Some older SF - comments and recommendations

Cafe Society
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This thread is inspired by this list, which I discovered via the SDMB. It is someone’s opinion of 100 must-read science fiction books.

I was surprised to find that I had read about 20 of them, but I’ve fallen out of the SF habit since high school, and a lot of what I have read I don’t really remember all that well. Moreover, I’ve never really explored many of the older, “golden age” writers; much of what I’ve read has been more recent, like Card’s Ender’s Game and Willis’ **Doomsday Book ** (both of which I love).

The list struck me as a good place to start reading science fiction again, and especially to educate myself about some of the big names of the genre.

I started with Frederick Pohl’s Gateway, and I was not disappointed. I really loved that book. I’ve heard criticism of the Freudian psychoanalysis in the book (the narrative is structured as a series of flashbacks brought on by the narrator’s visits to his shrink), but I thought it worked, both as a storytelling device and as a way of getting into the narrator’s head. I also loved the final revelation about what was really bothering the narrator, and the way the book ended. Impressive.

Next I turned to **Foundation ** by Isaac Asimov. Here my reaction was a little mixed. I thought the whole idea of the massive inertia of this interstellar empire - and the psychohistorical predictions that inertia made possible - was damn clever and thought-provoking. But I didn’t think the characterization was good at all - everyone talked the same - and the text was a tad dry. I don’t mean to denigrate this book or its fans; it just wasn’t really to my taste. I was also a little irked that, umpty-million years in the future, the only female character was someone’s jealous shallow wife. I know, it was written a long time ago. Still, for what it’s worth, that was my reaction.

Then I turned to **Journey to the Center of the Earth ** by Jules Verne. Will I lose my membership in any clubs if I admit that I couldn’t finish it? I liked the idea of the thing, but the narrator drove me nuts. I was exhasuted by constant repetition of this sequence:

  1. Harry worries that they’re all gonna die;
  2. Something happens;
  3. Harry takes the opportunity to suggest that they’re all gonna die;
  4. The professor ignores Harry;
  5. Harry returns to worrying that they’re all gonna die.

I skimmed and then abandoned the effort altogether. I’m sorry, Mr. Verne. I tried. :frowning:
So I’m interested in hearing what other science fiction fans think of all of this; and also, where should I turn next? I’ve never read Heinlein, Saberhagen, Delaney, Philip Jose Farmer – oh, lots of 'em. What do you think?

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As for the Verne – I don’t think “Must read” necessarily means “best.” The Verne is an important landmark of the genre, so you do need to read it to be literate in the genre, but it may be a bit dated for modern tastes.

Same with Foundation. It doesn’t date particularly well – the characterization isn’t the best – but it’s a work that you should be read because of its influence.

As for your choices, you really do need to read Heinlein. If I were picking one, I’d go with Double Star. Puppet Masters is also good, as it Moon is a Harsh Mistress and any of his juveniles (those published before “Stranger”). You probably should also read Stranger in a Strange Land at some point, but it isn’t his best.

Delany is one of my favorite authors, but he’s not for everyone. Plenty of people hate Dhalgren. I liked it, and also liked Triton, though probably a better place for a beginner is Nova or Babel-17.

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There is no SF fan who will disagree with either of those points. The difference between someone who likes Foundation and someone who doesn’t is whether the psychohistory is more important than the characterization, or the other way around. And we do see more females later in the series: In Foundation and Empire, the two main protagonists are husband and wife, with about equal import to the story. In Second Foundation, the protagonist is female, and in Foundation’s Edge the Mayor of Terminus (most powerful politician in the Galaxy, by that time) is a woman.

You definitely need to add some Heinlein to your list, and as RealityChuck said, you should definitely not start with Stranger in a Strange Land. Any of his juveniles (Space Cadet, Farmer in the Sky, Red Planet, Podkayne of Mars, Tunnel in the Sky, etc.) would be a good starting point, as would many of his short story collections (The Past through Tomorrow is a good one) or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

On Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth is not his best. I would recommend that you start with Around the World in 80 Days (not very SF, but perhaps the most engrossing thing I’ve ever read) or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

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I second the recommendation of early Heinlein. Toss in some Clarke (Childhood’s End, Tales From The White Hart) and some H. Beam Piper (Little Fuzzy) and you are on your way.

As for Chip Delany…the less said, the better. Words cannot describe how unreadable his books are. Random chimpanzees could turn out more readable prose! Of course, as noted above, YMMV.

