ILB Argues About Who is the Greatest Science Fiction Author

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.

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.

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.