow-on books have Piers Anthony-itis; that condition whereby an author takes a story that has enough plot and characterization for a short story or novelette at best, but pads it out with useless verbiage into a novel to maximize earning potential.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Iain Banks is a Scottish writer of the Culture universe, among others.
He's considered by The Times as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945, and yet he's relatively unknown compared to many people discussed here.
The Inquestor Trilogy. John C. Wright 20 years ago.
"Fear is the rootkit of democracy.." Blarkon
Jeff is more widely known for writing computer books, including books on Turbo Pascal and x86 assembly language, Degunking Windows, and Jeff Duntemann's Drive-By Wi-Fi Guide, and for editing one of the better programming magazines of the 90's, PC Techniques (later Visual Developer Magazine), but his SF work is worth anyone's time. The Cunning Blood , his first published novel, is classical hard SF jam-packed with information and ideas, including a prison planet without electricity, kept that way by nanotechnological devices that eat active electrical conductors. (The inhabitants of the planet have developed many non-electrical technologies into a fairly advanced society.) It also posits life after death...with the effects thereof mainly visible at the femtometer scale. (You'll have to read it to understand what that means, and the significance that point has.)
Another group of his works involves the survivors of a lost starship that have built a new home on an Earthlike world...which has thousands of strange machines left on it by an unknown race, consisting of two pillars and a bowl of dust. Tap on the pillars 256 times, in any combination, and an object will appear in the dust. Simple patterns produce simple objects, like saws, knives, and rope; more complex patterns are likely only to produce indescribable metal "thingies," but certain patterns produce powerful objects indeed. The resulting world has something of a "steampunk" flavor in parts, with an additional strong resemblance to frontier America. For one of the books in this universe, he's teamed up with another local author to revive the old Ace Doubles-style book, with two novella-length works bound "back to back" in one volume.
He's currently working on a quite different novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities, that combines fantasy, SF, and humor in some surprising ways. Among other things, it features--I am not making this up--zombies doing the Macarena.
Read more from Jeff on his Web site and blog.
Be who you are...and be it in style!
I'd nominate William Hope Hodgeson.
Ok, maybe that's slightly disingenuous. There are actually good reasons why he isn't more widely appreciated - such as the fact that his most notable work is written in a hideous cod-medieval style and is about twice as long as it needs to be.
But among a bunch of short-stories of variable quality, he put out two staggeringly imaginative works of longer fiction.
The House on the Borderlands has a central premise that seems, at first glance, quite similar to The Time Machine. However, it has a number of significant differences in its own right. First, it imports some substantial trappings from the gothic horror genre (parts of the book are more horror than sci-fi or speculative fiction). Second, it has some really ambitious cosmological stuff - basically, think back to the "dying earth" section near the end of The Time Machine, and imagine that extrapolated forwards. This book's written in a perfectly approachable style and isn't particularly long - it may date from around a century ago, but it's still pretty accessible to the modern reader.
But the House on the Borderlands is never going to be the work that WHH is best remembered for (where he is remembered at all). That's always going to be The Night Land.
Here we have a book that is, in many ways, so far ahead of its time as to be mind-blowing. Written before the First World War, it's set in the distant future, on an Earth where the sun has gone out and where humanity survives in a gigantic arcology, beset on all sides by both natural and supernatural threats. If you're looking for literary sci-fi firsts, then this book is filled with them: arcologies, geothermal power, NASA-style food concentrates and powered armour, to name some of the more notable examples. It also does a great turn in Lovecraftian horror (indeed, Lovecraft himself was, with some reservations, an admirer of WHH), with hostile yet inscrutable supernatural forces which share quite a few traits with the Cthulhu mythos. The book is a strange combination of speculative sci-fi and fantasy-horror and is one of the most imaginative books I've ever read.
Unfortunately, it's also actively painful to read at times. It's written in the aforementioned cod-medieval style, has a completely unnecessary and rather tedious medieval framing-story, has massive amounts of repetition (particularly in the second half) and features an toe-curlingly misogynistic and implausibly written romance storyline (WHH apparently went through his short life with almost no contact with the opposite sex).
In short, it can be an extremely rewarding book to read, but it demands a lot of effort from the reader (and quite a bit of skim reading in the second half, if I'm honest). There is a modern "remake" of it by James Stoddard that you can get from Amazon's Kindle store, which switches to modern language, tightens up the framing plot, makes the romance subplot more plausible and reduces the length dramatically. That might be a better way into it - but when I tried it, I did find that a little of the original's imaginative power got lost in the translation.
Zenna Henderson, for her "People" series.
African American female SciFi author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler
"Kindred" is pretty awesome. Hollywood movie bait.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_(novel)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Stainless Steel Rat series are by far my favourite sci-fi books. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stainless_Steel_Rat
Slippery Jim DiGriz is a top notch character, how these books have managed not to be turned into a film/tv series is beyond me.
I was scrolling down to see if anyone had beaten me to Alexei Panshin. Drat.
"Rite of Passage" is one of the great science fiction novels. There isn't anything very groundbreaking from the science angle but the characterisation and plot are brilliant.
My teenage daughter assumed that Panshin must be female because his teenage girl protagonist is so believable. Her gradual (partial) transcending of her own cultural blindness is excellently done, and the way Panshin manages to use her as a highly sympathetic POV character from what turns out to be a really quite disturbing culture is done with a lot of subtlety.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
According to Harlan Ellison, who was there, the actual event came about at a Con in NYC in 1952 when L. Sprauge de Camp made a joke that, if you wanted to make money with science fiction, you should just invent your own religion. L. Ron, however, took it seriously.
L. Sprauge de Camp, unfortunately, remains unappreciated.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I can't believe that no one mentioned Science Fiction Hall of Fame: The Greatest Science Fiction Stories of All Time ! Chosen by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America and published in 1970: stories were from 1929-1964. No ISBN in my (tattered) copy, but Library of Congress Card Number 70-97691. Edit: Oh wait: look here: http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Science_Fiction_Hall_of_Fame_Volume.html?id=yPVbDv5DqkoC. 52 of 58 people rated it 4 or 5. You can then buy it right over in the left-hand column. Go, go!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The Altered Carbon trilogy is as masterpiece of dystopian cyberpunk. Shame he seems to have moved to fantasy now, I didn't think as much of his last two books.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm a firm fan of his work.. The "Night's Dawn Trilogy" is a good fun read, and the "Commonwealth Saga" is intriguing..
Misspent Youth is a really interesting read, and had me snickering a few times and thinking "Yep, I can see that!"..
