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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Hogan
The Two Faces of Tomorrow was my favorite.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
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
Alfred Bester didn't publish very much science fiction, but his novels are amazingly good, and the short stories are also wonderful.
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.
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.
Third. Farmer gets credit from Heinlein for breaking barriers that made for his own success(and Farmer gives it back).
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
Thanks for this. Vance is among the writers in -any- genre whose work I value most after 30-odd years of reading. I periodically return to the Demon Princes and the Cadwall novels. I cannot recommend his work highly enough.
Matt
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. (I suggested Vance waaaaay up at the top of the thread somewhere...) MUCH under-appreciated.
The Demon Princes was so well-appreciated by my wife, that had my daughter been a boy, he'd have been named Kirth. A fine, fine writer.
And his approach to "deep themes" was that there really aren't any "deep themes", just human lives with their tragedies and joys, aspirations and failures, grand vision and pettiness and always, always, from the meanest hamlets of Earth to the Grand Concourse, the innkeeper will try to shortchange you, water your drinks and pilfer your valuables.
Did I mention charming, too?
"To be fair, I was left completely unsupervised." ~Anon
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?
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.