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.
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I think he requested under-appreciated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin#Awards [wikipedia.org]
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Huh. I actually liked that.
Must be at a certain level of appreciation, certainly below the sophisticated understanding of modern MFAs, but I liked that.
Anyway, the most under-appreciated sci-fi author, bar none, is Jack Vance. If any deem this underappreciation deserved because he didn't seem to undertake the addressing of Big Themes, said "any" merely show they just. don't. get it.
Also, he was the best at creating names, like, evar!! He could outname Tolkein on Tolkein's best day even if he let Tolkein use
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].
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:4, Interesting)
Star Trek had a tendency to ignore human nature. That's something that was nice about Bab5. We were in space but we were still ourselves. We've had 10 thousand years of recorded history to become something else. A couple hundred years and some extra technology isn't going to change us on a fundemental level.
You could point to history for equally drastic changes that didn't turn everything into pretty ponies and unicorns.
It got so bad that aliens had to stand in for human failings.
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:5, Funny)
The originals are of course better
You mean that they are more polished? *ducks*
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:5, Interesting)
I was hoping in fact just today there'd be an appropriate reason for me to post this on Slashdot.
Lem is relatively well known in the USA, from what I can judge. The couple of English translations I've encountered weren't particularly good. Lem's Solaris is brilliant, and several other works are well worth reading.
But whom I really want to point out to sci-fi fans in the USA are the Strugatsky brothers (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky). Soviet sci-fi authors with legendary status in post-Soviet space among anyone who reads sci-fi. As an avid sci-fi fan, I put them on the very top tier of authors, along with the better known English-language greats like Clarke, Asimov or Bradbury.
English translations are not too numerous, but I discovered last month that one of their best books, Roadside Picnic, has been re-released in the USA with a new translation. Amazon link [amazon.com]. Give it a try. I really hope that new edition will help in getting them to be better known in the English-speaking world, and greatly hope that this post will get at least a couple of Slashdotters to look into it.
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky). Soviet sci-fi authors with legendary status in post-Soviet space among anyone who reads sci-fi.
The iron curtain blocked a lot of great writers. Not just for Russia/Eastern Europe but also China. I recently purchased a book that was an anthology of the "best" Chinese stories and was blown away.
TRIVIA - The best selling magazine in the WORLD is a Chinese science fiction magazine. "Science Fiction World" It has a readership of 400,000. For comparison Asimov's SF is only ~15,000.
http://www.concatenation.org/articles/science_fiction_world_2010.html [concatenation.org]
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the first Slashdot in ages in which the comments are hitting almost uniform high quality.
Brunner, LeGuin, Lem, and the Brothers Strugatsky. All great SciFi in terms of ideas above technological opera.
I hope to see Yevgeny Zamyatin, maybe even Jack Vance and Zelazny mentioned.
All these guys are on par with the standard "canon of important literature you should know, Mr college graduate."
Re:Stanislaw Lem (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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I read Clifford Simak's "City" as a teenager in the 50's and I still remember it as clear as it was yesterday. It is one of my two all time favorites. The other is Bester's "The Stars my Destination". Bester is at least not underappreciated
Alastair Reynolds (Score:5, Informative)
Love the Revelation Space series...
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To me, Alastair Reynolds is the Robert Jordan of sci-fi. Very long, very tropish, not worth the effort. My Brother adores him, so does my ex-boss who has read everything. My wife didn't care for it, boring and over explanatory.
I think Iain Banks ruined me for Reynolds, which is funny because it was my ex-boss who turned me on to both authors. I don't know if Iain Banks is under appreciated, but I was the first to mention him in the depressing sci-fi thread. The Culture is this super enlightened,
J. K. Rowling (Score:5, Funny)
Going for a downvote record!
Re:J. K. Rowling (Score:5, Funny)
Re:J. K. Rowling (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, I totally agree!
We need an "L. Ron Hubbard award for literary audaciousness".
What other sci-fi writer jumped the shark with such intense audacity as to proclaim a series of lackluster works of science fiction space opera cliches as a genuine religious faith?
