Agreed, but at least the main characters were likable, unlike the aforementioned authors who write characters you couldn’t care less what happens to because they’re so uniformly awful.
Add Charles Stross as another in that category, I picked up ‘Glasshouse’ because I liked his short story, ‘A Colder War’, but whereas the dark and depressing tone suited that story when its dragged out into a full length novel its just unreadable.
On ‘The Forever War’, Haldeman wrote a short story giving Mary-Janes side of the story when her and Mandela get split up towards the end of the book. Read it in ‘Far Horizons’ edited by Robert Silverberg, an interesting collection of short stories based on the premise that authors are asked to revisit their most famous story-worlds and write another story for them.
Somebody mentioned China Mievelle above, read his short story collection ‘Looking for Jake’ recently and while the stories are very uneven in quality I thought the novellete ‘The Tain’ was very well done with a genuinely surprising ending. For the longest time I thought China Mievelle was actually a woman until I saw ‘her’ picture at the back of the book!
Yes, I’ve read that story, “A Separate War” and the sequel novel, Forever Free, which I mentioned above. (Haldeman also wrote a novel Forever Peace which is not connected to The Forever War but which some people refer to as a sequal anyway.)
I think the thing that gets me about Haldeman’s books is that he seems to be following the normal SF storyline in his books. He’ll have protagonists who appear to be standard SF characters and he’ll put them in a standard SF plot. But right at the climax when you’re expecting the protagonist to figure out how to save the day, Haldeman will have him die instead. Sometimes he’ll even introduce some entirely new storyline in just so the protagonist will be defeated when he or she seems to be triumphant. It’s like Haldeman’s message is that happy endings are impossible - if you survived today it just means something else is going to kill you later.
As for Stross, I’ve read many of his books but I always feel like I’m working my way through them.
Talk about someone who likes to fuck over his characters. I loaned a buddy Perdido Street Station and he really enjoyed it…right up until the end. Then he swore he’d never read any Mieville ever again.
I wouldn’t recommend Mieville to a newbie, either ;).
Damn, I love me some Mieville, and I consider him, to be totally pretentious and irritating, the most important voice in SF in the last decade. And there’s no goddamn way I’d recommend him to the OP’s friend. I might recommend him to someone who loved Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon, but that’s a different set of tastes.
Bujold. Starting with Shards of Honor, for most of the reasons people gave above as to why a generic woman might like some other book.
Heinlein. Specifically Friday and/or Podkayne of Mars. Although my all-time “this is the one book I’d pick to introduce someone who doesn’t understand the genre to SF” is Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
I’d actually recommend Serpent’s Reach as an initial Cherryh novel – strong female protagonist, interesting aliens, and the plot is not as convoluted in politics as Downbelow.
And Tepper’s earlier stuff isn’t quite as stridently feminist – the True Game series is good.
Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series is outstanding… but obviously a series, not just one book.
I quite like Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite the Sun duology. Though it’s probably out of print, again.
If I had to recommend just one, though, that would be Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light, which is awesome writing.
I managed to plough through ‘Number of the Beast’ at age 14 (oy veh!), by the end of which I wanted to punch the author in the tits. I didn’t pick up another Heinlein book for 25 years, but eventually my curiosity about why everyone kept recommending him got the better of me, and I read (hi pinkyvee) Stranger in a Strange Land, by the end of which I realised:
a) Actually, Heinlein is a very accomplished writer and may well deserve his reputation. At least if he stays away from female characters.
Bradbury wrote Literature, with SF or fantasy themes. He was a good writer, but he kept jolting me out of his stories, because while they were good Literature, they weren’t really good SF, with a few exceptions.
Heinlein had Issues with women. Women weren’t real women unless they were very interested in having babies (Friday was a notable exception) and men weren’t real men unless they were obsessed with women (with another notable exception, who was later found to be a MtF transsexual). Heinlein wrote a lot of really great SF and some very good fantasy, but he really never understood what makes most women tick, or perhaps he just wanted to write about how he thought women SHOULD think and act. He was extremely political, and it shows. A great many of his stories have not aged well, because they were commentaries on various issues of the time of the writing. If someone is really into science fiction and/or fantasy, then they need to read a lot of Heinlein, if for no other reason than to understand where newer authors are coming from, because Heinlein IS a foundation of modern SF.
I wouldn’t recommend any of Stephenson’s books that don’t have real endings, either. While it might just be his style, I find that such books are extremely frustrating to me as a reader, and I want to hunt him down, sit him down at a computer, and MAKE him write endings to some of his books. I’ve read two of his books, and while I enjoyed most of the books up til the end, I refuse to read any more of his books, even though I’ve been assured that he doesn’t do this with every book. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, fool me three times, and I’m definitely a fool.
Bah. To the end of my days I will accept no differentiation between “literature” and “genre fiction.” Capital “L” literature is a mirage and if it exists all fiction is universally included in it, even cheap porno paperbacks. Bradbury wrote sci-fi ( as well as in other genres like horror ), he did not write Literature, because Literature as some snotty, elitist imprimatur of a higher standard of syntax and literary merit DOES. NOT. EXIST.
Literature is what writers commit when they have aspirations to get out of the SF ghetto (or country club, as per Niven). Fiction is what writers write when they want to tell a story. SF can be Literature as well as good SF, but Literature written with SF themes is usually damn poor SF. For instance, the guy who builds a “rocket ship” in his backyard, and takes his kids on a “spaceflight” is not really SF, it’s just a story about a guy who wants to give his kids the illusion of a spaceflight. It’s put in the SF category because it takes place in a world where spaceflight is possible, but SF isn’t about spaceships. I hate to dis the story because there are damn few Bodonis in the world, but I also dislike the notion that a Bodoni would play such a trick on his children.
Let me put it to you this way…English lit teachers who HATE SF usually love Bradbury. For me, that’s the kiss of death.
I disagree. I think there are works that are specifically marketed as “literature”. It’s a genre just like science fiction or mysteries or romance or horror.
When Lynn Bodoni wrote “Bradbury wrote Literature, with SF or fantasy themes,” she was saying something that is, in some significant way, both true and important.
According to some reasonable definitions of the term “science fiction,” very little of what Bradbury wrote qualifies. Unlike other classic SF writers, Bradbury’s fiction isn’t really about issues related to science and technology and doesn’t concern itself with plausible consistency with the known laws of science.
On the other hand, unlike many of the classic SF writers, Bradbury has a “literary” style, and is concerned with things like words, language, imagery, as more than just a vehicle for telling a story or exploring ideas.
So, without meaning any disparagement toward either side, there’s a sense in which it’s reasonable to say that Bradbury’s stuff is “literary” in a way that most of the other authors’ mentioned here is not, and that theirs is “science fiction” in a way that Bradbury’s is not; and that, for all their merits, Bradbury’s works are probably not the best choice to represent science fiction.
I agree with what Lynn wrote. In addition to Bradbury, I’d give Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. LeGuin, James Tiptree, and Kurt Vonnegut as examples of authors who are more in the literary genre than the sicence-fiction genre.
I appreciated it just for the literary portrait of the American Midwest in the Good Old Days (pre-Roaring-'20s), of which we got a smaller glimpse in Time Enough for Love. That was the environment that produced Heinlein’s parents, and gives something of an insight into his own world-view.
Yeah – try his new series, WWW, about a blind American girl who recently moved to Canada and tries an experimental procedure to let her see. Along the way, a entity on the Internet achieves consciousness, a Chinese dissident is harassed by the government, and a chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid has trouble growing up.
The first book, Wake, came out last year, and the second, Watch, was just released a month ago. So far it’s shaping up to be his best trilogy yet.
