ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

We love to hate him, the same way he loved to hate Asimov. It is a form of tribute

You see this is another barrier to Aimless's entry, all of this inside baseball bickering.

Should have added the word "background" in there for the triple alliteration.

My pick to start with Delany would be Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I think. (Though I should reread it to be sure.)

that's a godawful place to start!!

'oh so it's a didactic novel where monologues and sex scenes interrupt each other, by someone who's largely given up on narrative by this point and he never finished it anyway because all the friends the characters are based on died? man, i'm so glad i didn't read one of the pacy 150-page sf thrillers'

i mean i love 'stars in my pocket' a lot more than i do 'babel' or 'nova' but it seems kind of a hard sell

¯\(°_o)/¯

ok had some thoughts about this but was waiting until I could post from my computer rather than my phone... maybe Aimless just needs to skim through Clute's encyclopedia: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/. If you want to get a sense of various author's position within the genre, what they're known for, what they're generally regarded as being good at, that's a great resource.

I don't really foresee a lot of actual "arguing" going on here, since those of us who have been posting on the various spec-fic threads seem to be pretty comfortable with having personal favorites as opposed to defending or promoting a particular canon. I'm sure plenty of us would be happy writing detailed posts extolling the virtues of particular favorites, had we not already done so here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here, among others.

As to the subject of who's great at what, there's a variety of different angles one could pursue - who has the greatest ideas? who has the best prose? who is greatest at short fiction? who is greatest at novels? who is greatest at series' of novels? who is the most formally innovative? who is the most significant in terms of the genre? who had the longest sustained run of quality output? There are different answers to all these questions (and they are very different questions), but even each question would return a range of answers as opposed to just one.

For example, who's the greatest sf short fiction author? I'd be inclined to say Tiptree or Ballard, maybe Silverberg or Bradbury too (particularly if we count the Martian Chronicles as a collection of short fiction). All for different reasons: Tiptree for sheer variety and audacity, Ballard for the strength of his prose and the consistency of vision, etc. If anyone wants to talk about those authors or why they like/dislike them I'm happy to participate and maybe Aimless would find something he was curious about reading over the course of the discussion - but said discussion would have v little to do with "who is the greatest sci-fi author".

also re: Herbert - I've always considered him something of an outlier in the genre. He published very, very little prior to Dune, and was hardly a regular contributor to the pulps that served as a training ground for the majority of writers in the field. What he did was expand on the template provided by Asimov's Foundation series - that whole "universe building" schtick spread across several novels with multiple narrators, an intentionally broad scope, elements of politics/history/philosophy - which later became practically an entire subset of the genre unto itself. This idea that writers should have meticulously researched and detailed backgrounds w genealogies, languages, religions etc. to make their "world" as real as possible was something that had been germinating for awhile (certainly Tolkien is another important predecessor on this point) and shortly became de rigeur following Dune's massive success. And Herbert came up with this one thing, this one central concept/storytelling framework, that is effectively all he ever did.

But do I want to read it? Not really. I read the first one in high school and it was okay, definitely felt like some kind of accomplishment to make it all the way through it given it's length and density, but if you aren't overawed by the scope of Herbert's undertaking or especially enamored of the ecological or political analogies I feel like there isn't a lot there. To me Herbert fandom is the equivalent of Joe Bonamassa fandom or something - "wow look at that guy play all those notes! just like the masters!" It's like he's the culmination of a lot of other people's ideas, developed and applied with a fanatical attention to detail, but I don't find it anywhere close to deserving of "greatest" status. It's good, it's solid, there's interesting stuff in there - but stylistically, formally, conceptually it doesn't resonate particularly deeply with me.

these days my canon is like

Tiptree
Octavia Butler
Rudy Rucker

and then Dick, Sterling, Gibson, maybe Atwood?

then some other random old school dudes - Farmer, Pohl, Brunner

Dune is not a fave but I really like Herbert's Whipping Star

I should really give Butler a chance one of these days, I suppose

at first glance my reaction was "oh great an even more didactic Ursula K. Leguin"

shit I forgot Leguin, if only for Left Hand Of Darkness

re: Butler, Lilith's Brood trilogy is my fave fwiw, Fledgling is also fun and standalone

What Shakey said.

maybe I'll just pick one author a day to ramble about, would that make you happy Aimless?

I have quite a few shorts bks by Herbert and yeah Whipping Star co-sign. idk what Shakey is talking about.