The Greg Mandel series (his first, I think) were good too.. Well worth picking up..
People kind of forget about him, but I don't know why. He was constantly being nominated for Hugos and Nebulas. I read Niven and Pournelle's Inferno long before I read Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy trilogy -- but it compares quite favorably in retrospect.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I'm going to trot out two authors that I think are very underrated. George Alec Effinger (Esp. his Marid Audran series); and; Walter Jon Williams (Esp. Hardwired and related books).
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
I mentioned in another thread to someone talking about "hard" sci-fi, but the original post was AC, so my response probably got lost...
Hal Clement?
I've know read Jack Williamson, but not "Firestarter."
Now that I'm thinking... Clifford D. Simak?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Verhoeven's Starship Troopers adaption was a brilliant parody of the original material and made a pointed joke of everything Heinlein claimed to stand for.
If you consider the original novel to be profound I can't imagine you would have the sense of self-awareness required to enjoy the film, anyway.
I see you need a little something in that department as well. As unintentional self-parody, it was decent material. And space marines killing bugs? Always a great time!
I Robot is not nearly as bad as some people whine.
As a popcorn movie it was okay, but as something having the name Asimov linked to it it was a rape of everything he ever wrote.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Maybe not "under appreciated" as much as lesser-known, Connie Willis is a reliable source for a good read. I confess I haven't read her most recent 2 tomes (yet), but her earlier stuff is enjoyable. Especially if you don't mind some human emotion and humor with your ray guns and time warps.
Well someone mentioned him but didn't give him an entry. Gravity's Rainbow is killer, if not a tad bit long. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity's_Rainbow
Ayn Rand used strawman fallacy arguments, ad hominem attacks, and false dilemmas to make greed in capitalism look heroic and power-mongering by religions and socialist groups to be criminal. In reality, there are vicious criminals in capitalism as well as socialism and religion - people don't change, weapons just evolve.
But her real con was convincing people that when someone else is suffering, you have no moral obligation to help them out. It's the same bullshit as reincarnation spun a different way. If an Objectivist tries to help the poor, the sick, the injured, the uneducated, etc... he's betraying capitalism and preventing the free trade of the markets from leading the most moral people to success. So while it's not technically evil for him to do it, he has no obligation. The person who believes in reincarnation has no need to help others, because any pain they have in this life will be offset by a happier future life. Either way, it's a fancy justification for saying, "I got lucky in this life, everyone else can go fuck themselves."
I don't care who you are, your success is more luck than anything. Maybe you were born to great parents. Maybe you had a wonderful teacher or career mentor in your chosen field. Maybe you got lucky with your social networking skills (in the non-Facebook sense) and your career skyrocketed that way. Maybe you stumbled across a book or website or meditation practice that taught you the self-discipline to succeed. Most of all, you didn't die of communicable diseases, of cancer, in a car accident. No matter how much work you did to reach your current success, luck is more than 50% of the picture. The Objectivist fantasy that you owe society and the rest of humanity nothing in return is an absurdity.
Society needs to allow hard work to be rewarded, or it will collapse - that's why pure socialism will never work. But this idea that everyone with a hard life somehow earned their pain and does not deserve help from the lucky is nonsense.
Fantasy writer. The Gap Cycle is the only scifi work I'm aware he wrote, and it's fucking EPIC.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I enjoy his writings a lot, but they're just very good mystery novels with a few science fiction concept novelties set in space. I like them, I own most of them, but I wouldn't consider McDevitt groundbreaking in any way.
You claim none of the people who hate Rand have read her. Concerned Onlooker says "I've read her, liked her for a time, then realized she wasn't really that good."
Seems relevant to me. Here's another one. I've read Anthem, and a representative sample of Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead. I've also read some of her personal correspondence and a fair amount about her life.
Ayn Rand is a terrible writer, and, while she explicitly used the word selfishness, and made a case (at length) for it as a social value, her "selfishness," translated into the real world, maps perfectly onto "greed" as commonly constructed. The only reason it doesn't look like greed in her novels is that she very, very aggressively manipulates the reader and tries to manage their perception of events at every step. No event or motivation in Rand's books is ever presented to be interpreted in context of the reader's understanding of their own, real world - it's all very explicitly forced into Rand's perspective, with sometimes PAGES of explicit pre-packaged interpretation demanding that you read this character's rape of this other character as the highest form of love because it is purely self-involved which is the highest possible value because only the self is valuable because altruism and other-directed emotion not based on cold value judgements are horrible because...
And it goes on like this. It's not literature, it's not even really a utopian novel - it's propaganda. And, particularly speaking of the Fountainhead, not well written propaganda - I mean, that giant-ass speech in the courtroom? Come ON. Watch the black and white Fountainhead movie some time. Watch that motherf*&king speech, read out by an actual human being. It's intolerable - it's as far from naturalistic, comfortable speech as exists in the English language.
Mod parent correct.
And one of the things I most respect about him is that every book is different. Unlike, for instance, Zelazny, who started out so brilliantly, but who turned into the Amber Corporation after his divorce (yes, I know they're very popular books - and I don't care - try reading his fabulous Hugo/Nebula winner Lord of Light, or his little remembered Isle of the Dead, or his novelette The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth and see if you don't agree that the Amber series is really pretty dismal stuff by comparison)
Umm... His only divorce came in 1966, same year he married again, and it predates almost everything he ever published.
He never divorced his second wife, though they were separated during his later years which he spent with Jane Lindskold.
As for his opus... if you're looking for different, you've clearly not read enough of Zelazny.
The man put out three books of poetry while he wrote those Amber books you mention, did a dozen collaborations with other SF writers, won 4 Hugos (and other awards) from '76 to '87 alone, developed a video game, did ~20 other books, edited over half a dozen others... leaving 2 unfinished books at the time of his death. He clearly had decades of books left in him when he died.
Sure, his opus revolves around mythologies, gods and immortals a lot but he didn't dwell on a single myth in his explorations, always going to the next one.
And I don't see what is your problem with series. A long story is long. Particularly if it is loaded with characters.
Personally, I would have loved if he had done a trilogy around the Lord of Light.
As for why I find him to be underrated despite all those awards - the man wrote in so many references and subtext into his stories, years later you can find in them something you didn't know was there first couple of times you've read them.
Plus, being a poet, he knew how to set up those little ambushes mid-paragraph where you least expected them.
And you can tell that he had so much fun writing. His stories are full of tongue-in-cheek wordplay and jokes.
Without trying to be funny, like sat, Harry Harrison.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter
Invented Cyberpunk ("Dr. Adder", published in 1984, but written much, much earlier, and delayed due to graphic and extremely weird sexual content).