Clearly, this level of literary audaciousness deserves a analog to the raspberry award.
Re:J. K. Rowling (Score:5, Funny)
You gotta admire the innovation though. I mean, many sci-fi stories have been turned into movies or video games, a few into plays and some have even inspired albums. But to my knowledge, Hubbard is the first to turn a sci-fi series into a decades long piece of performance art so encompassing that most of the players don't realize it isn't real life. He even called his shot!
Re:J. K. Rowling (Score:5, Funny)
What other sci-fi writer jumped the shark with such intense audacity as to proclaim a series of lackluster works of science fiction space opera cliches as a genuine religious faith?
joseph smith. have you had a peek at the pearl of great price? oh, and the person/people who wrote the urantia book. dianetics is a urantia rip-off.
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I once worked in a place where numerous people spent long hours sitting at consoles waiting for things to happen, and were allowed to read to stay awake. One guy used to read the same book over and over again, perhaps a hundred times over a decade...
It was Battlefield Earth.
Re:J. K. Rowling (Score:5, Interesting)
Keep modding parent up, please.
Everyone's opinion of L. Ron Hubbard today is strongly colored by the fact that he went insane at some point and took a joke way too far (by inventing Scientology as part of a casual bet with Heinlein over who could invent the best religion). I hate Scientology and all other religious cults (i.e. "religions") as much as the next rational person, but unfortunately it makes people forget the fact that LRH was actually a very good writer back in the day, including science fiction. He was contemporaries and friends with other sci-fi greats like Heinlein. People judge him now based on the craziness of the Xenu story, but I believe he specifically made the basis of Scientology as totally nonsensical as possible to demonstrate how easy it is to get people to believe in totally nonsensical made-up crap. He was making a point, originally, but then ran off the tracks with it because so many people fell for it that he convinced himself it was real (or at least worth taking advantage of to bring himself money and power).
All that aside, and this has been mentioned before a couple of times in other sci-fi discussions, the man was fully capable of writing excellent stories. I was fortunate to read _Battlefield Earth_ long before I had ever heard of Scientology, and even though I've devoured Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert, Dick, Zelazny, and many other great collections of sci-fi before and since, to this day decades later _Battlefield Earth_ remains one of my favorite sci-fi novels. There's just something about it. It's incredibly well thought out logistically and filled with fascinating concepts that I've never quite seen replicated in any other sci-fi I've ever read or seen since then. There's a sort of plans-within-plans scheming aspect that strongly reminds me of _Dune_ at times. It's also very long, much longer than your typical sci-fi novel, so it's got the space to tell a very detailed and satisfying saga-type story with lots of different well-written characters. There are many concepts and scenes from the book that just pop back into my head now and then because they were just so unique and interesting. Oh, and it's just plain fun. It's a grand adventure. (One of my favorite parts was the little gray lawyer guy with the upset stomach at the end. Hilarious.)
The movie of course is a horrible joke. I was actually kind of surprised that someone with that much money to play with and who supposedly worships LRH as part of his religion would thoroughly massacre such a great book. The movie ended up containing about 1% of what made the book so good. So don't let that stop you from reading the book. If someone really did justice to a movie adaptation it could easily be one of the best blockbuster trilogies ever made.
So anyway, if you've got the balls go get yourself a copy of _Battlefield Earth_ and read it. Then when people ask why you're reading crap by "that Scientology guy" you can set them straight. My vote is definitely for L. Ron Hubbard being one of the most underappreciated sci-fi writers today.
Actual origin of Scientology (Score:4, Interesting)
According to Harlan Ellison, who was there, the actual event came about at a Con in NYC in 1952 when L. Sprauge de Camp made a joke that, if you wanted to make money with science fiction, you should just invent your own religion. L. Ron, however, took it seriously.
L. Sprauge de Camp, unfortunately, remains unappreciated.
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I have read a few L. R. Hubbard books -- always found them pretty schlocky. Thus, only the few, while I have read most if not everything from others of that era: Clarke, Asimov, Herbert, Zelazny, Ellison, etc.
