Your SF Summer Reading List

(Written for Students)

This is the good stuff. If you’re interested in the possibilities that a “literature of change” offers to writers and readers, I encourage you to explore the books listed here. The great thing is that this list only scratches the surface. Most of these authors are still writing today.  Tomorrow there will be more of them.

Douglas Adams. Adams does on paper what Monty Python does on screen. His Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is a sharp, clever parody of SF conventions that every fan of the genre should read. Hilarious and smart. Too bad he died recently.

Isaac Asimov. The grandfather of modern SF. Asimov was the first to move 1940-50s “space stories” out of the heroic rocket-ship mode to explore more complex social and philosophical themes. His aptly named classic Foundation is the place to start.

Margaret Atwood. Normally considered a “mainstream” writer, Atwood sometimes touches on the fantastic and magical nevertheless. Her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale gives a chilling portrait of a near-future North American nation ruled by extreme fundamentalist Christians.  Her recent Oryx and Crake does something similar, but with genetic engineering and environmental collapse.

Clive Barker. Barker is both more gruesome and more intellectual than Stephen King. His career began in horror but has since expanded to deal with wider themes of desire and frustration in modern life. Imagica is a fantasy epic set in contemporary London but dealing with hidden magic and dimensions beyond our own. Barker’s short story collections will seriously disturb you.

Greg Bear. A good “Hard SF” writer whose science of choice is biology and genetic engineering. Smarter than Michael Crichton (who wrote Jurassic Park). Blood Music and Darwin’s Radio are Bear’s best. Great stuff for pre-med students.

Alfred Bester. Bester took the classic “space opera” model and made it into something weird. The Stars My Destination ushered in a whole new wave of 1960s SF writing that dealt openly with social change, altered states of consciousness, and anti-heroic protagonists.

Octavia Butler. Butler’s brilliant SF deals with race and other social issues without ever being preachy. Lilith’s Brood is a stunning trilogy (under one cover) that presents humanity’s genetic mixing with a truly alien species. Parable of the Sower depicts a violence-torn, economically ruined near future and the decent people struggling to make a life in it. Very powerful.

Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game is an ambiguously heroic novel about young people trained to be killers in the service of the State. Card deals with their training, their maturation, and finally with the ethical dilemmas posed by their role. His series The Seventh Son is an alternative history of the United States in which the American Revolution never happened and Native American magic is real.

Samuel Delaney. Delaney embodies the anarchist, free-spirited soul of 1960s SF. His future societies are always detailed, thought provoking, and vastly different from anything you’ve seen in fiction before. Triton and Dhalgren are two of his best.

Philip K. Dick.  The master of the paranoid form. Dick invents societies where things are never as they seem, and where political power can change the shape of reality itself. The movies Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall were based on his work. Read his novels The Man in the High Castle (set in an alternate America where the Axis won the second World War), A Scanner Darkly, and Valis (which details Dick’s encounters with a being that he believed was God).

Mary J. Engh. Arslan takes an unexpected premise—an almost unknown Asian warlord literally taking over the modern world, à la Alexander the Great—and develops it into a mature and affecting novel about fathers and sons.

William Gibson. Gibson basically invented the “Cyberpunk” style in the 1980s with his novel Neuromancer, set in a dark near future of computer hacking, street violence, and espionage. (The movie Johnny Mnemonic was a bad adaptation of the short story that later became Neuromancer.) Gibson’s novels generally deal with a rapidly changing world in which society is increasingly defined by surveillance and paranoia.  After Cyberpunk, Gibson went on to help invent Steampunk as well:  The Difference Engine (written with Bruce Sterling) is an alternate history that explores what happens when primitive computers are invented in nineteenth-century England.

Robert Heinlein. Another grandfather of the genre, Heinlein took SF in the 1950s and gave it a combative political edge. You may not agree with everything he says (his politics are Libertarian sometimes bordering on Fascist), but Heinlein is constantly thought provoking and vivid. Stranger in a Strange Land is about a messiah who comes from Mars. The movie Starship Troopers was basically a parody of Heinlein’s cold-war novel of the same name.

Frank Herbert. One of the great idea-writers of 1970s-80s SF. The Dune series (there are seven books, Dune being the first) depicts a far future that is just as complicated politically, culturally, religiously and economically as our own era. Herbert’s main theme is always the politics of religion. Heady and thought provoking.

Stephen King. King’s dozens of novels are all over the place, but some of them (e.g. The Shining and It) are very, very good. His post-apocalyptic thriller The Stand is just about the most chilling novel of good and evil that I’ve ever read.

Ursula Le Guin. SF as anthropology. The Left Hand of Darkness details the culture, politics, and crises of a world whose human inhabitants change gender on a monthly cycle. The Dispossessed is a smart Utopian novel of two planets with vastly differently social organizations. Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea trilogy (actually there’s a fourth book now) is the Fantasy world that many people love best after J. R. R. Tolkien’s.

Jonathan Lethem. Can SF be hip? Lethem proves it’s possible. Gun with Occasional Music is a wild take on the 1930s hard-boiled detective genre, except that it takes place in a near-future America where animals talk and kangaroos work for the Mafia. His mainstream novel Motherless Brooklyn is detective story whose protagonist has Tourette Syndrome. (Ask your science teacher what that is!)