Invented and coined the term Steampunk ("Morlock Night", 1979).
Wrote the book with arguably the biggest number of cool scenes ever ("Farewell Horizontal", 1989). Seriously, read it. This book is nuts.
Also, was a very good friend of Phillip K. Dick's.
Jeter's output in the 80's was nothing sort of astounding. Sadly, he was reduced to doing a lot of hack work in his Star Wars and Bladerunner novels later on, and is all but forgotten today.
It's almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity.
My first step into the world of science fiction was a copy of his "Untouched by Human Hands" which I found among my grandfathers books when I was 12.
Is Norman Spinrad underrated? He was one of my favorite "young" authors back in the early 70s
Spider should absolutely be on the list!
With the third Lady Sally book still unsold and currently busy writing sequels to his "inherited" Heinlein book, there's hopefully more to come. Utterly different SF, but worth reading.
Yep, that's about where I ended up too. Nice post.
Blogging because I can...
Verhoeven's Starship Troopers was only dullwitted if you ignore its entire point - a venomous satire of propaganda and groupthink.
----
WWJD...For a Klondike Bar?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks
That's a name you don't hear often.
I thought "Consider Phlebas" was excellent, and "Excession" was brilliant.
"Use of Weapons" and "The Player of Games" were interesting, but not "great" IMO.
That's being far too kind to him.
New, pretty much unknown. Addictive. http://kassandras-song.com/free_stories
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
Funny, original and like nothing you've ever read before. Lafferty is the literary equivalent of taking a strong hallucinogenic. A wild and sometimes wonderful ride.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Absolutely Wolfe. He was a writer's writer, with strong but silent Hemingway-ish protagonists who told the story by what they did not say. Wrote a series "The Book of the New Sun" where the main character is a congenial and level-headed torturer on a dying Earth far in the future. Mr. Wolfe also developed the machine that makes Pringles. How could such genius be overlooked?
I don't know. Not so thrilled with the Academy (Hutchins) series, and the Benedict novels have become formulaic. The first four were great but I'm afraid he's beginning to just churn. How about the Miles Vorkosigan books by Bujold? Also an iconic and charismatic protagonist who rarely fights his own battles, but with a much higher tempo. And the entire series from beginning to end, including short stories, does not sag at all.
Dang, didn't see this and posted my own. Gene Wolfe for the absolute utter win. I think other authors can stop now. Wolfe already reached the peak. And the Pringles angle!
Good stuff but uneven quality. VALIS? Also, nuts. Still, Androids, Scanner, Policeman, and Second Variety are enough to be proud of and retire on that alone.
Ellison purportedly wrote an I, Robot script. That's something I'd like to see. The lowbrow action flick was terrible. Two brains? The robot has a secret f***ing brain? That's the plot twist?!
Mindswap! http://www.scribd.com/doc/35996274/Robert-Sheckley-Mindswap
His books are somewhat of a pseudosci-fi fantasy horror genre, but many of the Necroscope series were quite good.
Overall some of the ways he described the working and transfer of the vampiric virus were quite cool.
I would also submit David Gerrold's Ch'torr series, except that it seems to have stalled for nearly the last decade, and I worry that he's going to pull a (Robert) Jordan before it gets completed.
Hardwired is as good as anything any of the other big name cyberpunk authors did. Then there's his comedy series....
Ignoring the idiot trolls, most of the other authors I've seen mentioned had a *lot* of awards, and are quite well known and appreciated. Well, Doc Smith - go read Skylark of Space, and remember a) he started writing it, with the help of a female friend, b) it was first published in 1928, and only slightly revised in the late fifties. Science, adventures, and not a screaming heroine in sight... AND it was the first startship out of the solar system.
mark
A brilliant engineer, contemporary and friend of Heinlein and Hubbard.
My father was a friend of his; we lived in the same building in Jackson Heights when I was in elementary school, and we moved into his old apartment when he moved to New Jersey. My father used to say that Scientology began as an argument between Hubbard, Heinlein and Smith in that kitchen. Through the years that apartment probably hosted every member of the "Trap Door Spiders". I wish I had met them all! He did introduce me to Willy Ley and of course I had no idea who he was until "Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, (1957)" was published.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Hamlet (I, v, 166-167)
He's a writer's writer -- quality of prose was amazing, learned a new word on just about every page.
His Gap Cycle is brilliant but is barely even listed, if at all, in most "top 100" sci-fi series lists. The portrayal of mankind's antithesis the alien Amnion, and their 'technologies', physiology and psychology are very original. The writing style is dark, hard edged sci-fi without dependence on all the scientific marvels typically separating the characters from space and space travel, so often leveraged in science fiction writing. There is no anti-gravity, just centrifugal force. He uses physics like a mallet to pound the cast of characters and the reader with the hard, cold realities of life in space. It's reminiscent, at times, of classic Arthur C. Clark describing the effects of starlight and gravity on the insides of a Rama vessel and its occupants.
The series also does a wonderful job of paralleling mini and macro power struggles across multiple levels: humanity vs. a very alien Manion, military forces vs. corporate powers, ship to ship combat, antagonist vs. protagonist.
This literary style combined with a blatant attempt to pay homage to Wagner's Ring Cycle makes for a truly unique science fiction series. An underlying device in the series is the rotation from book to book of protagonist, antagonist, victim and tormentor. It's hard to describe what makes it work and still feel believable, authentic and engaging, but somehow it is.
"Mirabile" is a great read
Ayn Rand did not oppose charity. But Ayn Rand thought it should be voluntary, nor forced by government.
Not Stellar, but deserves much better than he has gotten. He writes some really enjoyable SF, if on the Racy side! His stuff is only available in eBook formats form various places, but his website http://www.abintrapress.com/ has a deal for 33 of his books for $30.00. His 3rd World Products series is like eating pistachios, very hard to quit after the first one!
"You claim none of the people who hate Rand have read her."
No, I didn't. In response to GP I claimed "the roving band of nitwits" had not read her.
"I've read her, liked her for a time, then realized she wasn't really that good."
Still irrelevant, because I wasn't commenting about that. My comments, were, specifically:
(A) The "roving band of nitwits" think when she wrote about "selfishness" she really meant "greed". My point being that Rand used a meaning for "selfish" that does not occur in the dictionary.
And (B) that she made at least one good point, no matter how bad her writing was.
Agreed.
The original title as a serial in Astounding wasn't bad, either: "The Fisherman" (you have to like biblical references, though).