As far as Scientology goes, there are plenty of rumors. It's pretty clear that Hubbard started with Dianetics. He lost control of Dianetics when he had to sell out interest in the business to pay back taxes. Oops. So why not turn it into a religion? That way, there are no taxes to pay, and as the figur
Kilgore Trout. (Score:5, Funny)
And so it goes.
Daniel Suarez (Score:3, Informative)
Daniel Suarez and his trilogy of Daemon, Freedom(TM), and Kill Decision.
Kurt Vonnegut (Score:5, Insightful)
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Karin Boye (Score:3)
Just one "SF" novel, "Kallocain", written eight years before Orwell's 1984. Definitely worth reading for the day when technology can easily detect lies and/or force people to speak the truth.
L. Ron Hubbard (Score:3, Funny)
Duh!
Piper (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Me (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Me (Score:5, Funny)
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"My teacher said my handwriting was too messy. I never wrote again."
You were lucky. My teacher said I was smart and my writing was good. She almost had me believing I was smart, but I've wasted 60 years writing in an age when writers outnumber readers.
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Re:Me (Score:5, Funny)
Should have put in a star crossed romance interest between a stalactite and stalagmite from two warring houses, the Calzites and Bicarbonets.
Could end it tragically with some lime-a-way...
Cordwainer Smith (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith
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I'm not too sure. I think mister Linebarger is one of those that are overappreciated, like E.E. Doc Smith and RAH.
Even though they wrote their spit shined hero stories well, they also did receive their well deserved appreciation for them.
I'd rather go with Harry Martinson [wikipedia.org] and Cyril M. Kornbluth [scribd.com].
What, you haven't heard of them? Goes to show that they're underappreciated.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith
I hate to be trite, but this ends the discussion. Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, aka, Cordwainer Smith was an absolutely brilliant writer, possibly the most brilliant ever in the field. His stories put you in another place, another time, another reality. Not just a spectator, but a participant. It's hard to describe. And the kittens. Oh, fear the kittens.
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Robert Anton Wilson (Score:5, Interesting)
The Illuminatus Trilogy was brilliant, and his SchrÃdinger's Cat Trilogy was pretty awesome too. I guess there's better writers out there, and more prolific ones, but there's something thought provoking about his work. For me , they allow you to see the world differently and they make you ask questions. RIP RAW.
Are Those His Only Books You Have? (Score:3)
Terry Pratchett (Score:3)
I also enjoyed Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. Granted, it was a translation, but it was a helluva interesting story about the third world deciding to invade the first, through mass population exodus. I got to read that in a pop culture sci fi English class in college, even though it was originally written in French and translated.
I enjoy some Piers Anthony, even though I didn't enjoy Bio of a Space Tyrant. The Xanth series is fun if you're bored and willing to read 'em straight through, and like puns. Mute was good.
I read a lot of David Weber, though I wish he'd get on with the Honorverse and with Dahak and Safehold. After Robert Jordan's death I swore I wouldn't read any more authors who were living or at least whose series were still going somewhere and weren't done, and Weber is one of the few that fits that. Dammit, finish the stories!
And Bruce Sterling seems under-appreciated these days too.
Re:Terry Pratchett (Score:5, Interesting)
Having met the man a few times, and seen the adoration of his fans (only red Dwarf fans seemed more manic), I can genuinely say that Pterry [1] deserves all the accolades he receives. As to how well known his works are outside of fantasy fandom, I have no idea. Most of my geek friends has read his works and enjoyed them.
The Discworld books are largely parodies and satire examining various pop culture phenomenons or societal constructs. for something slightly different, try Nation [wikipedia.org] which isn't considered a Discworld novel per se.
Pterry is also an advocate for voluntary euthanasia, having recently made a documentary [wikipedia.org] for the BBC. His interest in the topic was partially inspired due to his diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer's disease.
If you are looking to try the Discworld novels for the first time, "Guards Guards" is a good place to start. The quality, complexity and depth of the novels has improved greatly over the 30 years or so he's been published.
