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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

The authors are overwhelmingly male (90%), and the titles are overwhelmingly old.

That's not to say that they're bad (though at least one is objectively bad). Just old and male.

Here's three for diversity:

- Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga. Character-driven space opera, with side-trips into mystery, thriller, and (gasp) romance. Start with the short story collection _Borders of Infinity_ to get a taste for it.

- Elizabeth Bear -- lots of variety, but _Carnival_ and _Dust_ are excellent. Respectively, they are an espionage/police procedural and a political thriller on a doomed starship.

- Linda Nagata -- she's best known for the epic nanotech series (The Bohr-Maker, Limit of Vision, Tech Heaven...) but recently started a near-future series about the impact of cybernetics, prosthetics and early AI (First Light).

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I don't really pay attention to the gender of the author of a book, and I'm not sure why someone putting together a list of what they consider to be good science fiction should have to either.

That said, people are obviously going to have a lot of their own opinions about what books would go on a list of must-reads. Personally, I'd never include Ayn Rand on any list, except maybe one that gives a list of authors that aren't worth reading.

In the science fiction I've read and enjoyed, most of it is written by men, but I'd rank books by both Connie Willis and Ursula K. Le Guin highly.

And, of course, in terms of enjoyment, I've loved much of what both Margaret Weis and Anne McCaffrey have written, even if their writing isn't exactly award winning.

More notably to me they are all western.

There's a lot more diversity missed out on due to not having say Lem and the Strugasky brothers than on old and male imo.

Eastern European sci-fi is well worth spending some time on.

I was half expecting you'd suggest some Far East sci-fi, which I'd love to get acquainted with.

On the GP's call for female authors, I'd add Joan Slonczewski, who's also a microbiology book author and professor, and draws on that knowledge for her classic A Door Into Ocean which is also feminist sci-fi.

I would love some far east too - I have no experience with that though, so if someone has some advice I'd love to hear it too.

It looks like that a lot of russian sci-fi is hard to get english translations of. For example a search for "Kir Bulychov" on amazon.co.uk doesnt return anything of the childrens sci-fi he wrote, which you would expect to still sell well.

The Anglophone trade fiction industry has serious structural issues when it comes to publishing translated works from other languages. Firstly, a lot of readers (and store book buyers) have a "not invented here" problem with foreign authors. Secondly, names that are unfamiliar: difficult. Names that are hard to pronounce: also difficult. (I know one Serbian author who uses a pseudonym specifically because her surname is hard for Americans and Brits to pronounce.) Thirdly: before an editor can decide to acquire and push a title out to marketing they have to read it; this entails at a minimum a bilingual editor in the language in question, or a budget to pay a translator for a three chapter extract and synopsis. Then, if they go with the book, they have the added overhead of commissioning a full translation and, hopefully, getting someone else who's fluent in the source language to sanity-check it. All in all, this costs thousands of dollars -- and there's so much adequate material already available in the vernacular that most editors don't bother. It takes someone with a real sense of mission to put the effort in -- or an author who's willing to pay a translator up-front on spec in hope of selling.

Little-known fact: Finnish SF author Hannu Rajaniemi writes in English. Indeed, his novel "The Quantum Thief" was translated into Finnish by someone else (and made it to #2 in the "foreign translated fiction" bestseller charts in Helsinki).

That is really unfortunate. Especially considering english is second language of choice of so much of the world. It would be helpful for more great works to be translated.

The Quantum Thief is a really interesting book. I really enjoyed it.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Quantum-Thief-Jean-Flambeur-ebook/...

Agreed. I have a collection of five SF novels - translated to Portuguese - by authors from the Soviet Union (including by the Strugasky brothers, but also by Genrich Altshuller and his wife, and a few others) and as a whole they're easily better than many of the list.

A great advantage of being able to read in a few different languages is that it greatly increases the probability that you can read any specific work.

It appears that the vast majority of popular science fiction authors are men.

http://www.amazon.com/author-rank/Science-Fiction/books/1627...

(not saying good, mind you. For example "military sci fi")

The Vorkosigan Saga is pretty run-of-the-mill space opera stuff, as far as I've seen. It's got a sort of an interesting premise, but it definitely smells of your early 1900s central European cultural setup (at least initially). In space. I don't regret reading it.

How about The Sparrow from Mary Doria Russell. An amazingly deep and personal tale about humanity's first encounter with alien life. Sci-fi in the way that "Never Let Me Go" is sci-fi - the backdrop to a literary exploration of what it is to be human.

The Sparrow is so good.

I can't believe I forgot Elizabeth Bear's _Dust_. (I had been thinking I prefered her fantasy to her SF, but _Dust_ was top-notch.)

> The authors are overwhelmingly male (90%), and the titles are overwhelmingly old.

So what? I'm going now through the Vorkosigan Saga in internal chronological order (a couple more hours and I'll finish reading "Memory") and after Banks' Culture series and Simmons' Hyperion Cantos this is little more than properly edited average fan-fiction. Entertaining and enjoyable, but fundamentally flawed by Bujold's lack of depth and her much too transparent projections.

I conclusion, diversity can go out an air lock. Give me quality instead.

I think I will still prefer good books no mater age or gender of the author. I guess the idea of the diversity being good just because of diversity comes from some old male too.

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