"Time is the Simplest Thing" is a good example of a book that works really well as SF-- it *feels* like an SF novel, not Fantasy-- without having much in the way of a hard scientific or technical basis.
Maybe I'm just showing my age, but I still consider Stapledon's 1930 quasi-novel "Last and First Men" to define "epic" science fiction forty years after reading it for the first time. Decades before "cosmic" scope became science-fiction cliche (and long before the concept of natural selection had been accepted by the overwhelming majority of rational human beings), he penned this epoch-spanning story of the evolution of past, present, future, and "final" human species. Check his brief Wikipedia page. Only a few of his other works approached the audacity and imagination of L&FM, but IMHO that work alone earns him a place in the pantheon.
I don't know. I've read a good deal of what she wrote and was rabidly into her for quite some time.
Were you a "low-life sociopath" at the time? Otherwise, I don't see the relevance to the comments above.
Yes, of course humans essentially perform better when motivated by self-interest...
So she was basically correct on the desirability and morality of egoism and a market economy?
I'm not an Objectivist, and I disagree with Rand in fundamental ways. But I've generally found Objectivists and their sympathizers a better class of people, and certainly preferable to the know nothing nit wits who feel the need to shriek their ignorant disapproval of Rand at every opportunity.
I wish I had mod points today, you'd get one.
Free Martian Whores!
When it comes to plausible, space exploration & sci-fi, I have been impressed with & influenced by the "Academy" series of books by Jack McDevitt (The Engines of God, DeepSix, Chindi, etc.). Of course he allows for the invention of faster-than-light travel, but other than that, McDevitt pays special attention to a future that is both plausible & fascinating ... not easy to do. His stories are a little slow b/c he takes time to explain the technology and how the human race got to where it is. He also pays special attention to the field of xenoarchaeology. Look it up!
Screenwriter and author of Buckaroo Banzai.
For me it would undoubtedly be Helmut Halfmann, who wrote the story for the AquaNox game series, which are (sadly) the cornerstone of vastly underrated brilliance.
It started way back in 1996 with Archimedean Dynasty, a DOS game that had (for the time) advanced 3D graphics, a long and exciting nonlinear storyline, dialogue where you get to choose what your character says and it actually makes a difference, splendind environments and extendable vehicles, and above all, a great story.
This world is a post-apocalyptic dystopian future, where humanity has destroyed the Earth's surface to the point of uninhabitability by the mid-22nd century, and, lacking sufficient space tech, the only way to survive was to migrate into the oceans where the water provides a strong enough shield from the radiation. The games play in the 2660s, when humanity has completely forgotten what life on the surface was like.
A deeply troubled society living in a completely hostile environment, breathing artificial breathing gases that mess with their heads, living in amazing yet depressing underwater cities where no sunlight ever goes. Imagine that with some of the most brilliantly and disturbingly atmospheric soundtracks ever put into a computer game, and what you have are the sequels AquaNox (2001) and AquaNox 2: Revelation (~2003).
The story was so intricately worked out that to this day I can still see it happening; there was a timeline starting from the 21st century that detailed the events that led to the world you see in the games, and I remember getting the chills and thinking "HOLY SHIT!" when I realized that some of these fictional events have since then actually happened and some are looking more and more plausible by the day.
Call me a fanatic (which I am), but the day I got a copy of AquaNox bundled with an old Geforce video card was the day when gaming started for me (even though I didn't even understand a word of it because it was in English) and the day Massive Development went under was the day it ended. Every single game I've played since then only managed to get ONE of these things right, at best. When was the last time you played a game that kept you imagining being in that world for days after you've played it, that kept you replaying over and over because of the sheer atmosphere, or one where you extracted the game's sound files (ahem) just so you could listen to the ambient music for hours on end? When was the last time you played a game like that, and at the end you thought, "holy shit, this could actually happen?"
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
Burning karma to plug my favorite sci-fi author, Howard Tayler. His major opus is Schlock Mercenary, a web comic about ambulatory excrement working for a company of space marines for hire. Really, it's better than it sounds! And it's delivered the funny every day without fail since 12 June, 2007.
I'm comfortable submitting him as "underappreciated" due to the obscure medium he's chosen - not a lot of recognition to be gained as a comic artist. Howard's comic demonstrates, though, that thought-provoking hard sci-fi can be delivered in a format other than the novel.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Look him up on Amazon and then look at the price for the Kindle Editions, most of them are free.
I thought the film was about as faithful to the book as Jurassic Park (film) was to Jurassic Park (novel).
I tend to refer to it as the 'Nutri-Matic Tea' version -- a film almost, but not quite, completely unlike the novel.
"Under-appreciated" is a hard word. Most of what I've seen posted above are authors who were pretty well appreciated.
I think Walter Jon Williams' book "Aristoi" counts as under-appreciated because it was in the running for a Hugo award- but wasn't selected. The ideas and concepts put forth in that novel, and the clarity and believability of the universe/society that he created made it one of the best sci-fi books I have ever read. I understand that that year had a lot of other good candidates for the award, but I've always felt his was still head and shoulders above the rest of the field. He really should have won.
I can't promote him as an under-appreciated author, though. His other books, while mildly entertaining, simply did not reach the level that Aristoi did. If that had been his only novel, he'd have been on my list of "shoulda-beens." As it stands, he's a one-hit wonder. But WHAT a wonder. Man, if his other stuff had been even half as good as Aristoi, I'd have cleared him a whole shelf in my library. Good author. Great book.
(I've often wondered if he feels the same way about the comparative merit of his other works)
Iain M. Banks underappreciated? He's a popular and celebrated writer, who easily sells lots of books. I could say the same about Jack Vance, Roald Dahl and Kafka. The rest of your list are indeed unknown to me, and I read quite a lot of sci-fi. :-)
The word "deserve" is where your argument fails. No one deserves a damn thing except life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If my neighbor hits the lottery, he doesn't suddenly owe me something extra simply because he was luckier than I was. If he's generous and kind enough to do something for the less fortunate, huzzah for him. But I'll be damned if I'm going to give the government permission free reign to his good fortune, to redistribute it as they see fit. The problem with your ilk is that you just see rich people as evil, money-hoarding pricks. You don't know them as people, or track their charitable givings, or anything. You don't know if they were handed their wealth from mommy and daddy or if they busted their ass to climb out of poverty up to the top. Regardless of how they got it, they don't deserve it, or they have "more than enough", or they "owe everybody something". And the exact amount they "owe society" is never enough -- it's always a nebulous concept of "they should give more" that is never actually sated (until, I'm assuming, they're just like you)
"The Witches of Karres" seems to get the most attention, but that one kind of left me cold. I much preferred the Telzy Amberdon stories. Yeah, psi powers, which kind of pushes it towards the "fantasy" border, but it's handled very much in a science-fiction/space opera sort of way.
