Yes it is "Underrated Week" and our next genre is science fiction.
But – sorry guys — I don’t think there is much underrated science fiction. You might think the genre as a whole is underrated, but within the genre there are so many sad desperate souls (I know, I am one of them) who will clutch at straws and elevate the mediocre into the worthwhile and the worthwhile into the superlative.
Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s. Since that time its most glorious achievements have been on the screen, not on the printed page. There are some excellent individual books, such as Eon or Hyperion, but the genre is mostly retreads. Nor do I think much of attempts to cross science fiction with "serious fiction," whether it is coming from Philip K. Dick or Doris Lessing. Yes the idea is cool but the execution is usually quite flawed.
Still we all must have our picks, so here are mine:
1. Sphere, from Michael Crichton. Forget the last few books. He is the best science fiction writer in contemporary times, though his publisher works very hard to make sure that label does not stick.
2. Star Maker, by Olaf Stapledon. Read Stapleton if you fervently believe that British Hegelianism is the missing element in most science fiction. Yet this is probably my favorite science fiction novel of all time, who else can credibly skip over 20,000 years in a single breath? "Civilizations rose and fell, yet now we must move on," or something like that. Honorable mentions go to Stapledon’s Odd John and especially Sirius.
3. Jonathan Lethem, Gun with Occasional Music. This is marketed as contemporary literature, which keeps away the science fiction fans.
It is hard to call Joe Haldeman underrated but still there are fans who don’t know he is one of the best science fiction writers, period.
I guess there is some underrated science fiction after all.
Crying Uncle: OK people, I retract the claim "Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s." Card and Butler are the most convincing counterexamples.
Chrichton? I don’t think so.
It’s hard to call them underrated since their getting so much cred the last few years, but the stuff coming out the the British hard-SF scene (Stross, MacLoed, Egan, Morgan) really is something new under the sun.
Haldeman is often very solid, but the last (Camoflague, Forever Peace) have seemed a lot more slight.
Charles Strauss is writing some great books. While he’s not under-rated within the SF industry, he’s certainly overlooked in the wider industry.
The few chrichton books seem like he’s been shitting them out – but man, Jurrasic Park was a revelation for me.
I’m a big Octavia Butler fan. She never seemed to receive enough attention.
I ave to agree with “kl” and Zach Wilson on Crichton’s work. It’s trite in a very sad and funny way. So as an antidote, can I guide you to some short stories published and left open for us (I don’t think you need to log-in to download them.)
http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/arts/futures/index.html
Nature and Nature Physics ran a series of these over 2006 and they are wonderful literary glimpses into the future. I’d love to see economists try this.
“Science fiction has been treading water since the 1960s.”
Hmmm…
- Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar/Vorkosigan series
- Harry Turtledove, any of his alternate history series (at least, in the first two volumes or so)
- Jerry Pournelle, Falkenberg’s Legion/Co-Dominium series
- Eric Flint, 30 Years’ War series (1632 et seq.)
- Mike Resnick, “Divine Comedy” and other “Africa-in-space” works
Most of these are from the 1980s or later. And that’s off the top of my head: I’m sure if I inspect my shelves, I’ll find more.
SF went through a slow patch in the 1970s, it is true: but then, so did the country as a whole. It’s fitting that the vastly-overrated “New Wave” joins leisure suits, disco, and big hair on the ashheap of “bad ideas whose time seems to have come in the 1970s”.
I confess to not having read too much of it in recent years, which means I am probably sort of
in Tyler’s camp on this, although Cyberpunk was good and Pournelle and some others are good.
I would bring the quesion back to the classics, though. So, presumably people like Clarke, Asimov,
Heinlein, and Bradbury are not underrated. But what about A.E. Van Vogt?
Regarding State of Fear, Virginia State Climatologist Patrick Michals claims to be the model for
the hero of the book, sort of. As for the worst scene in the book, well, maybe Martin Sheen is
annoying, but to have his clone in the book eaten by cannibals while conscious and him thinking
until the last minute they were his fans? A bit much.
Some of the bibliography was informative, however, although clearly rather biased.
One word: Dhalgren by Sam Delaney.
Combines stream of consciousness, gorgeous writing – “… to wound the autumnal city” has got to be one of the most enigmatic yet beautiful openings of a book ever – and hyper-Joycean modernism. Do you need more?
I took two years to read it and found it to be some of the most well spent reading time of my life.
It’s old by now, but still massively under rated and blows away anything else on this list.For myself, I’d rank it up with any novel in any genre. It’s that good.
I mostly abandoned reading science fiction in the 80′s, but had been an avid reader up to that time. I recently had the opportunity to read the new Dune novels written by Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, and Kevin Anderson. I thoroughly enjoyed them as they filled in the unwritten history of the original six novels. And I would recommend them to anyone who liked the original novels.
