Ask Slashdot: Most Underappreciated Sci-Fi Writer? 1130
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?"
Ursula K. LeGuin (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I can.
Stanislaw Lem (Score:5, Insightful)
I will admit I don't know Polish and have only read the English translation of his works but I will also say that where I find contemporary authors like Stephen King or Cormac McCarthy to be masters of description, Lem was lacking. His works, however, I often found mirrored in later American science fiction and sometimes what he packed into a chapter could be as deeply philosophical and have as much political commentary as an entire novel by his contemporaries. One of my Polish computer vision professors in grad school saw me reading the Cyberiad and picked up my book and held it up to the class and hyperbolic-ally announced "Every work of science fiction past 1960 is a derivative of this man." He's probably a hero in Poland but I have friends that consider themselves very avid readers and haven't even heard of him.
I have to admit I even stumble upon works of his I never got around to and find pleasure in them [slashdot.org].
Kurt Vonnegut (Score:5, Insightful)
Cordwainer Smith (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith
Re:Terry Pratchett (Score:2, Insightful)
The same Terry Pratchett that's been honoured by the queen and is a best seller?
Fredric Brown (Score:5, Insightful)
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...
One of his more famous stories, Arena, was made into a Star Trek episode, although I liked the story better. My favorite story is a just a few paragraphs about a many who invents a machine to manipulate time.
Fredric Brown helped me to understand how limited my imagination really was and prompted me to expand it. What is more amazing to me is how well these stories still hold up today.
Re:Subjectivity (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, being well known and oft-cited isn't the same as being appreciated for what you really are. Consider Adam Smith who wrote *The Wealth of Nations* a book far more cited than read.
Asimov was merely a *good* writer, but he was a *brilliant* thinker. There are, therefore, multiple layers of irony then in the way the three laws are cited. They don't have the kind of scientific validity they have in his robot story universe, where people simply cannot build robots that violate the laws. In the real world we are far from building robots that are capable of interpreting the three laws.
The real significance of the laws is literary. They killed the popularity of the robot-run-amok story, because suddenly everyone expected a more sophisticated -- or at least more clever story than a third-hand Frankenstein retread. Such a story would pose no challenge nor offer rewards to an intellect like his.
The ultimate irony is that while the three laws are the sci-fi trope par excellence, Asimov used them as an excuse to slip numerous variations on the classic locked room murder mystery past sci-fi readers. He wrote a number of great pure sci-fi stories, but I think he was at heart a mystery writer.
Gene Wolfe (Score:4, Insightful)
The Book of the New Sun should be considered one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century. It has been aptly described as a work of vast imagination.
Re:Subjectivity (Score:2, Insightful)
He's one of the most appreciated ever.
Alas, his I Robot was translated into a travesty of a film .. rather like happened to Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:4, Insightful)
Daniel Keys Moran (Score:4, Insightful)
The guy invented Cyberpunk as we know it (or at least pioneered it), and nobody credits him for it. He had avatars in the Crystal Wind (his vision of the VR net) and AIs doing battle with and against genetically engineered soldiers and telepaths, all set against a backdrop universe of UN Peacekeepers keeping a fascist regime in place with orbital lasers and a greater background spanning the whole of time. Internet addiction, flying cars that nobody was allowed to drive manually for safety reasons, and near future military equipment that makes sense (with drawbacks and idiot proofing). His universe dates back in magazines to 1983, a year before Neuromancer, but his novels were published a year later.
Plus he's been included in collections like "Star Wars: Tales from Jabba’s Palace" and "Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters".
And almost nobody has heard of him.
Re:Subjectivity (Score:5, Insightful)
Verhoeven's Starship Troopers adaption was a brilliant parody of the original material and made a pointed joke of everything Heinlein claimed to stand for.
If you consider the original novel to be profound I can't imagine you would have the sense of self-awareness required to enjoy the film, anyway.
Re:Ayn Rand (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know. I've read a good deal of what she wrote and was rabidly into her for quite some time. Then I came to realize that basically she was rather one dimensional and her model of the world is not very realistic. Yes, of course humans essentially perform better when motivated by self-interest, but human beings are so much more than little drones of capitalism. We're very complex and our motivations vary from day to day. For someone who actually looks at the complexity of the world Rand starts to look a little simple.
Re:Ayn Rand (Score:5, Insightful)
But her real con was convincing people that when someone else is suffering, you have no moral obligation to help them out. It's the same bullshit as reincarnation spun a different way. If an Objectivist tries to help the poor, the sick, the injured, the uneducated, etc... he's betraying capitalism and preventing the free trade of the markets from leading the most moral people to success. So while it's not technically evil for him to do it, he has no obligation. The person who believes in reincarnation has no need to help others, because any pain they have in this life will be offset by a happier future life. Either way, it's a fancy justification for saying, "I got lucky in this life, everyone else can go fuck themselves."
I don't care who you are, your success is more luck than anything. Maybe you were born to great parents. Maybe you had a wonderful teacher or career mentor in your chosen field. Maybe you got lucky with your social networking skills (in the non-Facebook sense) and your career skyrocketed that way. Maybe you stumbled across a book or website or meditation practice that taught you the self-discipline to succeed. Most of all, you didn't die of communicable diseases, of cancer, in a car accident. No matter how much work you did to reach your current success, luck is more than 50% of the picture. The Objectivist fantasy that you owe society and the rest of humanity nothing in return is an absurdity.
Society needs to allow hard work to be rewarded, or it will collapse - that's why pure socialism will never work. But this idea that everyone with a hard life somehow earned their pain and does not deserve help from the lucky is nonsense.