My favorite of his that I can think of right off is "The Tuvela", a.k.a. "The Demon Breed". Not much psi in that one (maybe none; Nile Etland doesn't have any psi powers I recall... she's just very, very competent.) Great "One really pissed-off woman vs. an alien invasion. Pity the aliens" story.
James H. Schmitz was a Sci-Fi writer published from the 40s to the 70s. He mostly wrote short stories (most in a common setting, often with one of two specific lead characters), though he wrote a few (short) novels.
He was an early feminist author; most of the his lead characters are strong females (Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee are the leads in many of his short stories, and the main lead in the novel The Demon Breed is a woman). His most famous work, the novel The Witches of Karres, is a picaresque, wildly imaginitive space-romp (although rather overtly expanded from a novelette).
In one (or more?) stories, he imagines an Internet-like source of information, and (IIRC) even calls it a "web".
In the 2000s, most of his works were republished by Baen Books, with sometimes significant interference^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H editing by Eric Flint.
Not a series. Like The Lord of the Rings a single novel published in three volumes. And it contains within it two short stories and a play, all of which are excellent.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
It needs to have its own law named. "Communism!" (or "Socialism!", often no distinction is made) is the Godwin's Law of the right.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I vote for D.F. Jones as being most under-appreciated. He wrote the Colossus trilogy, Denver is Missing, Earth Has Been Found, and others. I've read all his works listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Feltham_Jones except for Bound in Time.
His work was not always spectacular; Implosion, for example, has a weak ending. However, IMHO, Earth Has Been Found remains the best science fiction ever written, with Denver is Missing being a close runner-up.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
The roving band of nitwits seems clearly constructed above as a generic term for people who dislike Rand, but alright.
Rand didn't actually invent a new definition of selfishness - she tried to positively connote the existing one as part of her "enlightened self-interest." But she's clearly advocating for greed as a motivating factor, when viewed through any outside lens.
As far as (B), I don't think she did. Her villains were caricatures of attitudes that don't actually exist - their motivations and construction is so far removed from reality as to be useless to model the genuine possibility of abuse in the guise of altruism.
Ann Maxwell - A Dead God Dancing and Name of a Shadow.
Too bad romance novels pay better or she might still write Sci-Fi.
Hmm. I thought Piers Anthony-itis was where you pad that novelette out over about thirty or forty books.
Oh to be a Silkie!
"But she's clearly advocating for greed as a motivating factor, when viewed through any outside lens."
A big part of the Objectivist philosophy is to never take or accept something one has not earned via one's own efforts. So "greed" cannot possibly be involved, if you accept that the common use of the word implies exploitation of others (as in "corporate greed"). But I admit it is somewhat dependent on your definition. That's what I mean when I say it.
"Her villains were caricatures of attitudes..."
Yes, definitely. She exaggerated to get her point across. So? I disagree very strongly that it did not represent real actions by real people. Remember, her whole philosophy was built around things she saw while growing up in the Soviet Union. Power-grabbing under the guise of "helping" the worker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosel_Brown
Noticed a bit in her time, but long out of print,
My incomplete pulp paperback collection is bagged up - spine glue was 40 years old and gave out.
for illuminating the foibles of humans, Kornbluth had directness
But I wanted to post, not as AC
Colin Kapp
Stanislaw Lem
Tim Powers (more on the fantasy side than SF)
L Beam Piper
Kir Bulichov, just like many other Russian sci-fi writers, are pretty much unknown to the West. He is excellent.
Another obscure, but brilliant Russian sci-fi writer is Sever Gansovski - with short stories like "Poligon", "Day of Fury", etc.: http://tinyurl.com/c6eygs4 , see also: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?11119
Chalker is still my favorite. Any other fans out there?
While I haven't read all of Kube-McDowell's novels, I've read most. His first, _Emprise_, is wonderful --I've read it maybe 5 times over the years, though the sequels are so-so. He has a few other good ones, and a few misses. Allegedly, his Star Wars novels are pretty good. As far as I know, _The Adolescence of P-1_ is Ryan's only novel, but what a gem it is. I've read it about every 5 years since 1977. One of the first intelligent computer novels.
yeah, I had the same problem, and trouble following discussions. I just switched back to the "classic" mode. much better.
The only way they are not mutually exclusive is if the socialism is somehow consensual; give according to your own choice. If the government is the socialist institution and the common means are 'taken' rather than 'given' by the individuals, then the libertarianism is just a wish.
You could have pockets of socialism within a greater Libertarian society so long as membership in, 'taxes' to, and departure from those pockets is totally up to the individuals involved. A medical care 'community'. A food production and sharing community. But not big-S state Socialism.
By 'big-S' you really mean Totalitarianism, which is a political system, not an economic one - even if one of its concerns is indeed economic control.
Well, Piers Anthony had the disease untreated for so long that it grew particularly acute. (Treatment involves sales of new books drastically dropping from readers looking at the latest offering, shuddering after remembering hours wasted on the previous volume, and saying "Never again!"). Other high profile cases would be Fred Saberhagen (*Swords*), Terry Brooks, and David Eddings. There are rumours of cases prior to Piers Anthony, such as John Norman, but this correspondent has declined to confirm them.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
OK, should have said more than three decades since I was reading his stuff in a small school library in Australia in the 1970s, which didn't have many science fiction books at all. Worldwide success and hundreds of thousands sold is not obscurity. Winning a Hugo award for best novel is not obscurity IMHO. That's why I disagree, back when I was growing up he was one of the big names in SF and at least one of his books was available wherever SF books were sold. The literary mainstream didn't like him but they didn't like any SF.
You said yourself, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". That first freedom requires access to food, shelter, and medical care, and somebody has to pay for it.
Pick a successful, moral capitalist. For the sake of argument, I'll call him, say, John Galt. He was probably educated in a public school. Some of the people he worked with, worked for, or conducted business with were educated in public schools. He communicates over networks managed by the government. He conducts commerce over road and rail that are funded by the government. He can only do business deals because there is a court system for adjudicating contracts, and that court system is funded by the government. The air he breathes and the water he drinks are free of poisons because there is a government agency dedicated to managing air and water quality. He probably uses computers and the internet in some aspect of his business, and those were creations of government research programs and the government continues to fund research in many areas. He is protected from harm by police, fire departments, a prosecution system, and a prison system all managed by the government.
