Classic Science Fiction

[Holly]

I felt my mind really change when I read 'Enders Game' by Orson Scott Card. It wasn't until I started exploring the genre deeper that I realised how amazingly awesome it is!

HG Wells completely blew my mind. I read The War of the Worlds first, and while I actually prefer Day of the Triffids, I love how a lot of the science stuff he wrote about actually became true! If anyone's read the book but hasn't listened to the radio show: do it. It's seriously awesome and can fill a 2 hour gap in a car journey!

The Time Machine, for me, is pure genius. Aside from being a complete and utter bookworm, I have a love for sociology. So when I started The Time Machine, thinking it was a simple science- fiction novel, I was blown away when I realised it was essentially HG Wells' response to Marl Marx' societal writings 50 years earlier. The concept of humans turning into two completely different species due to the class divide fascinated me. It's extreme, yes, but in Wells' day, the class divide was far more prominent than it is nowadays. And you know the best thing? I can actually mention it in my sociology exam...

That's my classic science-fiction rave over. Sorry about that, kind of got immersed in the awesomeness... What do you think of the genre? :)

[Michael]

I don't know how you define classic and modern classic; for me I call books released in the 20th century modern classics. Having said that I haven't read many classic Sci-Fi novels but recommend modern classics like;

The Day of the Triffids (obviously)
Slaughterhouse-Five (while I hated it at the time of reading it, after finishing it was a different story. So much to think about and now I would call it a favourite)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (A political/sci-fi masterpiece)

[Malcolm]

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley is remarkable for its age. This is science fiction with regards to medicine.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde by R. L. Stevenson

[Terry]

I really love Jules Verne. What truely amazes me is that when you read these books and he describes this technology, it is what we have today. He wrote these books more than a hundred years ago. Long before the technology was being developed. Amazing mind.

[Roderick]

I just read "I, Robot" for the first time last month. It's really a collection of short stories, but I loved it. Asimov was ahead of his time as well.

[LauraT]

Roderick wrote: "I just read "I, Robot" for the first time last month. It's really a collection of short stories, but I loved it. Asimov was ahead of his time as well."

It on my TBR since ages ago ....

[Werner]

I've read five of Verne's novels (one, Around the World in Eighty Days, isn't really science fiction, and the SF elements in The Mysterious Island aren't very significant). For me, their quality is a mixed bag; my favorite is Journey to the Center of the Earth. One thing to remember, though, is that Verne was VERY poorly served by the English translators and Anglo-American publishing companies of his day. International copyright didn't exist in his day; translators and publishers could essentially steal foreign-language works and use them however they chose. What they chose to do in his case, very often, was treat his text very cavalierly, deleting whole passages they considered boring (which often included his most solid scientific content, and more serious philosophical reflections), change aspects of his plots, rewrite description and dialogue, and even change the names of characters --Prof. Lidenbrock in Journey to the Center of the Earth, for instance, became Prof. Hardwegg in the version I read! Being the oldest English translations, these are often the "standards" that are most apt to be in libraries; and being in the public domain now, they're also the cheapest for publishers to reprint. So it's a good idea, if you're serious about wanting to read what Verne really wrote, to check the copyright date of the translation. The 20th-century ones, especially those put out by university presses such as the Univ. of Nebraska Press' Bison Press imprint, are more apt to stick faithfully to the French originals.

Verne and Wells exemplify sharply different approaches to the genre, which developed into two opposing camps in the 20th century. Verne's approach, which became known as "hard" SF and was the dominant school of the American pulps in the "Golden Age," insisted on accurate science, or plausible extrapolation from known science, as a basis for its tales. Wells personified what came to be called "soft" SF, where "science" is invoked as the all-purpose explanation for the premises, but there's actually no attempt to ground them in real science; the author just posits whatever he/she needs for the story and goes with it. The contrast between Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and 'Round the Moon vs. Wells' The First Men in the Moon is a good example of the difference. To get his explorers into space, Verne extrapolates from existing technology to posit a giant cannon blasting a ship into space (and does a lot of math to calculate necessary velocity to escape Earth's gravitational field, etc.). Wells, on the other hand, just posits the discovery of a substance (with absolutely no basis in actual science, then or now!) that will cancel out the effects of gravity. Not surprisingly, SF writers of the Verne school have tended to be the best at actual prediction of future technological developments (uncannily prescient, in some cases!). "Soft" SF writers, on the other hand, because they concentrate more on people than on hardware, often produce tales with more human interest, and more of a tendency to speculate about philosophical, social and even spiritual issues.