As preparation for reading the lastest novel, which would now pick up the story where Frank Herbert left it when he died in 1986, I went back and reread the last three novels Frank Herbert wrote in the series because I could not really recall the details having read them 20 years earlier, and only once at that time. I was struck by how good they really were. If you have never read the Dune novels, you should, but if you haven’t, start with the son’s and his cowriter’s Dune novels starting with The Butlerian Jihad. It will make for an entertaining summer of reading since there are 13 books altogether with another due out next month.
I thoroughly enjoyed them as they filled in the unwritten history of the original six novels. And I would recommend them to anyone who liked the original novels.
What’s funny is that I came to the diametric opposite of your conclusion. I read the first two of the prequels, decided they were pretty terrible, and then went back to the originals. What I discovered was a series that got worse and worse the more I read of it, and the only conclusion I could make was that in high school I just had a higher tolerance for tedious writing. All of Herbert’s original stuff was on a different level than the prequels, though.
I’d like to put in a plug for CJ Cherryh’s Foriegner series. Interspecies interaction that feels realistic, humanoid aliens who aren’t too alien but just enough that humans consistently misunderstand them, as well as complex diplomatic intrigue and characters you really start to care about.
Should have mentioned a novel to go with my mention of A.E. Van Vogt. That would be
The World of Null-A and its sequels.
I have to very whole-heartedly agree with the commenter that cited Gene Wolfe and his beautiful, haunting series the Book of the New Sun. I recommend it to any SciFi fan seeking something a cut above the rest.
Metroid Prime.
Yes, it’s a videogame.
For old stuff, let me put in a good word for Cordwainer Smith and Clifford Simak. For newer stuff, it’s hard — I mean, I agree wholeheartedly that Wolfe, Willis, and Vinge are all topnotch authors, but they’re also very well regarded, so it’s hard to see them as underrated.
Maybe Kage Baker? Her Company series has gotten a bit long in the tooth, but the early books and short stories in it were great fun.
Armor, by John(?) Steakley.
I have to second the early posters’ recommendation of Greg Egan; his writing style can get a bit repetitive, but he’s got some really interesting ideas, and a very deep grasp of the science. (just note how often his name is mentioned in John Baez’s “This week’s finds in mathematical physics”…)
Crighton? Please. Sphere was mediocre at best and his writing leans towards a fleshed out movie script more than a novel. Dan Simmons would top the list in my book.
Tyler, I enjoyed reading your insights on Butler.
I read Sphere when I was 12. I didn’t like it at the time(probably because I was expecting a more readable novel like Jurassic Park). but i think I might give it one more try.
He really might be underrated because his work does not receive serious attention because he is the author of Jurassic Park.
Saying scifi has been treading water since the 60′s is silly. Do you really think that Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein etc had done all there is to be done in terms of ideas or style?
You’d have to ignore the entire cyberpunk genre, all the hybrid genre authors, as well as the writers who did conventional scifi as well or better than the previous era’s.
In fact, it’s equivalent to saying that literature as a whole has been retreading itself – since Shakespeare!
Vernor Vinge. Not only one of the best science fiction authors currently publishing, but one of those very few that can take some ideological topic and simply use it as a foundation for a book, without bashing you over the head with it. Start with “A Deepness in the Sky”.
Connie Willis is entertaining, but she writes the same book over and over.
“Treading water since the 60s” seems an odd position for a self-confessed fan. Still, some counterpoints:
(1) Always contentious to call China Mieville science fiction but if you haven’t tried Peridido Street Station or The Scar you’re missing some of the best writing of any sort going on today. (The Scar in particular riffs on the two great SF/fantasy plots – the LotR “perilous journey” and the Gormenghast “exploring the city” – by sending a city on a perilous journey.)
(2) Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece – The Baroque Cycle – is not SF, but his Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash are, and are wonderful
(3) Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, is probably the best SF comic of the past decade
(4) It’s unusual to call William Gibson underrated since he’s more normally credited with redefining the genre, but you implicitly dismiss his contribution so he goes in the list too – not just for the obvious Neuromancer stuff but for my money the best SF short ever written, The Winter Market
(5) My own outright favourite SF since the 60s is George R R Martin’s The Dying of the Light and Windhaven. He doesn’t do SF any more though, working on his fantasy magnum opus
(6) If you like Jonathan Lethem, you might like Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope (not the Malazan Book of the Fallen guy, a different Steve Erickson). TBH I find it an odd idea that anyone wouldn’t like Amnesiascope.
seeing as this has morphed into a _best of SF/F_ list from an _underrated SF_ list, i’ll add jack vance, stanislaw lem and piers anthony
cheers!
Yeah, Crichton basically sucks, but I thought Timeline was way better than Sphere.