That government is run by people we elect and funded by us through our taxes. No heroic capitalist, even John Galt, can be successful without it. So yes, the people who benefited the most from this giant interwoven network of public institutions that enables them to make their fortune do deserve to pay the most to support the people less likely and to make sure the system still works for the next round of motivated entrepreneurs.
Now on the other hand, I genuinely understand your last set of points. It's what originally drew me to Objectivism - I was frustrated with the idea that no matter how much I did for others, it was never enough. Where do you draw the line? 10% of income to charity? Why not 11%? Why not 12%? Why not 100%? I don't know the answer, and I hate that there is no easy, logical rule to apply that lets you know exactly when you are doing enough charity and can rest easy. But Ayn Rand's solution, "Fuck you all, I am never morally obligated to do a damn thing for anyone else at any time for any reason, I only help others when I feel like it." is no solution, it's the ethical equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum and running to your room the first time Mom asks you to wash some of your own laundry. I don't have the answer, and it's an important question. But her answer, like the answer from those that believe in reincarnation, is just an excuse to ignore the humanity in others and the social ties that bind us all together.
I don't care who you are, your success is more luck than anything.
Now, given all that above, why would one want to be an Ayn Rand villain? Yet we see above, the straw made real.
Just keep in mind that by calling success "luck", you're engaging in a similar con, this time against the successful. I guess it's easy to forget that one can make one's own luck.
Society needs to allow hard work to be rewarded, or it will collapse - that's why pure socialism will never work. But this idea that everyone with a hard life somehow earned their pain and does not deserve help from the lucky is nonsense.
And if there wasn't a way provided to work one's way out of such a rat's nest, then you'd be right.
Seriously, just ask "who would I want to be in this book?"
Piter De Vries
I had that one covered: "tech-geek mentat."
PDV is, of course, the character I had in mind for that. I'd make the same choice.
Duck, you do a good job here, but you don't go far enough. My sig points to the work of the greatest economist who has yet practiced the science. He points out that we all benefit from our inherited cultural framework, and that we all deserve, just by way of being human, a share in this.
Social Credit would solve everything...
No, you are frankly blind to the reality. You can't make your own luck if you're dead. You can't make your own luck if you're crippled by injury or disease. And the chances that you'll have the knowledge and determination required to make your own luck with that knowledge and determination arising out of nothing are near zero. Almost every great successful businessman or scientist had at least one teacher, parent, friend, colleague, coach, or supervisor that instilled in them the value of hard work and ambition - so the great luck in their life was getting that mentor. Every successful person has their success more from luck than anything else.
There is not always a way to work out of a rat's nest. If you're too sick to work, "working your way out" is not possible. If you have to care for sick family members or friends, or children ( say for example you have an idiot brother that impregnated a woman and then abandoned the child - he shirked his responsibility to care for the kid, and now your chances at making a good career for yourself are shot because you are obligated to care for the family member ). If you live in Detroit, or a rural area, the job opportunities may be very poor and you lack the resources to move. Try moving a 500 miles in search of work and finding a landlord that will rent you an apartment before you found a job. And the job market today is hard and it's getting harder - there are far fewer good opportunities than there are motivated, educated individuals.
Really? I read Atlas Shrugged, Capitalism: An Unknown Ideal, For the New Intellectual, and The Virtue of Selfishness. I think that qualifies me to make a comment.
I haven't read The Fountainhead, I read three of her non-fiction books and Atlas Shrugged. But as I wrote further up in the discussion ( http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3035653&cid=40941475 ), there's more than luck involved - the success of capitalists is built upon a functioning, safe society - roads, police, educated populace, military protection, safe drinking water, safe breathable air, courts, prisons, etc... and that success is also built with the use of research funded by the government (for example computers and the internet both started as government-funded projects). All of that is expensive, and it needs to be funded somehow - why not make the people who benefit the most from this infrastructure pay the most back to support it?
I realize pure socialism can't work. If you take everything from every person and try to redistribute it, you destroy the incentive to work and you turn the persons in charge of redistribution into dictators. But it is completely reasonable to demand that people who benefit from a functioning society help pay to support it.
I'll take a look at the book, thanks. Something else I've been looking at is "Participatory Economics". For all I know that's derived from the document in your link, I haven't read through it yet.
In any event, I think history has demonstrated that unfettered socialism leads to things like the Stalinist purges of millions of Russians. History has also demonstrated that unfettered capitalism leads to things like debt slavery and oligarchy - the people with the most money buy their way into the government, and then put the fetters back onto the market so that it works in their favor - that's the direction the US has been heading in for the past 30 years.
Speaking of making luck, let us also keep in mind that the last three presidents of the US could have been blocked long before they were ever contenders by charges of illegal drug possession. They got lucky in that they didn't get caught. The libertarian solution to that reverse lottery is simply to make drug possession and manufacture legal. Suddenly, we have lots of successful people who otherwise would have been caught and harmed by the War on Drugs.
If you're implying everything else about libertarianism is right (and the GP wrong), you're arguing a strawman (one of the things GP accused Rand of doing in her writing, remember?)
Well, that's not happening, ok? I just gave an example.
Mind you, if you're speaking of making luck, then whether libertarian solutions get implemented or not is also a matter of luck
At this point, we're removed any value from the word, "luck".
If you can't repeal the War on Drugs, well nobody else is obligated to help you. Your last 3 presidents are not obligated to. None of your congressmen are obligated to.
They are obligated to follow and support the US Constitution.
Let's kick it up a notch: nobody is even obligated to uphold the Constitution. If you live in a time where it's upheld, you're lucky. If not, too bad.
I already mentioned a counterexample above. Now, if you're claiming that one is not obligated to follow one's obligations, then that's another word that has lost any meaning.
Well, the Ayn Rand solution is that if that really is such a problem, then you and like-minded people can fix it with your own money.
But she sees no moral obligation to help others. I disagree with that. "Charity is optional" is a philosophy only popular with the people who would not be dead for lack of charity, and who are naive enough to believe they could never require it.
I have. You'll need to move in with someone who already has an apartment for a few weeks at least.
And if you don't know anyone who will let you move in? Then what?
I have solutions to that little problem: a) drop minimum wage or eliminate it completely, b) drop the tax benefit for employee health care, c) cut social security taxes (and benefits).
1. Try to survive on minimum wage, without relying upon a social support network (because many people don't have one). You will fail. 2. the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means that citizens should have health care through some means or another. 3. The people collecting Social Security already paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into it, you can't take it away from them now.