[1] A convention adopted on alt.books.pratchett and alt.fan.pratchett also refers to Terry as Pterry as a homage to his book Pyramids. It has been fairly broadly adopted within fan circles. Terry used to be a regular participant on usenet before social media was cool. It was kinda neat to be able to have a conversation with an author you appreciated and get direct responses to questions on interpretation or intent of their works. Sadly since the onset of his Alzheimer's diagnosis, he doesn't frequent social media channels as much anymore. He has a twitter presence, but I'm unsure whether he is actually behind the keyboard. He now dictates his novels as a coping mechanism.
Walter M. Miller Jr. (Score:5, Interesting)
Philip K. Dick (Score:5, Interesting)
He was almost unknown while he was alive, I'd never heard of him until I was an adult, and the only reason most people know about him is because Hollywood has been mining his mind-nuggets post-mortem for decades.
I'm sure the Slashdot crowd appreciates him, but I'd still say he's under-appreciated because he deserves to be up there with the likes of Asimov, Wells and Verne.
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Keep it that way (Score:2)
Roger Zelazny (Score:2)
Margaret Atwood (Score:2)
Garrett P. Serviss (Score:4, Interesting)
Writer of lame fanfiction and sci-fi genre pioneer, apparently:
http://www.cracked.com/article_19949_the-6-most-important-sci-fi-ideas-were-invented-by-hack.html [cracked.com]
Moses! (Score:2, Funny)
Number 1 in print, but he's not the first person you think of!
Neil Stephenson (Score:3)
Because Snow Crash is the first piece of science-fiction I've ever read, and then reflected that it actually predicted its future pretty well.
Under-appreciated? (Score:2)
Robert L. Forward (Score:4)
Robert L. Forward. An actual physicist.
To those evolved on the surface of a neutron star, you are mere smoke.
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I read Dragon's Egg when I was... 14 or 15 I think. It was a good book. It was a bit slow in spots but I still recall the story from time to time even now. I have no idea if he wrote anything else, your neutron star reference is what triggered my memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon's_Egg [wikipedia.org]
Yevgeny Zamyatin (Score:5, Informative)
David Brin (Score:4, Informative)
Re:David Brin (Score:4, Interesting)
He's quite well known, has had a movie made from one of his works (The Postman, with Kevin Costner), and has won multiple awards. He just hasn't writtena lot of his more epic sci fi he originally was known for in a while. But I wouldn't say he's under-appreciated. Also he just released a new book. Can't remember the name though.
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.
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My brother recently found and gave me a copy of What Mad Universe because we had both read and enjoyed it as kids. Fredric Brown was great.
Eric Frank Russell (Score:5, Informative)
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Frank_Russell
EMA
Alan Dean Foster (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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Theodore Sturgeon (Score:3)
You should read the short story "... And Now The News." It's truly one of the most eye opening short stories that nobody knows about. In many ways, it's a gloriously alternative view about the sadness of life and the optimism that people can have. Truly one of the best stories I'd recommend to anyone.
Here's the link:
http://books.google.com/books/about/And_Now_the_News.html?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC [google.com]
Some more commentary:
http://www.physics.emory.edu/~weeks/misc/faq.html [emory.edu]
Sturgeon&The Skills of Xanadu; James P Hogan & (Score:3)
Theodore Sturgeon also predicted the mobile internet in the 1950s and its possible social, political, and military implications. And much, much more. That one story inspired Ted Nelson and project Xanadu and Hypertext (so, ultimately the World Wide Web), as well as many other technologists (like for nanotech).
http://books.google.com/books?id=wpuJQrxHZXAC&pg=PA51&lpg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false [google.com]
Although I'd agree with others that Stanislaw Lem and Ursula K. Le Guin are awesome.
And my person favori
R.A. Lafferty (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a surprising suggestion (Score:4, Interesting)
Too many to mention. (Score:3)
I started to read sci-fi in the early 1970s, after the Golden Age but while many of the Golden Age writers were still with us. Time has passed and many great (and countless very good) writers are no longer with us are fading into obscurity: C.L. Moore, Alfred Bester, Clifford D. Simak, and Randall Garrett to name a few.
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.
