Hold the front page! This blog is not dead. It has merely been asleep and dreaming.
My top 10 science fiction novels.
This list caused me no end of angst, not for the ordering of the books in it, since, with a few exceptions, you could rearrange them in almost any order and I'd probably be happy. Rather, it was the ones that I had to leave out that gave me pause. I still find it hard to believe that Iain M. Banks - a novelist who I love - hasn't made the list. Not has Arthur C. Clarke, or some of my cyberpunk guilty pleasures like George Alec Effinger's Arabian Nights-tinged red light district in When Gravity Fails, Rudy Rucker's bonkers AI society in Software, or Lucius Shepard's cyberpunk voodoo zombie novel Green Eyes, a fungus-driven precursor to The Girl With All The Gifts. I also left out Nineteen Eighty-Four, as it's arguably satire rather than SF. Most painful of all was the omission of Vernor Vinge's dizzying space opera A Fire Upon The Deep. I do love me some space opera. Even Dune didn't make the cut. It's a book I admire, but don't really love. There are also no novels of eco-doom, a genre that I don't generally have a lot of time for, although I do keep a special place in my heart for John Brunner's savage The Sheep Look Up, third only to his great population crisis dystopia Stand on Zanzibar, and of course his pre-cyberpunk masterpiece The Shockwave Rider in my estimation (more on the latter later). I probably also ought to apologise for the dearth of female writers - I love Pat Cadigan, Ursula le Guin, Tanith Lee (The Silver Metal Lover was another close contender), Julian May, and the ending of Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed is one of my favourites; like The Culture if it was run by average fuckwits like ourselves. I debated whether Frankenstein ought to be on the list, but as ground breaking as it was, as a novel it never quite grabbed me. But anyway, here's the list, for better or worse...
10. Islands in the Net (Bruce Sterling, 1988)
I am a great fan of Bruce Sterling. Of the cyberpunk writing circle that emerged in the late 70s/early 80s, I think he was the most interesting, as he had a much broader range. He could do Dune-inflected desert world strangeness in Involution Ocean, his far future Shaper/Mechanist universe in books like Schismatrix and a collection of amusing short stories; Crystal Express. He even invented Steampunk, along with William Gibson, in The Difference Engine. But perhaps most cogently, he could do near future realistic SF that was strangely plausible. If you want eco doom, look no further than Heavy Weather, a novel whose basic plot was essentially ripped off for the movie Twister without his consent. But my favourite of all was his near future stories that just took a plausible future as a background but then told conventional thriller/adventure stories within them. There were short stories like Green Days in Brunei, and then the sprawling Islands in the Net, set in 2023-25, and actually quite plausible for that. They remind me of Neal Stephenson, but without the 200 page lectures on Sumeria. Some of the politics looks a bit dated - from the perspective of the 21st century, it seems almost amazing that in the 1980s people still thought the USSR would linger on for decades - but then, without Gorbachev, probably it would have. There's not really a lot else to say about Islands. It has data havens, terrorism, globalisation, assassination by drones, first worlders caught up in third world flashpoints, and all of the panoply of the modern world we know and love, as predicted by a particular visonary in the 1980s. It's neither optimistic or pessimistic, just realistic. Of all of the futures I've ever read in SF, it's the most convincing, and while it may be wrong in detail, it feels right in general.
9. The Day of the Triffids (John Wyndham, 1951)
Triffids is in some ways a stand-in for the genre you might call 'a very British apocalypse'. This entry was nearly War of the Worlds instead, which is a similar theme; the upending of civilisation in London and the Home Counties by some terrible catastrophe, the precursor of everything from The War Game, Survivors and Quatermass and the Pit to 28 Days Later. Wells is the more visionary writer - he was writing in 1897 after all - and while War of the Worlds was at its heart a parody of the 'invasion scare' literature prevalent at the time, envisioning the Beastly Hun somehow smuggling his army ashore in Blighty to wreak havoc - see also The Battle of Dorking, The Riddle of the Sands, The 39 Steps etc etc, Wells turned it up to 11 by making the Prussians into Martians. But there is a coldness to Wells as well; a dispassionate bleakness that makes the book less approachable. In some ways I actually prefer Jeff Wayne's musical version to the original novel. Whereas Wyndham's characters feel more relatable, their dilemmas more mundane. The reassembling of a nuclear family of survivors is a bit cutesy, but far from implausible, and the triffids are as alien a species as you'll find in science fiction.