I’d just realized that I’d never read the rest of the “Sprawl Trilogy” after Neuromancer, and so I’m just finishing Count Zero.
How come nobody talks about this one?
The images Gibson paints in my mind with his prose are like no other.
I’m constantly saying to myself, “I have got to learn how to assemble sentences like that!“
There’ve been a lot of good recommendations in this thread, but let me add [i]Ventus[/i] and [i]Lady of Mazes[/i] are excellent medium-hard science fiction with both engaging characters and stories and a lot of meat on them. [i]Permanence[/i] by him is credible, but not as good as his other work.
I’d also recommend John C. Wright’s series that begins with [i]The Golden Age[/i]. I don’t feel I could give a description that would do them justice so go read the reviews of people who can use words more cleverly than I can.
I would certainly not say that SciFi has done ANYTHING good on any sort of screen.
I have enjoyed science fiction because it allows the author to deal with and examine situations and concepts that would be impossible or very very hard within a contemporary or historical context. Thus, the author bends reality to illustrate some concept, from the personal (Alfred Bester likes to assume “what if people could teleport?” and go from there) to the universal (Asimov’s Foundation series).
Screen scifi is nothing but stories set in space. Just cause it mentions galaxies and planets and aliens, doesn’t make it science fiction in my book. Is star wars scifi? I would disagree. It’s just a fairy tale with blasters.
As for recent and amazing, mind-blowingly good science fiction read: Vernor Vinge’s latest stuff (True Names reads a bit stale these days, so check out Fire Upon the Deep), Ken MacLeod (superb!), and as someone above mentioned Neal Stephenson. And although not new, if you haven’t read it, I recommend reading all 6 original Dune books. Many have only read the first, some have read the first 3, but very few ventured unto the last 3, which REALLY add to it. If you haven’t read those, I would HIGHLY recommend it.
Several folks have mentioned Vernor Vinge, but no one appears to have mentioned his “real time” sequence, The Peace War, “The Ungoverned,” and Marooned in Real Time. The latter is not only great SF, it’s also a good mystery novel. Given that these books always seem to get shoved aside in favor of A Fire Upon the Deep and its sequel, I’d argue that they’re underrated.
Just wanted to join in the chorus of trashing Crichton. I have three major problems with him as a sci-fi writer:
1: His science is not only faulty, it is occasionally laughable.
2: His prose, while fun (and very, very quick) to read, is forgettable, shallow, hack-work. Yeoman craftwork, perhaps (and a cut above the standard Walgreens bookshelf offerings), but still hammered out with scarcely any literary worth in-and-of-itself.
3: His books are effectively pitches for (bad) Hollywood movies.
Not to mention his excerable politics. But never mind that.
As far as underrated (or, perhaps, unacknowledged) sci-fi, how about:
- Mary Doria Russel’s “The Sparrow”. It’s the sci-fi book I lend to people who’ve never read sci-fi. They usually love it, and want to read more books like it, but are inevitably disappointed by other sci-fi novels they come across (e.g., Crichton).
- Haruki Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”. Japan’s best-selling novelist’s early experiment in sci-fi. Utterly, mind-blowingly brilliant.
- Talk about unacknowledged: no one has even mentioned Bruce Sterling! While he is not the finest literary writer (and admits that he’s more of a “speculative journalist” than a novelist), I often feel that he’s the only American writer who actually understands how the modern world has come about, and where it’s going (not just “Islands in the Net”, but also his more recent novels: “Heavy Weather”, “Zeitgeist”, and “The Zenith Angle”).
- Finally, Gene Wolfe is not really underrated, as he has been described as “the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced” by the Washington Post’s book review of the “Book of the New Sun”. Under-acknowledged by the sci-fi fanbase, perhaps, but not underrated.
H. Beam Piper.
Fantastic stuff.
Larry Niven is first-rate, but not underrated.
I’m another Crichton fan. It’s hard science fiction in the classic style of “Forget about character and fancy writing; it’s plot and clear writing that matters here”. Pretty much everything I’ve read has been good except Prey, the silly novel about nanotechnology, and even that was suspenseful and memorably– just stupid. So it looks like Crichton does count as underrated.
I would add Jack Vance (for example: The Dirdir). He is respected, but nonetheless underrated. He seems to have an especially devoted group of fans, which might be evidence for that. (And his late novels are both bad and, it seems to me, the most strongly promoted by the publishers.)
“Sphere” is your idea of great science fiction? I find it ironic that even though you brand science fiction as a genre of “mostly retreads,” you choose to praise this book, which is itself a retread. Its central revelation was handled with more whimsy and invention in an old “Star Trek” episode titled “Shore Leave,” written by the great Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon was also behind what is now known as Sturgeon’s Law, which goes something like this: 90 percent of science fiction is crud, but then, 90 percent of everything is crud. Crichton’s book a deserves solid ranking among that 90 percent.
