The mid-to-late sixties were to sf what they were to rock music. The brilliance was not merely insanely widespread but insanely prolific.
If you picked any of the first five Nebula anthologies out of a hat you’d say it was the best ever, until you read another one. They’re like Arrow’s paradox. 1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 1.
A couple of questions for the OP…
What type of science fiction do YOU think about when you say “science fiction”? Starships and interstellar empires? Cyberpunk/Tron? End of world scenarios?
Do you want your writing modern, or is it OK if it’s rather stilted?
How cutting edge do you need your science? Is it going to drive you batty when a serious work from 1969 gets cosmology wrong?
What do you like in non-SF literature/stories?
This may help our answers be more pointed towards your likes.
Wow, I’m away for a day, and now I have a reading list to last me a year! Some of the books people have listed are ones I’ve actually read, but didn’t think of when I started composing my list. A bunch of them are ones I’ve never even heard of, which is great! I will definitely try to get my hands on some of the short story anthologies that have been mentioned, as well.
Thudlow Boink, I’m intrigued by your idea that there are some books for which it’s enough to know of them, without necessarily having read them. There are definitely some books I don’t really have an interest in reading.
Good questions!
I think of spaceships, robots, aliens, and maybe a little time travel as well. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good definition of the genre, though. My impressions are colored only by the books I’ve read, not by all of the science fiction that exists.
How broadly are you defining “modern?” I’m particularly interested in material from the 1950s and 1960s. Definitely still willing to read things from earlier or later.
Accuracy of the science doesn’t really matter to me, unless it’s egregiously implausible.
What I like in non-SF literature is well-developed characters and good dialogue. What I love about science fiction, though, is the exploration of different ideas and possibilities. I’m can ignore some flat characters or stilted dialogue if the book has an interesting premise.
If you’re willing to go a little more contemporary, I’d say throw something by Robert J. Sawyer in there. I won’t recommend anything specific here, just peruse his offerings and grab one with an appealing subject.
Also on the whole “what is or isn’t SF” I had a conversation with a bookseller when Carl Sagan’s Novel “Contact” came out:
Me: “What’s it about?”
Bookseller: “This woman scientist tries to contact aliens.”
M “So it’s Science Fiction?”
B “No.”
M: “Why not?”
B: “Because it’s written by Carl Sagan and he’s not a science fiction writer.”
M “He’s a scientist, right?”
B “Yes”
M "And it’s fiction, right?
B. “But it’s not science fiction.”
Well, you get the idea. She finally defaulted to authority saying that it wasn’t SF because the publisher didn’t classify it as such.
That list is excellent, thanks, even though there are a number of stories on the list that are horror or weird rather than SF.
I’ve read, and would recommend, plenty of the above, but some primarily for their historical value, since science and society have moved on. Recently, though, I reread **A Canticle for Liebowitz **and it’s held it up remarkably well.
I can’t find any evidence that Cosmos wasn’t sold as science fiction. These are the closest things I can find to reviews of the book at the time. Was the book really not sold as science fiction when it came out?:
trapezoidal jellyfish writes:
> This was inspired by a conversation with someone who mentioned a book that he
> claimed was a science fiction classic, which I had never heard of.
What was that book?
Incidentally, you cannot possibly put together a list of 15 to 20 science fiction books for which there will be any general agreement that they are the classics of the field. At best, you may be able to put together a list of about a hundred books which nearly everyone will say includes nearly all their choices for the classics. Even then, they will say, “Yeah, but you missed a book which I think is among the classics.”
Was that a typo, Cosmos for Contact?
My apologies. I meant Contact, not Cosmos.
This. Thanks to Project Gutenberg I’ve read Frankenstein and it was a slog. Being a long time s-f fan I’m glad I did it, but would not recommend it to someone just starting out.
(Regarding The Call of Cthulu) Hence the endless debate about speculative fiction. I would put it on the soft end of the Mohs scale with a strong leavening of horror (which makes it unpalatable for me).
“Contact” was originally released as General Fiction/Lit. Later printings put it in SF.
Check these images of the various covers. They all say “A Novel.” In publishing a novel is not science fiction; it’s a literary work.
I checked the ISFDB for all works in the field published by Simon & Schuster in the 1980s. Most were loosely associated slipstream. A few were core f&sf, by the like of Pournelle and Zimmer. None of those got the “novel” label.
In the whole of the 1980s, only one other did. *Timescape *(1980), by Gregory Benford, which was marketed like *Contact *as a novel about science from a noted scientist. If you pressed me, I’d have to mention Lisa Goldstein’s *Tourists *(1989), but she wrote literary fantasy that was almost slipstream.
Fiction about impossible science. Sounds like a purist’s definition of science fiction. Yet it has almost never been marketed that way, and publishers traditionally have gone to great lengths to avoid doing so. “It’s not science fiction. It’s about people!” The field never wins that argument.
Science Fiction is always about people. The gadgets aren’t the plot, they’re the setting.
Not true.
Lots of sci fi is really about the thing or the idea, particularly hard sci fi. You still want good characters to populate the set, of course, but often you could swap out different people and get essentially the same story.
Ringworld and the like come to mind.
Plenty of SF stories are mostly concerned with ideas - take Rudy Rucker’s “White Light” as an example: the characters are just a means to illustrate the mathematics of infinity.
Otoh, Ray Bradbury’s “[There Will Come Soft Rains](Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”)” is a story without any characters and where the gadgets are all that’s there - but it’s still a story entirely about people. [online version.]
Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote Literary Fiction–never Science Fiction–warned of the sad fate of Kilgore Trout. An excellent writer, but condemned to the back rooms of ratty used paperback stores because his work was marketed as SF.
While I know that Phillip Jose Farmer wrote “Venus on the Half Shell”, I’ve always wondered if Phillip K. Dick was the real-life inspiration for Kilgore Trout.
Or the really bad pun, if we’re talking Clarke short stories. 