Great Books of SF — Tentative defintion of SF v F

Part of an ongoing conversation:

Reader ShadowLC gives his picks for SF books meeting Mortimer Adler’s definition of a Great Book:

Hmmm. DUNE, for me, does not stand up to re-reading. The only sympathetic character is Paul… at the beginning. By the end, I really don’t much care what happens even to him. (And the sequels are unbearably oppressive – and worse, dull.)

It does evoke a sense of wonder, though, I’ll give you that. There’s some compelling stuff in there. I’m glad I read it. It just doesn’t seem to me to meet the three criteria.

I don’t think THE SILMARILLION counts as SF, much as I love it.

THE TIME MACHINE, seminal as it was to SF, doesn’t strike me as adding much to the Great Conversation. Very powerful from the point of view of sunsawunda, but Wells’ political satire is heavy-handed and quite shallow.

BOOK OF THE NEW SUN – great candidate. I have never gotten to the bottom of those. I personally find them difficult to read, though… There are some amazingly wonderful bits in there, but something about how they’re written makes them difficult for me to get through. (I find the Latro books – which I love with a consuming love – much easier on the mental palate.)

Gene Wolfe in general is very hit-or-miss for me. When he hits, oh how very much he hits! But loving one Wolfe book has very little to say about how much one will like another Wolfe book. THERE ARE DOORS, which I think he described as his personal favorite, left me quite cold.

I would nominate PERELANDRA in preference to THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, on every criterion. It’s more SFnal, too – though I would argue that the line between SF and fantasy in the translunary realms of Great Heaven doesn’t just blur, it gets actively murdered. :) The argument could well be made that it isn’t ‘really’ SF. (OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET clearly qualifies, but I don’t think it has as much to say.)

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR I’m not sure I would classify as inspiring a sense of wonder… More like suffocating horror. It’s not a book I have ever felt inclined to re-read, either. (I once made the mistake of reading it and ANIMAL FARM back to back… I was about ready to open a vein afterward. :)

It’s been ages since I read BRAVE NEW WORLD, but I think it definitely belongs on the list. It’s also much more SFnal than NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR.

CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ clearly qualifies for the short list.

I agree with what others have said about the Foundation books. I loved them once, but as an adult I’m hard-pressed to say why – other than the fact that Asimov is one of the most readable of all SF authors. (It’s like Card said: “You read him and think, ‘I could write like that!’ BUT YOU CAN’T!”) The characters in Foundation recur to memory as quite colorless.

I refuse to give STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND so much as the time of day. Heinlein is a huge disappointment to me – so much talent for storytelling, so very misused in his later books. Don’t even get me started on THE CAT WHO WALKED THROUGH WALLS, it’s a painful and anger-inducing memory.

Now for some new candidates…

How about ENDER’S GAME? This book made my brain explode, so it’s difficult for me to analyze, but it seems to me to have quite a lot to say about free will, ethics, war, and much else. Pity the sequels were not worthy, but really – how could they have been? What do you follow up a book like that with? Better to have left it to stand alone.

I would dearly love to nominate me some Roger Zelazny, who is among my very favorite SF authors. But while he towers in the sunsawunda department, and is eminently re-readable, I’m not sure how much he contributes to the Great Conversation, alas. He loves to play with ideas, but he rarely seems to me to go beyond play. If any of his works qualify, I’d say LORD OF LIGHT and his short story (my Most Favorite Ever) FOR A BREATH I TARRY. His little-known work TODAY WE CHOOSE FACES raises all sorts of questions about personal identity and free will, and might qualify too.

Someone mentioned HYPERION and FALL OF HYPERION by Dan Simmons, and I could get behind that. Perhaps the first book has a little too much pastiche about it, though? He’s a bit too self-conscious about shifting between different styles for the stories of the different characters – the seams show, if you will. Great read, though.



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My comments:

“THERE ARE DOORS, which I think he described as his personal favorite, left me quite cold.”

You and me both. There are Gene Wolfe books that simply do nothing for me. CASTLEVIEW was one such. I am also not a fan of his short fiction, aside from FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (which, upon rereading as a adult, chills me to the bone with horror, seeing a society utterly indifferent to human life, no doubt desensitized by their dabbling in biogenetics and baby-designing to the evils of selling their own children, or mutating girls to satisfy artificial sexual tastes.)

“I refuse to give STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND so much as the time of day.”

I salute your good taste. Heinlein shares with John Norman the unique talent that he can even make sex scenes boring. The differences between pervs and straights is that pervs are usually self-centered, hectoring, lecturing, obsessives.

(The difference has to do with the straight attitude of sex as a part of a sacriment versus the perv attitude sex as either so unimportent that normal rules shouldn’t apply or as so all-importent that normal rules don’t apply or (paradoxically) both at once — but that is a topic for another time.)

“His little-known work TODAY WE CHOOSE FACES raises all sorts of questions about personal identity and free will, and might qualify too.”

Rarely do I meet anyone, even among Zelazny fans, who has read this, which in some ways is his most eerie and memorable book. Again I salute your good taste, or perhaps your good fortune, to have read it.

“I would nominate PERELANDRA in preference to THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, on every criterion”

My argument would be that HIDEOUS STRENGTH has more to say about some of the Great Ideas listed than PERELENDRA, since it addresses the roles of free will and government, education, angels and devils, and critiques both determinism and mysticism.

“NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR I’m not sure I would classify as inspiring a sense of wonder… More like suffocating horror.”

Agreed. I should have defined science fiction as inciting a sense of awe, either the awe of wonder or the awe of  terror, in the reader.

The difference between mere terror and awe-inspiring terror is that mere terror does not make us forget the mundane world around us (as when a mother is worried about a missing child, and sees a small corpse in the distance) and awe-inspiring terror does (as when a mother is worried about a missing child, and sees Cthulhu rising from Rlyeh in the distance.)

The difference between the awe-inspiring terror produced by fantasy (as when a world is crushed by the world-serpent Ormgandr) and the awe-inspiring terror produced by science fiction (as when a world is burned by atomic war) is that the science fictional terrors, if portrayed with sufficient craft by the author, are made to seem realistic by reference to real science: an atomic war could happen in the world as we know it, or an impact by a dinosaur-extinction-level asteroid, but the fury of the Midgard Serpent cannot.

Even something that breaks a law of nature as we currently understand nature, such as a faster-than-light weapon or a time-travel disaster, still takes place within the scientific view of the universe, where the stars are balls of gas and the planets are worlds like ours, and are not lanterns carried by seraphim-winged planetary intelligences and not lesser crystalline heavens where adversarial archons dwell, and where our first ancestor was sculpted by evolution, not by Prometheus. A story that violates the scientific view of the universe by clinging to a view of the universe meant to resemble the pagan view, a place of gods and monsters and magic powers, that is a fantasy.