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Beginnings of Science Fiction

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36 pointsrberger29 comments

I always derided art-talk. Art history, movements, art-appreciation. I saw BS and I assumed it was BS. I now think that art is just hard and part of why it's hard is that nonsense and sense are hard to tell apart. It's not that objectivity doesn't play a role, it just requires some work in applying it. In any case, I missed out on stuff I shouldn't have missed out on. Young me's loss. Old me's gain.

One idea, that I think could be expressed as one of those movements which encompass science, art and philosophy starts with the definition of history, which basically defines history as stuff people wrote about things that happened. Prehistory is the stuff that happened before with a hundred years of commentary, nuance, various waves of correctness and such. But, arbitrary demarkations are uncomfortable. We much prefer a nice definable river or mountain range to act as our border than a straight line on a map. As definition go, history's in an interesting one. Someone writes about a guy who was the king, that's history. Someone finds bones and a fancy hat in a lavish grave, that's prehistory.

Now, by that definition we're running into some interesting hockey stick phenomenon. Our accumulation of history, via the digital record is growing f-ing vast. Vast! Google decided (independently, which is creepy but moving on) to make me a little album with dates and places of a recent trip I took. It's choice of photographs was good and so was the labeling.

So, written history with some guy or girl compiling a list of kings and laws and even daily accounts of wars and politics and money are now superseded. Written history is giving way to recorded history. Is recorded the right word? Is history? Post-history?

Back to sci-fi. Sci-fi of the 20th century was about technology. Video phones and space blimps. Alien invasions and human colonization of new worlds. Fantasies of mixed specie societies reflecting our struggles to transcend ethnicity and culture. Today's science fiction is, I believe most enlightening in describing the human response to technology. What will the world be like when tinder puts you in a virtual room with a would be friend? How do we react to real wars (as apposed to a science fiction version of romantic fantasy) in the communication age. How will it feel to be a 90 year old who can run a half marathon. What will it be like for people who can access thousands of hours of conversations their grandparents had with their parents?

These are interesting questions.

> What will it be like for people who can access thousands of hours of conversations

Along these lines I highly recommend episode 3 of Black Mirror "The Entire History of You". It is essentially a British version of The Twilight Zone.

Nice article; I got deeply into science fiction through collections of stories culled from the magazine. I love earlier stuff - Wells etc, but the pulpy golden age stuff is just fantastically easy to read.

If anyone is interested, there's a 2 volume set from 1959, A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, copies of which are always dirt cheap on Amazon; it got a few duds, but it's one of the best collections I've ever read, and an amazing introduction (has The Stars My Destination [as Tiger! Tiger!], the Chrysalids, Waldo, the Weapon Shops of Isher, among loads of other stuff). This site is amazing as well, if you can hack the weird design: http://greatsfandf.com/

Recommendation seconded, the Boucher anthology is full of great old stuff. There's a fuller description of it at http://www.philsp.com/articles/anthopology_101_07.html

(Science fiction, not San Francisco.) Having never really experienced the genre much, I have recently been trying to assemble (and eventually read) a list of influential and quintessential science fiction books, and while my informal research into the beginnings of sci-fi as an identifiable genre led me to earlier authors like Verne and Wells, I had never heard of this fellow or this magazine.

By the way, if one wants to read a quick standalone sci-fi novel, I just finished Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I can't recommend it strongly enough.

The William Gibson short story "The Gernsback Continuum" is a reference to Gernsback. Gibson is probably on a lst of important SF authors.

Here's a (probably pirate?) link: http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt

EDIT: see also the Hugo Awards, which could probably do a better job of publicizing the sorce of their name.

PPS: congrats cstross for best novella! I hadn't noticed that.

I tend to rate Mary Shelley as the earliest sci-fi author. Not just for 'Frankenstein', but also for 'The Last Man'.

I would strongly recommend tackling Issac Asimov's 'Foundation' series as one of the all time classics.

Another pretty early one to take a look at is 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It was the first book banned by the USSR and was the inspiration for Orwell's 1984.

