Art & Criticism

I thought it no more than fair to give my own list of twenty essential science fiction books of the past twenty years, after my criticism yesterday. Below then is a list of the twenty books I think you should read to get a good overview of developments in science fiction in the past twenty years. Some ground rules:

• The books listed are representative of a particular subgenre or development, not necessarily the best books of the past two decades.
• they’re all books I’ve read myself
• No series, because that would be cheating
• As with the original lists, the John Clute and Peter Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is added as a free, twentyfirst choice. I’ve looked hard for another essential non-fiction book, but there isn’t any of the same stature.
• Books are listed in order of publication, from 1988-2008

Brothers in Arms (1989) — Lois McMaster Bujold
The Miles Vorkogisan series is one of the best examples of mil-sf or military science fiction, a subgenre that came to prominence in the late eighties/early nineties. lots of it is dreck, rightwing power fantasies, but Bujold proves it is possible to write good mil-sf novels.

Rats and Gargoyles (1990) — Mary Gentle
A somewhat overlooked writer, but where she went with this novel a lot of writers would follow later, exploring a world where a different sort of science was established.

Earth (1990) — David Brin
To a large extent, we’re living in the world Brin described here. ‘Nuff said.

Use of Weapons (1990) — Iain M. Banks
The best of the Culture and the best of the New Space Opera that got going in the late eighties.

Heir to the Empire (1991) — Timothy Zahn
Surprisingly readable, this book opened the floodgates for a veritable deluge of Star Wars tieins, comics, merchandise and ultimately the prequel movies.

A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) — Vernor Vinge
Vinge had already established his idea of the Singularity in his earlier novels and stories, but with this novel it started to dominate science fiction, as a whole generation of writers became convinced that the Singularity was real and needed to be worked around.

Snow Crash (1992) — Neal Stephenson
The book that opened up cyberpunk to be more than just the adventures of lowlifes with hightech.

Ammonite (1993) — Nicola Griffith
Though at first it looked to have disappeared in the eighties, science fiction exploring feminist and gender themes was still being published. Ammonite was one of the first and best of a new wave of these sort of novels.

Gun, with Occasional Music (1994) — Jonathan Lethem
Science fiction has never been as hermetically sealed from the rest of literature as some of its fans like to think and writers have crossed over in both directions since before there was science fiction, but what was new in the 1990s was that there was a whole generation of literary writers fully aware of all science fiction traditions, who moved in and out of their genre when the mood struck them.

Axiomatic (1995) — Greg Egan
Greg Egan’s first short story collection. Egan was the last major writer whose strength was unambigiously the short story rather than the novel as well as the hardest hard science fiction writer of the nineties.

The Star Fraction (1995) — Ken MacLeod
During the eighties it had been the Americans who led the way in writing near future science fiction; cyberpunk being a largely american affair. With The Star Fraction the Brits took over the torch.

Catch the Lightning (1996) — Catherine Asaro
Science fiction romance, a very succesful subgenre but largely ignored by the critics… Not my genre either.

In the Garden of Eden (1997) — Kage Baker
The first in a popular series of time travel/secret history novels where the focus is not on either the time travel or the secret history, but on the somewhat mundane concerns of the hero of the series.

Cryptonomicom (1999) — Neal Stephenson
Another breach in the walls of science fiction’s insularity: this was labelled science fiction, sold as science fiction and generally accepted as science fiction, but was it really?

Perdido Street Station (2000) — China Miéville
The book that launched the New Weird, the closest science fiction has come to another cyberpunk or New Wave movement.

Nine Layers of Sky (2003) — Liz Williams
One example of a growing subgenre of books with a real world grounding intersected with a retrofuturistic, steampunk sf element.

Fitzpatrick’s War (2004) — Theodore Judson
By now, the mil-sf genre has crystalised so much razorsharp parodies of it are possible. In one neat package, all the cliches of the genre are skewered.

Accelerando (2005) — Charlie Stross
An example of the new blogdriven generation of authors like Scalzi and Doctorow, nerdy, computer and internet literate to a degree rarely found in previous generations. (Don’t mention Jerry “I need my friends at Cisco or IBM to reboot my modem” Pournelle)

The Vance Integral Edition (1999 – 2006) — Jack Vance
The ultimate in fandriven publishing projects, but it wasn’t alone; NESFA press for example also published a lot of new, definitive collections of old favourites.

