The Masks by Ray Bradbury

Masks, myths and metaphors" play an important part in much of Bradbury's work, claim Jonathan Eller and William F. Touponce in their Bradbury study, The Life Of Fiction, and they believe Bradbury gets to the bottom of this obsession in his never-finished novel called The Masks. Filled with images of carnivals, this 1940s novel would have been the purest distillation of Bradbury's obsession with magicians and magic.

The Owl In Daylight by Philip K. Dick

When Dick died in 1982, he was busy with The Owl in Daylight, which is reputed to be concerned with deaf aliens abducting a B-movie composer, artistic genius, new forms of sensory input, an amusement park, or a sci-fi reboot of The Divine Comedy, depending whom you ask. Dick never outlined the plot, so it's hard to say. His wife Tessa published her interpretation of his concept in 2009, but her version is largely her own work, and draws inspiration from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

Irontown Blues by John Varley

We interviewed Varley back in March 2008, and he told us:

One of these days I hope to write a third novel in the Steel Beach, Golden Globe trilogy, entitled Irontown Blues. The reason I haven't written it is that I don't yet know what's going to happen.

People have been waiting for this novel forever, and little is known about Varley's ideas so far. Back in February, he said it's "third in line," after two other novels he's working on. "If I write it, it would be about a cop," he told Xero magazine.

The Pressure of Time by Thomas M. Disch

A sequel to Camp Concentration, about the pursuits of a society of humans become immortal through genetic alterations caused by a plague that swept through the world. A few regular mortals also survive, hiding out in enclaves. Disch explained:

For various reasons, personal and impersonal, I never got back to work on "Pressure", and now I see I won't, alas. Since Camp Concentration (which took 8 months to write) I realise I can't afford to spend such a lot of time on a book that earns only a standards sf advance". The personal reasons included an intense affair with the poet Lee Harwood that lasted about six weeks. After Harwood left him, Disch suffered several months of unrequited love. Disch confessed that much of The Pressure of Time was "inspired by the pangs of despised loved". Disch travelled around, visiting Ireland and Turkey, but suffered writers block. Unable to continue with his own work, he wrote novelisations of The Prisoner and Alfred the Great.

The other books in Octavia Butler's Fledgling series.

Butler died after Fledgling came out, but the book's ending left most people believing she intended to write at least one sequel, if not many. I've heard rumors she'd made notes on a sequel, but can't find any confirmation of that online. Butler also had started a third novel in her Parable series, called Parable Of The Trickster, but was unable to finish it due to a seven-year bout of writers' block. (Octavia Butler's advice on dealing with writers' block? "Fall in love. Why not? You're already miserable.")

Voyages D'Etudes by Jules Verne

Verne wrote 50 pages, and never finished the rest. The book was rewritten by his son Michel as L'etonnante aventure de la mission Barsac, along with several other works inspired to greater or lesser degree by his father's manuscripts. Esperanto enthusiasts are particularly saddened that in so doing, Michel expunged all references to support for the nascent language, of which Jules was a proponent.

Azathoth by H.P. Lovecraft.

Ia! Ia! Lovecraft started this novel in June 1922, but only wrote a small fragment, which was published afterh is death in the journal Leaves. According to Wikipedia, he described it as "a weird Eastern tale in the 18th century manner" and as a "weird Vathek-like novel." (Vathek being an 18th century novel about Arabia.) You can read the fragment that he actually wrote here. It starts quite stirringly, bemoaning our gray, citified, un-magical existence.

A Sense Of Time by Henry James

Yes, that Henry James. The "Turn Of The Screw" guy. He started writing this romance, about a young man who discovers he can walk through portals into the past, in 1900, but all the time-travel mechanics got too convoluted and gave him a headache. He abandoned it, only to return to work on it in 1914, writing another huge section. In the novel, Ralph Pendrel travels back and takes the place of his own ancestor, but then the woman he loves realizes he's a time-traveler and makes a great sacrifice to help him return to the present.

The Plant by Stephen King

This was King's famous experiment, where he serialized a novel online, and you were supposed to pay him $1 every time you downloaded a chapter. If the percentage of downloaders who paid $1 dropped below 75 percent, King threatened to stop posting the chapters. And eventually, that's what happened. The already-posted chapters have been removed from King's site. The novel is about a paperback editor who receives weird letters (and odd photographs) from a magical weirdo. The editor sics the cops on the magician, who sends him a strange plant in revenge.

The Dark Tower by C. S. Lewis

A story of interdimensional travel including the titular tower (which turns out to be a far-future replica of the the bog-ugly Cambridge University Library), this was supposed to be the original sequel to Out of the Silent Planet. It ends abruptly and some people have accused it of being a forgery.

The Splendor And Misery Of Bodies, Of Cities by Samuel R. Delany

This sequel to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand may never actually see the light of day. We asked Delany about it a while back and he explained:

I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in.

And after that, Delany's view of the gay community changed somewhat drastically.

The Salmon Of Doubt by Douglas Adams

Adams was working on this book, a Dirk Gently novel, when he died, but he'd decided his ideas for it didn't work for Gently. So he tried first turning it into a standalone novel, and then reworking it into a sixth Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy installment. The version which appears in the book of the same name does star Gently, and involves a client who wants to hire him to find the back half of her cat. According to Don't Panic, the book about Adams by Neil Gaiman (with revisions and updates by Guy Adams), the fragment which appears in the book is actually from several different versions of Salmon which were on Adams' various hard drives. What we have is pieced together from three files — Chapters 2, 8, 10 and 11 are from one file, Chapter 1 is from an earlier draft, and Chapter 9 is Adams' last known piece of writing. It's basically a mish-mash, and an assembly of working notes and fragmentary stuff.