I wonder whether you’ve even read that much post-1960s science fiction. Just off the top of my head, I would refer you to the works of John Varley, Octavia E. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Orson Scott Card, Alice Sheldon (a k a James Tiptree Jr.), Robert Charles Wilson, Richard K. Morgan, Peter Watts, Vernor Vinge, Mary Doria Russell, John Scalzi and Gregory Benford.
How about Chuck Palahniuk? He picks up where Phil K. Dick left off.
Try Tepper (Sheri). Why wait till she’s dead before you discover her? I think she’s better than Butler at being Butler and arguably more creative than Card. She doesn’t build series although she maybe should. Maybe she’d be better known. An odd hybrid between modern day, fantasy and science fiction, I recommend (all of them) but start with:
Singer from the Sea
Beauty
Grass
and lastly, if the right wing view towards stem cell and “sanctity of life” frightens you, read _The Visitor_.
“Screen scifi is nothing but stories set in space. Just cause it mentions galaxies and planets and aliens, doesn’t make it science fiction in my book. Is star wars scifi? I would disagree. It’s just a fairy tale with blasters.”
“Very true.”
There are a lot of science fiction movies that are not just adventure/romance/whatever stories set in a high tech background. Here are some that turn on at least some interesting speculative premise. Not all equally good, but all really science fiction, IMO. Doubtless, some will disagree on a few, but I doubt on all.
Blade Runner
A Scanner Darkly
Thirteenth Floor
2001 A Space Odyssey
Fight Club
Twelve Monkeys
Strange Days
War of the Worlds
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Truman Show
Matrix
Dark City
Vanilla Sky/Open Your Eyes
Donnie Darko
Andromeda Strain
Children of Men
Idiocracy
Minority Report
and as an afterthought,
Terminator
Total Recall
The focus of these last two is on action, but even so I would class both as science fiction, not because they have a killer android or scenes of Mars. The genuine science fictional elements of the first are (a) the possible takeover by machines (an old theme but not an invalid one) and (b) defeating your enemy by keeping him from being born (and a couple of other details). The genuine science fictional elements of the second are the identity crisis and the uncertainty about what is real.
Some good old movies too, like Metropolis or The Day the Earth Stood Still or The Forbidden Planet.
Constant
Alien is also a first class science fiction movie. And so is Aliens. The former with a horror bent, the latter by someone who had obviously read Heinlein, and knew how too build a movie around it. Did the stories ‘Waldo and Magic, Inc.’ (as well as Starship Troopers) not instantly pop into your head?
The modern subtexts are fascinating: the repeated intimation that the Alien is the product of a biowar project gone wrong (difficult to imagine a natural ecosystem that would create something as deadly as the Alien, and then not be destroyed by it: although you could argue humans fit that description well).
The machinations of the corporation revealed in the latter 3 Alien films (and of course Ash in the first one).
Agree with your list and would add:
- Predator
- Running Man
‘Cube’ and ‘Cypher’ are also very clever SF films, from a Canadian Director (whose name escapes me).
Gattacca is a massively underrated movie: one of the best SF films of all time, in my opinion.
Being John Malkovich is also science fiction, and is pretty good for it.
On ‘golden oldies’:
- Fantastic Planet
- This Island Earth (not so clear, but I liked it
- The Day the Earth Stood Still
- The Shape of Things to Come
- Metropolis
- Invasion of the Body Snatchers (both versions)
- Silent Running (prescient, as we discuss creating ‘last stand’ ecosystems, for near-extinct species)
- On the Beach
On other Paul Verhoeven films:
- Robocop
- Starship Troopers
both are brilliant satires (although not many seem to get that, re the latter).
Let us not forget *all* the Quatermass films and (while we are on the subject of British film:
- the Day the Earth Caught Fire
SF authors we might read in 100 years time:
- Philip K Dick (almost certain) – already issued as a Penguin Classic
Note: the movies A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, Bladerunner are all based on Philip K. Dick books. Many of his other books have failed as movies, but those 3 will be with us a long time– each is brilliant in its own way.
- Ursula LeGuin (probably: The Word for World is Forest, Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and The Lathe of Heaven, all have a prescience about them)
- I wonder about Norman Spinrad? In particular ‘Bug Jack Baron’ is looking more, and more, like a novel of its times (TV shock jock becomes President)
Someone mentioned Cormac Macarthy and I would agree with that.
- again for prescience, I suspect David Brin’s Uplift War saga– dolphins and chimpanzees as humanity’s partners. Not for literary style, though.
Of course the tastes of the future are obscure. I can’t stand Iain Banks, but people love them. Note to self: must try harder.
The problem with Michael Crichton isn’t bad ideas, it’s just a overly dry executions, flat charaters and stupid enddings (plus, the plot to “State of Feat” was stupid)
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