ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

jg

Dune is considered one of the best SF books ever written by lots of people. so, yeah, for a lot of people it's an apex of sorts.

This is a slippery business. A lot of great literature isn't considered to be amazingly written even now, like Dostoevsky - and yet it didn't matter that much to people who voted him above Austen on the ILB thread. Much great literature was rejected at first or had to be released through other channels -- Joyce and Proust. Bet we all have friends who love great literature and think Proust is a madman.

These qualities shift around too. Is Bolano's 'Part about the Crimes' great literature? Not going to answer that but the distinctions made between qualities in SF and 'great literature' are mostly bogus.

Aimless, have you read anything by Thomas M. Disch? I like him a lot, though I don't have anything particularly intelligent to say about him

― soref, Saturday, October 24, 2015 2:00 PM (2 hours ago)

Fundamental Disch is one of the best short story collections I've ever read by anyone.

In SF, I'd rather talk about peak value rather than career value, to borrow sportsy terminology. In other words, greatest works in the genre rather than greatest authors. But this is a "career value" thread, and that's worthwhile too.

there is an ILX best SF thread or poll or best 100 or something. from some years back.

but, you know, if you go into something suspicious from the start that you are not going to enjoy it or suspicious that there isn't enough value in it for you, it might not be for you. you should be open to it at least. just dig in! or don't.

Asking about the greats of the genre might not always be the best approach, especially in this one, where some of the most acknowledged turn out to be gas giants. I am interpreting this thread as "recommend an sf book to Aimless that you think would appeal to his sensibilities." In that spirit, I am recommending M. John Harrison's Signs of Life, because Harrison is a superior stylist who is very interested in the natural world and the outdoors-he took several off from writing to go rock climbing around the UK- and this book in particular has a lot of that.

Huh i love harrison's sf stuff but have never come across that one

Contra scott - idk anyone who considers Dune the apex of the genre.

This is a slippery business. A lot of great literature isn't considered to be amazingly written even now, like Dostoevsky

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.

Is Bolano's 'Part about the Crimes' great literature?

The Part about the Crimes cannot be sensibly considered outside the context of the rest of 2666, but within that context it operates exactly as the author intended and contributes considerably to the overall effect of the book. So, yes, it is great literature imo.

Huh i love harrison's sf stuff but have never come across that one

Sorry, Course of the Heart came first. And the rock-climbing started way before. Still

idk anyone who considers Dune the apex of the genre.

same here.

I think the main problem w aimless' question is that it glosses over a) what is scifi and b) what constitutes "greatness". Both of which we could argue about forever.

And no doubt already have.

a) what is scifi

We may easily sidestep this difficulty by admitting as a sci-fi author any author that you or another ilxor considers in good faith to be a sci-fi author. Bad faith trolling is pretty easy to detect and ignore.

b) what constitutes "greatness"

To my mind there need not be a consensus about what is "greatness". We each get to define it in our own terms.

But merely calling author X or book Y "great" and stopping at that is pretty thin gruel. It constitutes an argument based wholly upon an appeal to authority, where the authority is ones self and no evidence of that authority is provided. At bottom, all it says is that the author or book suits one's tastes. Who could disagree with so bland a statement as that?

It is far better and more useful if one can persuasively describe the qualities one finds in that author or book, both good and bad, and then argue that the sum of these qualities should be viewed as having a kind of greatness. We can disagree, but there is at least a sound basis for agreement or disagreement. But this approach requires having personal standards that one can apply and personal appreciation that one can articulate.

I am still sticking to the idea that the purpose of this thread is to find some books for Aimless to read that he might actually have a chance of liking. Let's face it, if you have been reading ILB with the least bit of care this past decade, you know that Aimless is not skot, it's not like you can point him at a blog post about the 50 Greatest SF novels and then he will go out the next weekend and buy thrift store copies of all fifty, then buy fifty more by the same authors then another fifty more just for the heck of it and then start a photo thread about them.

