io9 
Enter your username and password.
-
posts about #crossoversuccesses more → 
Science Fiction Authors That Lit Geeks Think It's Cool To Read
San Francisco, 3:56 PM
Mon Nov 30
21 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors: tips@io9.com
Editor-in-Chief:
Annalee Newitz | Email
News Editor:
Charlie Jane Anders | Email
Associate Editor:
Meredith Woerner | Email
Assistant Editor:
Lauren Davis | Email
Weekend Editor:
Graeme McMillan | Email
Contributors:
Joshua Glenn
Stephen Goldmeier | Email
Ed Grabianowski | Email
Austin Grossman
Paul Hogan | Email
Lauren Davis | Email
Chris Hsiang | Email
Lynn Peril | Email
Ann VanderMeer
Alasdair Wilkins | Email
Graphic Designer:
Stephanie Fox | Email
Interns:
Tim Barribeau | Email
Julia Carusillo | Email
Alex Eichler | Email
Cyriaque Lamar | Email
Caitlin Petrakovitz | Email
Mary Ratliff | Email
Josh Snyder | Email
| posts about #crossoversuccesses more → |
Science Fiction Authors That Lit Geeks Think It's Cool To Read |
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
12/19/08
In response to the suggestion of Herbert and Heinlein, I would say that they were both brilliant thinkers and great story tellers, but I'm not sure they quite belong on this list.
12/19/08
I think arguments could be made for Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami as important and well-known authors who use SF as a tool in their respective styles. Certainly Gravity's Rainbow has a heaping helping of SF elements, and in novels like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World Murakami uses SF as an element of constructing his brand of magical realism.
Earlier authors like Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester are gaining popularity among literary circles too, in my experience. Sturgeon is certainly notable as the inspiration for Vonnegut's character Kilgore Trout.
Other modern SF authors like Iain M. Banks and Charles Stross have plenty of literary meat to them as well. I once wrote a paper on cultural and individual identity as a primary theme in Consider Phlebas, in an "Imperialism in Literature" course back in college. Which, coincidentally enough, had Octavia Butler's Dawn as one of its required books.
An argument could certainly be made for J.G. Ballard as well, but it'll have to wait until I've read more of his books. :) I'm currently reading Concrete Island.
Thankfully, aside from a few stodgy professors in college, most of my "lit-geek" friends and associates have zero qualms with recognizing SF genre novels as legitimate literature. I think that, at the same time as many SF writers are pulling the genre out of its "ghetto," more critics are willing to recognize its legitimacy outside of the "BEM" stereotype.
12/19/08
And SF isn't really in a "ghetto". It's just where it is. Certain people don't like it for certain reasons, other people like it and nothing else for those same reasons. Whimsical fabulousness, adventure, epic plotlines, insane technology... It's never going to be EXACTLY what other forms of literature are, and I'm not sure why you want it that way? SF is vastly more amusing than standard literary novels. Why not leave it at that?
It's funny that SF students think you get the short end of the stick, when quite often you're the most vocal haters of other genres in any given faculty. I can't tell you how many times an SF fan has despised to my face someone like Henry James, or Hemmingway, or Thomas Hardy, or DH Lawrence, or even Shakespeare.
12/19/08
Good post! Really good!
12/19/08
12/19/08
12/19/08
12/19/08
WOW. Why didn't anyone else EVER think of that? A definition of ART.
WOOOOOOW.
12/19/08
12/18/08
and Ursula LeGuin is my favorite author in ANY GENRE!
12/18/08
12/18/08
Salon has a nice appreciation by John Clute here, from 2000.
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/19/08
That's how I found his books, after reading some glowing review of him in an anthology of classic sci-fi.
12/21/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
I swear I'll do one this weekend, which one should I read?
12/18/08
12/19/08
If you want an actual story with your book, then anything but Dhalgren.
Beautiful writing, never goes anywhere.
-Kle.
12/19/08
I think Dhalgren has its strengths, and some wonderful prose and scenes, but I could not for the life of me finish the damn thing. And this is coming from somebody who actually finished Gravity's Rainbow.
12/19/08
12/19/08
12/19/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
12/18/08
Besides, so many of his early stories and novels are about the world being submerged, or losing its oceans, or turning into crystal-- basically psychedelic variants of the "cosy catastrophe" subgenre of the 1950s popularized in the UK by John Wyndham.