Feu de joie
Niall has a new game: Second-guessing the Denvention 20 Essential Science Fiction Books of the Past 20 Years panel. Here’s my take.
If there’s something you can’t believe isn’t on the list, probably I didn’t read it. I know, I’m a terrible person.
| The Chrononautic Log Provisional SF Canon, 1988-2008 |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Author | Title | Year | ||
| Iain M. Banks | The Player of Games | 1988 | ||
| C.J. Cherryh | Cyteen | 1988 | ||
| Sherri S. Tepper | The Gate to Women’s Country | 1988 | ||
| Greg Bear | Queen of Angels | 1990 | ||
| William Gibson & Bruce Sterling |
The Difference Engine | 1990 | ||
| Emma Bull | Bone Dance | 1991 | ||
| Maureen McHugh | China Mountain Zhang | 1992 | ||
| Walter Jon Williams | Aristoi | 1992 | ||
| Connie Willis | Doomsday Book | 1992 | ||
| Vernor Vinge | A Fire Upon the Deep | 1992 | ||
| Nancy Kress | Beggars in Spain | 1993 | ||
| Ursula le Guin | Four Ways to Forgiveness | 1995 | ||
| Neal Stephenson | The Diamond Age | 1995 | ||
| Ken Macleod | The Cassini Division | 1998 | ||
| Bruce Sterling | Zeitgeist | 2000 | ||
| Ted Chiang | Stories of Your Life and Others | 2002 | ||
| Christopher Priest | The Separation | 2002 | ||
| William Gibson | Pattern Recognition | 2003 | ||
| Charles Stross | Accelerando | 2005 | ||
| Peter Watts | Blindsight | 2006 | ||
|
||||
For my next trick: essay questions for the final exam.
N.b.: I didn’t think too hard about this. Also, there’s more than one book on here that I wasn’t personally all that fond of (or even that irritated the living hell out of me) but that I think is still an important part of What We Talk About When We Talk About The Last Twenty Years Of Science Fiction.
I did try to stick to books I could easily convince myself were unambiguously science fiction, or that were more usefully discussed in company with unambiguously - science - fiction books than with unambiguously - fantasy books. (Fantasy list to come later.)
Side note: Damn, what was up with 1992? Maybe that’s just the last year I really read a lot of SF.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Several things:
1) Interesting definition of “twenty”….
2) To an extent, your choices have the same issue Niall pointed out with mine: a clustering around 1990-3, in my case when I started to read sf. But his are clustered round 2001-4… And yes, 1992 was a very good year.
3) Unlike some of us, you haven’t gone especially slipstream/sf-published-out-of-genre. Any particular reason?
August 15th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Oops! Oh, well, sorry, Alastair Reynolds.
I think Zeitgeist, Pattern Recognition, and The Separation are pretty slipstreamy, but you’re right. The Kelly Link current of slipstream goes on the fantasy list. (Murakami may show up there, too, we’ll see.)
As for SF published out of genre: The Sparrow didn’t make the cut; YPU I loved but I don’t see it as in dialogue with any of the other books on this list; and I haven’t read Cloud Atlas, Oryx & Crake, The Time Traveler’s Wife, or Never Let Me Go. Any other obvious candidates of that sort I missed?
August 15th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Well, I voted Against the Day, which I think is awesome but recognise is a minority enthusiam. The Road? Hav? The consensus choice on this, though, does seem to be Cloud Atlas.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Concenus?
We habe evidence to suggest these Books are mere fodd fodder which all must pass through in order of relevance to prove they’re intellectally up to assuming their next phase in Cultural Mechanism Ranking, which has at its base, some weird rational relating to whtaever our sources have sold.
Make My Words, then adjust for period , location and grammer errors yoyr averarge Oxford English Major either will or canot be a party too.
Alternatively, do a Pontious Pilate, which will be blamed on either of 2 quite distint acts one’s forced into soing against the warnings we have touted time and again.
We may not pay heed, but we’d beeter pay the Piper whose own sources are screaming for so kinf of Number I’ve never thought of as being anything other than a cheap Swiss version of the Newtonian……
August 15th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
The contribution of the gentleman from Dissociated Press is duly noted. (Andy, that’s not you wasted on Tullamore Dew, is it?)
The only Pynchon I’ve had the patience to read so far is Crying of Lot 49. Also haven’t read The Road, though I suppose I’ll have to one day if only to pick sides between the people who say it’s in the tradition of A Canticle for Leibowitz and the ones who say it’s just in the tradition of Outer Dark and Child of God.
Hav I liked, but most of it was written in 1985, and that’s the part I liked better. I’d also be on the fence as to whether it should go in the SF list or the fantasy list.
August 15th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Yay, somebody who likes Four Ways to Forgiveness as much as I! I had really thought Chris Barzak and I were the only people who remembered that book, so I’m glad to know there are others — perhaps entire silent legions…
August 15th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
To be honest, it’s not my favorite of the Hainish novels, but it’s the only one inside the eligibility period. And I think it makes a nice contrast with the Williams, Vinge and Banks, as well as showing Nancy Kress a thing or two about SF and social change.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Y’see, if I was going to pick one Le Guin book from this period, it’d be The Birthday of the World. Four Ways has never quite got through to me in the same way.