In my opinion, "amazingly written" is not a matter of stylish sentences, symbolism, or deep structure. A book can lack many of the attributes that are commonly admired in lit crit and still be great. "Amazingly written" should apply to a book's entire conception and execution. This applies as much to Dr. Seuss as to Dostoevsky. There are as many ways for a book to be amazing as there are for human faces to be amazing.

So a lot of the conception and execution often falls down in so-called "great literature" too.

So if there are many ways for books to be amazing why apply harsher boundaries on stuff just because it comes with 'weird' covers.

yeah I should qualify what I said about his pulp stuff, he wrote more short fiction than I thought

xp

And Herbert came up with this one thing, this one central concept/storytelling framework, that is effectively all he ever did.

and this is overly harsh, I should've said it's all he's effectively famous for (he did do other stuff)

buncha Dune haters around here. it's universally beloved you know! it's also on EVERY list of the best SF ever made since it came out practically. i've never actually finished it...but i will someday.

So a lot of the conception and execution often falls down in so-called "great literature" too.
Yes, but you are merely confronting a straw man with a wicker man.

verne

the Dune world-making thing so influential in fantasy and SF it's kinda crazy. i guess you really can only compare it to LOTR previously.

greatest book in the sf canon says this guy. we needed it for tatooine to live.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/03/dune-50-years-on-science-fiction-novel-world

and he reminds me that i have the collected Lensman books at home and that might be my winter project. to read those.

i guess you really can only compare it to LOTR previously.

nah - Foundation. Although it's true Asimov doesn't get so hung up on the details and trappings of various planet's cultures iirc.

There's also the obvious element of real-world analogies at work (which happens in LOTR too, although Tolkien would and did deny it). Asimov basically wanted to re-write the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, and Herbert's debt to Gibbon is also clear, albeit one updated with parallels to oil in the middle east/Lawrence of Arabia etc.

I tried the first volume of Foundation a little while ago but soon gave up on it. Aside from the poverty of Asimov's prose style - so ugly - the narrative itself was crushingly dull. Asimov's complete indifference to character reminded me a little of Arthur C Clarke, without any of those compensating moments of serene, mysterious beauty that you find in things like Childhood's End.

On the other hand I read Dune for the first time a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I think Shakey is slightly underselling Herbert's ability to get things moving really quickly - yes, there's lot of world-building, backstory, ecological-mysticism and whatnot going on in Dune, but the actual narrative construction is pretty breathtaking - it sweeps you along. Overall it struck me as a reaction to Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land - another big American blockbuster SF novel that also shares some of the same values as post-beat, pre-hippy early 60s counterculture - which brings us back to PKD of course (I read SIASL many, many years ago and imagine it's pretty close to unreadable now - it certainly doesn't seem to get on many of these Best SF novel lists any more).

gonna give Dune another read, so thanks thread. haven't read it since high school.

agree w Ward about Foundation. When I tried to re-read it a few years ago I had an identical experience.

i read the foundation trilogy when i was a kid and loved it but then again i also found 'battlefield earth' to be a "ripping yarn" when i was a kid.

'dune' is great, want to re-read it.

i love foundation but it is difficult to recommend it to ppl because the first book is by far the weakest one, basically just five semi-related stories about characters with silly names sitting around in rooms and talking (and every now and then jumping to their feet and shouting "confound it!").

feel like all the OG "Grandmasters" (Asimov, Heinlein, etc.) have fallen out of fashion, with their virtues becoming more and more obscured.

like, Clarke, Heinlein and Asimov were all respected and popular in the genre because they exuded *seriousness*, albeit not in a literary way. They were seen as serious because they took scientific concepts of the day and attempted to extend them into the future and extrapolate as to what that might entail, and they tended to do this in a way that was more coherent, rigorous, and methodical than their peers. This isn't to say there wasn't humor or poetry in their writing, because there was to varying degrees, but all of these guys seemed to approach writing like an engineer - as if it was just a matter of assembling the appropriate parts according to established laws, where the underlying concept was probably the most important thing. Robots! Alien civilizations! A history of the future! What would these things *really* look like? It's like they were conceptualizers first, and writers second. Clarke is easily the most lyrical of all of them, and the one whose work is most infused with a mystery that probably transcends his era.