[Werner]

Willliam Morris' News from Nowhere (1889) is sociological science fiction of a particular sort, the Utopian strand, which concentrates on depicting human socio-economic and political arrangements that the writer thinks would be better than the current ones. This tradition got its start (and its name) at the very dawn of SF back in the 1500s, with Sir Thomas More's Utopia. (That's Latin for "no place" or "nowhere;" Morris' title deliberately alludes to it.)

A devout Roman Catholic, More didn't actually believe that fallen humanity could achieve social perfection in this world, though he thought a lot of improvement was possible compared to Tudor England. (His commonwealth, set in the unexplored wilds of the New World, also is necessarily without exposure to Christian revelation; so it represents, in his view, the best of what purely human reason and conscience can achieve apart from special revelation.)

Utopian fiction flowered in the late 1800s, mostly influenced by Socialism; but the writers of that era, like Morris, were much more optimistic about the possibility of social perfection in a heaven on earth. They didn't view human nature as essentially fallen, and expected education and social engineering to perfect it. (That view lost a lot of ground, at least in popular literature, after World War I.) I've tried to read News from Nowhere (I couldn't finish it, because I personally found it too boring and naive); but IMO, the best of the Utopian novels is William Dean Howells' A Traveler from Altruria (1894).

Just as "hard" SF has its exact opposite tradition, so too does the Utopian vision; it was countered early on by the dystopian strand of social SF. The writers of this camp saw very real possibilities that human society could wind up as hell on earth rather than heaven; and many of them thought the chimera of Utopian Socialism was more apt to produce the former. The great works of this tradition, of course, are the modern classics (in chronological order) Zamiatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, and Orwell's 1984. But their works had earlier precursors, such as Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World (1907).

[Bionic Jean]

What a couple of very interesting posts Werner! Last first - I have immediately added Lord of the World to my TBR shelf, never having heard of it. It sounds fascinating. I have a liking for both dystopian and utopian fiction, but only yesterday removed that fact from my profile, as I despair of the plethora of so-so books which purport to be "dystopian".

Unlike you, I do like News from Nowhere . I am quite willing to concede however that I may have given it a lot of leeway, as I admire the author William Morris so - his life, his Art and his early sociological views.

Most of all though, thank you for the information on Jules Verne . This is an author whose ideas I have long admired, and novels such as "Paris in the Twentieth Century" (which does not seem to be on Goodreads) is extremely prescient, in the way that the great H.G. Wells was in his SF works. However, when I read Journey to the Center of the Earth I was shocked at how poorly written it was. It did cross my mind that this could be due to the translation, but I never followed it up. Clearly it is time for me to give this author another chance - paying due attention to the translator this time :)

[Werner]

Jean, I see you haven't listed Morris' best-known writings in the fantasy genre on your shelves. I really liked his The Wood Beyond the World (my review is here: www.goodreads.com/review/show/18369161 ), and have his The Well at the World's End on my to-read shelf. You might also like his short story "The Folk of the Mountain Door," which is included in Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.

Although I skimmed some of it years ago, I've never actually had a chance to sit down and read Lord of the World myself (it's also on my to-read list). I'll be interested in your take on it! Was the professor's name Hardwegg, in the version of Journey to the Center of the Earth that you read? If so, that was definitely one of the more butchered translations! (I need to read one of the modern ones sometime.)

