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

[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.

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

The problem with the Rama series is that Clarke wrote the first book himself and picked up a crappy co-author for the rest of the series.

[snailprincess.livejournal.com]

Man was the ending of that serious a let down. I don't know if that was what they were planning from the beginning, but it really felt like they wrote themselves into a corner and picked the worst possible way out.

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree, although I think the problem is even more fundamental: the problem with it is that it's a series. Rama II felt like it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a sequel or a rewrite.

[roninspoon.livejournal.com]

Asimov?

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Asimov was the first science fiction I ever read and holds a special place in my heart. I'm pretty sure that I've read every single work of his fiction that I could get from any library to which I was a member.

All that said, his novels are starting to age poorly. Even the robot stories which were always my favorites. I still reread and like them, but I'm no longer sure that a person like me when who is 12 right now would like them.

[roninspoon.livejournal.com]

Are they aging poorly? Or maybe it's you how are aging poorly!?

Herbert and Heinlein were an enormous part of my life and were hugely influential on me, and so I may go easy on them. I don't think it's incorrect to suggest that simply because a genre writer is approachable and maybe even a little predictable, that this means it isn't good.

I think it's important to keep in mind that much of what we consider to be classical literature, started out as genre romantic fiction.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

There's something to what you are saying, but as long as I still derive enjoyment from them it's not a problem - I just no longer think of them as qualifying as great literature. It's sort of like the crappy food I liked as a kid - I still like a lot of it, but I no longer think it's the best food ever and I recognize that it may be gross if you didn't grow up on it.

I've outgrown a lot of books that I thought were awesome as a kid - the Redwall series, Hardy Boys, David Eddings books, etc. And those books are now pretty much unreadable. Asimov and Heinlein are merely losing some of their luster with age - Heinlein more than Asimov. Asimov is dated and deeply conformant to genre norms (in part because he created them). While Heinlein's lesser works are proceeding into unreadability - Number of the Beast, Farnham's Freehold, Lazarus Long books, Friday, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls ... they are not aging well at all. Herbert's books at some point stopped being about the story and started being about Frank Herbert musing about power and social control, and I think they suffered for it. God Emperor of Dune had long sections that were just the emperor musing about how messed up it was that he had all this power and how he needed to have all this power to hold things together. Perhaps it's interesting philosophy, but it makes for ponderous reading.

And now after dissing Heinlein, I'm kind of worried bagoffarts is going to hunt me down and destroy me...

[bookerz.livejournal.com]

Agh! Stranger in a Strange Land is so pulpy...

[neonelephant.livejournal.com]

From Herbert's non-Dune stuff that I've read, I'm not sure any of it fares better than the second and third Dune books (I'm remembering those as Dune Heretics and Children of Dune... I recall liking the two of them, but it's been many years and I have never reread them :-). The White Plague is an interesting idea that feels like it plays out rather mechanically, combined with a couple of character subplots that didn't make a lot of sense.

The Dosadi Experiment (a sequel to Whipping Star, I believe, which I have not read) had some cute ideas and the usual interesting ethical questions, but I'm not sure I'd defend it as literature either.