Like the novels we're discussing, this list is decidedly unfinished — what are the books that were never completed, for whatever reason, which you would dearly love to read?

Additional reporting by Josh Snyder, Mary Ratliff and Cyriaque Lamar.

When we talked to Samuel R. Delany for our mega-feature about writers we wished would return to science fiction last week, he was gracious enough to stay on the phone and answer some more questions. And since we promised almost a year ago to ask him some of your questions — back when we had a failed game of phone tag with him — we decided to ask as many as we could. Along the way, he told us a lot more about his new novel.

mistermac2000 asks: "During the seventies, Samuel Delany had a brief involvement in a few comics/graphic novel publications. With the rise in popularity of these forms, has he considered any more projects of this type?"

As I think I've written at one point or another, they are a large investment, especially for the artist. I think a 23 page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself. When I did Empire with Howard Chaykin, which was 1980 or 1982, Byron Preiss was the packager, and that was a strangely ill-fated project. After we did it, I was very happy with what we did, and Byron was very unhappy with the ending, and just took it upon himself to completely rewrite it, and cut up the art, so that there's no way to put it back in its original shape. It just doesn't exist any more, and he's dead now of course. So nobody will ever see the way it was originally supposed to end. I've written about it in at least one interview. I think it's my book Silent Interviews. I'm very happy with Bread And Wine, which is the one I did with Mia Wolff more recently. It basically explains how Denis and I, my partner of the past, getting on for 20 years [got together]. But you basically need to find someone who is really interested in doing sixty to 100 full-sized fairly complicated and rich drawings — or paintings in the case of Empire, every page was actually painted in Empire — that's hard to find. So I could see doing more, but you've got to find somebody who wants to do it.

DocNoodle asks: After being involved in science fiction for 40 years, are you seeing any trends that are tend to repeat themselves or go in cycles, or do you have any predictions for the future of the genre?

Not really. No. I think that's the easiest way to answer that. Some of the Cyberpunk stuff — some of the most recent incarnations of the Cyberpunk stuff seem to me to be kind of dull. It seems to become a [collection] of endless mannerist fights, with everyone firing various and sundry power guns at each other from around corners, and I don't see what the point of it all is. I suspect probably I'm not giving it my full attention when I read it, rarely do I finish it. It ill behooves me to make a judgment, but rarely are they able to catch me up in the first 20 pages or so. It's as if they think these blood-and-thunder beginnings of "Agent Joe C. Seven leaned from behind and fired into the explosion, etc. etc.," and this goes on for twenty five pages, and this is supposed to make you interested in the character or the situation. ANd it doesn't. It sounds like a bad movie that I wouldn't be interested in either. I will not name names, but I do see a lot of that stuff, by writers who you can tell have a certain verbal facility. They actually do describe these things moderately well. For me, I've read the situation described so frequently, that there's no amount of verbal invention that's going to reawaken it for me. I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is — which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight. Most people under the pressure of a gunfight, assuming they know how to shoot guns, do pretty much the same thing: try very hard to stay alive and kill the other guy. Not terribly exciting.

Djehuty asks: "Will he ever finish and publish The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities?"

Probably not, I can't say for sure. Again, I haven't written it off entirely. I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in. A lot of it, as the diptych was originally planned out, was a celebration of lot of the stuff I saw at the time in the gay world. Sort of in allegorical form, a lot of that was being celebrated. There was a lot of the gay situation that made me rethink some of that, not in any kind of simplistic way, but in a fairly complicated way. So between the personal breakup, which was an eight-year relationship that came to ane nd, and the changes in the world situation, there were other things that sort of grabbed my interest more. That made the second one a little hard to go on. I still think there are some valid things to be said about it, in that second volume. And it's quite... I've got two or three more books, that I really would like to write, and at this point, my books take me three to five years. So that's 15 years, and I'm practically 70 years old. So I'll be in my 80s when those books are done, and I don't know whether I'm going to be writing anything, or even if I'm going to be here. But I do have thse other projgects I want to write first. Three of them, one of which is the book I'm finishing up now, Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders.

Can you tell us more about that?

In a way, it's a very simple story, just about two working-class gay men, who meet when they're seventeen and nineteen, living on the coast of Georgia. They meet in 2007, and they stay together for the next 80 years, until one of them dies. Now you tell me whether that's science fiction or not. It definitely goes into the future, but on the other hand, they're absolutely out of the center of life, and things progress where they live, very very slowly. And they hear about things that are going on outside. They live on coastal part of Georgia in a little town that does go through cycles of being a semi-popular tourist spot in the summers, and then some years, nobody bothers to come at all. Eventually they move to a little island off the coast, and a little lesbian art colony starts up on the island. And they wonder if they're not being crowded out of their new home. But they're very fond of some of the people who live there, and some of the people who live there are very fond of them.

Gargle asks, Do you consider linguistics a science in real life? And how do linguistics and philosophy inform your work?