The Foundation series is certainly on my list. I have been giving series lower priority, simply because I want to go breadth-first, but I'm not confident this is a reasonable strategy, especially since I could just read the first entry and decide from there how to proceed.

I had not heard of We, but I will look into it.

'We' is excellent. It is also a lot funnier than '1984', though that is not hard.

Also, you have to hit the short-story collections to find some of the best sci-fi. Off the top of my head, Asimov, Dick, Bradbury, Clarke, Gibson, Banks, Egan, all wrote some of their best work in short form.

And, just thinking about really early stuff, 'Flatland' by Edwin Abbott is another you should really take a look at.

If you want to try any recent stuff, Alastair Reynolds and China Miéville are both excellent authors.

edit - oh, and just read everything ever written by Neal Stephenson.

edit2 - and Bruce Sterling. His tumblr blogs aren't bad either.

http://brucesterling.tumblr.com/

http://wolfliving.tumblr.com/

Some iconic science fiction books that can stand alone:

    Asimov: The Gods Themselves
    Clarke: Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama
    Herbert: Dune, Whipping Star
    Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
    Bester: The Demolished Man, The Stars My Destination (also called "Tiger, Tiger")
    Niven: Ringworld
    Niven and Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye, Footfall
    Gibson: Neuromancer
    Stephenson: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age
    Bear: The Forge of God, Eon
    Sagan: Contact
    van Vogt: The Voyage of the Space Beagle
    Lem: Solaris
    Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale
    LeGuin: The Left Hand of Darkness
    Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet

Some of these are the beginnings of series or have sequels, or exist in a larger continuum of stories. But each can be read and appreciated on their own. If you find one you really like, it's not hard to see if there are more in a series or sequel.

Edit: formatting

The Foundation series is mind blowing. I recommend reading the "Robot" series before it though as they are interlinked, particularly "Robots and Empire"; the whole thing's a joy.

I did an "English for Engineers" course at uni (a misguided attempt at giving engineers a more rounded education - personally I was frustrated that they didn't let me take straight up Literature 101 - my roommate was an English major, and I must have written about half her essays for Lit 101, just because I found it interesting - averaged a distinction :D )

Anyway, Frankenstein was one of the cornerstone texts of that course, and you can clearly see many of the themes of later SF being developed by Shelley. We also read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in that course, plus some early Australian SF (like Picnic at Hanging Rock). It was all pretty interesting, but a long way from the space opera that is one of the cornerstones of modern SF. I just don't feel like you can experience SF unless you've read some of the bigger more sweeping stuff, like Hyperion or Pandora's Star.

If you like Asimov's Foundation series, you should look up Donald Kingsbury's Psychohistorical Crisis.

When I was 12 or 13 I discovered E E "Doc" Smith, John W Campbell and Philip Nowlan. I'd been reading more contemporary authors like Heinlein and Andre Norton, and the sheer "noise" of these older books were astonishing. What teenage boy doesn't like antimatter planets being flung at Boskonian space pirate outposts, or spaceships powered by solidified light? For a while I loved them.

I still have fond memories of Smith's galaxy-spanning Skylark series, the planet bashing swagger of the Lensman series, and Campbell's unapologetic "super science", but the prose has not aged well and I find them difficult to read now. I feel a little sad about that.

I can still recommend Smith's The Skylark of Space and Skylark Three, and Campbell's The Moon is Hell, but not much else.

Who Goes There?, as well as Twilight and Night, all published by Campbell under the Don Stuart pseudonym, still work for me.

SF is a broader church than you might imagine from the outside, and many people (including me!) will give you a list of "classics" that are actually quite a narrow slice because that's the subgenre they're into. I'd recommend starting from something like the Locus top 100; populism has its problems but will at least ensure you don't completely miss any major areas.

Larry Niven's short story collections are well worth picking up. His first is 'Inconstant Moon' and it's where I first discovered him. Some of the stories later developed into key parts of his Known Space cycle of short stries and novellas. They're all great stuff, but IM is the starting point.

