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Dark Futures: What happens when literary novelists experiment with Sci-Fi
- Simulacra 9y agoThe author Charles Stross stopped writing his Halting State series because the events depicted in his books were becoming real, and it frightened him.
- arethuza 9y agoHe's actually an HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross [NB As long as the events in his "Laundry" series don't start happening then we're probably fine]
- Animats 9y agoThe real world keeps derailing his Laundry universe. The next book, due out in July, was delayed because he had to rework it to accommodate Brexit.
- Simulacra 9y agoOh wow how cool!! Should've known. I have been Jonesing for his next Halting State novel for some time. It's such an amazing literary adventure, in second person no less, I really hope he reconsideres.
- rbritton 9y agoFor anyone else curious: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-there-wont-be-a-third-.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-...
- Animats 9y agoThe classic SF by a literary novelist is E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops".[1] This is over a century old and still reads well. [1] http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
- Uhhrrr 9y agoUsually tedium is what happens when literary novelists experiment with Sci-Fi. And the same when SF novelists try to get too lit'rary. Atwood has a couple of corkers though.
- douche 9y agoIf the Handmaid's Tale is anything to go on, I don't want to see any more Atwood. It takes a lot for me to toss a book in the trash, but there was one...
- throwanem 9y agoHow come? I mean, I don't regard it as particularly good, but I did at least get all the way through it. (On the other hand, I was much younger then.)
- douche 9y agoI was probably ruined by reading a few hundred good science fiction novels before hitting that in a freshman lit class. It's basically Newbury-level dreck. It reminded me far too much of The Giver - wildly implausible dystopian societies bent on the authors childish ideological sympathies.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago> It's basically Newbury-level dreck. That's a...really weird condemnation. I certainly haven't read all of them, but every Newbery Medal nominee I have read has been excellent.
- douche 9y agoGood lord, suffer yourself to Belle Prater's Boy or Out of the Dust, and come back to me. Granted, that's just late 90s Newbury's, maybe they sucked less going forward. If I wasn't already reading Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum and Tolkien by that point, that kind of horseshit might have turned me off reading altogether at around 11-12.
- Zigurd 9y agoUnder the Skin looks like a novel about aliens on Earth. It's really about meat, and about how people, especially women, get treated like meat. It's brilliant. But based on the Amazon customer reviews, there's a sci fi audience that doesn't want that kind of bait and switch.
- andybak 9y agoNo mention of Ballard? Or any of the New Worlds "New Wave" era writers?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 9y agoBallard was primarily an SF author though. His autobiographical Empire of the Sun was an exception as was, arguably Crash. But really, although his later writing got away from the world destroying sub-genre, there were at least science fictional elements throughout.
- tyrw 9y agoWho are the new wave writers? I'm looking for some more good authors, and not finding these jump out on Amazon.
- sbisson 9y agoWell, on the UK side of things you can probably pick any of the authors published during Michael Moorcock's tenure at New Worlds: so Aldiss, Moorcock, M John Harrison, Hilary Bailey, Ballard, Barrington J Bayley, Disch, Brunner. You can also probably toss in Delany, Spinrad, much of Dangerous Visions, and then go on from there. The movement, if there was one, is best characterised by a shift from puzzle stories to more complex fiction, with some authors crossing the divide, like Silverberg and Zelazny in the US.
- andybak 9y agoA volume of Robert Silverberg stories blew me away when I was young and eager for ideas based fiction. I think he might be the under-rated author of that era - talented with characters and narrative, yet provocative and thought provoking in terms of his conceptual exploration. However - decades (and probably puberty) sit in between me and my last reading of his work so this is probably an unreliable viewpoint.
- WalterBright 9y ago"it depicts a dystopian future in which a celebrity becomes an authoritarian politician. As shocking as the presidency of Donald Trump has been, there’s a history of mulishly regressive Americans electing such people, from Ronald Reagan to Jesse Ventura." Reagan was an authoritarian? I've heard endless complaints about him, but not that one.
- bitJericho 9y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkpatrick_Doctrine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkpatrick_Doctrine
- 3131s 9y agoThe slight towards Ventura is unfair as well. Although he is an odd guy, he is not ideologically in the same category as the recent American presidents at all. I am proud that my mulishly-regressive home state elected Ventura in a way, even though I don't necessarily think he was the most effective politician.
- Avshalom 9y agoYes well I can imagine if you've spent your childhood reading airport novels books that might expect you to relate to a character on a human level might be a bit rough.