A race to the bottom against the Chinese is not the answer. Allowing industrial companies to poison drinking water instead of disposing of chemicals properly will make production cheaper. Removing worker safety regulations will make production cheaper. Removing labor laws related to 40 hour work weeks and child labor will make production cheaper. You really want that world?
I've read most of it, but I have had problems understanding parts of it. I'm still working on it.
Since mankind has been struggling with devising a proper economics system since the dawn of time, it will take a lot of thought before I give this my unreserved approval. It doesn't help that the guy attributes some of the ideas he opposes to a Jewish conspiracy. I'll examine the rest of his arguments on their own merits, but even if I do agree with him it's going to be damn difficult to convince anyone else to take him seriously on those grounds.
The world is of course never as black and white as anyone makes it seem.
I'm largely pro-capitalist. I buy into what I thought was Rand's core statement, namely that a governing system that requires large numbers of people to act against their own self-interest is either doomed to fail (best case) or aggregate power into the hands of those who are good at pretending to act on behalf of everyone else.
That said, I'm not completely opposed to charity, even the forced charity via welfare and similar that are the usual complaints of libertarians.
However, two scenarios:
I saw a woman not too long ago while I was waiting for a train. She had a long white skirt on, the back of which was stained brown in what was obviously fecal matter. There were other aspects of her appearance and scent to reinforce this conclusion. She behaved in a way that implied she thought this was perfectly normal and acceptable. I don't think there's much that could be done for her now, but I think that somewhere in the past, say 5-10 years ago she might have been in a place to reach her. I'm all for the idea of publicly funding programs that could prevent the people today that may end up like her (implementation details are certainly an issue, but let's assume for the sake of argument that an effective and viable approach exists).
vs.
I know someone (don't want to get too specific on who) who is incapable of supporting himself and his daughter on his salary, despite that I was able to support myself, my wife, and (at the time) two kids on less salary in the past. He simply makes piss poor financial decisions -- his mother does the same thing. I have a much bigger problem publicly funding his bailout.
The trouble is telling apart at a large scale those who got dealt a shit hand versus those who either dig their own grave or are disinclined to further themselves.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Actually, the AC is right that Ayn Rand's novels are science fiction. She wrote about things like metals with near-magical properties, invisible battleships, force fields, colonies of übermenschen trying to take over the Earth -- classic science fiction material. While Ayn Rand's works are well known they are not often recognized for what they really are, works of science fiction.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
No they are not. There is nothing that forces an individual to commit to any so called obligation. You can walk out on contracts, renege on agreements, break promises, and piss all over the Constitution. People have done it in the past, they're doing it now, they'll do it in the future. Again, what is the point of using the word, "obligation" if you ignore what it means. An obligation is not just something that you're supposed to do, but also consequences for not doing the thing you're supposed to do. For example, jail time is a possible consequence of "pissing" on the Constitution. Or not getting reelected. Or getting shot. Contracts have all sorts of fallout, if you chose to break them.
If the people without food or health care can do something about their own problems on their own, then you can do something about the War on Drugs on your own.
I can, but it's a lot more and a lot harder work than merely putting beans on the table. For you're trying to reverse a terrible flaw of society, not merely feed yourself.
And if you don't know anyone who will let you move in? Then what?
Then you find someone. I didn't say it'd be zero effort.
1. Try to survive on minimum wage, without relying upon a social support network (because many people don't have one). You will fail.
I take it you've never tried. I've done it a few times.
2. the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" means that citizens should have health care through some means or another.
This is very stupid for a couple of reasons. First, it's a quote from the Declaration of Independence which has no legal relevance. Second, health care is not "life". One could by the same boneheaded logical flaw demand immortality as a "right". They aren't going to get it no matter how it is legally interpreted. I'm not surprised to find someone claiming an entitlement as a right.
Why is government obligated to give health care when you can do it yourself? Why is government obligated to give social security when you can do it yourself? Why is government obligated to provide national security? Because you can't do it yourself. See where I'm going with this?
Also, you might want to cross over with Mr. A.C. who seems to think that government has no obligation to do anything, including enforce rights.
3. The people collecting Social Security already paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into it, you can't take it away from them now.
Why not? It's not their money any more. And we currently have bigger needs than worrying whether grannie eats catfood. We also need to keep in mind that they voted for the current insolvent program while the people who are currently paying for it didn't. If they had taken even rudimentary precautions way back when, the program would be far less vulnerable to being ended.
A race to the bottom against the Chinese is not the answer.
It's a better answer than the current slow slitting of the throat. You need to come up with a better answer in order to claim that a propose solution is not a good solution.
Allowing industrial companies to poison drinking water instead of disposing of chemicals properly will make production cheaper. Removing worker safety regulations will make production cheaper. Removing labor laws related to 40 hour work weeks and child labor will make production cheaper. You really want that world?
Actually, I do. All those regulations were passed with a single thought to the consequences. I think we can have reasonable environmental protection, modest worker safety regulation, and some of the rest without a lot of government regulation being required. The US had a good run, and now due to burdensome regulation and the subsequent blurring of corporate/government boundaries, we're starting to see the consequences of trying to have and eat our cake.
That means lower wages and lower standards of living. I merely recognize this fact. An obvious solution to cut back what makes US labor so expensive.
Ok, that's the Ayn Rand solution. Now how many Rand followers are actually applying the Ayn Rand solution? Who's putting their own money (and life, and freedom) on the line to fix the problems of the US?
I'd say most people. Anyone who donates to charity, for example. The Objectivist view, such as I know of it, would also include anyone who works and whose output is voluntarily accepted.
You survived by minimum wage completely on your own? Really? I'd like the details. I couldn't pay my car insurance and fuel for my commute on minimum wage. I couldn't pay rent and utilities on a one bedroom apartment on minimum wage in my area. In most of the country it is not enough to provide food, shelter, and transport to work - let alone medical coverage.
I realize that the Declaration of Independence has no specific legal impact. But the point is that this country secures freedoms for all of its citizens. It's a social contract, and starting about a hundred years ago with Teddy Roosevelt and gradually increasing with time is the public, national sense that our attitude towards among us that need help should be something other than "too bad".
We don't have bigger needs than worrying whether grannie eats cat food. If I have to choose between putting taxes on wealthy Americans - at 1980s levels or 1960s levels versus letting people starve, I'll vote for the tax and pay it without hesitation. Telling the people who paid into the program that we decided not to support them is immoral. It's also going to cause an awful lot of civil unrest - and maybe you like the idea of trying to get the national guard to gun down angry grandparents, but I don't.
