11 of my fave s.f. novels
(originally wrote this for purposes irrelevant to go into at this juncture)
Keith Roberts, Pavane
Alternative history/counterfactual set in England where the Reformation never happened, Roman Catholicism dominates the country, and science has been suppressed.
Ward Moore, Bring the Jubilee
Alternative history in America where South won the Civil War, an unacknowledged precursor to steampunk in terms of technological backdrop, very well written and characterized, full of great historical jokes and inversions - e.g. in the impoverished, backwards remnant of the United States of America, the transcontinental railroad was never completed, the Native American tribes never defeated, and Deseret (the original Mormon name for Utah) still has polygamy, while a Klu Klux Klan-like militia called the Grand Old Army fights against the overwhelming economic influence of the Confederate States of America, a/k/a those damn Southrons.
Robert Sheckley, Mindswap.
The exact plot escapes my memory – something involving a guy who ends up in an alien body and his attempts to get home, involving jaunts across many strange planets, each time ending up inside a wildly different lifeform. But Sheckley is that rare thing, the genuinely hilarious s.f. writer.
John Brunner, Stand On Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up.
These weren’t quite sequels but more like companion books, both set in an overpopulated future, Sheep I think nearer the present and more polluted and ruined, Zanzibar more about pop cultural overdrive, the pressures of overcrowding. Both excellent.
Frederick Pohl and CM Kornbluth, The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law
Possibly my favorite s.f. book ever - certainly the most reread. Another one set in an overcrowded, ecologically ruined future, this time a world dominated by advertising agencies. Written in the 50s circa Vance Packard and The Hidden Persuaders but surprisingly not dated at all and probably has renewed interest because of Mad Men and our culture of branding, Facebook ads, micro-targeted propaganda etc. Pohl and Kornbluth wrote a bunch of really excellent books both separately and together – they belonged to this cabal of NY-based, mostly Communist or left-aligned writers who called themselves the Futurians, so the anti-capitalist slant of Space Merchants makes sense in this light. Gladiator At Law, also excellent, is set in a similarly dark, corporate dominated future, where the masses are kept happy by a revival of Roman style bloodsports
Walter Miller, A Canticle For Leibowitz
Absolute classic set in the Dark Ages several centuries after world war three, with monks who preserve the lost knowledge and painstakingly copy onto parchment the circuitry diagrams for machines they no longer know what they were for. Beautifully written and wry
Alfred Bester, the Demolished Man, and Tiger, Tiger (also published as The Stars My Destination) Two more classics. The Demolished Man involves a future where telepathy has been developed and so has teleportation ... and to be honest my memory of the plot/scenario momentarily fails me, but it’s.... great! Tiger, Tiger – ditto, I recall more particular amazing scenes. A great stylist, though, is Alfred Bester and generally accredited as a master.
Alfred Bester, the Demolished Man, and Tiger, Tiger (also published as The Stars My Destination) Two more classics. The Demolished Man involves a future where telepathy has been developed and so has teleportation ... and to be honest my memory of the plot/scenario momentarily fails me, but it’s.... great! Tiger, Tiger – ditto, I recall more particular amazing scenes. A great stylist, though, is Alfred Bester and generally accredited as a master.
Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room!
The book that was turned into Soylent Green but about 10 times superior to the movie. A very grim and gritty, well imagined scenario of overpopulation and resource depletion in New York circa 1999. ‘Soylent’ is not “made out of people” as in the hokey Charles Heston movie but is just one of the dreary processed foodstuff that people subsist on along with krill burgers and weed crackers. The rich go to “meatleggers’ and “meateasy’s” where they can get some dog or if they are really wealthy and connected, a sliver of beef steak.
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Things I would obviously add to the list: Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle (and a couple of other PKDs), several J.G. Ballards (The Drowned World, High Rise, Low Flying Aircraft, others), an Aldiss or two (Greybeard, Hothouse) Lem's Solaris and Fiasco definitely, possibly Christopher Priest's A Dream of Wessex.
And I suppose Fahrenheit 451 is undeniable.
As is Neuromancer. And The Difference Engine.
Ooh, how could I forget - most of John Wyndham - particularly The Chrysalids (that should be a movie, I think) and The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky, but you can't deny The Triffids.
Out of recent years reading in the genre, I don't think anything would get added to this core list, which was consolidated in my mid-teens - except for Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men and Starmaker - visonary works both. And David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which isn't exactly s.f. (more on it at the bottom).