H. P. Lovecraft. Writing in the 1920s, Lovecraft invented a dark mythology all his own, and writers continue to add to the world he created even today. Collections of Lovecraft’s many short stories (he never wrote a novel) are still in print. Start with “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” or “At the Mountains of Madness.”

Louise Marley. Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan explores the position of women in a fundamentalist neo-Islamic society on an Earth colony centuries from now.

Maureen McHugh. China Mountain Zhang’s protagonist is a young Chinese man living in a communist America. McHugh’s focus is not on action but on the myriad details and plausible changes that make up daily life and daily struggles in this society.

Ken Macleod. Gritty, Scottish, and unabashedly socialist. Cosmonaut Keep is a split story showing us both an Earth colony centuries from now and the events just years from today that ultimately make the colony possible. Smart and fast moving.

China Mieville. Is it SF or Fantasy? I don’t know, but it doesn’t get any weirder than Perdido Street Station. Set in the down-and-dirty streets of the alien city of New Crobuzon, the novel gives us a desperate cast of non-human eccentrics and binds them together in a sprawling, fascinating set of conflicts and coincidences. Secretive and seductive, beautiful and strange.  Good sequels follow.

Michael Moorcock. Moorcock is the extraordinary writer who just happened to elevate Fantasy from the gutter to high art. He has written more novels than you’ll ever need to read, but his Elric of Melniboné series is an epic worth your attention. The title character is a sickly albino who rules a failing empire. The brutal and glorious world Moorcock creates has more than a few echoes of our own mythologies.

James Morrow. Morrow has been called a Christian satirist, and his main target has always been the pretensions of his own religion. Towing Jehovah imagines the death of God in a very literal way: God’s two-miles-long corpse falls from heaven and lands in the Atlantic Ocean. A cast of difficult characters crews the oil tanker sent by the Vatican to tow the body into the Arctic Circle so that it will not decay. A parable.

Kim Stanley Robinson. “Terraforming” is the process of altering another planet’s environment so that it is more Earth-like. In the series that begins with Red Mars, Robinson chronicles the terraforming of our nearest neighbor by exploring the scientific, economic, and political dimensions of the project. Good hard SF.

Mary Doria Russell. Remember how the sixteenth-century Jesuits were involved in the colonization of the Americas? Russell’s novel The Sparrow imagines a twenty-first-century Jesuit mission to a newly discovered alien civilization on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. The characters are well imagined (if they do talk too much).

Melissa Scott. Scott’s characters inhabit fully-realized social milieus with customs, institutions, and even entertainments all their own. Shadow Man and Trouble and Her Friends exhibit Scott’s perennial concern with gender and sexuality in the variety of human societies she imagines.

Norman Spinrad. Indescribably smart, Spinrad’s novels push all the limits (and maybe all your buttons). The Void Captain’s Tale chronicles a disastrous journey on a starship powered by the human libido. The Iron Dream is a book-within-a-book: a hateful hack science fiction novel written in 1940s New York by a German immigrant (and failed artist) named Adolf Hitler.

Neil Stephenson. A satirist for the internet age. Snow Crash is a riotous parody of the cyberpunk style pioneered by William Gibson (see above). Cryptonomicon is a clever epic of code-breaking set both in World War Two and in a modern Asian “data haven” for hackers and software criminals.

Bruce Sterling. Another cyberpunk writer. Sterling’s novel Islands in the Net rivals Gibson’s as a dark political vision of an information-overloaded tomorrow. Distraction depicts the world of electoral politics and “spin” in a near-future (but vastly transformed) United States. Sterling also writes provocative nonfiction on the cultural and creative impact of technology.  With Gibson, he helped invent Steampunk in The Difference Engine.

Michael Swanwick. The Iron Dragon’s Daughter is a darkly comic updating of all the fairy tales you’ve ever heard: its protagonist escapes imprisonment in a dragon-making factory and finds her way to a high school world of tough dwarves, hipster elves, malls, and magic spells. Jack Faust re-tells the Faust legend in a dystopian, totalitarian mode.  Great, smart, compelling re-imaginings all.

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings’ Middle Earth is a much more complicated and richly imagined world than some people give it credit for. Tolkien was writing out of his experience as an accomplished scholar of European myths and medieval history, and his books still have a lot to say to the contemporary world.

Harry Turtledove. Turtledove has made a career our of alternative history, basing whole series on questions such as, What if the Roman Empire had never fallen? His best work is The Guns of the South, in which the Confederacy comes into possession of advanced twentieth-century machine guns. This odd premise is only a launching pad for the novel’s real purpose of exploring the American Civil War’s impact on history.

Gene Wolfe. Wolfe is my favorite writer. Sometimes compared to Herman Melville for his stylistic prowess and moral vision, Wolfe continually pushes the boundaries of SF/F in order to make the genre smarter and more mature. You simply must read his adventurous and intelligent Book of the New Sun, which comprises two (really four) volumes: Shadow and Claw and Sword and Citadel. Wolfe’s short stories are beautiful and strange, and his mainstream novel Peace is an unsettling meditation on aging and memory. His double novel The Knight and The Wizard is a good starting point.