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Delany is as brilliant a writer ever to grace the field, while the prose value of Foundation is enough to gag a maggot.

As Chronos says, everything depends on what you’re looking for in fiction. Even back in the 1940s, the continuum went from Asimov to Heinlein to Moore to Bradbury. Except for his very earliest work, Bradbury’s prose is consistently poetry. His science was negligible, though, just a notion to hang his stories on, and his plots revolved human interactions, not formal resolutions of problems. If you consider Bradbury to be sf, then you’ll probably like Delany’s work. If your inclinations are for Asimov’s formalities of idea expansion you won’t.

The place to start with Delany is Driftglass, his first collection of short fiction. “The Star Pit” and “Time, Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” remain two of the best stories in sf. Ever. Period. The other stories ain’t that shabby either. Hell, he won a Nebula with “Aye, and Gomorrah,” the first short story he ever published.

After that, try Babel-17 and Nova, which set the foundation for all of cyberpunk a decade later. That means you get to discover William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and Pat Cadigan and the Mirrorshades anthology and all that good 80s stuff.

That top 100 list isn’t really strong for older stuff, but if you find Asimov and Verne’s prose unreadable - and I also recently gave up on Journey to the Center of the Earth - you probably tend toward the better prose writers of the era. My recommendations from that list:
50s
A Case of Conscience James Blish
More Than Human Theodore Sturgeon
The Stars My Destination or The Demolished Man Alfred Bester
A Canticle for Leibowitz Walter M. Miller Jr. [from stories written in the 50s]
Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes [from a story written in the 50s]
The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury

60s
The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick
Way Station Clifford D. Simak
The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K. Le Guin
Lord of Light Roger Zelazny
Stand on Zanzibar John Brunner
Cat’s Cradle Kurt Vonnegut
Camp Concentration Thomas M. Disch

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Please read Alfred Bester: while The Demolished Man is the one that’s always on the list, and it’s a good book, The Stars My Destination is way better. I’m so pissed at myself for not having read it earlier.

Also, if you haven’t read A Canticle for Leibowitz, walk, don’t run. Seriously. It may be my favorite book.

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I found ‘Liebowitz’ to be interesting but dull. It just never grabbed me properly for some reason.

I, too, would toss in the early Heinlein works and almost anything H Beam Piper wrote. Brilliance.

And it’s not going back quite that far but Niven’s early short stories were brilliant if you’re reading for cool science and problem resolution.

Toss in a few John Boyd as well. I loved ‘The Last Starship From Earth’.

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Don’t forget “Doc” Smith and his Lensman and Skylard series! Great stuff, spanning the 30’s to the 60’s! Real space opera when space opera was new! Men were real men, women were real women, and dexitrobopers were real dexitrobopers!

Seriously, it is entertaining stuff. Tho the heros smoked cigarettes in outer space a lot.

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How about the 70’s?

Joe Haldeman - The Forever War and Mindbridge are two of my favorites from that era.

Also The Mote in God’s Eye by Niven/Pournelle was an excellent book, I thought.

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I know why, Qadgop! I needed a cigarette myself after picturing that scene!

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I can’t call myself a science fiction fan, but I read a lot of SF when I was in my teens and twenties. It seemed like SF took a turn toward science at the expense of fiction, and I didn’t read it again for a long time. I’m just not interested in the science part.

I’ve read 26 of the books on the list, mostly the older ones.

From the list, my favorites are probably the Hyperion books by Dan Simmons, and more recently, Ilium (just awesome, with the Trojan War and dinosaurs). In all of the Simmons books, I can skip the technical parts and am still left with a hell of a story.

I’d add Titan, Wizard and Demon by John Varley to the list. Those knocked my socks off many years ago.

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Don’t read the sequel however. It’s dreadful. Miller died before finishing it, and it was completed by someone else, and it is the only case I know of where the part that the guy finished was better than the rest of the book.

For Clarke, I’d skip White Hart which are fun tall tales, and go with the already mentioned Childhood’s End and The City and the Stars. Asimov’s robot detective stories are much better written than the Foundation stories. For Heinlein juveniles, I liked Star Beast, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, and Citizen of the Galaxy myself, though all the later ones are good.

Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade is quite good. I have trouble considering anything published before I started buying lots of books in the late '60s old. What do you consider the golden age - it usually refers to Astounding from 1939 - 1945, and sometimes Galaxy in the first half of the 1950s.

