Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (2 page)

But wait—that’s an oversimplification, too, because a glance at
The New York Review of Books
or the
Guardian
’s book review pages reveals a “literary” appetite for many varieties of fiction or styling, some of them blurring into the kinds of writing marketed since the 1960s as science fiction. Franz Kafka’s phantasmagorical fables remain evergreen, Latin American “magical realism” was fashionable a decade or two back, John Barth’s rich and zany metafictions had their day, while nobody doubts that Dante’s allegorical adventures in Purgatory and Hell in
The Divine Comedy
and Don De Lillo’s absurdist Airborne Toxic Event in
White Noise
are as heavy-duty literary as it gets.

It’s equally true that many genre readers stick faithfully to their accustomed diversions, preferring yet another franchised episode of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, or Luke Skywalker and his mean Dad, rather as some people eat the same breakfast every day and wouldn’t dream of adding garlic to their nightly dinner steak, or replace it now and then with squids in spice. For these happy browsers, “literary” writing is
snobbish
and any attempt by sf writers to adapt the same techniques to broader their canvas and elaborate their palette (or palate) is
pretentious
or
boring
or uses “too many hard words.” In a genre where masters from H. G. Wells to Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick were comfortable with once-unfamiliar terms like
ecology
or
delta-V
or
epistemology
or with fresh coinage like
ansible
or
kibble
, this seems an odd complaint. It’s one we intend to ignore in our discussion of 101 significant, exemplary sf novels from the last quarter century, novels that in a hundred and one different ways are as wily and inventive as the best speculative writing and as well-wrought and insightful into the nature of human consciousness and society as anything by, well, Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing or Philip Roth or Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon or Cormac McCarthy—some of whom, marvelously, are here as well, with their own distinctive contributions to the canon of recent speculative fiction.

The year 1985 inaugurates the span under consideration in this volume, and it might profit us to consider, with memory’s Wayback Machine, exactly what some of the salient features of that far-off year were. (Of course, we are not going to rely solely on our fallible human wetware, but instead will consult Wikipedia, an omnipresent invaluable resource whose very name was nothing but a gibberish string of phonemes in 1985. But more on that in a few paragraphs.)

Ronald Reagan assumed his second presidential term. His name then still conjured up images of black-and-white movies, and, for sf readers, a deliberately and brilliantly offensive New Wave story by J. G. Ballard, not the vaseline-lensed hagiography the man enjoys among some today. Reagan’s
bête
noire
was the Soviet Empire, which in 1985 seemed destined to reign eternally with an iron fist across half the planet. China, on the other hand, although also a Communist bogeyman, was an amusingly backward country subject to internal purges and worthy of notice only when it reared up against Taiwan. Japan, however, was a different matter, the one country threatening to usurp the USA’s place as global economic and cultural powerhouse. (This irony of their past top dog status became particularly painful in early 2011, when a devastating earthquake and tsunami battered that island nation.) European nations still featured individual currencies, and required their citizens to present passports for internal travel in their own Union. The worst terrorist attack against the USA had happened in 1983, in Beirut—an enormous blow, some 200 soldiers dead. The world population was 4.8 billion. Climate change was something only paleontologists had to be concerned with.

A state-of-the-art cellphone was the Motorola DynaTAC, that expensive, rarely seen, retrospectively laughable walkie-talkie-sized unit. The internet consisted of low bandwidth communications amongst some military and university computers. A state-of-the-art home computer setup could be had for $1000.00 (nearly $2000.00 dollars in today’s terms): a Commodore 64 CPU and keyboard; a green-on-black CRT monitor; an external floppy disk drive; and a dot-matrix B&W printer. (That’s what many writers sprang for back then, happily abandoning electric typewriters and carbon paper forever.) Text-only email service could be obtained through a noisy dial-up modem connection. Music was released by large corporations on the relatively new medium of compact discs. Books and magazines and newspapers had no digital electronic counterparts. Broadcast TV and the major networks remained dominant over the nascent cable hookups. Electric cars were nonexistent.

In the sf field, cyberpunk had burst out of the zeitgeist as the hottest new movement, while steampunk was merely a tossed-off term of derision. If science fiction did not still outsell its upstart sister fantasy, at least sales were basically even—unlike the present, when sf is the minority category. The
Star Wars
cinematic franchise had ceased, seemingly forever, with three films, while 1982’s
Bladerunner
had as yet sired no true progeny. The term “CGI” was essentially meaningless. The prime mode of sf fan activity (“media fan” was more or less a subcategory of readerdom), besides the occasional small-scale convention (that year, San Diego Comic Con hosted a mere 6000 attendees), relied on paper “fanzines” distributed through the postal service, and in fact the cyberpunk movement, preaching a future dominated by cyberspace, promulgated itself through just such paper vessels.

Of 1985 fashions in clothing, dance, music, interior decoration, art and other mutable human pursuits, we will not speak, since such things are by their very nature transient and not assumed to be an unchangeable bedrock of existence.

You can, of course, provide your own present-day counterpoint to this capsule description of 1985. But any portrait of today will certainly limn a world that has undergone immense, almost unforeseeable changes since that vanished baseline year. Wired, distributed, hyperkinetic, beset by heretofore-inconceivable perils and challenges, gifted with potential-filled miracle gadgets, inventing new artforms and modes of communication, moving at warp speed, the world of the second decade of the
21st
century and its inhabitants must present time-traveler-magnitude cognitive dissonance to anyone who contemplates the past twenty-five years. Yet at least half the global population is old enough to have experienced both eras firsthand. Why, then, are we not on a daily basis disoriented strangers in a strange land, unable to function for all the head-whirling confusion? Well, primarily because all the massive changes snuck up on us incrementally, and were absorbed at a steady pace. But also because of sf.

