Good Science Fiction of the last 20 to 30 years

haven't we had this about three times already this year?

Sci-fi S/D
School Me On Some Sci-Fi My Astral Brothers And Sisters!

crappy thread but some recommendations from here on:
Science fiction

none of those threads are about recent SF - thus proving that there is no good stuff from the last twenty years.

Are you sure?

I like Alastair Reynolds

Iain M. Banks! Totally insane stuff, plus he's created an "utopia" that, despite seeming pretty repulsive at times, is pretty hard to dismiss.

Greg Bear, especially the short stories. And yes to Iain M Banks. SOME Alistair Reynolds (the two novellas in Turquise Days & Diamond Dogs or whatever it was). Some Greg Bear, esp Blood Music, Hammer of God. Lucius Shepard.

Jeff Vandermeer and China Mieville are the first couple of names to come to mind.

I have just read Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds and it was the fucking shit. Very much like Rendezvous with Rama, except where that was an interesting idea or two suffering from woeful underdevelopment, this had interesting characters and a plot that goes somewhere and actual aliens. Maybe the politics and personalities were a tad OTT but that was preferable to some dullsville scientists just tooling round a big empty relic.

Oh and Peter F Hamilton is hilariously bad.

Today I bought a book for one whole UK pound sterling, called "Amanda & the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer" by Carol Hill, copyright 1985. This is the rear cover blurb:

Meet Amanda Jaworski. She's an astronaut who roller-skates through the halls of NASA. She's a subparticle physicist who can enter the mind of Mary Shelley. She's incredibly beautiful and uncommonly intelligent. With her magical cat, Schrodinger, she finds herself on a trajectory that leads to a confrontation with the ultimate seductress, the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, as she seeks to bring back from a world forty million light years away a message of love that can save the earth.

It has glowing plaudits from the New York TImes Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times ("There's no doubt about it - this book is in the running as a 'great American novel'").

Will I regret my purchase?

I fear so. That blurb seems calculated to make me cross.

That a fair stretch of time we're talking about - 30 years is back to the late 70s - there's been an insane amount of good sf since then.

Just within even a 20 year limit is Dan Simmons Hyperion and Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep

Jeff Noon's Vurt and Pollen were pretty good. Maybe not all-time classics, but good nonetheless. Also, Gibson and Sterling to thread--unless, for some unfathomable reason, cyberpunk doesn't count as 'good sf', that is.

Ted Chiang is awesome. He hasn't written much but it's all incredible.

Somebody linked his time machine story here on another thread - "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" - it's beautiful and amazing.

Ender's Game is a great novel.

science fiction novel.

not romance...lol

Ted Chiang is awesome. He hasn't written much but it's all incredible.

"Stories Of Your Life And Others" is one of the best short story collections I've read by anyone.

Yes, if you read that one and Greg Egan's first story collection--'Axiomatic'--you'll be well set for brilliantly written mind-blowing SF shenanigans.

Ted Chiang is rocking my world right now. Quite a lot of his compilation of novelettes "Story of Your Life and Others" is available online (let me know if you need help). I think Alchemist's Gate is still his best, but going through the back catalogue has been a lot of fun.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51EGWMXO2WL._SS500_.jpg

also, look, a sci-fi cover that isn't completely awful

Time and Again by Jack Finney is a good sf that came out in 1970.

fast forward 1 & 2 are awesome anthologies you will prob dig

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang (Hardcover - Jul 23, 2007)
5 Used & new from $59.95

;_;

i hope this is because it's coming out in paperback soon?

you know it's online, right?

no, i do not know that!

Well-read (according to my friend) MP3 here: http://podcast.starshipsofa.com/podcast/Ted_Chiang_The_Merchant_and_the_Alchemists_Gate.mp3

The text was on the Fantasy and Sci-Fi website when it won the hugo but apparently they've taken it down. I've got it saved if you want it though. Hit me up in webmail.

apropos of nothing, i enjoyed this short film of a ray bradbury story:

Oh I remember that story. I think I will be too sad if I watch it.

it is kind of a bummer yeah, but very pretty

Today I bought a book for one whole UK pound sterling, called "Amanda & the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer" by Carol Hill, copyright 1985.