8. Ringworld (Larry Niven, 1970)
Alien megastructures are quite the thing these days; Dyson Spheres and the like, and the Halo rings of the eponymous video game. Some people even think we might have seen them around distant stars. But the great grandaddy of them all is surely Ringworld by Larry Niven. Other books that might have made this slot include The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke, and Matter by Iain M. Banks (Banks also has ringworlds in many of his Culture novels, and the destruction of one in Consider Phlebas is a major plot point).
Niven seems a bit dated now compared to the tail end of the 60s when he was writing, and his sexual politics probably don't pass muster these days (although he did seem to predict furries via the act of rishathra - cross-species sex with other hominids). But his aliens were always fun and just alien enough to be credible, from the paranoid Puppeteers - descendants of nervous herbivores; the psychotic Kzinti - evolved big cats whose idea of strategy is "scream and leap"; the truly alien Slavers, dead but having left their genetically engineered creations scattered across the universe; and the mysterious Protectors, progenitors of humankind via a kind of Von Daniken-esque Ancient Astronauts scenario, and also, it later transpires (spoiler alert) builders and populators of the Ringworld itself. The physics are on a grand scale and while the characters are often dwarfed by it, it's the kind of spectacle that only Space Opera can do. Niven was very influential on me in the late 70s and most of the 80s, and I think this is his best work.
7. Babel-17 (Samuel Delaney, 1966)
Another novel that is based around a cool idea, specifically that of a language that reprogrammes you to think in a certain way, based on the Sapir-Worf hypothesis. You may be familiar with the idea from the short story The Story of Your Life, which became the basis of the great film Arrival by Denis Villeneuve, and the concept of the 'memetic virus' was also used to great effect by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash. Babel-17 is an artificial language spoken by enemy alien invaders. Polymath Rydra Wong (an addmittedly terrible name) learns it and becomes able to predict enemy movements but also becomes changed by it and, unknowingly to her, it is later revealed, also a saboteur on her own ship. It's not a tremendous read, but I like the idea so much that the book is here.
6. Accelerando (Charles Stross, 2005)
Vernor Vinge invented the world 'singularity' to refer to the inflexion point at which machines rapidly become more intelligent than their creators, but Charles Stross tried to envisage what living through it might look like. I have mixed feelings about Stross. I find his attempts to be funny and Pratchett-esque a bit wearing, which means that I can't be doing with the Laundry series of novels, but his space opera can be suitably grand, and I did like his sprawling sub-light post human universe of Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood and the fragmented universe inhabited by a godlike AI that appears in Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise. Accelerando is in effect a series of nine short vignettes that take place before, during and after the technological singularity, which tackle big subjects like the Fermi Paradox (it turns out there are no alien signals because they are all living in their own AI-run Matrix-style simulations), while simultaneously satirising capitalism and especially libertarian tech bro ideas about capitalism. The evil kitten (or AI posing as a cute kitten) was also quite funny.
5. Hard to be a God (Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, 1964)
One of the things about the Strugatsky brothers is that, via their Noon Universe, they invented the kind of post-scarcity society that has become a commonplace of moden SF, from the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek to The Culture in Iain M. Banks' novels. It was a given of communist theory that any aliens encountered would by definition be communists, because that was the most advanced form of civilisation in Marxist theory. But in their novels, the Strugatskys both posit this society and then undermine it. The while point of Hard to be a God is the impotence of the 'higher' civilisation to change the ways of less advanced civilisations, in this case the dreary medieval-level Arkanar Kingdom. Urbane social scientist Don Rumata and his colleagues try to nudge the kingdom towards an Enlightenment, but instead it collapses via a fascistic police state into a religious autocracy, with the offworlders only able to save a few intellectuals from being burned to death. The book functions as a thoughtful meditation on the responsibility of more advanced civilisations to less advanced ones, with the Noon Universe practicing something akin to Star Trek's 'Prime Directive', as well as a thinly veiled critique of the excesses of Stalinism.
4. Blood Music (Greg Bear, 1985)
Sometimes a book comes along that makes you look at the world in a completely different way, and you have to just admire the breadth of its scope and vision. Blood Music was one of those books for me. It is in a way another story about a technological singularity, but in this case via biology and biochemistry rather than computing and robotics. A renegade scientist who is told to destroy the biological computer white blood cells he has made instead injects himself with them, and as they divide and evolve at a much faster rate than humans, within weeks he finds himself playing host to an advanced microscopic civilisation who are beginning to remake him. And then the story gets bigger and stranger... I really love where it ends up, and anyone who has played any of my science fiction games will probably recognise this as the genesis of my Ancients transcendence virus on the one hand, in its more benign form, and/or The Swarm in its less benign incarnation.