- throwanem 9y agoThat's a bit glib, don't you think? I mean, I didn't much care for The Handmaid's Tale, but my own introversion, along with some experiences in youth that gave me to understand something of how one's mind may behave when deprived of stimulus or opportunity for meaningful interaction, made its viewpoint character's relentless inner focus rather less alien and offputting than I suspect I'd otherwise have found it. Even for me, though, that didn't come anywhere near making it pleasant. For someone who came to it without those traits or experiences that made it at least intuitively understandable, I can easily imagine it being no more than an awful slog - especially when forced to read it for a class assignment, rather than happening upon it organically as I did. (And I read airport novels as a kid, too, not because they were great, deep, meaningful literature, but because they were a lot of fun! God forfend, I suppose...)
- Avshalom 9y agoA) no shit it was glib B) slagging off Newbury award winners as a category is slagging off A Wrinkle In Time and them shits fightin' words C) douche helpfully proves me as being in fact far too charitable by claiming that it is predictably disaster to expect a boy to relate to a story about a girl.
- douche 9y agoTrying to force a teenaged boy to read books intended to be from the perspective of a pre-teen girl, written by a middle-aged woman, was predictably a disaster. Too many layers of indirection there. Stephen King on the other hand... besides a few awkward questions with the father about what a screwdriver was, or what the Combat Zone in Boston was... was incredibly readable.
- sctb 9y agoPlease don't get into personal attacks like this here. We detached this flagged subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14494218.
- andrewflnr 9y agoI'm pretty sure anyone who thinks sci-fi doesn't deliver good characters isn't reading the right sci-fi. Go read Blindsight and The Quantum Thief and see if you can still tell me that with a straight face.
- Baeocystin 9y agoI read Blindsight and I thought it was good, I think, though I am no longer certain I exist as an I.
- andrewflnr 9y agoThat works, too.
- qznc 9y agoBlindsight is a great story, but I don't really remember the characters. Why do you think the characters are noteworthy?
- Pica_soO 9y agoThey where excellently shaped to display a philosophical problem.
- Baeocystin 9y agoThe man with literally half his brain removed becoming, in essence, the surviving ego of the story, was a nice touch.
- lmm 9y agoSome sci-fi has good characters, but character is inherently secondary in sci-fi. An ability to enjoy works without good characters (e.g. those of Asimov) on the strength of other merits is what separates sci-fi fans from dabblers.
- 9y ago
- glangdale 9y agoI think it's pretty clear what happens when literary novelists experiment with SF, to wit, it is not defined as SF and is shelved with the literature. This is devoutly desired by most authors as being tarnished with the "SF Author" label is a ticket to lower pay and guilt-by-association-with-trash. Margaret Atwood furiously resists the idea that her stuff is Science Fiction because "SF is talking squids in outer space". What often feels irritating about literary adventures into SF is that they allow themselves to loot the treasury of SF ideas and present them under respectable covers to readers who would never venture into the SF section (I view Atwood as a repeat offender in this department). This is considerably less irritating than the bulk of the F/SF section, of course, which is 90% extruded paint-by-numbers escape literature. The average page count should be the first clue that 'we're not here for the ideas'. Thank goodness for the "Masterworks" series (and a few other lines) which do the admirable job of keeping something other than the Escape Lit du Jour in print.
- Toenex 9y agoIn the film industry there seems to be a differentiation between things labelled SciFi (spaceships fighting, laser guns, squids in outer space) and Science Fiction (fictional science enabling the plot).
- amelius 9y agoHow does IMDb make the distinction?
- Toenex 9y agoI don't think it does. For instance I notice The Handmaids Tale - what I'd regard as a science fiction - is currently number 3 in their 'Most Popular Sci-Fi' list between Alien: Covenant at 2 and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 at 4 - both films I'd place firmly in the Sci-Fi category. [http://www.imdb.com/search/title?genres=sci_fi&explore=genres http://www.imdb.com/search/title?genres=sci_fi&explore=genre...].
- frooxie 9y ago
- pavlov 9y agoI've always had a soft spot for Doris Lessing's bizarre '70s sci-fi experiment Shikasta. Ursula Le Guin wrote a review of Shikasta in 1979: https://newrepublic.com/article/115631/doris-lessing-shikasta-reviewed-ursula-le-guin https://newrepublic.com/article/115631/doris-lessing-shikast... I found this review really fascinating because I consider Le Guin and Lessing to be writers of equal caliber. Le Guin was pegged as a sci-fi / fantasy author, while Lessing just experimented with the form. (She won the Nobel Prize in 2007.)