But Heinlein and Asimov haven't aged as well imo, in that their projections seem quaint at best and delusional at worst, and there's nothing in the way of other qualities - engaging characterization, deft plotting, prose style, etc. - to compensate. This isn't to say their work isn't worth reading, because it is if you're at all interested in the way the genre developed and grew, just that I would hesitate to point to any of their works as GREAT writing. Heinlein's protofascist swinging sexism is mostly just laughable these days. Asimov can be cute and is best in small doses/short fiction, but from a distance something like the Foundation trilogy is something more to be admired than read.

sad no mention of Sturgeon yet

It's a little funny to pick up a copy of Best American Short Stories and find Bradbury and Sturgeon stories tucked in there. SF must have had a respectability boomlet back then.

Bradbury broke out of the genre early, he always managed to hold himself apart from it to some degree. Maybe because he was explicitly *not* interested in prognosticating about technology and other "hard" science concerns.

Sturgeon wrote some great short stories.

There is a Delaney piece- I mostly prefer his criticism to his fiction at this point -in which he says Sturgeon was the first sf writer to revise a story he had already written and this blew everybody's mind.

lol

I'm still catching up on this thread, and I don't really feel like engaging the initial question (even if I were more enthusiastic about exercises in ranking, I haven't read enough in the genre), but I find Delany's work as a whole more compelling than any other SF I've read. That preference does imply what I tend to value in SF (as a queer reader, perhaps, although I don't think it comes down to a matter of identity in any simple way): the possibility of experimenting with new modes of relation between people, or exploring existing but marginalized or devalued forms of sociality, along with sensitivity to problems of language and representation. Those qualities aren't unique to Delany's work, I realize--I still need to read more of Russ, Butler, Tiptree, Disch, LeGuin, Sturgeon and others--but I consistently find them in his fiction.
xp

also - my man Moorcock very otm (in my opinion) about why people like Dick and Ballard are still garnering new fans and receiving relatively high media exposure and the Big Three et al seem increasingly like irrelevant science fetishists:

“We live in a Philip K Dick world now. The technology-led, military-led big names like Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Arthur got it dead wrong. They were all strong on the military as subject matter, on space wars, rational futures – essentially, fascist futures – and none of these things really matters today. It’s Dick and people like Frederik Pohl and Alfred Bester who were incredibly successful in predicting the future, because they were interested in social change, ecology, advertising. Look at Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google . . . These are Philip K Dick phenomena.”

many xxps

Tiptree>>LeGuin>Disch>Russ>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Delany

imo

is there a good book of Delany crit James? I would probably read that. I enjoy reading insider histories/overviews of the genre.

His first two books of essays, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine (the source for that Sturgeon revision anecdote) tend to get the most attention.

at first glance my reaction was "oh great an even more didactic Ursula K. Leguin

Taking this as a throwaway remark rather than a sincere criticism of Le Guin then. Out of interest what have you read, or not read, of hers? I think she might actually be an example of an SF writer who gets more respect, relatively speaking, from outside the SF community than from within it. I struggle a bit because I always want to recommend the Earthsea saga but don't want to come off like a mad Harry Potter fanatic all excited about half a dozen volumes of kid lit. It does start off pretty YA oriented but much less childish than Potter, and when she revisits and reshapes the saga after 20 and then another 10 years, struggling at first with her earlier choices but then fully in control by the end - for me that beats Dune or Foundation or Tolkien no question.

that was a throwaway remark meant as a joking criticism of Butler (whom I have not read, I was just thumbing through her books at the store), and not LeGuin, who I genuinely love. I've read Left Hand of Darkness, Disposessed, a bunch of short story collections. But she wears her political and ethical concerns on her sleeve, they are central to her writing. I don't think this is a fault (altho some do, cf Tom Disch), partly because I sympathize with the vast majority of her concerns but also partly because she is a good enough writer that these things don't bog her down. Her stuff is not like reading a lecture.

The Word for World is Forest is the only major novel I haven't read of hers I think, Always Coming Home is the only one I couldn't get behind, not so much didactic as joyless. Not that everything has to be fun, plenty of her short stories are serious and tragic and great. ACH was just a slog.

feels a bit boring/obvious to mention him but hg wells still deserves a spot on any list of the best SF writers imo. i reread a few of his novels earlier this year and they are still very sharp, funny, well-plotted. war of the worlds in particular has some haunting descriptions of a ruined countryside/bombed-out london that feel very prescient and even ballard-like.