Poul Anderson (Score:5, Interesting)
Most unappreciated has to go to Poul Anderson.
He wrote so much stuff, and almost all of it top-notch. His name deserves to be right up there with Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein.
The Flandry books. The van Rijn books. The Time Patrol. The Hoka books!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul_Anderson [wikipedia.org]
http://baen.com/author_catalog.asp?author=panderson [baen.com]
His work was nominated for Hugo awards on numerous occasions, but the top names released popular stories at the same time and he lost to those.
Somewhere I saw a discussion of the best SF books to give to SF-hating friends to try to win them over. The Time Patrol books were chosen by several. "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" is fantastic.
Baen collected all the Time Patrol stuff into one mega volume:
http://www.baenebooks.com/p-428-time-patrol.aspx [baenebooks.com]
You can read the first novella and most of the second one for free at the above link (click on "View sample chapters").
steveha
Donald Kingsbury (Score:4, Informative)
_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.
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My Short List (Score:4, Interesting)
James P Hogan (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_P._Hogan [wikipedia.org]
The Two Faces of Tomorrow was my favorite.
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.
Alfred Bester (Score:3)
Harlan Ellison (Score:3)
He just does not get enough hugs. I really encourage everyone to go to his book signings and appearances and give him a big ol hug.
Connie Willis (Score:3)
Lincoln's Dreams. To Say Nothing of the Dog. TheDoomsday Book. Passage. Etc. Oodles of Nebula and Hugo awards, but her name rarely comes up in general discussions about sci-fi. So despite her literary successes, she qualifies as underappreciated (in the Slashdot venue).
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Dune is a masterpiece. The masses don't know it exists. The award-givers looked him over. And only the first book got any real acclaim from critics.
It's a good book, but it's just not that interesting in terms of ideas. It's just desert Islam in space. Plus some worms to provide action.
Seriously, just ask "who would I want to be in this book?" About the only answer is Paul or maybe one of the tech-geek mentats.
Bummer if you're a women too: you get some soft power if you happen to be in the elite court and get your Bene Gesserit training, else you are pretty much a non-entity.
If you think Dune is great, you'll like many of the available historical novel
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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.
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I Robot is not nearly as bad as some people whine and Starship Troopers was clearly not meant to be a straight adaptation.
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.
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I think, in his time, he was under-appreciated. But he certainly is appreciated now, if not a cherished part of the science-fiction canon. We are fortunate, as science-fiction readers, that he did not move on to other genres as he originally had intended (or, maybe not, I don't know. In some other reality, PKD was a furnature saleman who never had the inkling to write at all).
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Even for someone trained in maths and physics his books can be a struggle to read. But they are full of concepts that really make you think. I recommend Permutation City as one of his easier, but still very interesting reads. Short stories are good too.
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Thanks for this. Vance is among the writers in -any- genre whose work I value most after 30-odd years of reading. I periodically return to the Demon Princes and the Cadwall novels. I cannot recommend his work highly enough.
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Actually, the AC is right that Ayn Rand's novels are science fiction. She wrote about things like metals with near-magical properties, invisible battleships, force fields, colonies of übermenschen trying to take over the Earth -- classic science fiction material. While Ayn Rand's works are well known they are not often recognized for what they really are, works of science fiction.
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.
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You claim none of the people who hate Rand have read her. Concerned Onlooker says "I've read her, liked her for a time, then realized she wasn't really that good."
Seems relevant to me. Here's another one. I've read Anthem, and a representative sample of Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead. I've also read some of her personal correspondence and a fair amount about her life.
Ayn Rand is a terrible writer, and, while she explicitly used the word selfishness, and made a case (at length) for it as a social va
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For example, I was less politically and socially naive than what she has written by the time I was 16, even though I was an introverted geek that mostly read Asimov, textbooks, technical manuals and newspapers.
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.
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But she sees no moral obligation to help others. I disagree with that. "Charity is optional" is a philosophy only popular with the people who would not be dead for lack of charity, and who are naive enough to believe they could never require it.
I have. You'll need to move in with someone who already has an apartment for a few weeks at least.
And if you don't know anyone