3. The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams, 1979)
Now. I like Sci-Fi comedy, but it is a valid question as to whether H2G2 is SF or fantasy (in much the same way that Star Wars is not really an SF universe - fight me). The Infinite Improbability Drive, Bistromathics, and the acknowledged existence of ancient norse deities (not to mention the Great Prophet Zarquon) are not very scientific concepts, and I was torn for a while with instead going for the other option for this slot, which was was The Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison. I loved the adventures of 'Slippery Jim' di Griz as a teenager, and Harrison also produced a number of other very funny SF novels like Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers and The Men from PIG and ROBOT. But I have to admit that no-one is quite as funny as Douglas Adams. I know that the series got more and more introspective and less funny as it went along, but the first two or, to be generous first three novels are classics, and the one that started the whole ball rolling is a fizzing grenade of ideas that barely stops to draw breath. Almost every sentence is a throwaway joke that often hints at a much wider and stranger universe (like the never explained Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster - the source of Ford Prefect's Betelgeusian nickname: Ix, which means: "boy who cannot satisfactorily explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse VII in particular") and I eventually concluded that I had to include it in my top 10.
2. The Fifth Head of Cerberus (Gene Wolfe, 1972)
This is probably a bit of an off the wall choice as far as a lot of people are concerned. It's a strange novel set on a colony world where the colonising humans have had to fight a war against shapeshifting natives, and who even now cannot be sure who is or is not a human. It is told in three sections, through the eyes of a man reminiscing about a childhood growing up in the planetary capital, Sainte Anne, a kind of 1890s Louisiana - local manufacturing cannot support the most high tech goods, which must be imported from Earth. There is also a strange folk tale of the natives, and then finally the records of an interrogation of a man who may or may not be a shapeshifter. The three stories are told sequentially but clearly connect with each other, but all of the narrators are unreliable, and you have to comb the book closely for clues as to what is true. I love the myster, and most of all the atmosphere of the book, which is like the endless mists of the planet on the baroque streets of Sainte Anne. Gene Wolfe is a master of telling a story from a single unswerving viewpoint - for example a child witnessing noble and rebel shenanigans in medieval Europe in The Devil in a Forest, or a soldier journeying through the Trojan Wars whose brain cannot lay down new memories due to a battle injury and so, Memento-style, he must record everything on the scroll that forms the book in Soldier of Arete. This is a book which I re-read every few years and I find something new each time.
1. Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984)
My favourite SF novel remains William Gibson's Neuromancer. It's not the first cyberpunk novel; that may well be John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider, itself a riff on Alvin Toffler's futurology in Future Shock, which also influenced the Mega-City One of Judge Dredd, and whose DNA can definitely be found in Gibson's novel's setting of the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, aka The Sprawl. But even if it's not the first, it's certainly the most influential. Gibson wrote Neuromancer in part from from his experiences of Canada's underworld while living as a draft dodger in Toronto in the late 60s and his semi-nomadic life before settling in Vancouver in the mid-70s. Its tales of low lives and high technology, crime, designer drugs, artificial intelligences, and the envisioning of something like the internet before its time were a heady combination that has been much copied but never bettered. While he wanted to reject the optimistic Golden Age SF of his childhood - the ray guns and rocket ships of an America colonising the stars the same way it had the West - Gibson also had little patience with the nuclear doomsters of the 80s - in Neuromancer the Third World War is 30 or more years in the past, was over quickly, and aside from the nuking of Bonn was mostly decided by hackers paralysing the Soviet war machine. Nations are almost an irrelevance in his future, which is instead carved up by big corporations and billionaires who are no longer entirely human (Elon Musk take note). The plot is a breathless series of heists and capers in New York, Istanbul and near earth orbit carried out by burnt out hacker Case, cyber-enhanced mercenary Molly Millions, WWIII psychological casualty Colonel Armitage and ratlike fixer The Finn, but the person pulling the strings turns out to be an AI - the Neuromancer of the title. Like a lot of SF, the characters are sketchy, and the ideas are the main thing, but the book is as fast paced as a Mission: Impossible movie and the plot and pacing enhance the minutely imagined world.
No comments:
Post a Comment