Samuel R Delany, Philip K Dick, Ursula K Le Guin, and (maybe) William Gibson.

[pmb]

What scifi/fantasy authors would you be willing to defend as writers of high quality literature and not just genre fiction? What authors both have something to say, and say it well?

NB: I'm primarily looking for people who are by default filed in the SciFi ghetto, not "real" authors who have occasionally been filed in SF/fantasy. Because Kurt Vonnegut is widely acknowledged to be a virtuoso writer and has written a bunch of SF, but I'm not sure that most people think of him as a science fiction writer.

Comments

[leech.livejournal.com]

I'd add Frank Herbert to that list. Orson Scott Card might make it if he'd published significantly fewer crappy books along with his few gems. I don't think Neil Gaiman makes it, because he's just too squarely a fantasy writer. Same issue with Neal Stephenson.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Frank Herbert - but only for Dune. All of its sequels sucked progressively more and more. Neil Gaiman tells a good story, but I'm not convinced there's anything more there, and I'm even more sure of that with Neal Stephenson. The same thing with Lois McMaster Bujold. I read their books and they make me smile, but not think beyond that. That's wonderful, but not quite what I'm looking for.

Orson Scott Card ... he's a tough one. I think Ender's Game will stand the test of time, but I'm not convinced that any of his other books (the Alvin Maker series, Speaker for the Dead, etc) will.

Theodore Sturgeon perhaps. I haven't read much by him, but I was very impressed with More Than Human.

[morganlf.livejournal.com]

Definitely Octavia Butler. Would you count Ray Bradbury in this category? What about H.P. Lovecraft? George Orwell?

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Octavia Butler!

[leech.livejournal.com]

Shit, I forgot Ray Bradbury! Duh!

[lucasmembrane.livejournal.com]

You totally beat me to it with Octavia Butler.

I'd be tempted to add Heinlein for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but many of his other works fall short of the mark :/

[morganlf.livejournal.com]

I would also say that James Tiptree Jr. should be counted, but she's not as well known.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

I'm just discovering Tiptree, mostly as a result of the fantastic biography by Julie Phillips, but so far the short stories have been good enough that I was glad to see the mention. I'll probably put one of the novels on hold at the library soon.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

Kim Stanley Robinson, especially his pre-Red Mars body of work (best examples: Icehenge, Memory of Whiteness, The Wild Shore). Great science fiction, but also a real attention to history, art, music, culture, nature, and character.

Side note: Robinson wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the novels of Philip K. Dick.

[conform.livejournal.com]

Philip K Dick is fascinating to me. I don't think I could name another author who is so good and so awful at the same time. I'm not sure "high-quality literature" is an appropriate tag. He wrote pulp, in every sense of the word. Reams and reams of it. He wrote the same stories over and over again. His characters are so thin you could cut yourself on them. And yet... his stories are fascinating, because they ask (and yet rarely answer) over and over again, with a haunting anguish, "What does it mean to be human?" and "How can I know reality? How can I trust my senses?"

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

Dick's last novels (Valis, Radio Free Albemuth, Ubik...) definitely went beyond pulp into "serious literature" territory.

[thrasymachos.livejournal.com]

Margaret Atwood. Though one might argue that she's a lit writer that dabbles in sci-fi rather than a primarily sci-fi author.

Roger Zelazny. Especially for his books that deal with mythology and pantheons.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

When there's a new Atwood book it doesn't get filed in sf/f automatically whether it belongs there or not.

Could you recommend me some Zelazny to start out on? He's one of those authors I never picked up for some reason.

[cabanasloth.livejournal.com]

Iain Banks.

I'll back you up on Delany and Le Guin. "High quality literature" is pretty thin on the ground in all genres.

[pants-of-doom.livejournal.com]

Bruce Sterling. And a lot of people already mentioned.

[pants-of-doom.livejournal.com]

This is who I was trying to think of: Angela Carter. Also, Alan Moore, but I'm thinking of Watchmen and don't know what his novel is like.

[roninspoon.livejournal.com]

I'll defend Heinlein in this. Love him of hate him, he repeatedly wove his opinions about politics and human nature into books that are routinely crapped on primarily because people disagree with his view points. Even a significant portion of his juvenille novels had a point and made it without sacrificing the story.

I'd also defend Herbert on the issue. Dune was a novel, and a series, that I enjoyed tremendously both as a youth and as an adult. While it's true that the first is widely regarded as the best, each is an essay on the politics of power and religion.

I believe Arthuer C. Clark belongs on the list as well as Jules Verne.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Heinlein gets crapped on because he only had 4 characters: hyper competent cynical old man, Jesus Christ, buxom young woman who is alternately brilliant and dumb as required, and regular joe on his way to becoming character 1. After a while it gets pretty easy to figure out the arc of any given story after the first page, except when the story has no discernible arc at all (eg. Friday, The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, really any late Heinlein). Unless you are contending that Heinlein's point of view is that those are the only four personality types, then I'm going to have to call him bombastic and weird.

Moon is a Harsh Mistress and perhaps Stranger in a Strange Land make the grade (while Starship Troopers works best as an insight into the country's mood during WWII), but I'm not sure I would recommend them to someone as great works of literature independent of their genre like I would the Earthsea series or Aye and Gomorrah or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep or Pattern Recognition.

Dune is a great book, but I've read the whole series and I don't think you are going to convince me that anything from Children of Dune onwards is really any good at all. The ones that had an interesting plot needed to shed 50+% of their words and 90% of their bombast and the ones that didn't have an interesting plot ... didn't have an interesting plot. I haven't read any of Herbert's non-Dune books so perhaps he saves himself there.