Yes, of course. Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences. It's a science in the same way that sociology and psychology is a science. [As for how they inform my work?] At this point, very little. They did when I was 22 and 23, and I am now 67.

Galatea2.2 asks: "One more question for Mr. Delany: Writers are often exhorted to write the novels they are dying to read...what's the unwritten book he would love to write (or just read)?"

All of my books have been ((what I would like to read.)) That's the impetus to write pretty much any book I've ever writen. That's true of the Jewels of Aptor, although maybe in this case, my wife would have liked to have read it, back when I was married. That cretainly was true of Dhalgren, and it's just equally true of Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders... As a gay man in a long-term relationship that's been going along quite happily, for as I said, going on for 20 years, I realized I would like to read a book about a long-term relationship and the type of things that might go into it. It's not an autobiographycal work in any way shape or form, although certainly many many of the lessons and ideas and the kinds of things that you learn as you go on in your life have gone into it. It's a very low-key book about people who do their laundry together and help each other fold up the sheets, and one of them makes the coffee in the morning because he makes an especially good pot of coffee. That kind of thing. It is not a "big plot" novel. It's a very characater driven novel. Although it's fairly long, around 200,000 words.

I was talking to some friends online about the writers we miss the most from science fiction, and these four's names came up again and again. So I was moved to get in touch with them and ask them if they thought it was true that they'd stopped writing science fiction. And if so, why was this the case? Their answers say as much about the genre as a whole as they do about the individual writers.

Mary Doria Russell wrote the breathtaking first-contact novel The Sparrow and its sequel, Children Of God. Since then, she's written two historical novels, A Thread Of Grace and Dreamers Of The Day. She writes:

My husband and I talked this over last night, and it's not clear to us that anything significant changed when I began my third novel. I didn't decide to switch genres. I simply told a third story, and then a fourth, and now a fifth.

SF and historical fiction make similar demands on an author. They both require you to imagine as fully as possible a time and place that are not your own. In all my novels, there is an ironic and distanced narrator who knows a lot more than the characters about their past and future. And there is always an awareness of the contemporary limitations of technology and ideology, and of how those limitations affects lives.

In my personal life, the most unconventional thing about me is how relentlessly conventional I am have remained for nearly six decades. I married my high school sweetheart almost 40 years ago. I was a PTA mom who stayed at home to raise my kid. Don and I still live in a Cleveland suburb and I'm on the City of South Euclid's Planning and Zoning Commission, for crissakes. At the same time, intellectually, I am drawn to borderlands and to the people who inhabit them: marginal natives, newcomers, travelers, people who don't fit and who therefore have an interestingly slanted view of the cultures they inhabit. Remember: I was an anthropologist long before I was a novelist. We are trained to seek out marginal natives; no one can give you a better perspective on aspects of culture that statistically normal people simply accept as, well, normal.

Admittedly: I have turned out to be kind of a genre slut. I will stand on the literary street corner and get into any genre that drives by and offers to take me to a good par-tay. And sometimes I don't go home with the one who brung me to the dance.

THE SPARROW is first contact SF; it is also a courtroom drama a lot like THE CAINE MUTINY. CHILDREN OF GOD is obviously SF, but it's also a three-generation family saga. Both are prolonged meditations on the role of religion in the lives of many people and in human history from the Age of Discovery to the Space Age. A THREAD OF GRACE is a World War II thriller, and a natural history of resistance movements. It also lets readers think about the two questions that every Holocaust novel must address: How could this have happened? What would I have done?

DREAMERS OF THE DAY is about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference and the invention of the modern Middle East, but it's also sort of a romance, and it ends as magical realism, complete with Egyptian gods and a bitchy little tiff between Napoleon and General George McClellan. And I'm almost finished with EIGHT TO FIVE, AGAINST.

This new book is in some ways a classical Western about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, but I see John Henry Holliday as a heartbreaking figure: born in the antebellum South, educated in the North for a professional life in the East, trying not to die on the rawest frontier of the West. Doc might as well have been THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH: frail, lonely and desperately homesick, surrounded by people who are not nearly as sophisticated or educated as he was. At the same time, this story is a murder mystery set in Dodge City in 1878.

So I guess what this all adds up to is: who gives a shit about labels? I write about what fascinates me, and I use whatever tools seem best suited to do the job at hand. What happens after that is marketing.

Karen Joy Fowler wrote Sarah Canary, which is widely viewed as a type of first-contact novel. Her story "What I Didn't See" won a Nebula Award, and she co-founded the James Tiptree Jr. Award for speculative fiction stories that consider gender in new and interesting ways. (Full disclosure: I was a Tiptree juror.) Her more recent novels, The Jane Austen Book Club and Wit's End, have fewer overtly fantastical elements. She tells io9:

So this is something I've been thinking hard about ever since I published Wit's End. I've just finished yet another of my maybe-they're-aliens-maybe-they're-not stories, (Gardner Dozois calls this the "is that a dinosaur in the shadows?" stories) and am about to write an incontrovertible ghost story.

Here are some of the things I've been thinking.

1) I don't set out to write in any genre; that's just not my working method. I start with whatever I have, some tiny incoherent image that I hope to make into a story. And then I take what I need to make that story work. Maybe what I need comes from science fiction, but maybe not. I won't know until I write it.

2) I'm really interested in genre and draw a lot of energy from it. So even if the things I write aren't, strictly speaking, genre piece, they all seem to be in conversation with genre in some way. (I like mysteries as much as I like sf, by the way.)