Well, I did go to my library's site and put a hold on a book of short stories by M. John Harrison, so, thanks for the pointer JRatB.

Things That Never Happen? Awesome.

Yup. That's the one.

Wonder if your copy will have the Iain Banks intro. Probably is the Nightshade Books edition so I assume it does.

Ursula Le Guin: one of the most compassionate and generous authors I know. She does convincing world building and is famous for experimenting (in fiction, not in life afaik) with radically different sexualities, family units, societies, but it's all in the service of trying to understand people. The Left Hand of Darkness is usually the one suggested to start with as it has like plot and thrilling chases n stuff; The Dispossessed also highly rated, a bit drier imo but I need to reread it.

Stanislaw Lem: sci-fi as philosophy, or vice versa. His USP is exploring the idea that alien intelligence, if we ever find it, might be so unlike our own as to be utterly incomprehensible. He got two great novels out of that idea: Solaris (the relationship to the films has been highly exaggerated) and His Master's Voice, which also contains a lot of political rumination - I know, sounds awful. Also wrote The Cyberiad which is a collection of silly sci-fi folk tales, and a bunch of other stuff I haven't read.

Yeah so apparently my idea of great sci-fi involves being tediously worthy and highbrow.

It is far better and more useful if one can persuasively describe the qualities one finds in that author or book, both good and bad

Sure

and then argue that the sum of these qualities should be viewed as having a kind of greatness.

Nah

asimov seemed like the smartest to me

He got two great novels out of that idea

i hereby retract this factually and philosophically flawed statement

asimov seemed like the smartest to me

i'm not really jumping in on this but huh, no one mentioned delany yet?

He's my guy til I die, but sometimes I feel it's hard to make a case for him because his prose style can sometimes be an obstacle.

The Delany book for people who don't dig Delany is definitely Babel-17.

I would've said nova

I know you would have. But I have it on the authority of noted Delany

Aficionado WilliamC that that one hasn't aged too well.

tbf i think what i get out of delany these days (i've not read anything from before triton in a little while) is only marginally aligned with 'sf'

i don't by any means think harlan ellison is the best of these authors but i also don't think he deserves the original post's "just kidding" -- he wrote a number of first-rate stories.

Glad somebody said that, i agree. Good editor too.

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.

now reading 'a scanner darkly'

it is good and better than the other dicks i've encompassed, if you will. we'll see.

of the others in aimless's original list, heinlein sucks and was a dick, asimov had wonderful ideas but was a terrible writer, i like most of the others, and it's probably ballard for legit pushing the envelope

Frank Herbert should probably be included, just for Dune, if nothing else.

fyi, that list was compiled out of my exceedingly scifi-deficient knowledge base in about four minutes, tops. it was only meant as a provocation.

dune is too weird/fantasy adjacent/sui generis and niche.

I think it's a rather narrow definition of science fiction that would exclude it though.

sure but i wouldn't put him in a list of greatest authors for his one weird magnum opus. either way there's really no need to carry on arguing about yet another canon of white dudes.

so, how about we usher in Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin for a refreshing twist?

I think we could do better than that.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man. Articulate rage about the expectations for women in mid century America (marriage, children, housewifery; education? get tae fuck) in a mindbending postmodern style.

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time: I came for the feminist agrarian utopia, I stayed for the brutal picture of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship by poverty and the state.

James Tiptree Jr: The Screwfly Solution. A sublime example of using science (in this case biology and sociology) to hold up a mirror to society, done with absolute panache. Head and shoulders above 99% of other SF short stories, Aimless if you haven't read this one then start here, it won't take up much of your time.

^this last

James Tiptree Jr is really good, but I read an entire collection of hers front-to-back recently and it gets incredibly depressing after a while. If I hadn't known she was a woman I'd have thought "why does this author love making women suffer so god damned much?"

Fair enough, but if it is the main collection of her work, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, it is grebt.