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I don’t think they are great books, but I will say that Titan is the book that most influenced my life. For some reason, after reading it, I began working at becoming a published SF writer.

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I just had this argument with a friend. I said I thought it was a clever idea, but horrible writing. This seemed to make him angry and he said, “Ironic, since Asimov defined the genre.” Maybe, but the writing still sucks.

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If you haven’t read anything by Philip K. Dick yet, the three books on the list are a good place to start. I’d start with Three Stigmata out of those three; High Castle is a bit more conventional and not a good example of his “usual” style, and Valis will just turn you off Dick entirely unless you have a good grounding in his books already.

I second the Alfred Bester recommendation. His style’s a little pulpy (more than Dick, even), but if you can get past that there’s some great ideas in there. I like A.E. Van Vogt, but he’s totally a pulp writer, and some people can’t get over the outdatedness of his material. I think you can bypass Jules Verne; objectively, his stuff isn’t that good, and is really only important as a historical document. (H.G. Wells is another matter, definitely read him.) And if you haven’t read 1984 or Brave New World yet, what are you waiting for? They’re classics and must be read. Same with Canticle, it’s a slow starter but the last twenty pages of that book is one of the best things I’ve ever read. If you haven’t read Neuromancer or Snow Crash, they’re both worth reading.

Then again, I’m probably not the expert on classic SF novels. I’ve never read anything by Heinlein or Clarke, and I can’t stand Asimov. Most of what I read is either from the sixties or the cyberpunk era; I don’t like hard SF at all.

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Well, I was going to say that I’ve read a bit of SF but that I wouldn’t consider me really “well read”… then I saw that I’ve read 69 books on that list…

Asimov’s Robot books come to mind as good reads and they aren’t as dry as the Foundation series.

I liked Ringworld by Larry Niven also.

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Terry Bisson finished Miller’s Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman and he’s a very fine writer indeed. He’s mostly known for his short fiction, but try to find his hilarious novel Voyage to the Red Planet.

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I second the Wells recommendations (the prose can be delicious! though I might be the only person who has ever said that) and the Verne un-recommendations (the prose can be, well, maybe he had bad translators).

Early Heinlein can be fun but from Stranger in a Strange Land on he was the most pompous and overbearing writer in SF. I don’t mind pompous and overbearing if the author confines it to real life (see Harlan Ellison) but Heinlein’s later books reek to high heaven.

Speaking of Ellison, his Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions compilations of cutting-edge (for the time) original SF are better than anything he actually wrote. For a writer he’s a great editor.

Clifford Simak’s Way Station is brilliant. Subtle, understated, and it answers the question, “If you are just sending the plan, physical and mental, of the person electronically then what do you do with what’s left behind?”

I thought I was the only person, beside’s Disch and his editors, who read Camp Concentration. It’s been about 35 years so I should probably read it again.

I don’t like LeGuin, MacCaffrey, and Norton. Maybe I discriminate against women. Maybe just I don’t like anything with dragons. But MacCaffrey and LeGuin can write. Norton could not. Astonishingly bad.

Dick was L Ron Hubbard without the success. Totally nuts and didn’t go in for creating sympathetic characters. If you can get past that his books are okay but don’t expect to care what happens to the protagonist.

No Lovecraft on that list? Gotta read some, if only to know what people are laughing at. But I have returned to him after a long hiatus and I’m finding his books and stories better than I remember. His writing is dated but it was dated when he was first published.

Dune was stultifying and the subsequent books were worse. So many trees were killed publishing that crap it was an eco-crime.

Some authors are on that list only once for a reason; just like with Verne you have to read one of their books as a historical reference but any more than that is masochistic. Burroughs, Crichton, and Gernsback are among them. Asimov, Clarke, and Vonnegut are borderline–they really aren’t that good! As overrated as those are, Pohl, Simak, and Adams are underrated and, for a first novel by a very young person, Frankenstein is an astonishing acheivement.

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Better than *“Repent, Harlequin,” said the TickTock Man," * or “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” or “The Beast That Shouted Love At The Center Of The World,” or…you get my drift. Yes, Harlan is a pompous ass, and yes, he is a great editor. But let’s not denigrate his great stories!

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Ingathering: The Complete People Stories by Zenna Henderson

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0915368587/qid=1100128162/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6866417-4300139?v=glance&s=books