3) What I love most about science fiction is the short fiction. Almost all my short fiction spins around a science fictional idea even if the resulting story isn't quite sf. Charles Brown of Locus told me once that I'm a science fiction writer because I think like a science fiction writer and I was enormously flattered and hope that's true.

4) But even if it is, mystery writing with its emphasis on plot and sf writing with its emphasis on tech don't really play to my strengths.

What I noticed with Wit's End was that my most sympathetic reviews came from inside sf or mystery. The literary reviews were more baffled and less pleased. People have asked me repeatedly if I think my story "What I Didn't See" is sf and I can't say that I do. But what is very clear to me is that I wrote it for sf readers. And what became clear with Wit's End is that I'm always writing for sf readers. Science fiction readers enjoy figuring things out and don't mind being puzzled for long stretches. They read in a very active way. And that's the way I read and those are the readers I'm trying to please.

So — what I'm asking myself now is: if my ideal readers are sf readers, doesn't it seem, well, logical, that I would please them most by writing sf? Which is really what they want to read? And I'm not sure I can be anything but the writer I am. But I'll keep trying.

One final point. In the last couple of weeks I've read about toxoplasma — the parasite that alters our behavior until we're simply pawns in the paws of housepet cats; a woman in India found guilty of murdering her fiance based on her brain scan; a site on the internet where for a monthly fee a computer will pray for you ceaselessly. Stan Robinson says we all live in a science fiction novel now and it's clearly true. So I truly believe that science fiction is realism now and literary realism is a nostalgic literature about a place where we once lived, but no longer do.

Nicola Griffith won the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Literary Award for her first novel, Ammonite, and the Nebula and another Tiptree for her second novel, Slow River. She co-edited two queer speculative fiction anthologies in the Bending The Landscape series. Her last few novels have been crime fiction, and her most recent book is a memoir. She says:

I'm a native of sf. You can't leave that kind of thing behind. Just as everyone I meet in the US knows I'm English, everyone who reads my work knows I'm a skiffy geek. It doesn't matter how long I've been away; my English sf upbringing colours my accent, my attitude, my vocabulary. It's who I am.

But I've been visiting home more often lately.

I've just written my first short story in years and it's sf—it will be in Eclipse Three, out in December. I've been outlining a screenplay—it's sf. I've written chunks of, and have most of an outline for, an alternate history/sword swangin' fantasy novel. My recent favourites in film and TV are all skiffy extravaganzas—Iron Man, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, True Blood. My last two essays were all about sf (one is even called "Identity and SF"). I just wrote the intro to the new edition of Leigh Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon. The only anthologies I've ever edited were fantasy, sf, and horror. I've just agreed to be a GoH at the Atlanta queer geekvent, OutlantaCon, next year.

Yes, the next novel I plan to publish is a 7th C. historical — but, hey, think of it as basically a big fat fantasy novel with no magic.

So, no, I haven't left. I'm still part of sf, and it's part of me.

Samuel R. Delany became a published science fiction author at the age of twenty, and wrote the Nebula Award-winning novels Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. His novel Dhalgren is considered one of the most important works in the genre, and his other novels include Nova, Triton and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Since the mid-1980s, he's focused on writing literary fiction, essays and erotica. He talked to us by phone yesterday, and here's what he said:

I certainly don't feel that I've abandoned science fiction in any way. I still love it. It's true, I don't either read or write it, the way I used to. But I've always basically considered myself, dare I say it, just a writer. In an odd way, I never really made a decision to be a science fiction writer. I was about 19 years old. My then-wife, Marilyn Hacker, got a job as an assistant editor at Ace Books, and she would come home complaining about the stories she would edit. Her major complaints had to do, mainly, with the women characters. This was back in 1961 or 1962. The heroines tended to be unbelievably wimpy and would hang around waiting to be rescued, and the villainesses were so dastardly, you couldn't believe them. And there was nothing in between. The women characters tended not to resemble anything that you could recognize as a human being at all.

So I began to write a science fiction novel for her, and I tried to work specifically on the female characters, and to make a couple of characters who started out looking like they were fulfilling the stereotype, their reputations came through. And then when you actually spent time with them, you discovered they were a little different than that. That was the Jewels of Aptor. To make a long story short, we submitted it. It was sold, and because it was sold, I began to write another one, and then another one and then another one. And by the time I had written a fifth, I suddenly thought, "Oh, I must be a science fiction author." Because I had now written five of them and had had sold four of them, and was on my way to selling a fifth. As I said, it was something that just kind of happened. I never decided I wanted to be a science fiction author, per se.

Before that, I had written nine other novels that were not sold — and that were not science fiction — and probably for good reasons. They weren't terribly good. It's arguable that neither was my first science fiction novel, if the truth be known. I was nineteen, and you can imagine how good they might have been, or not been. But I just kept doing this. And finally around 1975, 1976, or probably a little earlier than that — I guess it was with Dhalgren — I started thinking about things that couldn't be handled in the usual way science fiction handles things. I think of Dhalgren as a science fiction novel, but it's a lot bigger and a lot more ambitious, than some of the things that came before. And then as things went on, I think Triton is a return, pretty much, to the center of science fiction concerns. And then the Tales of Nevèrÿon, which is the next big project that occupied me — that's a sword and sorcery series.

