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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.
The man who inspired Douglas Adams at an early age.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Frank_Russell
EMA
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
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?
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.
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
Having met the man a few times, and seen the adoration of his fans (only red Dwarf fans seemed more manic), I can genuinely say that Pterry [1] deserves all the accolades he receives. As to how well known his works are outside of fantasy fandom, I have no idea. Most of my geek friends has read his works and enjoyed them.
The Discworld books are largely parodies and satire examining various pop culture phenomenons or societal constructs. for something slightly different, try Nation which isn't considered a Discworld novel per se.
Pterry is also an advocate for voluntary euthanasia, having recently made a documentary for the BBC. His interest in the topic was partially inspired due to his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
If you are looking to try the Discworld novels for the first time, "Guards Guards" is a good place to start. The quality, complexity and depth of the novels has improved greatly over the 30 years or so he's been published.
[1] A convention adopted on alt.books.pratchett and alt.fan.pratchett also refers to Terry as Pterry as a homage to his book Pyramids. It has been fairly broadly adopted within fan circles. Terry used to be a regular participant on usenet before social media was cool. It was kinda neat to be able to have a conversation with an author you appreciated and get direct responses to questions on interpretation or intent of their works. Sadly since the onset of his Alzheimer's diagnosis, he doesn't frequent social media channels as much anymore. He has a twitter presence, but I'm unsure whether he is actually behind the keyboard. He now dictates his novels as a coping mechanism.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
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 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/
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.