I remember back in the '80s there was an insane pan of this book by Norman Spinrad where he claimed it represented all that was bad about modern fiction.

In regard to the original question, I can't recommend Gene Wolfe highly enough. One of my favourite writers. I really hate when people use the phrase "transcends the genre" as a seal of approval, but with Gene Wolfe I think it is kind of true - if he didn't write SF I think he would be rated as one of the top authors of the last 30-40 years. Everything he does is like an intricately layered puzzle and although you have to persevere with it, the more you do the better it gets. His writing kind of slipstreams between SF, fantasy and horror in equal measures, without succumbing to the cliches of any of those genres.

Anyway specifically the four-volume Book of the New Sun (1980-1983) is the best place to start - dark fantasy with a SFnal backdrop. I'm currently reading The Book of the Long Sun (1993-1996) which is a kind of sequel - very slow-paced, but on a sentence-level it is a joy to read. For pure SF go with the earlier The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1977). Underrated is the Soldier series, of which I have only read the first one Soldier of The Mist (1986), a historical fantasy with supernatural elements - I love the central conceit: the main character is a soldier who has suffered a head injury and keeps losing his memory every day or so; each chapter is a new diary entry, in which he tries to come to terms with his situation having just forgotten everything that has happened to him; as the book goes on he doesn't have time to read back over all his entries, so the other characters motives and identities shift as he tries to grasp them all afresh. So there is this interesting tension between the character's knowledge and the reader's knowledge as the narrative develops.

Lately, after a hankering for space opera, I read the first two Charles Stross novels, which are not bad, but too, I don't know, *cyberpunky* for my liking. I don't know what people's views are on Iain M Banks, although he was mentioned a little earlier on in the thread, but as far as space opera goes I honestly don't think there is much better out there, at least from the last couple of decades. Excession (1996), Consider Phlebas (1987), and Use of Weapons (1990) are all pretty essential and I get the impression that Feersum Endjinn (1994) is unfairly overlooked, but I do come back to it pretty often. Maybe it is a consequence of it not being set in the Culture universe though.

I loved New Sun and Long Sun... haven't started Short Sun yet, but I must get to that soon. Long Sun is probably the most literary novel(s) ever published which also features extended scenes where a nude, large-breasted redhead runs around with a bazooka. And Consider Phlebas is a perfect introduction to the joys of space opera.

Another shout for Wolfe, or what I've read of him. I went into New Sun a little cynically despite hearing lots of good things about it (poss due to airbrush-fantasy-looking cover), and tho it didn't wow me flat out while reading, lots of it just won't go away: scenes and images have stuck around in my head, and they jump me unexpectedly in the middle of the day. It's like there's a meaning hanging behind everything in it that I can't quite decipher. Also that cold narrative voice. And such a fun vocabulary.
The Soldier books knocked me out too. An amazing essay on the ancient Greek world if nothing else (but there's also plenty of fun & that almost-taking-the-piss narrative conceit mentioned above).

YES to Iain M Banks. They're just great. I think Look to Windward is the best for sheer invention, but maybe the Player of Games is the tightest, best-constructed one.

YES to Cyberpunk - although there's all sorts of tawdry dated stuff, the second Gibson trilogy stands up and Bruce Sterling is really worth reading. Get Schismatrix Plus, as it also includes a short story called 20 Evocations, which is his "compressed prose" style taken as far as he can. That's also in the Crystal Express collection. Holy Fire is my other favourite, a lament for posthumanity.

I recently read Radix by A. A. Attanasio, which is from 1981 and is completely nuts.

Non-sci-fi sci fi: Margaret Atwood, obv Handmaid's Tale, but also Oryx and Crake, which I loved. Cloud Atlas By David Mitchell is an exercise in different genres, but has at its centre two sci-fi stories, one future dystopia, and a second post-apocalyptic earth. The whole thing is stunning, I think, but particularly those bits.