And since 1984, when I finished Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, I haven't written anything that's immediately recognizable as science fiction. And so the last few things have been non-science fiction: Atlantis: Three Tales, which is pretty much mundane fiction; the Mad Man, which is sort of highly erotically charged mundane fiction; Hogg (although Hogg was actually written when I was 27). So I was always sort of moving back and forth between them. Dark Reflections, which is last published novel, was not science fiction. Gallows is a historical novel and sort of a spoof on erotica. My most recent novel I'm actually finishing, is something called Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders, and it's very much on the three-way border between literary impressionism, science fiction and pornography. It's an attempt to see whether you can do all three in one book. Though the science fiction aspect of it isn't pushed, and you have to get at least a third of the way through it before any of it raises its head. I hope it works. I will either keep away people, the other two genres will alienate the lovers of the one genre, or maybe it'll be inclusive and invite people in from all three. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

So I never saw myself as either giving it up, or exclusively committing myself to it. I was just interested in trying to write well, and to tell stories using whatever generic constraints seemed to highlight what I was trying to do in that particular story. That's how I've always looked at the process.

1. Samuel R. Delany (1942- )
His 1975 novel Dhalgren is a hugely complex, at times incomprehensible tome reminiscent of the works of Thomas Pynchon. It also showcases every imaginable form of human sexuality, including a long-term polyamorous relationship between the protagonist, his lover Lanya Colson, and a gang member called Denny.

2. Philip José Farmer (1918-2009)
It would be a stretch to say Farmer invented sexual science fiction (especially considering some of the people on this very list predate him), but he did shatter the mainstream notion that sex had no place in science fiction. His 1953 short story "The Lovers" was an overnight sensation for its sophisticated, intelligent depiction of love between a human and an alien, which he followed up with five more stories in a similar vein in his 1960 anthology Strange Relations. He explored unconventional relationships both allegorically within science fiction and literally in his 1962 novel Fire and the Night, which looked at an interracial relationship before they had gained widespread social acceptance.

3. Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)
Nothing if not an iconoclast, Heinlein was a militarist who also passionately believed in free love, at least if his writings are to be believed. It's actually not that hard to reconcile when seen in terms of his ironclad libertarianism, which led him to foresee a future where homosexuality was fully accepted, public nudity was commonplace, and couples were far from the only acceptable number of people for romantic relationships. A noted advocate for polyamory, his works consistently shattered taboos, ranging from relatively mundane topics for the 1970s such as open homosexuality to a full-fledged incestuous romance between immortal time traveler Lazarus Long and his own mother - and all of that was in just one book, 1973's Time Enough for Love. But perhaps his crowning achievement for mixing sex and science fiction was his wonderfully twisted 1959 short story "All You Zombies", in which time travel and a sex change operation allows the story's protagonist to become both his own mother and father, not to mention just about everyone else who appears in the story.

4. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929- )
Le Guin has extensively studied alternative conceptions of gender, both as a critical theorist (in such essays as 1976's "Is Gender Necessary?") and in books like The Left Hand of Darkness. Her novel, published in 1969, considered the Gethenians, a humanoid alien race with no inherent gender. Instead, Gethenians experience the activation of either male or female sexual organs in roughly monthly cycles. To humans, this means they constantly switch genders, although this is a rather quaint notion to the Gethenians themselves.

5. William Moulton Marston (1893-1947)
Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, may not have the literary credentials of the other people on this list – although he did invent the lie detector test, for what that's worth – but his creation of the first female superhero might have the most pop culture impact. His personal idiosyncrasies, which included living with his wife and girlfriend in a polyamorous relationship, influenced the character's subtext, often leading to Wonder Woman being tied up by other Amazons in situations that evoked bondage imagery (there are entire sites devoted to tracking this very phenomenon). In an era when even recognized comic book geniuses like Will Eisner were content to rip off Superman, it took an uncompromisingly unique individual like Marston to create the first and still the best superheroine, and the medium is infinitely better for it.

6. Joanna Russ (1937- )
One of the first and most important lesbian science fiction writers, Russ confronted sexism head-on in the 1970s with a number of works, both fiction and non-fiction. Her most notable science fiction was probably 1975's The Female Man, which considered four women living on four different parallel universes who then travel between each other's worlds. The different universes include a universe where the Great Depression is still going strong, one that is essentially the same as the real world, another that is a utopian society without any men at all, and a universe where the two genders are literally at war. Russ uses this multiversal backdrop to compare how the various characters' situations influence their conceptions of gender politics and sexuality.

7. Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915-1987)
Better known by her male pseudonym, James Tiptree Jr., Sheldon spent her science fiction career methodically deconstructing supposed boundary lines of sex and gender (she herself was bisexual). She looked at the nature of sex, at times characterizing it as a playful expression of human free will, but otherwise seeing it more as an animalistic force in such stories as "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" and "The Screwfly Solution." Her 1975 novella "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" dealt with three male astronauts thrown through an anomaly in space to an Earth inhabited solely by women, which Sheldon characterizes as a peaceful but stagnant society. "The Women Men Don't See", on the other hand, depicted two women who used an alien abduction as an opportunity to escape the limitations of their lives on Earth. She depicted sex with a frankness and clarity that was exceptional for science fiction authors of the day, male or female.

8. Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950)
His 1935 novel Odd John is one of the earliest to explore sexual themes in science fiction. Following John Wainwright, a British mutant with extraordinary mental abilities, the novel in part addresses the sorts of relations a superhuman such as John could have with regular people. Although Stapledon never quite comes out and says it explicitly, Odd John almost certainly suggests that Wainwright has sex with both his own mother and a young boy. Ultimately, he concludes that all relations with normal humans are morally wrong on the grounds that his advanced intellect makes any such act essentially bestiality.

9. Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985)
The same year as Philip José Farmer's "The Lovers" broke new ground with love between species, Theodore Sturgeon shattered the taboo against depictions of homosexuality in science fiction with his short story "The World Well Lost." The story follows a pair of seemingly male and female alien lovers who visit Earth and become celebrities until their home planet demands their extradition. When the aliens reveal to one of the astronauts tasked with bring them home that they are both male and that their crime is love, he sets them free, in part because he nurses a secret love for his copilot. The story was so controversial that it barely got published; the first editor Sturgeon showed it to actively called other editors, demanding they not publish it. Thankfully, Universe magazine saw it differently, and science fiction is infinitely better for it.

10. John Varley (1947- )
His "Eight Worlds" stories depict how technology manages to make homophobia obsolete (well, more obsolete). In a future culture where people can change their gender instantly, there is little room for views that see homosexual relationships as different from heterosexual ones, as a person could wake up one day in one relationship and go to sleep in the other.

Top image from Clyde Caldwell's cover illustration for Farmer's Strange Relations.

Are "plot" and "story" just two different ways of saying the same thing? They're both about a sequence of events that starts in one place and ends in another? (Or goes in a circle, in a hopefully meaningful fashion.) And yet, people seem to use them to describe very different things.

When people talk about a "plot-driven" science fiction book or movie, they're usually implying that the characters are as wafer-thin as the exploding mint in Monty Python's Meaning Of Life. The only thing a "plot-driven" work cares about is marching us from one plot point to another. There's a spaceship that's going to crash, and we have to stop it! But if the spaceship doesn't crash, then the hero's mother will never have been born! And so on. It's all about the mechanics of the plot.

(For some examples, see the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Of America glossary of critiquing terms, which says "plot-driven" stories are ones in which the author forces the characters to go in the direction the plot requires, whether it makes sense or not. Also, a commenter at SFSignal says serious science fiction is being replaced by plot-driven spectacle.)

Meanwhile, you hear creators, and fans, talk about "the story" with awe. Joss Whedon, for example, talks regularly about how "the story" is the most important thing in his works, and everything else is secondary. (Says Joss, "The STORY is in charge, the story that keeps on speaking to me, that says there is much more to tell about all these characters.") Usually, there's an implication that "story" involves more of an emotional component, or some kind of magical alchemy, that's not present in mere plot.

Here's Doomsday Book author Connie Willis, talking in 1997 about how her religious beliefs affect (or don't affect) her writing:

I think writers have to tell the truth as they know it. On the other hand, I think every truly religious person is a heretic at heart because you can't be true to an established agenda. You have to be true to what you think. I think Madeleine L'Engle and C.S. Lewis both have times when they become apologists for religion rather than writers. I want always to be a writer, and if my religion is what has to go, so be it. The story is everything.

Samuel Delany talks, obliquely, about the relationship between plot and story in his book, About Writing, which I reviewed a while ago. First, he quotes E.M. Forster, from his 1927 book Aspects Of The Novel:

The more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growth it supports, the less we shall find to admire. It runs like a backbone - or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary... it is a sequence of events arranged in their time sequence - dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death and so on. Qua story, it can only have merit: that of making the audience wonder what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audence not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story... When we isolate the story like this and hold it out on the forceps - wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time - it presents an aspect both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it.

Delany adds:

With some extraordinary exceptions throughout the history of all these fields, most comic books, TV series and action movies don't have good stories. Neither do most published novels, and for the same reason: the logic that must hold them together and produce the readerly curiosity about what will happen is replaced by "interesting situations" (or an "interesting character"), which don't relate logically or developmentally to what comes before or after. That is to say, they are wildly illogical. We cannot follow their development, even - or especially - if we try. If we look at them closely, they don't make much sense. The general population, day in and day out, is not used to getting good stories.

You'll notice that both Forster and Delany use the term "story" instead of "plot," to describe the backbone of the narrative. Delany also says that he and Forster share a healthy respect for the ancient power of the story, so it seems like in these quotes, both writers are using "story" to mean both "story" and "plot."

And yet, I feel like I keep coming across the same dichotomy, especially as people talk about science fiction. Stories are nobel and revered, plots are ugly and spine-like, best concealed by layers of muscle and fat. So what is it that makes "plot" mechanistic and "story" magical? Here's one theory that I've come up with: plot is about the future, story is about the past.

Think about it this way: when you focus on the plot of a book or movie, it's always about "What happens next?" You're constantly watching to see how the hero's predicament will turn out, and how the clues you've picked up on will be resolved.

Meanwhile, we tell stories to answer the question, "How did we get here?" Like, for example, I want to know why the U.S. army is fighting in Iraq. I can tell a story about how there was this evil dictator who invaded Kuwait, and we had to stop him, but then he kept flouting the terms of the peace agreement. Or I can tell a story about how our president had an agenda that involved toppling the government of Iraq, and after a terrorist attack, he decided to use that as a pretext to invade. Which story I tell depends on my viewpoint - Does the story begin in 1991, or 2001? And which elements do I include? But either way, I'm telling a story about how things got to this point.