Farthing (2006) — Jo Walton
One example of the maturing of the alternate history genre, accesible to both fans and those new to the genre with a writer confident enough not to spell things out, not to use shock tactics to show the essential horror of an early peace between England and Germany in World War II.

This is a personal list, selected (with the exception of the Vance Integral Edition) from my own personal library. There are obviously holes in it, subgenres I don’t read or examples of trends I don’t like (e.g. self-indulgent sequels by once great authors, carnage porn). If you got books I missed, you could always make a case for them in the comments.

Torque Control reports on the “20 essential science fiction books of the past 20 years” panel at the just finished Worldcon. These are the results of the jury:

• The Culture Novels, Iain M Banks (starting 1987)
• The Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons (starting 1989)
• Grass, Sherri S Tepper (1989)
• The Aleutian Trilogy, Gwyneth Jones (starting 1991)
• The Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson (starting 1992)
• Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
• The Flower Cities sequence, Kathleen Ann Goonan (starting 1994)
• Fairyland, Paul McAuley (1996)
• Diaspora, Greg Egan (1997)
• Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (2000)
• The Arabesks, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (starting 2000)
• Light, M John Harrison (2002)
• Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
• Evolution, Stephen Baxter (2003)
• Pattern Recognition, William Gibson (2003)
• Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
• Air, Geoff Ryman (2004)
• River of Gods, Ian McDonald (2004)
• Accelerando, Charles Stross (2005)
• Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (2005)

It’s a bit heavy on the series and a bit light on female authors, but its worst flaw is that there is little variety in the type of science fiction books on display here. There’s only one short story collection (two if you count Accelerando, which started life as a series of short stories), but no less than six different series considered essential. There’s a lot of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk (Stephenson, McAuley, Egan, Gibson and Stross), as well as New Space Opera (Banks, Simmons, Reynolds, Baxter), some smattering of big literary books (Harrison, Ryman and Mitchell, arguably Gibson as well) and in general these are all Big, Important books liked by science fiction critics. Which is understandable, as this list was created by a a panel of science fiction critics after all. This is not to complain that this list is too literary, far from it. Most of these books are hardcore science fiction, beloved by fans and critics alike and which were paid a lot of attention when they were originally published. It’s a great list of books, but I think it will give you a skewed view of “the state of science fiction” of the past
twenty years.

For a start, if you really wanted to show how science fiction developed over this time period, one of the first books you have to put up would be Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, the first in his trilogy of Star Wars spinoff novels, because it was in no large part due to these that the fortunes of this franchise revived. Its success led to a veritable flood of other Star Wars spinoff books and comics, proved that there was still a market for Star Wars so ultimately paved the way for the prequels. Frnachise books have always been an important, if slightly embarassing part of science fiction, so a list of essential books needs to have at least one of them.

Also conspicious by their absence is any kind of mil-sf or alternate history novel. You could argue that the Jon Courtenay Grimwood series is alternate history, but there the divergence is only used as background. What’s missing is a novel like Christopher Priest’s The Separation or Jo Walton’s Farthing, where the point of the novel is to explore how history could be altered and what the consequences would be, rather than using this as just another exotic setting.

As for mil-sf, this is a genre that came of age exactly in the timeperiod covered by the list, yet you wouldn’t know it from this. Partially this might be because so much of it is so goddamn awful, but there have been some good examples of the genre as well. If David Weber is a step too far, what about any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels, or even Theodore Judson’s Fitzpatrick’s War?

But the most glaring mistake on this list is that it has Greg Egan’s Diaspora, rather than any of his short story collections, which are a) much better and b) much more representative. Egan was one of the last sf writers who came to prominence through writing short stories as opposed to novels. Sure, there have been many writers since then who’ve broken into science fiction with short stories, but I can think of only a handful who got the same buzz as Egan did solely on their short stories: Ted Chiang, Paolo Bacigalupi (even if I can’t stand them myself) and perhaps Charlie Stross. To leave out Luminous or Axiomatic in favour of Diaspora is just bizarre.