I don't know where ILX draws the fantasy/sci-fi/imaginative ficiton boundaries, but China Mieville is serious and thoughtful and political but also kick-ass and crazily imaginative, in a similar way to Iain M Banks.

Somewhere in New Sun, Severian finds an picture of what he calls an knight in ancient times, all in armor with a shining helmet, standing next to a banner, in a rocky waste. Years after reading that I remember the shiver I got realizing that it was an photograph of one of the astronauts on the moon.

But Peace looks to be the best thing he will ever write.

I don't know Banks' space opera at all, but I liked The Bridge for its sheer invention.

If "The Bridge" floats your boat, 'Feersum Enjin" would be a good place to start with Banks' SF - similar levels of inventive madness.

xxpost

That Attanasio book sounds really interesting - is the whole Radix "tetrad" worth reading? (is it cyberpunk?)

Struggled to get into Margaret Atwood. Her quote about how SF is "talking squids in space", irritated me no end, especially as she won the Arthur C Clarke Award and her novels (or at least The Handmaid's Tale which is the only one I've read) are clearly rooted in the SF tradition.

China Mieville has some fantastic ideas, but his novels could do with more editing and tighter plotting I think, although I haven't read any of his stuff for a couple of years.

Other recommendations:

Frederick Pohl - Gateway (1977) - might be slightly outside the OP's timeline, but really I don't think enough people have read this. Possibly the most perfect 200 page SF novel ever written.

I have to rep for Adam Roberts as well as he taught me for a bit at university. Salt (2000) is a very obvious homage to both Dune and the Dispossessed but worth reading nonetheless, as is Stone (2002) a novel from the perspective of a serial killer living in a future society where such tendencies have supposedly been genetically eliminated (I think this novel is maybe supposed to be a critique of the Culture novels). On (2001) and Polystom (2003) aren't quite as interesting IMO - the former labours the metaphor of living on a wall to a stupid degree; the latter was too weird to be effective and had a terrible ending from what I remember. Haven't read any others.

Does anyone have any other cyberpunk recommendations outside the main stays: ie. William Gibson/Bruce Sterling/Er...? I tried Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon recently for a more modern take on the genre, but found it exasperating, not least the so very stereotypical and smug hacker/web developer type character(s). I read something by K.W.Jeter, who I thought was a stalwart of the genre, but I think it was the wrong thing cos it was all about biker gangs living on a wall(or something). Deeply rubbish.

Life itself speaking. Song of the blue whale
Alone in Space?

No mention of squids though.

Have to agree with the 'Gateway' recommendation. A superb little book.

Adam Roberts is an odd one. Really enjoyed 'Stone', quite enjoyed 'On' and 'Salt', but 'The Snow' was awful. Haven't read any of his fiction since--I think he pisses away all of his time/talent on those stupid and unfunny knock-off books like 'The Soddit', 'The McAtrix' and 'The DaVinci Cod', etc.

Wasn't there a sequel to Gateway? Beyond The Blue Event Horizon, maybe? Didn't like that one as much. Do like the song it is named after though, especially in its first appearance, in the Lubitsch movie.

There are about 3 unnecessary sequels (actually my bad there are 5 o_O Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980), Heechee Rendezvous (1984), Annals of the Heechee (1987), The Gateway Trip (1990) The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway (2004)) where the characters actually go and find the Heechee (from what I remember). I've only read Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, but it was a chore and didn't add anything particularly interesting to the "mythos", just diluted the mystery of the original. Given that no one ever seems to be aware of the sequels I suspect they are guff.

xxpost

In his day-job as an English Lit lecturer he writes critical books on Renaissance Literature and Science Fiction as well. I think part of the problem with his novels is they feel rushed, like he is cramming them in around the day-job and the (presumably) terrible parody novels (which pay way better I'd imagine).

That Attanasio book sounds really interesting - is the whole Radix "tetrad" worth reading? (is it cyberpunk?)

I read the Last Legend of Earth as a kid, but I don't remember it. Not read the others.

Radix isn't cyberpunk at all.