So maybe a good plot is something that takes you from A to B to C without wrecking your suspension of disbelief, and keeps you guessing about what's going to happen next. And maybe a good story is something that delivers you at a destination, and in the end you understand how the journey all led up to this point. The best works, of course, do both. And the worst works do neither. But I guess I tend to think of it as more of a continuum, with most works falling somewhere in the middle. What do you think?

The book in question, About Writing, isn't quite what I'd expected from someone who's been teaching creative writing for the past thirty years. It's definitely not a style guide or a tutorial on fiction writing. (The book's subtitle, "7 essays, 4 letters & 5 interviews," could be a bit of a clue.) Instead, it's Delany's ruminations, gathered over the years, about both the craft of fiction writing and the writer's life in general.

There are fantastic insights in there, as well as advice that might make you rethink everything about your approach to fiction writing - even if you end up disagreeing with some of it.

You have to have a bit of patience, though. Delany says, in the book's intro, that he doesn't think you can talk about how to write fiction, without also discussing why people write fiction, and the world in which we write it:

[This book] deals with three other topics and the relations between them. One - which it shares with most books on writing - is, yes, the art of writing fiction. The other two are far less often discussed in classes and rarely figure in such "how-to" books. First, how is the world structured - specifically the socio-aesthetic world - in which the writer works?... Second (and finally), this book discusses the way literary reputations grow - and how, today, they don't grow.

He goes on to prove his point in the intro, mixing a nuts-and-bolts discussion of scene-setting with a long passage on the nature of begeisterung (roughly translated as "inspiration," but it's actually one of those German words that needs a 500-word explanation in English.)

There are some good nuts-and-bolts essays - in particular, the essays on "Thickening The Plot" and "Characters" are pretty helpful. Even here, though, Delany throws some curveballs, albeit welcome ones. Take the essay on plot, for example. Delany goes off on some tangents, and also seems to be discussing scene-setting instead of plotting. But it all comes together, when he explains that the key to a good plot is actually visualizing the events of the story as if they really happened. And if you're forced - by a cranky critique group, or your own conscience - to change the story's events around, then you must revisualize the story all over again. See it in your mind, through the lens of key details, until you can convince yourself that "on some level the story actually did happen (as opposed to 'should have happened') in the new way." It's actually pretty amazing advice.

A lot of the other nuts-and-bolts advice winds up in the back of the book, in an appendix called "Nips, Nits, Tucks And Tips." Including info like when to use the first person, how to punctuate dialogue, and the dramatic structure of fiction.

The rest of the book includes speeches, essays and letters, where Delany tells funny anecdotes and reminisces about his early friendships with storytellers and his encounters with other science fiction writers. (I didn't actually know he taught Vonda McIntyre at Clarion, but apparently he did.) He explains why Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a bad book, discusses how to achieve literary acclaim (including a discussion of Doris Lessing's refusal to cooperate with a would-be biographer) and a lengthy discussion of the state of writing and editing today.

The book is full of insights and startling arguments, but it's probably not a book you'll read in one go. I've found myself picking it up, reading one essay, and putting it down again for a day or two. It might actually be that rarest of creatures - academic bathroom reading. This isn't, by any means, a criticism. It's a very dense, ruminative book full of ideas that will pop into your head a few days after you read them. But it also feels a bit, at times, like Delany is sitting in an overstuffed armchair lecturing the reader, which goes over better in smaller doses. Luckily, the book comes packaged with the dosages already divided up.

I actually find myself disagreeing with Michael Chabon, somewhat, when he claims there's no real difference between literary and genre fiction. I've spent enough time in the literary scene (well, a literary scene) to get a sense that there is such a thing as literary writing. It has its own set of clichés, its own expectations, and its own chosen subject matter. You don't pick up the New Yorker, much less a small lit journal whose name ends in "Review," expecting to see the same kind of thing you'd see in Asimov's. You just don't.

At the same time, there's no one "literary establishment," with a single viewpoint. A couple of years ago, the New York Times Book Review polled 125 critics and authors to decide the best novels of the past 25 years. The winner, Toni Morrison's Beloved, got only 15 votes. Most other selections got only a handful of votes, meaning that nobody could agree on the best works. Not only that, but the list of winning books absolutely screams "lowest common denominator," with an over-representation of boring hacks like John Updike. (My hero Donald Hall spends a whole chapter in his seminal writing handbook Writing Well explaining, pitilessly and irrefutably, why John Updike really is a terrible writer, sentence by sentence.)

And that's the thing: the most literary writing from the "literary world" never really attains much prominence outside of a cloistered scene that talks amongst itself. There are tons of writers who are literary superstars in some context, but they'll never get profiled in Entertainment Weekly or reviewed in the NYTBR, any more than any paperback scifi writer will. In fact, the literary world is a lot like science fiction in that respect. There are literary stars who never break out of the lit ghetto, and then there are some who cross over and become "mainstream." There are people who the Quinnipiac Review will fall over itself to publish, whom you'll never in a million years hear of.

Which is the point, sort of — maybe at some point in the past the term "literary" referred to works, from whatever genre, that had stood the test of time and gained classic stauts. But nowadays "literary" refers to a particular type of writing. It's a genre in its own right, just like science fiction.

