Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer?

mvdwege writes "In the thread on the most depressing sci-fi, there were hundreds of posts but merely four mentions of John Brunner, dystopian writer par excellence. Now, given the normally U.S. libertarian bent of the Slashdot audience, it is understandable that an outright British Socialist writer like Brunner would get short shrift, but it got me thinking: what Sci-fi writers do you know that are, in your opinion, vastly underappreciated?"

Alastair Reynolds

[Anonymous Coward]

Love the Revelation Space series...

Daniel Suarez

[Anonymous Coward]

Daniel Suarez and his trilogy of Daemon, Freedom(TM), and Kill Decision.

Piper

[Anonymous Coward]

H. Beam. Piper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Beam_Piper [wikipedia.org]

But then he cut his own life short, so who knows where he might have gone?

Yevgeny Zamyatin

[PAPPP]

I'll argue for Yevgeny Zamyatin [wikipedia.org], at least for authors unknown among people who otherwise appreciate Sci-Fi. We [wikipedia.org] is probably my favorite of it's style of dystopian novels (Think 1984 and Brave New World) - it uses a clever mathematical symbolism as a framework for the story, it has an awesome IRL history of copies being smuggled in and out of the Soviet Union, and Zamyatin was an Old Bolshevik disenchanted with later developments in the party. This means it has a little bit different perspective than the similar pieces by western authors, and explains the nifty "There is no final revolution" mantra in the novel.

David Brin

[Antipater]

I don't hang out much with people who read sci-fi, so I don't actually know how well-known he is. But I've never heard him brought up during a sci-fi discussion, despite his work being amazing. So he gets my vote.

Eric Frank Russell

[aitala]

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Frank_Russell

EMA

Alan Dean Foster

[conspirator23]

Foster has single-handedly committed all the cardinal sins that Serious SF Authors(tm) must never do:

Movie/TV spin-off novels? Check (See: Splinter of the Mind's Eye [wikipedia.org]).
Crossing over into Fantasy? Check (See: Spellsinger [wikipedia.org]).
Dabbling with humor? Check (Spellsinger, Glory Lane [goodreads.com], etc.).
Indulging a disrespected fringe group? Check. (Furries man. See Spellsinger (again!), Quozl [wikifur.com], the Icerigger trilogy).

If there is a scale that measures prolific hackery, with Peirs Anthony on the bottom and Stephen King on the top, I would put Foster far, far closer to King. Glory Lane, To the Vanishing Point, and Into the Out Of are all truly excellent reads. They're not life changers, they're just damn good. He's got a fine roster of clever and poigniant short stories. For old school geeks, the most notable of which is "Why Johnny Can't Speed" which has been cited as direct inspiration for the classic Steve Jackson game Car Wars [wikipedia.org].

And hey, without Car Wars, SJ Games might never have been successful enough to launch GURPS. Without GURPS, there would be no GURPS Cyberpunk, no Secret Service raid on SJ Games in 1991, and maybe no Electronic Frontier Foundation either. How's that for underrated?

R.A. Lafferty

[HaroldBakker]

His writing wasn't 100% Science Fiction but close enough and since it's either that or Fantasy we'll have to allow it I think.

Donald Kingsbury

[hemo_jr]

_Courtship Rite_ is amazingly good. "Shipwright" and "To Bring in the Steel" are also top-tier. He just didn't write enough.

And if this audience here is actually Libertarian, he would have been mentioned well before now.

Re:Stanislaw Lem

[Omestes]

Clifford Simak.

Admittedly I'm biased, since the first actual novel discovered on my own and read was one of his. City is also one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written. Sadly no one I know, even vintage sci-fi buffs, have ever read anything he ever wrote. This could be because its getting harder and harder to actually find his books anymore.

Like Lem, he suffers from the absolute lack of reprints. I own a translation of all of his novels, and it took over 8 years to accrue them all. Simak is in the same boat, I have some of his novels that I got in the late 80's used, and have never seen since. And I looked, since many of them were presumed lost (actually hidden in an attic somewhere for over 10 years).

Though I did get some people to go read him when I told them that Stephen King's Under the Dome was a badly written, never ending (with hackneyed unattributed T.S. Eliot references/quotes) , version of Simak's All Flesh is Grass.

Lem, though, at least, got two movies (one shallow and exciting, the other deep and boring). Simak probably will never be remembered after another generation. This somewhat depresses me.

I feel the need to go find a used bookstore and browse the old sci-fi section.