Yeah, not going to disagree, just my own experience with it wore me down a little. And honestly, it's at least partly because she has important shit to say that it was so depressing. The ways in which women were and are treated, and what humans do to each other in general - those are super important topics. But it's hard to read a collection where literally every story involves rape or the prospect of it, and similar violences. My interpretation is also that she intentionally mimics that "macho sci-fi" tone of voice that was prevalent for some decades, which makes it more exhausting to me, and why I said if I didn't know she was a woman I'd feel like it was some scumbag dude getting off on making women suffer. I don't feel like any of this is doing her down as a writer, or saying that her stories aren't great, but rather explaining my own feelings while exploring that work.

not being a big reader or sci-fi i would venture to say that i would include cixin liu in my personal pantheon as his three-body problem is probably my favourite sci-fi series

emil.y agree with all of that. even if one is prepared for some brutal misogyny the 'macho sci-fi' tone does grate and make it hard to get into the stories, though it's used to particularly good effect in 'the women men don't see', where the whole story passes over the head of the macho narrator.

depressing though it is i guess it speaks to the maturity of SF that some of the most celebrated stories by women are about patriarchy and male violence (the ones mentioned above, 'the handmaid's tale', 'kindred', 'tehanu'...)

I'm sure you've had the same reaction as me to reading 1950s SF written by men tho, ledge - those stories about patriarchy and male violence HAD to be written, urgently, just because of the genre's legacy of crazy sexism and outright misogyny.

This is a difficult thing to express - but isn't Sheldon's use of the Tiptree persona, and use of 'macho' language/viewpoint, partly a 'cover' for the expression of lesbian desire in her work, and life, from what I know of her biography.

Robert Sheckley seemed to have a very golden 1950s - that NYRB collection of his short stories is enough to put him into the v top tier of SF authors.

those stories about patriarchy and male violence HAD to be written, urgently, just because of the genre's legacy of crazy sexism and outright misogyny.

yes, absolutely.

i know the hugo and nebulas are no longer the sausage parties they once were but i've just discovered the otherwise award (formerly the tiptree award) 'encouraging the exploration & expansion of gender' which I think might be a more fruitful source of un-macho sf - started in 1991, the retrospective awards in 1995 mention russ, piercy and tiptree, delany, butler, atwood, and some others i haven't heard of:

https://otherwiseaward.org/award/1995-retrospective-award
https://otherwiseaward.org/award/1995-retrospective-award/1995-retrospective-honor-list

Which, um, used to be the Tiptree Award.

which I think might be a more fruitful source of un-macho sf

― Believe me, grow a lemon tree. (ledge), Thursday, August 5, 2021 11:25 AM

Good publisher
http://www.aqueductpress.com/

I don't know if it's un-macho but woman centred swashbuckling is an interesting mission statement
https://queenofswordspress.com/

Which, um, used to be the Tiptree Award.

I recently seen Farah Mendlesohn say that Gollancz Masterworks had a shortage of women because they only pull from their own already existing catalogue (I think Lafferty was an exception?) which is apparently missing a lot of contenders despite its enormity. Gwyneth Jones recently got 5 books on the list and they were mostly Gollancz books in the first place. I'd like to see Tanith Lee on there sometime, they have a large chunk of her on ebook.

I posted that Mendlesohn interview on the speculative thread, it's really good and she stans pretty hard for Heinlein over authors she's more politically in line with, but she's convinced most people (including his fans) are wrong about him.

btw there is a great article about Cordwainer Smith and TIptree by a guy who was writing a bio of the former which I don't think he ever finished.

Oh, here is a link to download the pdf: Painwise in Space: The Psychology of Isolation in Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree, Jr., by Alan C. Elms.

Took a while but here is the index that shows more of his publications. Some have links to pdfs, including a few more about Smith, some don't, include more about Tiptree.

https://elms.faculty.ucdavis.edu/publications/

One of which is mentioned here: https://weirdfictionreview.com/2016/02/101-weird-writers-39-james-tiptree-jr/

But I can't click on those pdfs directly, I had to copy the links and repaste to browser.