In World War 2 the top tax brackets in the US was over 80%. The people of the nation felt their survival was threatened, and everyone suffered for it - most especially the troops killed and wounded, but everyone here paid a price. We spent the last decade at war, and that whole time taxes were near a hundred year low and were not increased. We're facing a debt crisis and economic crisis we built because in the last decade our transition from a democracy to an oligarchy shifted into high gear and somehow half the population has been conned into thinking social costs shouldn't be funded by taxes.
The changes you advocate are absurd. If you really believe in them, emigrate to China and go work in one of their sweat shops. Your "survival of the fittest" plans are convenient when you're certain you won't be one of the ones fed to the wolves.
You survived by minimum wage completely on your own? Really? I'd like the details. I couldn't pay my car insurance and fuel for my commute on minimum wage.
Minimum wage was $4.25 per hour in the early 90s and I was making roughly $5.00 per hour at the time ($5500 per year as a graduate student plus some part time work during the summer). I did have to borrow $4000 during the second year, but that was in large part because I didn't try to work more hours.
A second case was back in 2009. I started work as a seasonal worker at Yellowstone National Park. Starting pay was $8.00 per hour for five months of work (which was just above minimum wage at the time). I'm currently up to $10 to $12.5 per hour for about 10 months of work and saving most of my pretax wages.
That's one of the things to remember about minimum wage. Just because you start there doesn't mean you stay there. Given how much regulation there is to hiring someone, it's quite reasonable to allow employers to pay them less. They're taking a big chance on new workers and frankly, minimum wage is too high for many starter jobs.
In the PA coal region, where I grew up and most of my family still resides, the job opportunities are nil. So I have relatives with good work histories looking for work and getting offered minimum wage, part time, swing shifts - so gross pay is maybe $150 per week and their schedule prevents them from taking a second minimum wage job elsewhere. And promotion options are poor, because if you demand an extra $10 per week from your employer they can replace you with someone else that's desperate to get off unemployment.
The type of economy you're describing already exists, and it's fueled by illegal aliens - some tiny percentage of them are taking legal jobs from US citizens, but most of them are used as day laborers paid subsistence wages. They live three or five or fifteen in single person apartments. If they get hurt, they are dumped from the labor force and left to beg for help. And if someone tries to demand safer treatment or more pay, they are replaced by someone else more desperate. That's your ideal economy?
The United States had a period when capitalism was unfettered, it was the 19th century. The robber barons bought their local governments and police agencies, and employees were worked to death or put into perpetual debt slavery, or both. That's not the goal.
The type of economy you're describing already exists, and it's fueled by illegal aliens - some tiny percentage of them are taking legal jobs from US citizens, but most of them are used as day laborers paid subsistence wages. They live three or five or fifteen in single person apartments. If they get hurt, they are dumped from the labor force and left to beg for help. And if someone tries to demand safer treatment or more pay, they are replaced by someone else more desperate. That's your ideal economy?
That's the economy we have to work with. And keep in mind the effort we go through to keep the cost of living up. Prices of homes, health care, and education are greatly inflated, food is highly subsidized, taxes go to pointless transfers of wealth, and so on.
Also keep in mind that if you aren't valuable enough to be paid minimum wage, then you aren't paid at all. A salary of zero seems less useful to me than a salary that is "subsidence".
The United States had a period when capitalism was unfettered, it was the 19th century. The robber barons bought their local governments and police agencies, and employees were worked to death or put into perpetual debt slavery, or both. That's not the goal.
That's also the period where the US transitioned from a backwards former colony to a world class industrial and scientific power. That tells me that there's more to the story.
Hey, hey, hey, don't get all SS on us!
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
And he has already paid for all those things through taxes, same as you . So why does he deserve to get taxed AGAIN merely because he was successful through the use of those resources? We all had access to public resources. Some used them more effectively or more successfully than others. Why is that a ticket to more taxation? Sounds like a punishment to me.
I agree, the middle ground is a far better solution. The problem is that reform is required (particularly of social security and medicare), and no one but the Republicans is willing to talk about it. Paul Ryan is practically getting torn to shreds because he actually pitched a real plan that at least attempts to reform Medicare (however misguided). No one else is even willing to propose a counter solution. And those programs (particularly Medicare), by all estimated projections, are unsustainable. And that's my main issue -- we already have a series of gigantic expensive social programs that are supposed to be doing all these wonderful charitable things everyone is clamoring for. Except they don't work. And they're costing us lots of money. So before we dump a bunch of new cash into the sinkhole that is government, how about we fix the current social safety nets first?
I'd second Reynolds. I was business trip, and stopped in a book store and picked up a copy of Galactic North... Been hooked ever since.
I'd add Bob Mayer as well. He's a bit faster paced then Reynolds, and very good at telling a story. He can take a seemingly boring premise and turn it into a good story, and with a good premise...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
My ancestors worked the coal mines before the labor strikes - I grew up learning history about thousands of people killed due to unsafe working conditions, armed thugs sitting right inside the voting both to make sure everyone voted for the candidates personally selected by the local robber baron, and lives as indentured servants in perpetual debt to the company store. The ancient Egyptians made some of their greatest accomplishments on the backs of thousands of slaves - that doesn't mean their economic system should be modeled or admired.
Eliminating minimum wage and giving the person the choice between starving to death slowly on $3 per hour instead of starving to death rapidly on $0 per hour is not ethical and cannot be permitted - using supply and demand to exploit starving people for cheap labor is wrong, period.
As I've said many times before, and I will repeat now - the economy functioned fine 40 years ago when the wealthiest Americans paid twice as much tax as they do today. When we were at war in 1944 the highest tax bracket was over 80% - contrast that to the 15% long term capital gains tax on the wealthiest people today even while we were at war. This isn't a fair economy or an opportunity for people to follow the American Dream, it's an oligarchy: people who already have tons of wealth can accumulate additional wealth far faster than anyone earning a salary (instead of benefitting from long term investments) can gain wealth.
Steve Perry - his blog
http://themanwhonevermissed.blogspot.com/
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
The next Safehold book, Midst Trial and Tribulation, is due out 18 Sept in the US.
I'm personally waiting for the next Hedren War book myself...
While his Thomas Covenant series is pretty well known, the Gap series continued his amazing use of the anti-hero. Why keep reading about such wretched folks? His prose can get heavy, but he does a wonderful job of setting place. His characters are certainly multi-dimensioned, and deep. I've always hoped for a Thomas Covenant movie treatment, and a Gap TV series could be huge.
My all-time favorite sci-fi author. A thoughtful writer that is equally good at characters and dilemmas.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law