ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

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.

otm. Plus I think Aimless would dig him. I second War of the Worlds and would also recommend The Island of Doctor Moreau.

“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.”

imo this is somewhat unfair to asimov, who did not write v. much about the military or "space wars" (i guess foundation deals with a lot of "trade wars" haha) or even really much about technology aside from robots, and was a lifelong new deal liberal with none of heinlein's creepy right-wing tendencies. his characters tend to be thin and barely fleshed out (w/ a few exceptions -- the mule in the later foundation books, susan calvin in some of the robot stories) and his prose is certainly unflashy but i think his best stuff, mostly from the late 40s through early 50s, is still fun to read. imo his reputation was hurt by the awful, bloated novels he wrote in the 80s more than anything else.

Yeah i think asimov is more of a "rational futurist" part of that equation than a militarist.

Sorry that was a terrible sentence but i hope u get what i mean. I hate posting from my phone...

I remember reading Asimov's defenses of his terrible prose, where he would bash those fru-fru "stylists" like Kakfka

I also read that Delaney thing about Sturgeon--it wasn't so much that Sturgeon was the first guy to think to revision, it was more that the culture of the pulps (writing at top-speed, under various pseudonyms, in order to make enough $ to live on) had created a macho culture where attention to style was thought of as a weakness.

When I was a teenage SF reader I always found Heinlein a much more approachable writer than Asimov - some of the 'juveniles', like Podkayne of Mars, are bright and amusing, and The Puppet Masters is a pretty great alien takeover novel (surprised it hasn't been made into a movie).

It has been, in 1994

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_%28film%29

its story logic is solid, its science is satisfying and its thrills are nerve-wracking
Douglas Pratt
DVDLaser

About as nerve-wracking as a warm bath.
Nick Schager
Lessons of Darkness

good work, rotten tomatoes

a macho culture where attention to style was thought of as a weakness.

there was definitely some overcompensating going on among the 40s-50s writers - they were nerds but they wanted to be tough, manly, smart nerds! The kind of nerds that got sent into space by the government!

i read "foundation" about a month back. asimov strikes me as a writer who is staunchly opposed to writing having literary qualities, and as such his writing stands and falls on the strength of his ideas. and since his ideas are those of the mid-20th century, well, he ages about as well as malthus does. mind you i don't know what moorcock is on about re: asimov being fascist, as foundation is pretty consistently the story of free-market ingenuity trumping militaristic brutality.

dick, on the other hand, has transcendent ideas and writing that has overt anti-literary qualities. i love his work, but extolling his virtues as a writer always reminds me somewhat of extolling the virtues of 1970s doctor who. they both contain inextricable elements of the cheap, laughable, and generally unappealing.

asimov strikes me as a writer who is staunchly opposed to writing having literary qualities

haha yeah, I def got the sense that Asimov hated the literary kind of SF stories that were regularly published in the magazine named after him.

as foundation is pretty consistently the story of free-market ingenuity trumping militaristic brutality

what about that part where there's secretly an elite cadre of super-smart people running the galaxy. Lacks fascism's appeal to populism but it's definitely a rationalist future, one where the optimal course for society is determined and achieved through the application of mathematical models

dick, on the other hand, has transcendent ideas and writing that has overt anti-literary qualities. i love his work, but extolling his virtues as a writer always reminds me somewhat of extolling the virtues of 1970s doctor who. they both contain inextricable elements of the cheap, laughable, and generally unappealing.

agree w all this. although I find the cheap and laughable to have their own charm, especially when they're shamelessly employed over and over, and in some cases with a clear undertone of bitter irony - the ridiculous fashion descriptions in Ubik, for ex, or the way super-powerful aliens or technology are rendered utterly banal (like the telepathic denebian slime mold neighbor in Clans of the Alphane Moon).