Ooh, how could I forget - most of John Wyndham - particularly The Chrysalids (that should be a movie, I think) and The Midwich Cuckoos and Chocky, but you can't deny The Triffids.
Out of recent years reading in the genre, I don't think anything would get added to this core list, which was consolidated in my mid-teens - except for Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men and Starmaker - visonary works both. And David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, which isn't exactly s.f. (more on it at the bottom).
That said, I was very impressed by Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For the Future.
Short stories is a whole other ball game... Dozens by Ballard. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is one that lingers in the memory disquietingly. Ray Bradbury's one about the pedestrian who gets arrested for going for a walk at night.
Short stories is a whole other ball game... Dozens by Ballard. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is one that lingers in the memory disquietingly. Ray Bradbury's one about the pedestrian who gets arrested for going for a walk at night.
So many others from paperback collections I got from the local library.
Some major science fiction writers that I have never read: Asimov, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein (not entirely sure actually that it's zero with him - but certainly nothing has stuck in the memory). A number of other surprising omissions...
Mainstream literati having a go? Well, you'd have to mention 1984, Brave New World, Kingsley Amis's The Alteration (but certainly not Russian Hide and Seek), Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (but certainly not 1985 and nor The Wanting Seed). The Plot Against America. Oh and Nabokov's Ada, although he professed to despise s.f.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A Voyage to Arcturus
One of the strangest novels I've read. By David Lindsay, published in 1920. Not exactly science fiction, nor fantasy, but a tortured religious vision. Absurd, yet with a unsettling quality of reality and gravity that takes it out of that zone of the Marvelous a.k.a. make-it-up-as-you-go-along cobblers.
It starts with a seance or spiritualist type meeting in an Edwardian living room, there are three gentlemen ... but then quickly.... well, it's hard to say what proceeds from that, paraphrase wouldn't quite convey.... Logic and plausibility quickly disappear without any loss of a sense of reality or grim seriousness.. It's a slightly barmy religious vision that you can't shake off. The outer space location (Tormance, a planet around Arcturus) is by the by really...
The attitude to all things worldly, fleshly and pleasure-giving reminds me of peak-delirium K-punk's Spinozist scorn for "sad passions".
Harold Bloom was such a fan of Arcturus (he claimed to have read it hundreds of times!) that he tried to write a sort of an extension of it, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy (1979).His only attempt at a novel. Did I read somewhere that he subsequently tried to get hold of all remaining copies and destroy them? Or perhaps he joked about doing so.
11 comments:
No room for Joe Haldeman's The Forever War? That was the one that really captured my imagination when I read it. Published in 1974, it is a brilliant extrapolation from its era that, sadly, hasn't dated one bit. In a sly way, it's the real source for Paul Verhoeven's 1997 movie Starship Troopers, which is ostensibly based on the Heinlein novel.
In more recent sci-fi, the giant is obviously the late great Iain M. Banks. Not quite up there with the classics of the 60s and 70s, IMO, but still highly enjoyable space opera.
A Voyage to Arcturus sounds reminiscent of CS Lewis's also profoundly weird religious sci-fi trilogy: Out Of The Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. I remember finding the title and cover of That Hideous Strength deeply disturbing as a child.
The Wikipedia entry for That Hideous Strength reads like Ghost Box sleeve notes:
"Mark Studdock is a young academic who has just become a Senior Fellow in sociology at Bracton College in the University of Edgestow. The fellows of Bracton are debating the sale of a portion of college land to the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), whose staff already includes some college faculty. The sale is controversial since the land in question (Bragdon Wood) is an ancient woodland believed to be the resting place of Merlin. After the deal is struck, a N.I.C.E. insider called Lord Feverstone proposes a possible post for Mark at the Institute.
Mark's wife Jane (a PhD student at the university) has suffered a peculiar nightmare involving a severed head."
Ed - I was also thinking of Iain M Banks (as modern SF giant) and CS Lewis (as religion / SF weirdness). And that then prompts me to compare the two. While their beliefs are radically divergent they are both SF authors who are mostly known for their non-SF writing. Lewis's SF is part of his broader apologetic project. Banks's work is less overtly ideological - and I think he's the better fiction writer. He even counts as "mainstream literati" with his other career.