David, re Pynchon, I recognise that I’m at an extreme point on the distribution of how well people get on with him. But anyone who can write as stunning a set-piece as the two pages in Gravity’s Rainbow about the after-use history of toothpaste tubes deserves attention.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Yeah, I never got around to Birthday. Getting me to read short fiction is often kind of like getting me to pull my own teeth.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
(Note my mischaracterization of Four Ways as a novel, two comments up. Sometimes I can trick myself…)
August 15th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
We did say right at the start of the panel that we’d agreed not to quibble about the meaning of any of the words in the title, including “twenty”.
August 15th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Cheryl: you’re right, and I therefore note that I’m aged twenty-five. Again.
August 17th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
Some assorted thoughts without connective tissue:
I think the period around 1990-1993 was something a golden age for my reading too, fwiw. I’m not sure what was going on then, but I think there was something. Note that that’s also the peak period for female writers getting nominated for Hugos; no idea if there’s any causality there or not.
As usual, I’m having trouble with criteria. Cheryl quoted Graham as saying “emblematic”–a list “that somehow encompassed the field as we understood it.” But I think to me that’s a fairly close parallel with Important Books, the ones that are influential and/or very widely talked about and highly regarded. So I may not have the same criteria in mind as any of y’all.
But going by my criteria, I’m surprised to see Bone Dance on your list; I loved it (it’s my favorite of Emma’s books that I’ve read), but I don’t think it was especially influential or talked-about.
I would say something similar, though milder, about China Mountain Zhang; I think it was influential and talked-about in some circles (and certainly caught my attention), but nowhere near to the level of attention that, say, Accelerando or Cyteen or The Difference Engine got. Definitely emblematic of a certain current or sub-stream in sf, but seems to me to be a little outside the main body of the field.
I’m also surprised to see you pick The Diamond Age over Snow Crash–from my point of view, Snow Crash was one of the most influential and talked-about books of the ’90s. (Rather to my dismay.)
I’m embarrassed to have not read 11 of the books on your list, and even more embarrassed to have not even heard of at least one of them. But the fact that I do know a fair bit about most of the ones I haven’t read seems to me to be supporting evidence that this is a good set overall.
Le Guin is my favorite writer, and several of her books and stories would be in my top 25 favorite works of fiction, and Four Ways to Forgiveness may be my favorite Le Guin book. That and Fisherman of the Inland Sea were, I think, what brought me back to the Le Guin fold after my dubiousness over Always Coming Home and The Telling. And Four Ways does feel to me like a unified book, even though not a novel per se. But even so, I’m a little surprised to see it on your list, because I had the impression it was one of her least-known works. I think I’ve only ever seen two copies of it, and I own one of those.
I don’t think I have enough of a sense of what was released when to put together my own list, even with the aid of y’all’s lists and the Hugo and Nebula lists. I do think I’d include Hyperion; that seemed tremendously influential to me, at the time, at least. And it seems like one of Egan’s books should be on the list, but I haven’t read his novels and tend to get them mixed up with each other, so I’m not sure which.
I also think that the 20-year cutoff makes a significant difference. Extending it to 25 years would (for me) add Startide Rising, Neuromancer, The Peace War (probably), Ender’s Game, and maybe Blood Music, The Handmaid’s Tale, and others. There was a lot going on in the mid-’80s.
…So what’s on your fantasy list?
August 17th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Snow Crash ain’t what I talk about when I talk about science fiction. It goes on the futuristic satire list, along with Stark, Counting Heads and Sewer, Gas, and Electric.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I’m surprised you didn’t call out Zeitgeist, since I seem to be the only person I know who’s ever read it.
Bone Dance may not have gotten a lot of attention, but I think it’s an interesting transitional book — on the one hand it’s an example of the last generation of Cold War postapocalyptic fiction, and on the other hand it’s a good candidate for marking the moment when genderfuck went mainstream.
China Mountain Zhang wasn’t as talked about as Accelerando because it didn’t happen to be for, about, and a product of the English-speaking world’s dominant middle-class white male youth subculture. I think it’s been much more influential, though that might be observer bias. I would argue that CMZ gets a lot more attention now than Cyteen or The Difference Engine, even if it didn’t at the time.
The fact that it’s emblematic of a “sub-stream” is a strength, I think — I’m not sure there’s actually been a “main body of the field” in quite some time. (It would be cute to point to 1992 as the moment the ice sheet broke up, but it probably isn’t.)
Four Ways to Forgiveness is, one, a cheap way of getting around the fact that all the major Hainish works were published well before the period in question, and two, a concrete contrast with the (by comparison quite similar) approaches to interplanetary culture-clash fiction taken by Banks, Cherryh, Macleod, Reynolds, Vinge, and Williams.
Anyway, listing the twenty books “most talked about at the time” would just be an exercise in citation counting.
August 18th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
(Ideally I’d have Sterling’s Globalhead or A Good Old-Fashioned Future instead of Accelerando, but first, I wasn’t thinking enough about short fiction, and second, I figure I ought to make some concession to the Slashdot Generation.)
August 18th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
I’ve read Zeitgeist, although it made such little impression on me that I basically remember nothing of it.
My preferred Sterling from the period is Holy Fire, another book very few people seem to have read.
August 18th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Yeah, you can pretty much flip that and that’s my experience.
What I didn’t figure out about Zeitgeist until, I don’t know, the fourth or fifth time I read it — probably till the second time I listened to the audiobook, actually — is that every word in it is meant to be read as literally true. Which makes it one of the weirder books I know.