[Bionic Jean]

Yes, I have read those two novels, Werner, but it was such a long time ago that I haven't got around to adding them! (I add historically in reverse order - except for some that really stand out.) I probably read them in between 1971 and 1973 - round about when Ballantine issued a series of Fantasy Classics such as Lud-in-the-Mist The Worm Ouroboros The King of Elfland's Daughter and Phantastes - most of which are vague memories in my mind now! I will try to date and add them, but probably cannot even rate fairly never mind review! (I'll happily hop over and look at yours though :) )

I don't know of the short story, but the character of Hardwegg may ring a bell - not sure...

I have been meaning to recommend a book to you - a sequel to H.G. Wells 's The Time Machine. It's The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter . He's an SF author in his own right of course, but I think he captures H.G.Wells's voice very well with this book. I'm finding it very enjoyable - (the only reason it's taking such a long time is because it's audio!) And what you may particularly appreciate is that it is considerably more in the "hard" SF mould than the "soft".

[Amber]

All I've read is anthem and that was pretty good.

[Werner]

Jean, thanks for the recommendation; I've added The Time Ships to my "maybe to read" shelf! (I've read one or two of Baxter's short stories, I think; but I'm not sure which ones, without looking through my reviews of anthologies.) Actually, I'm more of a fan of "soft" rather than hard SF, though I can appreciate both. (I'm also a skeptic of a great deal of modern quantum physics, though admittedly I haven't studied it much; so I think contemporary "hard" SF that's based on it may actually be quite a bit "softer" than the authors imagine that it is. :-) As a literary conceit for justifying time travel and alternate world scenarios, though, quantum physics can come in pretty handy to an SF writer!)

[Bionic Jean]

Oh there's plenty of that in The Time Ships . But I actually prefer the "soft" sort too in general :)

[Beth]

I loved The Time Machine too. It's beautifully written. I read the audio version from LibriVox.Org. The narrator was very good. I haven't had a chance to read anything else by Wells though.

My other favorite sf books are more recent (not contemporary, but post-1950 at least).

Some classic sf and fantasy writers that have disappointed me -
James Branch Cabell - Neil Gaiman loves him and I thought I would too, but I tried reading Jurgen and found it pretty tedious. I don't mind archaic language. I've read and loved The Odyssey, Beowulf: A New Verse Translation, The King of Elfland's Daughter and The Silmarillion. There's something else that bugs me about Cabell - maybe it's his frivolity? But I like Lewis Carroll, who is pretty silly. So I'm not sure.

E.R. Eddison - GR has recommended Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros to me based on a bunch of other books I've read: The King of Elfland's Daughter, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Gormenghast Novels and Lud-in-the-Mist. But even though I like these other books, I can't get into Eddison's prose style at all.

[Werner]

Beth wrote: GR has recommended Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros to me based on a bunch of other books I've read..." Alas, Beth, Goodreads' "recommendations" can't be taken seriously. They once recommended Brigadoon to me "because you liked Frankenstein" (no, I'm not kidding :-( ) My theory is that Amazon wants them to do the "recommendations" on the chance that it might sell a few extra books here and there (regardless of whether or not the purchasers turn out to actually like them); but they certainly don't want to pay a staff person to actually study people's shelves, reviews and posts, etc. to get a genuine feel for their real tastes; so I'm guessing that they run some kind of robo-program to automatically match a few key words in one book description to the same words in other descriptions.

[Beth]

Werner wrote: "Beth wrote: GR has recommended Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros to me based on a bunch of other books I've read..." Alas, Beth, Goodreads' "recommendations" can't be taken seriously. They once recomm..."

Well, sometimes their recommendations work pretty well. Other times they're just odd.

[Werner]

Beth wrote: "Well, sometimes their recommendations work pretty well." True --even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. :-) And even if they're using a robo-program that, for instance, just matches the tag "fantasy" or "science fiction" to the same tag in other books, chances are that at least some of those others will prove to be books you'll like. I've never added a book to my to-read shelf based on the recommendations --it's already bloated enough!-- but I do sometimes check one out if I'm intrigued by the cover, and they're sometimes things I might like. (And then there are the recommendations of books I've already read, or posted to the to-read shelf; they also apparently don't cross-check for that very carefully)!