great SF books

[Dohol]

the other books set in the timeline/universe of Revelation Space

i forget what the title of the book was, 'cause i read it a while ago, but the one that dealt with the colonization of Sky's Edge (the planet where that khouri character from revelation space came from) was a really fun read

The Prefect? I enjoyed that one...

[William Hutson]

just found this thread.

nobody has noticed in all these years but my avatars on this site and on noisefanatics are both images of severian the torturer.

regarding the quote: jon clearly got his buttons pushed by the super jerky guy who posted it. also, jon has expressed before on this board that he's never been particularly interested in experimental fiction (isn't that right?-- seriously, correct me if i've misremembered). i would never recommend 'book of the new sun' to him for that reason. it's an epistolary novel written by someone who actually has no idea what's really going on around him. that severian's prose is clunky is by design, not a flaw on wolfe's part. it's like 'riddley walker' in that way. every book wolfe writes has a completely different voice, because they are each the diary of a different person. which is why one can never fucking ever ever ever excerpt a single paragraph out of thousands of pages unless they want everyone to completely misunderstand it.

there are very few sf novelist more respected in the academy, or in criticism than gene wolfe. not that this should sway anyone's opinion of his work, once they've actually read, say, a whole novel, but it's worth noting. he's not airport fiction like william gibson, orson scott card, or most of the other writers mentioned in this thread so far. alongside john crowley, samuel delany, ursula leguin and octavia butler (none of whom are measurably better than wolfe— in fact, i think butler's writing is often rather poor) he is the top. too bad he really hates women, and sometimes allows too much catholic morality into his worlds.

[William Hutson]

...and most of wolfe's recent standalone books are pretty lightweight. nothing i'd recommend. 'fifth head of cerberus' is really the only thing between the sun books and the short stories that's really great.

[mudd]

i think your assessment of the new sun is about right. i have the book of the long sun in two volumes somewhere around here but i have not read it yet, not have i read any of his stand-alone novels. i read a collection of his non-sci fi stories and wasn't too impressed.

so in total i think wolfe is pretty good, but that doesn't mean he'd appeal to non-sci fi readers. more accurately i would say he appeals very much to sci fi readers with interests in literary fiction as well.

i personally hold crowley and delany a step above, but the book of the long sun is great.

m

[jon abbey]

jon has expressed before on this board that he's never been particularly interested in experimental fiction (isn't that right?-- seriously, correct me if i've misremembered).

yeah, there's some truth to this, but I think here my disinterest in fantasy sci-fi supersedes that. but either way, extremely out of context combined with an obnoxious presentation was certainly less than ideal, hence my reaction.

[carlos]

airport fiction

nice

[Vincent Kargatis]

jon has expressed before on this board that he's never been particularly interested in experimental fiction (isn't that right?-- seriously, correct me if i've misremembered). i would never recommend 'book of the new sun' to him for that reason.

I agree with what you wrote about Wolfe, and said something similar earlier. But I'm curious about this bit - is Wolfe considered "experimental" fiction? Jon really likes Murakami, for example; is "experimental" a good axis of distinction between those two writers? (I'm asking naively, I'm just curious what you have in mind.) I find Murakami a lot easier to digest stylistically, but otherwise, I wouldn't know how to encapsulate their differences in a way that would yield predictions for a reader (like Jon). (I'm just using Murakami as an example specific to Jon - I'm not drawing any specific comparisons between the two writers.)

[William Hutson]

i absolutely would consider wolfe's best works (new sun, fifth head of cerberus, peace, and the latro books) to be experimental fiction. he doesn't do the wacky page layout stuff of steve erickson or david markson, and he's ghettoized onto the sf shelves, but they are some of the most extreme experiments with the epistolary form ever published. each one requires the reader to grasp an entire world through only the half-coherent ramblings of someone whose understanding of that world is completely flawed. for example, when 'peace' was published, none of the reviewers understood that it was a ghost story, because the narrator himself doesn't actually know he's dead, and never admits to himself (or to the readers, obviously) that he's a serial killer. it was treated as a sweet sepia-toned memoir with no fantasy elements whatsoever. the story, on the surface, has absolutely no conflict unless the reader picks up on those clues.

murakami is an excellent fantasy writer with a really good publisher who managed to get him shelved in literature and not fantasy (though many of his minor books don't contain fantasy elements). i've read everything but the last two novels and except for 'hard boiled wonderland + the end of the world' and 'wind-up bird chronicle' i've found most to be a bit cringe-inducing. however i would consider 'hard boiled wonderland' to be a structural experiment, although a total breeze of a read compared to wolfe. (this is not an attack on murakami, at all. i would consider myself a fan of his).

anyway. i am finished defending wolfe now. let's talk about other writers that are good!