It starts off as a pretty standard post-apocalyptic setting, with radiation, mutations, and a hierarchy based on genetic purity, but then introduces these psychic entities, the voor, who are sort of pure mind, and then it gets really, really HEAVY. Lots of meditation, mysticism, trances and controlling your vital energies, while getting in touch with the cosmic forces and realising your place in creation. Phew! It's very post-hippy, and I'm a bit surprised it's as late as 81.

That might sound a bit off-putting, but I thought it was really great. Something to completely absorb yourself in.

Haven't read him in a long time, but Attanasio had great imagery and wild plotting--though maybe too merely compulsive with the tangents eventually--? Not Radix, that's the place to start. Dr. Adder is the place to start (and maybe end) with Jeter. Pohl had one called Black Flag Rising (I think) was good, and The Space Merchants with C.M.Kornbluth, but read that in jr. high, seemed good though.The sardonic 50s attitude, science fiction as a way around McCarthyite attentions (also in Jack Vance's collection, Dust of Far Suns, I'm reading now)

Yep I enjoyed Space Merchants. From what I remember, "sardonic 50's attitude" is the definitely the right way to describe the tone of that novel (and maybe why I don't like it quite as much as Gateway).

My non-SF-reading wife really dug Space Merchants, for what it's worth.

Space Merchants is classic, and from what I remember the satire is still relevant. It would make a great film, as would Gladiator-at-Law: same writers a couple of years later, similar mood.

I'd like to check The Comic Inferno, 50s(and maybe other decades?) S.F. satire, collected by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (both of whom went way conservative or reactionary or later, didn't they? Which might say something about the limited power of 50s S.F. satire to edify, but I still like it, in the way I still like/empathize with attempts to deal creatively/self-entertainly with a fucked era)(Pauline Kael wrote about coming to detest liberals smirking over Dr Strangelove and cocktail parties)

'pushing ice' would be my reynolds recommendation. i've re-read the first 4 or 5 a couple of times, need to re-read some of the later stuff. 'the prefect' i also enjoyed.

have been re-reading Consider Phlebus. nearly at the end. has been fun but it's not his best.

Quickly scanned through the thread and couldn't see them mentioned, but Dan Simmons' Hyperion & Endymion books are 4 of my all time favourite sci-fi novels. Brilliant stuff.

Another nod for Banks too. His Culture books are tremendous.

Not read Gridlinked but I did recently read a collection of Neal Asher short stories ( Gabbleduck?) that made me want to read more of his stuff. Anyone recommend anything?

I enjoyed the Asher book I read (The Skinner), but it was also very, very over the top

Thought Gridlinked was woeful, but only got about 20 pages in.

Before it was Syfy, the SciFi channel put a bunch a great old and new stories online at there old website. Some guy put the whole archive over here http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/archive.html and it's pretty sweet. Among all sorts of other stuff, it has multiple stories by Robert Sheckley, Fredric Brown and James Tiptree, Jr., especially the latter's "The Screwfly Solution," written under her Raccoona Sheldon pseudonym. Also "Carcinoma Angels" by Norman Spinrad, "Auto-da-Fé" by Roger Zelazny... just see for yourself and then use Instapaper to download to your favorite device.

"The Screwfly Solution" ... wow.

not that keen on this guy's style, but an impressive feat nonetheless:

http://www.lexal.net/scifi/scifiction/periodictable.html

That's interesting, because the stories themselves were available for a couple of years after the index page was taken down.

Yeah, there seemed to be a lot of broken links so I looked around and found that other site

Saw someone upthread recommending Greg Egan's Axiomatic collection - what else do you guys recommend by this guy? Is Axiomatic a good place to start?

idk about axiomatic but

diaspora: v hard scifi mathy phsyicy post-singularity space opera. would recommend.
permutation city: more near future, earth based treatment of singularity topics (brain upload, specifically). of interest to mind/body philosophy problem fans also. would recommend.
schild's ladder: very very heavy on the maths and physics side, story there just to serve his kerrazy ideas. too hard going for me.
quarantine: heavily based on particular quantum physics interpretation, suspect history will bite this one on the ass.