Keeping on a mystic-religious tip - I'd recommend Clarke's Childhood's End.
I have a soft spot for Asimov. Altho in hindsight he's as much a mystery writer as he is SF. The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun are really detective novels. The Foundation books are primarily about protagonists figuring out clever solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The robot short stories are based around twists in his laws of robotics. He's less interested in conjuring the epic or the weird than he is in puzzle boxes.
Re: The Chrysalids - it would have made a great early 2010s YA movie.
>Chrysalids as YA movie
Exactly! Plucky mutant kids in a post-apocalyptic overgrown landscape easily conjured with CGI.
I've never read any Haldeman.
When I was mad for s.f. - which was for about 2 or 3 years between being into Monty Python etc and getting into music (there was some overlap of eras of obsession) - I must have read 100s of novels and scores of short story collections, but there are many many big names I never got to. A.E. Vogt, all sorts.
There were a lot of writers I liked but never quite did an 'all-time fave' - e.g. Robert Silverberg was very good, I seem to remember liking a book by Thomas Disch set in the near-future.
The only Banks I read is The Wasp Factory.
Pretty certain That Hideous Strength is part of the Ghost Box canon
One of those C.S. Lewis non-Narnia books is the source of the name Belbury Poly
I've only read the Narnia books, each of which I must have read four times. At least.
As much I had an insatiable appetite for new fiction as a kid, I also loved to reread things. Had several go-rounds with the major Tolkiens.
1984 is pretty undeniable too I would have thought and Animal Farm if that counts. Some other personal faves; Anna Kavan - Ice, Ira Levin - This perfect day, John Christopher - Death of Grass, Asimov - Foundation Trilogy. Do like a bit of Vonnegut too, as well as Man in the High Castle, Galapagos, Sirens of Titan and Cat’s Cradle.
Cheers,
Jim.
If you are ever moved to go back to sci-fi, I would highly recommend The Forever War. I have seen it described as both "the best sci-fi novel ever" and "the best war novel ever". It's not either of those, but it probably is the best sci-fi war novel ever.
The Chrysalids I remember really enjoying as a teenager, but I have forgotten all of it except the jacket. Like so many of these books, the paperback had a brilliant cover: a child's footprint in the sand, with six toes.
Jim mentions John Christopher, who I also loved. Another writer who feels foundational to the Ghost Box aesthetic. And another writer with great covers like this one:
https://i.stack.imgur.com/lyE9d.jpg
Someone not yet mentioned: HG Wells. I'm not sure how his reputation stands these days, but The War of the Worlds is an amazing vision of technological warfare, written in the 19th century. And The Island of Doctor Moreau is quite eerily prescient about genetic engineering and animal experimentation, as well as a gripping story.
Yes Kurt Vonnegut is great - I always forget him for some reason. Does he count as literati doing s.f.? He doesn't feel quite bound by the genre like people such as Fred Pohl.
I did enjoy a couple of John Christopher books - Death of Grass and Wrinkle in the Skin (a massive earthquake raises the English channel and tips all its water into England - the character walks from Guernsey or one of the Channel Islands in search of his family on the mainland only to find (spoiler, apologies) that the mainland is now a huge sea.
Riddley Walker is a good one I suppose
Yes HG Wells - can't be forgotten. War of the Worlds especially, and The Time Machine.
Thanks for this, been looking for something new to read, Brunner is a new name to me but looks interesting ordered Zanzibar along with Stars my Destination and Chrysalids which must be the only Wyndham I never read in my youth. Ed’s suggestion of the Forever War is a good one, well worth checking out.
Cheers, Jim
I will have to give Forever War a go.
Brunner is really great - I don't think I ever went beyond reading and rereading Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar but there are couple of other books by him that look interesting from that same time period - The Shockwave Rider and The Jagged Orbit (which has an experimental structure). I believe he also did a well-regarded alternative history, something to do with Latin America never becoming Latin America because the Latin races - Spaniards and Portuguese - never conquered it?
Ah I have confused the John Brunner book with Robert Silverberg's The Gate of Worlds, which does partly involve a South America is never called America cos there's no Amerigo Vespucci and it remains Aztec and Inca ruled.
The Brunner alt-history is Times Without Number and it's another twist on if the Armada succeeded scenario as in Amis's The Alteration and kinda-sorta Pavane by Keith Roberts.
The scenario is quite complicated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Without_Number
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