[Matt Wuethrich]

Funnily enough I've only recently started reading SF in any serious way. It seems many pick it up as teenagers and then move on to so-called more serious stuff, but recently it's just hit the spot. Perhaps it's the way a lot of it can be enjoyed on multiple levels (as escapism, for the ideas, as experimental fiction). It can be difficult but also go down easy.

Haven't seen any mention of Thomas Disch's polemic The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. It's obviously written with a great passion for (and intimate knowledge of) the genre, but he spends most of his time poking holes in it and generally making fun of and sharply criticizing its excesses. A recommended read for sure.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

In the meantime, I've read Wolfe's The Book Of The New Sun. Easily one of the most imaginative books I've ever read and probably will ever read. Thanks to all the people in this thread that made me aware of its existence.

Also, viz. the writing style argument: I agree with what's been said by most of you, it's in character indeed. True, it's dense, it could be more clear, there are redundancies, etc., but it's the writing of a character, so Jon's arguments aren't really applicable, since I don't think Wolfe would have been able to achieve the same effects otherwise.

Who has reread the series btw? Is it true a second reading really pays off?


Also, viz. Banks, my current favorite Culture novel is Excession, but I haven't read the latest, Surface Detail yet. Just finished Matter, it's finale is so engaging, a bit short and sudden though, I wouldn't have minded 50 or 100 more pages...

[jon abbey]

IAlso, viz. the writing style argument: I agree with what's been said by most of you, it's in character indeed. True, it's dense, it could be more clear, there are redundancies, etc., but it's the writing of a character, so Jon's arguments aren't really applicable, since I don't think Wolfe would have been able to achieve the same effects otherwise.

it shouldn't have been posted as a stand-alone example of his writing then. if I say "Ed the Musician" is the best musician ever, then I post a 3 minute excerpt of his work to try to prove my point, I would expect people are going to judge that excerpt on its own.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

Very true. The book simply can't be done justice via excerpts.

This is of course the case for lots of books, but as the style of narration is so crucial in this book, you have to grasp the entire narrative to judge the writing style.

Anyhow, however it may be, it's a tough read nonetheless, it really needs focus to not miss all the hints/clues to see the bigger picture.

[orangettecoleman]

As far as Delany goes, is Nova one of his better titles? I read it last week and wasn't too enthralled - it seemed that Delany was too absorbed in showing off his own writing style and distinguishing it from other Sci-fi of the time... it's the first Delany I've read and I'm wondering whether to continue. Some of that late 60s/early 70s sci-fi is so dated by self-consciously "edgy" prose that the whole period becomes a tough row to hoe for me... tried to read "Stand on Zanzibar" and made it about 20 pages in before moving on to something else due to frequent eye-rolling and wincing from the hippie/beatnik futurespeak. I'm keeping it around for a second go though...

[mudd]

nova is not a particularly good example of delany's writing. 'dhalgren' is the monsterpiece, but 'babel 17', 'trouble on triton', and 'stars in my pockets like grains of sand' are probably my favorites. at least of the SF work.

m

[P. Wretch]

Looking over this thread again, I notice that most of the discussion is of novels, and yet SF is a genre which evolved initially through the short story and novella. I've been trying to get some perspective on this historical development lately, reading through the quite good Oxford Book of SF Stories (1992), ed. Tom Shippey, which includes work spanning 1903-90, and also Brian Aldiss's Science Fiction Omnibus (1973), which contains mostly 50s stories from American magazines. Even the most obviously pulpy or rudimentary ones are at least passably entertaining, and there is a sense that the conciseness of the short form was eminently suited to the exposition of a novel idea, scenario, or hypothetical technology without the need to spin it out.