> more near future

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER not at the end, where is goes a bit Time Machine

oddly i have read 3 of those and was planning to make quarantine the next.

would argue that dispora isn't post singularity as that suggests they came from humans, which they didn't. goes all a bit n-dimensional.

short stories would be a good place to start i think.

Yeah, Axiomatic is a good starting point -- brilliant ideas most writers would make a 500+page book out of worked through brilliantly in 30 pages, really really cool stuff.

Some of his recent novels have been a bit less good. I don't really care about post-singularity humans that can back themselves up and transport themselves across the universe at light speed or whatever. There's no dramatic tension. I think the big bad universe-destroying thing in Schild's Ladder kills about 8 people because of this.

this singularity stuff fascinates me, it's not entirely implausible... "friendly ai" guys are one of the few groups of people seriously considering the future.

Yeah--I don't completely reject the possibility of it, just that it often drains a lot of interest out of stories set in that sort of world if they're going for dramatic tension or serious characterisation.

some singularity scepticism - we have nothing to fear from rogue AIs:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2011/01/20/why-im-not-afraid-of-the-singularity/

and if you think moore's law = inevitable singularity, think again:
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/01/singularity.html#c3390361953159222628

realised this morning that a computer capable of consciousness and a computer capable of supporting a human's consciousness are actually two different things. not sure which is easiest.

back on topic, finished "Use of Weapons"* on thursday and 3 other books (2 kids books**, 1*** i was 90% of the way through) this week

* in the last chapter, can't remember whether it was prologue or epilogue, she calls him by a name that only appears once more in the book (flicked through, couldn't find where. this is where a kindle would be useful). is it the chairmaker's second name? was she aware who he was right from the beginning?

** Dragonfall 5: The Royal Beast and DF5: The Kidnappers. read them when i was 8 or 9 from mobile library in the youth club.

*** Tove Janson's Summer Book. didn't enjoy it.

can't find what you mean about the other name...

back from work...

Final chapter, "Prologue". bloke in wheelchair (main protagonist?). woman (sma?) calls him "Mr Escoerea" and recruits him with the offer of new legs. am pretty sure i'd heard the name before but don't know when.

VII is the chapter with the children in it. doesn't give Elethiomel's surname though.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
SPOILERS http://www.staberinde.com/ SPOILERS
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Escoerea is some other guy? The chapter's completely unrelated to the story, just showing that zakalwe isn't sma's only charge, she's somewhat in the business of army recruitment (utopia breeds few warriors). And it's not the prologue, it's called 'states of war'. The prologue and epilogue are the ones that show zakalwe after the brain operation, head shaved, hanging out in some other conflict. Freelancing again, perhaps.

Perhaps escoerea is mentioned before idk.

Otherwise, er, when did zakalwe lose his legs?

> The chapter's completely unrelated to the story

i don't know. Two books, the chapters alternate, one going forwards in time, one going backwards. States Of War could be the name of the backwards one.

> Otherwise, er, when did zakalwe lose his legs?

Escoerea mentions it being "on the way to Baziet City" which is also mentioned in Twelve (the city with the priests?)

besides, it's not like he didn't also lose his head once...

Well y'know, dizzy just ain't going too far out of her way to do her recruitment. And it's written like the guy doesn't realise he can get new legs - he must be from an uncontacted world.

ah, yes, also in Twelve there's a bloke called Napoerea which suggests Escoerea from the same place. does sound like he's the next recruit, Z's replacement, and the States Of War (2nd) prologue is for the next part of the story... (and all we get of it)

Just read the first couple of excellent stories in Axiomatic. Anything else by Egan worth reading?

Didn't we do this recently? I rate Diaspora and Permutation City, Quarantine and Schild's Ladder not so much.

yeah, last page.

diaspora > permutation city > schilds ladder for me but all pretty close.

Yeah, that sounds about right

Back to Use of Weapons... I found the apparent twist at the end (that character A was actually character B OMG) to be the most annoying thing about what was otherwise a very enjoyable book.