If you like it you can check out the rest, if not then they're only short stories so not too much of an investment in time.

I'm a big Heinlein Fan. I strongly recommend you read his other big famous works, "Starship Troopers" and "Stranger in a Strange Land." After that you can dig deeper into his bibliography, but I'd consider those three to be essential reading.

I recently finished "Roadside Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and I loved it. Makes me curious to read other sci fi from the Soviet world.

Imo forever war is amazing, but stranger in a strange land devolves into bizarre fantasy. I'd strongly recommend the former if you're more interested in hard sci fi and the implications of real accurate (ish) relativistic travel.

Seconding this... Forever War is probably some of the most readable, non-America-Fuck-Yeah military sci-fi I've read--another good one is Armor.

If you want more military sci-fi, check out the Hammer's Slammers series by David Drake (tank company in spaaaaaace, but not the stupid Bolo stuff); he also had one anthology that was very nearly solid cyberpunk surveillance dystopia, Lacy and His Friends.

Look for Macmillan's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series, published in the early 1980s. It's a mix of novels and short story collections. For shorts, I particularly recommend World's Spring, New Soviet Science Fiction, and Ballad of the Stars.

A long time ago, I read that Asimov's short story 'Nightfall' was considered the finest short SF of all time, but I respectfully disagree. Nine Minutes, by Genrikh Altov, is that story for me. Link: http://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/science-fiction4.asp

Also - a truly awesome novel - 'Self Discovery', by Vladimir Savchenko (also in the Macmillan series). (Link: http://lib.ru/RUFANT/SAWCHENKO/savchenko_selfdiscovery_ok-en...) It has one of the most compelling, and fascinating, descriptions of AI I've ever come across. As Theodore Sturgeon writes in the introduction, 'described with such realism that one is tempted to apply for a grant, build it, and check it out.'

So, because I haven't seen it mentioned, go check out anything by Harlan Ellison. I will strongly suggest the Shatterday or Stalking the Nightmare anthologies. Those stories have some fucking teeth.

Science fiction (or speculative fiction, if you're feeling highbrow) is probably one form where I still regularly buy "Year Best <whatever>" anthologies...it's a form that is benefited heavily from short stories, because scifi is about the ideas, not so much the characters. Good science fiction has both, of course, but must have good ideas--lots of stories happen that have decent character development but the ideas stink.

I also would strongly recommend the Pump Six anthology by Paolo Bacigalupi; it's biopunk, I suppose, but pretty solid and plays well with the ideas of being past Peak Energy.

"Ralph 124C 41+" is awful. After that, Gernsback published SF of others, rather than his own, and as a publisher did much to launch SF as a genre.

Before SF, there were "Edisonades", the classic being "Edison's Conquest of Mars". That's a milestone in science fiction. It's one of the first space travel stories, and it's reasonably plausible given scientific knowledge at the time.

Heinlein is not from the "beginnings" era. Heinlein is from the "golden age" of SF, when a space-oriented future looked not only technically possible but close. Watch "Destination Moon". Most of Heinlein's better works predate the discovery that Mars barely has an atmosphere and Venus is well above the boiling point of water. Planetary colonization within the solar system looked possible back then.

(Sorry about posting that twice. Hacker News was reporting gateway timeouts.)

I think short form scifi is where it really shines:

http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

this has been posted on HN before, but it's relevant: http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

If you're interested in Sci-Fi, especially some of the older stuff, there's an unbelievable treasure trove of books, short stories, scanned magazines, old radio dramas and books on tape all for free at archive.org.

Finding stuff there is a mess though, but even just a search for "science fiction" is like falling into a dragon's hoard of genre pieces.

Also lots of free stuff at Project Gutenberg, including a bunch of Astoundings (which I believe is what Amazing Stories became?): http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Science_Fiction_%28Bookshelf%2...

Gernsback was the man, but I feel the need to mention: H.G Wells, Jules Verne, Mary Shelly, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs...

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