"Literary" certainly doesn't mean "good." It's a description for one way in which writing can be good. But something can be literary and not particularly good, and writing can be good without being particularly literary.

Let's take a concrete example: I recently reviewed David Louis Edelman's Multireal, and a while before that I reviewed The Stone Gods by former literary darling Jeanette Winterson. There is no doubt in my mind that Edelman's novel is a much better book than The Stone Gods, which is a severely flawed work. But The Stone Gods is a thousand times more literary than Multireal. Literary qualities that The Stone Gods possesses include a masterful, poetic prose style; a clever experimentation with narrative form; a heavy layer of irony over the main characters' inner lives; a story that jumps around in time and repeats the same motifs and characters across different settings. Multireal, by contrast, tells a complicated story in a fairly straightforward way. The earlier novel, Infoquake, has one big flashback that takes up a third of the book, and there are some dream sequences here and there. But it's not that arty.

Certainly there are some SF writers writing today who are "literary." Kim Stanley Robinson comes to mind, as does Geoff Ryman. Sarah Hall's Carhullan Army/Daughters Of The North, which just won the Tiptree Award, is extremely literary. Many lit snobs now talk about Samuel R. Delany with as much rapture as they reserve for Raymond Carver or Alice Munroe.

What would you get if science fiction novels and stories were more "literary"? It wouldn't necessarily make them better, or even help them gain respectability. But here's a random, and possibly wrong-headed, selection of what you might get if science fiction went more "lit.":

1) More ambiguity. A friend of mine used to joke that the New Yorker's short stories always had to end with a "clarifying moment of ambiguity." We're not sure what's just happened, and nothing has actually been resolved, but we feel somehow better, or worse, about the whole business now that it's over. Oh, and here's a teacup. Isn't it shiny? So forget having everything explained — in fact, the less we understand about what just happened, the better.

2) Fancier word-play. Most science fiction stories and novels use language as a tool to get the story across. They're usually written serviceably, but not sparklingly. There are usually way too many adverbs, too many passive sentences, and too much use of the verb "to be." In literary writing, by contrast, there's an obsession with prose style. Every sentence must dapple, like sunlight through a babboon's toes in the jungle. A couple years ago, I got on the mailing list for a few of the biggest literary publishers and found myself receiving a couple dozen literary books a month. I read as many of them as I could, and the writing was often quite lovely, even when the stories left no other impression on my mind. MFA programs are exploding with people who have been drilled to create prose bonsai.

3) Paragraphs that start with numbers. I have no idea where this fad came from — maybe poetry? — but I still see it a lot, especially in short fiction. It used to be lists, or fake memos, but I think those are out now. But numbers are still around.

4) Heroes who are less heroic. Look at it this way: Why is Hamlet the most written about of Shakespeare's plays? It's not because it's good. Hamlet is actually a pretty weak play, lacking the cleverness of As You Like It or the heaviness of the Scottish play. Several other Shakespeare plays, including The Tempest, have nicer writing. Actors like Hamlet because the lead role gives them a chance to have fun grandstanding and Burbageing. But critics love Hamlet because the main character is such a poor hero. He couldn't lace his boots without agonizing about it for hours, and he's horrified by his own mortality in precisely the way that a hero isn't supposed to be. So goodbye escapist science fiction heroes, hello angsty wanderers!

5) Tell us more about the teacup. It's chipped on one side, but somehow the friction from all those fingernails holding it steady has worn it down. So the chipped area feels almost polished, as if the cup-maker chipped it herself, and then glazed it. There's a stain on its base that no amount of scrubbing with the wiry brush is ever equal to removing. It has a pattern of flowers and baby's breath, which you haven't noticed in years.

6) A fetishization of a certain kind of person. People joke about the literary story revolving around suburban malaise, but it's sort of true nonetheless. During my year of reading piles of literary books, I read tons of near-identical stories of growing up with a nanny, or being a soccer mom, or being a business dad. For some reason, a lot of literary novels start with a funeral, forcing a successful thirtysomething or fortysomething person to return to his/her family and uncover the buried secrets of his/her childhood. (Think Sweet Home Alabama, but not quite as cute.) In science fiction terms, this would mean more stories about middle managers, shuttling around below decks on the starcruiser and wondering if this is all there is to life.

7) Why do we feel bad? A lot of the most interesting literary fiction that I've read lately has a kind of malaise running underneath it. Angsty, or maybe angry. I'm thinking Gary Amdahl type stuff. Stories about people who feel bad or pissed off for reasons they can't articulate, and which we understand even less well than they do. Science fiction has come a long way since the days when it had to feature "happy, competent characters" with no emotional problems. But it's still the literature of problem-solving, not anhedonia.

So it's a "be careful what you wish for" type of thing. As I said earlier, some science fiction is genuinely literary, as much as anything in The New Yorker ever is, but I wouldn't want to see all science fiction writers making that their life's goal.

I love literary fiction, for mostly different reasons than I love science fiction. There are truths you can only tell by being playful with words, or by delving into intentional murkiness. The best literary fiction is both clever and heart-throttling, making you confront the "boredom, the horror and the glory" of life by forcing you to see more clearly, or more murkily, than you're accustomed to seeing. The best science fiction, by contrast, is about exploring brilliant ideas, thought experiments, possible futures or just escapist fun. And there's nothing wrong with that.