I subsequently read the more recent Iain M Banks book Surface Detail, and it had another character-A-actually-character-B twist at the end. Does he just like lamer twists irrelevent to the main thrust of his books?

I didn't even get what the Use of Weapons ending meant when I read it years ago. Had to have Banks explain it to me in words of one syllable when he did an online Q&A back in the dawn of the web era.

xp you don't mean the bit at the very end where Vatueil turned out to be our good pal Zakalwe, the very guy from Use of Weapons? 'Cause that was just an incidental bit of lol fan service.

SPOILER i guess

I've given up on Banks a little bit or at least I don't pick up his books as religiously as I used to - it just seems to be all fan service at this point.

I think that's a fair point, there was arguably more variety, invention, and moral complexity in the earlier Culture novels, now he's just rolling along in a comfortable groove. But I'm a fan so w/evs.

I've given up on Banks a little bit or at least I don't pick up his books as religiously as I used to - it just seems to be all fan service at this point

Started attempting to read all the culture novels in order earlier in the year and I can really see the gradual way they decline. Except for Excession which I thought bobbed up and then let slip again.

sigh

going to have a go at something by China Mieville, any suggestions for where to start?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/may/10/china-mieville-radical-sf-mainstream

which is the banks book with the big ship? (lol, sounds facetious, isn't meant to be - there's one set predominantly on a GSV rather than an orbital or a planet.)

i've been rereading them in the last 5 years or so, but haven't got around to that one yet... i know it's not Phlebus or Excession or Use Of Weapons...

Hmm I would have said Excession, a lot of that is set aboard the Sleeper Service. Player of Games mostly planet bound, Inversions entirely planet bound, Look to Windward mostly on an orbital, Matter on a 'shellworld' with a brief trip out into Culture-space, Surface Detail mostly on planets or in virtual realities or IN HELL.

And the State of the Art novella, on a GCU and Earth.

excession was, i think, the first of the re-reading. but that itself is 5 or 6 years ago now. think there are only a couple that need re-reading, both those you mention (Excession and State Of The Art).

(am not sure it's the sleeper service, had more interaction than that (SS being mainly 1 person and a lot of stiffs))

i really should make better notes... did toy with wiki-ing everything i read on a per-chapter basis, just so i can look things up afterwards. but that's no use when you're reading in bed. i guess this is where searchable ebooks win.

(i'll be re-reading these every 5 years or so for the rest of my life, i realise that)

going to have a go at something by China Mieville, any suggestions for where to start?

I like Mieville's ideas well-enough (although I don't think he is doing anything new enough to justify the 'radical sf' tag) but I'm not always enamoured with the execution. The City & the City was pretty good, but it is future-noir thing rather than out and out science fiction. The new one, Embassytown, does sound intriguing though - Ursula Le Guin gave it a good review.

Don't start with Kraken. Or read it at all for that matter.

ha ha, while I have not read Kraken myself, I know several people who have. They like it - and they enjoyed reading the book too.

I liked the City and the City a lot. I think you could claim it as SF, but it is more sociological SF than "OMG Robots!".

I also loved the only other China Mieville book I read - "Scar". Or "The Scar", can't remember. But it is maybe a bit too fantasy to be proper SF.

in fact, it is barely SF at all.

oh shit, i have Kraken at home and was looking forward to reading it. is it better to try something else?

I actually really like Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Kraken sounded like a cool idea but the execution is terrible. It's much too wacky.

Oh and he's definitely not a SF writer. Up until the latest book that is.

The Culture books have definitely fallen off a bit in quality. Not as much as his non-SF work, though, which is getting dramatuically shitter with every book since Complicity

I thought he had given up on regular fiction to focus on SF or did I imagine that?

His last non 'M' book was SF - and published as an 'M' book in the states. But his new one in 2012 is 'Stonemouth' - "set in a small town north of Aberdeen and involves two warring crime families. Our hero was run out of town five years ago and now he's back for a family funeral - some closeted skeletons are about to appear!" Sounds like his non-SF is in as much of a comfortable groove as his SF.