fave science fiction + alternative history

 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.

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.

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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).

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. 

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.