boda wrote: ↑Thu Oct 28, 2021 9:43 pm
FiveSkandhas wrote: ↑Thu Oct 28, 2021 1:07 am
It has been said that there are two books that have a high probability of ensnaring the minds of 14 year old boys and changing their characters forever. One is Frank Herbert's Dune, the other is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.
If the hapless boy picks up the wrong book, he is doomed to life as a snivelling, skulking antisocial failure, trapped in a delusional universe of fantasy and fiction by obsessive interest until he is permanently emotionally stunted and unable to reach maturity or have normal adult relationships ever.
If he picks up the other book, he just gets a cool adventure story about giant desert sandworms.
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As far as recommendations go, and as a dedicated sci-fi fan, I've recently very much enjoyed
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.
So have I, but it's really lightweight.
Returning to Malcolm's point, then -
treehuggingoctopus wrote: ↑Thu Oct 28, 2021 1:02 pm
Malcolm wrote: ↑Mon May 24, 2021 4:44 pmIf we actually confined ourselves to SF books of demonstrable literary merit, I think the recommendations would shrink really fast.
Apart from Le Guin (indeed uneven) and Atwood, China Mieville (anything, pretty much), Ian R. MacLeod (Light Ages, House of Storms, Wake up and Dream, Red Snow, Song of Time. Short stories are decent as well), Susanna Clarke (just two novels, both masterpieces, and a lovely short story collection).
Oh, Mervyn Peake, too, if one believes he is a genre writer.
Plus lots of names outside the Anglosphere.
I like your list, treehuggingoctopus. If we're including fantasy with the SF, as we seem to be doing, I would add Peter Beagle, Alan Garner and Neil Gaiman. Perhaps Lian Hearn, too, but it depends on how much of the genre we want to mention - top 10% or top1%.
But the point I want to make is that there is a lot of very very good F & SF which is not defined as such but thought of as mainstream literary fiction. It seems that any writer who is good enough is claimed by the mainstream, leaving the second, third, fourth ... fifteenth rate writers on the genre shelf. (And then the mainstream establishment dismisses all genre fiction as trivial, poorly written rubbish - which most of it is, because of their grab.
)
Names:
Jeanette Winterson (top of my list because she is top of my list
and I will read anything she writes)
Aldous Huxley, George Orwell
Anthony Burgess
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ballard and Russell Hoban (both uneven)
Cormac MacCarthy (I really don't like
The Road but a lot of people do)
Borges, Calvino, Eco ...
Kim