Arthur C Clarke. Perhaps. The first book of any series is often quite good, but not any of the sequels. 2001 is excellent, 2010 less so, 2061 is for laying down and avoiding. Rendezvous With Rama follows the same pattern. Childhood's End is weird, and Orphans of the Sky is by turns awesome and infuriating. He's an idea man first and a writer second, and his ideas are always first rate while his writing is more varied.

Jules Verne I'll definitely agree on, but he's already filed under "Classics" and not SciFi.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Have you reread Asimov recently? It's starting to age poorly. Which is sad because I love those books so much. (Foundation, the Robots, the short stories, ... I've read all the Asimov fiction in every library I've used)

[kirin]

Shirow? Really? I mean, yes, he does some interesting explorations into the grey areas between humans and machines, but his original manga tend to get so bogged down in minute details as to obscure his points, not to mention the plot. I'm not saying I haven't enjoyed him, but he's got some issues.

(And then you put him and Oshii (who I think is often brilliant) together for movies, and you get the world's best recipe for interminable socio-political monologues in front of a lot of really pretty and detailed scenery.)

[dragonmudd.livejournal.com]

L. Ron Hubbard.

Just kidding.

[bagoffarts.livejournal.com]

Harlan Ellison - he's all over the place genre-wise but is places in the SF/fantasy dept because of his earlier work.

Isaac Asimov - wrote on pretty much everything, fiction and non. Definitely considered a sci-fi author though.

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

I think there are really two questions here. One is: Which authors who are traditionally categorized as scifi/fantasy authors do you feel are writing stories that make use of scifi/fantasy trappings but ultimately are mainstream fiction?

To that, I'd answer "Theodore Sturgeon" because his work isn't really *about* scifi/fantasy or an exploration of a setting, but sometimes uses scifi/fantastic trappings. Some of books don't have any scifi/fantasy elements at all (e.g., "Some of your blood"), but they're still found on the scifi shelf.

On the flip side, there are some books/authors that are definitely scifi that manage to make their way on to the regular fiction shelf. In that category, I strongly recommend "The Time Traveler's Wife", which is a great scifi/romance (an unusual combination, but masterfully executed).

The other is: which scifi/fantasy authors do you feel are generating high quality literature that falls within the scifi/fantasy genre?

To which I'd point to LeGuin and Tolkien. I'm sure there are others, but I'm not thinking of them right now. This question hinges a lot on whether you're looking for high quality writing versus a high quality story. Some authors tell a great yarn and capture the imagination even if they aren't masters of language.

[annag.livejournal.com]

charles dodgeson also tends to be considered a writer of "literature" (and math) rather than sci-fi or fantasy, and he definitely knew language well.

i'll second tolkien, atwood, possibly le guin and gaiman, and add terry prachett, who also appears to know language intimately, and have things worth saying, with distinct characters, and plots that hang together well.

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, Pratchett! His writing is so fun that it's easy to forget how well done and insightful it is. And it's been getting even better with each new book.

[esmesquall.livejournal.com]

I'd echo prior commenters' sentiments that Bradbury, Gibson, Dick, Atwood and LeGuin are all writers that (at one time or another) have piqued my interest as an almost dyed-in-the-wool lit snob.

The one name I'm surprised not to see is JG Ballard. Some don't consider him sci fi, actually, for whatever reason: because he writes about the current day, actual universes, actual technologies (sometimes). But man, can that guy write a sentence. And spin a nightmare-inducing alternate-reality yarn.

[snailprincess.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of Dan Simmons.

[coldtortuga.livejournal.com]

Goddamit. I just wrote a fine and well-researched comment on why and how Herbert has earned his "literati" promotion (up from mere "pulpist")... AND THE FRIKKIN' INTERNET HAS EATEN IT.

Ctrl-A Ctrl-C, why hast thou forsaken me? Back-button, oh my back-button...

[bookerz.livejournal.com]

If you're looking for a single book, The Road is science fictiony in a post-apocalyptic way, and definitely qualifies as Serious Fiction.

[bookerz.livejournal.com]

Mmm, maybe The Children's Hospital, too.

[kyptin.livejournal.com]

(Saw you post on mrsmalkav's journal, came here, saw this, couldn't resist. Hi!)

I've gotta echo snailprincess: Dan Simmons is terrific. He has become my favorite author. He has great plots, builds believable and consistent worlds (a must for me), and writes well. He also researches his background extremely well, from Keats in the Hyperion saga to "The Iliad" in "Ilium" and "Olympos". Furthermore, he is a very versatile writer, having written mainstream fiction, sci-fi, horror...and having won awards across genres.

He also thinks about how to write, and how to read, and how to live. And he writes about such things. I find almost all of his messages (http://dansimmons.com/news/message/message_index.htm) on his website (http://dansimmons.com) to be well worth reading. (In particular, and relevant to some comments here re: Herbert and Heinlein, check out his thoughts on Negative Capability (http://dansimmons.com/news/message/2004_12.htm).)

So yeah, I'd defend Dan Simmons, for sure.

Great post! ;-)

[quizro.livejournal.com]

Terry Bisson
Howard Waldrop
Joe Lansdale
James Blaylock
Michael Swanwick

[pmb.livejournal.com]

They have been checked out. Reading will commence soon. I wasn't that into Terry Bisson the first time I read one of his works, but that was some time ago, and I may have chosen poorly. The others are new!