Science fiction is the tool that allows us to master such change. From birth in its modern genre form in the pages of 1926’s
Amazing Stories
, through its nurturing and refinement by a small coterie of true believers through the middle of the twentieth century, and on to its gradual world domination starting with, oh, let us say, Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, science fiction has offered a cognitive toolkit in easy-to-assimilate, entertaining form that allows us to get mentally comfortable with the notion of change and its most radical effects before we are hit with the reality of it upside the collective head. Science fiction is the one type of literature that promotes, to use the phrase pioneered by the bloggers at Boing Boing (try explaining the concept of “blog” to a citizen of 1985!), the creation of “happy mutants.” It’s the literature of cultural Darwinism, the sieve through which we pan for ideational gold.

Our selections in this volume, if we have done our job well, will illustrate not only the immense changes of the past two-and-a-half decades, but also sf’s vast reach and power, which of course we will need even more in the wild quarter century ahead!

One caution: Although our title promises a survey of the 101 best science fiction novels in English since Pringle’s volume, we can’t guarantee that any single reader will agree that our tally really
is
the
best.
After all, the annual Hugo and Nebula and Clarke and Locus and Campbell and Ditmar and other awards for the best sf novel of the year do not always concur—indeed, it is a rare distinction for any book to gain as many as two of these prestigious prizes. There are many celebrated and perhaps bestselling authors we might have included, and we would have done so if we’d had room for another hundred titles. Certainly we are not dismissing this abundance of enjoyable riches.

What we can promise you is that the novels we discuss are among the most
significant
works of science fiction from the last quarter century, books that reward careful reading while providing pleasure, amusement, novelty, wonderment. If you read all or even many of these good novels, you’ll slowly realize that science fiction is not just a genre but is indeed a
mode
of storytelling. Most other genres are restricted in their subject matter, their focus, their typical ways of using words to invite readers into their familiar worlds. Crime fiction and thrillers, romances, westerns, tales of vampires or zombies—all offer niches, however various and ingeniously developed, within which the reader knows pretty much what to expect. Some franchise sf is like that too, but the best sf breaks through genre boundaries and tells stories that can borrow their subject matter and manner from any of the existing genres, while pushing them into new territories never before visited.

The science fiction mode has experienced large scale convulsions since it emerged a century or more ago, and especially since its advent as a commercial pulp form in the 1920s. If we regard the earlier work—by Mary Shelley, Verne, Wells, many others—as not yet visibly genrefied, it’s apparent that science fiction’s history has passed through several “waves” since the ’20s The first pulp fiction age ended when John W. Campbell assumed editorship of
Astounding
in 1939, and the famous Golden Age storytellers emerged: Isaac Asimov, Leigh Brackett, Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore, A. E. van Vogt. Call that the Second Wave, extending into the discovery of the “soft sciences” in the 1950s. A Third Wave flooded over the field in the 1960s with a newly refined, often poetic, literary flavor and political concerns typical of the sixties (but foreshadowed in the previous decade by Theodore Sturgeon, Edgar Pangborn, and others). This Third Wave included the so-called “New Wave” but exceeded it, with pivotal work by Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Norman Spinrad, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, a host more.

In the 1970s, that upheaval was already history and sf entered a period of consolidation, blending its traditional excitement with more self-aware literary aspirations. At the end of David Pringle’s catchment area in 1984, cyberpunk came and went like a lurid flower, followed by the New Space Opera and the New Weird as a Fourth Wave carried sf on its flood tide into the new millennium. In the decade or so since the century’s turn, sf has made its extraordinary impact in music, movies and even “literary fiction” (though seldom acknowledged as such). There are hints already that we stand at the frothing edge of a newer Wave. Nobody is quite certain where sf is headed, or what form some Fifth Wave will take. Is the age of the book finally over? Will reading shift from paper to Kindles and Nooks and snazzier forms of portable electronic platforms, sheets of e-paper you can jam in your pocket, beams of light shone straight onto your retina, waves of information borne directly to your brain via wifi or quantum entanglement? Already much of the best short sf is released online, usually in free venues supported as loss-leaders by traditional publishers, or funded by ads. An e-future would not spell the death of sf novels, of course, any more than the passing of pulp magazines with their monthly serials and the rise of paperback originals meant that sf was extinct—far from it. But we might see the sorts of unsettling, exciting novelties proclaimed by
Eric Rosenfield
:

a lot of big-name Science Fiction writers look like they’re standing still. While Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow and Vernor Vinge fantasize about the Singularity or augmented reality… [others are] writing a fiction that speaks to a world in which we find ourselves not exactly emancipated by technology but simply hyper-connected by it, our identities as people redefined by the media we share, media which we embrace and deeply care about even when it leaves us bewildered, co-opted, and reduced in a thousand ways to algorithms…. This is not what our world is like, but it’s very much what it
feels
like… tapped into some kind of primal dream of what it means to live in our techno-saturated time…
[2]

Perhaps that’s the shape of future sf, or maybe this post-Latest New Thing prospectus will be already antiquated in another few years (“
So
2011”). Meanwhile, we can enjoy the accumulated riches of the past quarter century, from mainstream novelist Margaret Atwood’s speculative/sexual political sensation
The Handmaid’s Tale
to the brilliant first novel of Finnish string theorist Hannu Rajaniemi writing with perfect ease simultaneously in English, and sf, and quantum physics, all conjoined to dazzle us. From one perspective, then, you can see this list as Science Fiction 101. From another, it’s 101 excellent novels for sf to hang its hat on, at a jaunty angle and with a knowing gleam in its eye.

Damien Broderick
San Antonio, Texas