- andy_wrote 9y agoI've never read Lessing, but Le Guin is one of my favorite authors. For me, _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is easily on a par with other canonical "great" 20th-century literature I've read. I've always felt that if she were born later, now that sci-fi has become a little less fringe and a little more respectable, that she'd be more properly grouped this way.
- Pica_soO 9y agoShe really pushed the envelope on sociological SciFi. "You may have the handkerchief i carry."
- zellyn 9y agoThat review was amazing. Thank you for posting that!
- jejones3141 9y agoI'll never forget something Lloyd Biggle Jr. wrote in the intro to a short story. It went something like this: given a group of people in a sewer, the mainstream author will lovingly write about those who stay there. The SF author will write about those trying to get out.
- lmm 9y agoI loved Station Eleven, but I was conscious of how incredibly suffused with privilege it was; somehow in this post-apocalyptic world our viewpoint characters can live as a travelling theatre/symphony and a museum curator and, aside from an offhand mention of a few hours' hunting, never have to worry where their next meal is coming from. I guess actual hardship is genuinely unimaginable for the literary audience.
- jhbadger 9y agoTrue, but isn't this pretty much the case for post-apocalyptic literature in general? The protagonists are usually threatened by zombies, radioactive mutants, or roving gangs of punk rockers but not so much by starving to death, which would be a more realistic (if less interesting from a dramatic perspective) fate after the collapse of civilization.
- arkh 9y agoThe Road would be a good counter-example.
- VLM 9y agoDisease is even more realistic. Before modern civil engineering (at least in the west) almost all newborns died before age five. If a kid made it to 5 and avoided accidents and stuff, they made it to 80 just like we do today. But until 1900 or so in the west, about 80 to 90 percent of humans died before age 5.
- neaden 9y agoThis is a pretty inaccurate exaggeration. While death in childhood was a lot more common it was more like 30% in the middle ages and lower then that by the 1800s. And while people living to 80 wasn't rare it was by no means as common as today given that diseases and injury were both more common and treatment was worse. Childbirth was also a very dangerous time for the mother and accounted for a substantial amount of post-childhood mortality.
- akvadrako 9y agoI'm surprised that an article about literature and scifi doesn't mention Gene Wolfe, the only scifi author I know who gets occasionally placed in the literature section at book stores. Literature should not really be it's own genre, since the language used to tell a story isn't related to the contents of that story.
- old_chap 9y agoThis, easily one of the greatest writers in the genre but largely ignored in regards to marrying literature and sci fi. I suspect he is too dense for most, although they will never admit it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zellyn 9y agoCan you recommend something of his to try? Go for best, not most palatable :-)
- root_axis 9y agoBook Of The New Sun. I've read about 300 fiction novels over the course of my life and that book still maintains a hold on me like nothing else ever has. It is easily the best fiction novel I've ever read.
- zellyn 9y agoInteresting. It shows Hyperion in the "People also searched for" section in Amazon. I liked Hyperion: it showed such promise. It's tricky: if your writing feels mythical, you shouldn't resolve/reveal too much at the end.
- root_axis 9y agoI also enjoyed Hyperion, but I would say that they are on two totally different levels from a literary perspective. I don't mean to sound dismissive of Hyperion, I think it's very good, but BoTNS is exceptional.
- agentgt 9y agoI have read a lot of scifi books particularly post apocalyptic (yeah its overdone but I still love it) and "The Road" still haunts me. I am more of a plot junkie and have very little to justify a good opinion of literature but for whats worth "The Road" is very well written. Highly recommend it.
- phaemon 9y agoThis seems an appropriate place for an Iain Banks quote: " "Well," he says, "if you are going to write what a friend of a friend once called 'Made up space shit', then if it's going to have any ring of truth that means sometimes some of the horrible characters get to live, and for there to be any sense of jeopardy, especially in future novels, the good people have to die. Sometimes." Banks freely admits that he enjoys writing his SF novels more than his "literary" novels, and the Culture novels more than his other SF. The hedonistic, anarchistic, post-scarcity series is "a hoot. It's my train set. I adore the freedom and the size of the canvas," even though writing them "requires a greater degree of concentration. And there's so much baggage with the Culture now that I have to get each new novel aligned with earlier Culture history. I don't have the same leeway to make things up compared with when I started." " From his last(?) interview: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the-final-interview https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/15/iain-banks-the...
- zellyn 9y agoDon't let her description of Void Star put you off. It's not literary, but it is fun scifi. Although I don't think it will ever be seminal, parts of its world-building compare favorably to Snow Crash, and the treatment of AIs is quite fun and sometimes thought-provoking.