I think many of the common criticisms of so-called 'Golden Age' SF - flat characterisation, mechanical dialogue, workmanlike prose, etc. - were exacerbated in the transition from the story to the novel, as writers, many of whom had backgrounds in science or engineering rather than belle lettres, diluted the distinctive and innovative component of their work in the effort to adapt it to a longer structure. Of course, by the 60s, the SF novel was well established, and the New Wave writers certainly did interesting things with it, but the story/novella has remained important to the genre to a greater extent than it has for mainstream literary fiction.

Which is not to say that much great work hasn't been done in the novel form, but that some of the more recent authors who churn out bloated multi-book sequences would do well to go back and look at the verbal economy of the story writers.

[mudd]

a valid point. one thing i used to love about old sci-fi stories was the ease with which a writer could create an entire world in just a double handful of pages. i have several of those 'best of' sci fi collections around, should poke around and see what comes back to me.

m

[billygomberg]

agree with this too, just that I don't get into short story collection so much (despite the fact that I'm about to start one...heh)

•any relatively complete JG Ballard story collection
•"Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" by James Tiptree Jr

[carlos]

never was much of a short story reader- especially of multi-author collections like the ones P. Wretch mentions. Other than Ballard, Lovecraft and some Gibson & Sterling- haven't really read too many SF short stories that i can recall. but P. Wretch makes a good point about SF and short stories.

i did recently read two Jack Vance novels- one of which (The Dying Earth, 1950) is made up of interrelated short stories

speaking of Vance- i read some of his 60s paperback novels before i read Gene Wolfe and was not surprised to later read that Wolfe considers Vance his favorite writer. The baroque/archaic style and vaguely medieval future worlds (and not just that) will seem familiar to anybody who has read The Book of The New Sun.

partly inspired by this thread i dug up an old box of SF paperbacks- mostly things i've already read & enjoyed but there were several Jack Vance novels i never got around to reading. considering re-reading The Book of The New Sun but i'm not sure i'm up for it.

[frozen reeds]

In the meantime, I've read Wolfe's The Book Of The New Sun. Easily one of the most imaginative books I've ever read and probably will ever read. Thanks to all the people in this thread that made me aware of its existence.

Also, viz. the writing style argument: I agree with what's been said by most of you, it's in character indeed. True, it's dense, it could be more clear, there are redundancies, etc., but it's the writing of a character, so Jon's arguments aren't really applicable, since I don't think Wolfe would have been able to achieve the same effects otherwise.

Who has reread the series btw? Is it true a second reading really pays off?

Great to hear. A second and third reading are essential for maximum enjoyment, I would say. Give it a while, though, so as not to overdose on the same story.

Fortunately you can now enjoy the books which follow, more or less continuing the saga, though in an incredibly obtuse and tangential manner.

Next comes The Urth of the New Sun, then The Book of the Long Sun, then The Book of the Short Sun. None of them are quite as good as the first, but each of them gets close in their own distinct ways, and they all have enough great content to satisfy anyone already into Wolfe.

I have to admit that I don't understand the reactions on this board to the excerpt I posted. Unfortunately I can no longer see it out of context nor judge it on that basis. It arrives early in the book, and when I first encountered it, my jaw was on the floor. Rereading it for the umpteenth time today, I find my reaction to be the same. And the efforts to criticize it based on economy and style I find laughable. I don't mean to offend anyone by saying so. I just thought they were incredibly wide of the mark.

Wolfe is currently ghettoized in the SF genre and his reputation rests on the enthusiasm of its hardcore devotees. While he's definitely not the only great writer in this predicament, I'd wager anything that he's the only one who will eventually attain mainstream literary discovery and mass deification.

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

Wolfe is currently ghettoized in the SF genre and his reputation rests on the enthusiasm of its hardcore devotees. While he's definitely not the only great writer in this predicament, I'd wager anything that he's the only one who will eventually attain mainstream literary discovery and mass deification.

from what I can see now, after one reading, is that there is a lot of meta-literature/narrative theory stuff going on, but extremely subtly done (but that's mainly a hunch, I guess I'll HAVE to reread it in a year or so). in a way, it's a SF book that seems to be mainly about the act of 'narration'. Also, wtf is going on with 'time' in the book??

So I guess it's indeed worthy of deep analysis by A-class scholars, not many books (from whatever genre) merit that.