Inspired by
this comment on my post a few days back, well... this post isn't going to be about my own writing, but the writings of others.
I've been a sci-fi fan since childhood; it wasn't what you'd call standard fare in my home, but watching
Star Trek (dubbed into German, so I knew it as
Raumschiff Enterprise) and the anime series of
Captain Future gave me a keen appetite for rayguns and fancy spaceships. At the time, however, I didn't actually
read science fiction. That came later.
The first sci-fi novel I bought was the book adaptation of
Star Trek III: The Search For Spock; we were visiting London that summer of '84, the film was opening in theatres, and I begged my mother to let's go see it. She refused (she has always considered
Star Trek childish). I then resolutely bought a copy of the book. Never mind that my mother thought I was wasting my money, and that the book would, in terms of language, be too advanced for me to comprehend (it was, at first, but I persevered and gleaned a bit more understanding with each reading). I might add that now, twenty-four years on, I still have that copy of the book. So, waste of money? I think not.
I think that became my introduction to 'adult' science fiction. The author was Vonda McIntyre, and it turned out the local library actually had a Danish translation of one of her other books,
Dreamsnake. I read it. And was none too impressed, to tell the truth. After all, that story doesn't have a lot of rayguns or spaceships in it.
But having discovered that there
was such a thing as adult science fiction, I began exploring it. Our local small-town school library did actually stock a good number of classics (in Danish, of course, but back then I wasn't a very proficient English reader) by such chaps as Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon, Dick... At roughly the same time a couple of publishers were aiming to translate and publish a number of more recent sci-fi novels by authors like Julian May, Larry Niven, Douglas Adams (yes, that was my first encounter with
Hitchhiker), and Brian Aldiss'
Helliconia cycle, and of course a few years later a certain William Gibson coined the term
cyberpunk for the entire world to read about.
I've not been true and ever faithful to the genre. I've strayed into horror (mainly Stephen King), I've explored some of Clive Barker's dark-fantastic worlds (
Imajica is absolutely fabulous, by the way) and China Miéville's wonderful steampunk-fantasy New Crobuzon novels, as well as Neil Gaiman's rather more humourous takes on the world-right-next-to-this-one; I've read Terry Pratchett's
Discworld series ragged, as well as
Harry Potter, and having grown up in a home where the bookshelves contained a good number of Agatha Christies I've also kept in touch with the crime genre (although Christie has long since lost her allure - these days if I want classic British crime fiction I'll go for Dorothy L. Sayers or, for the more modern touch, Reginald Hill or Val McDermid). But I keep returning to science fiction like an old, old friend. It's a love affair I doubt I'll ever outgrow.
Eleven days ago Arthur C. Clarke, one of the greats of science fiction, passed away. And while it's true that most of the old ones are gone now - I was actually surprised, a few months ago, when I came across a recent Brian Aldiss (Super State from 2002) and realised that he might still be alive (he is, but given that he's past eighty, for how long?). Embarrassingly for me, I'd assumed, insofar as I thought about it, that he was long gone - I don't believe that this means the science fiction genre is dying too. It may have changed - in a day and age which brings almost-daily leaps forward in science and technology, when the world is constantly changing and the fantastic seems to be at our fingertips, it becomes hard to imagine the impact a technological advance would have on a more static society - but there are still fantasts out there, still thinkers pushing hard at the boundaries of the imagination. And some of them create marvellous visions.
SF, as Peter F Hamilton once put it (though he may have been quoting somebody else) is not about prediction. This, I think, is true. It's about speculation. And yes, the S in SF does stand for science. But who says it has to be science as in technology? There are such things as social science and political science, and I personally find that speculating on human evolution in those terms can be as fascinating as - and possibly even more frightening than - wondering whether we'll ever get out of the solar system or learn to travel in time. After all we live in a day and age when there are people with the wherewithal to wipe out more or less all life on the planet who, under normal circumstances, you wouldn't trust with so much as a rubber knife. And if this is where we're at now, what will the world look like in a hundred years' time? In fifty? In ten?
Okay, what I really wanted to do with this post was list my favourite contemporary science fiction writers. I've not exactly done that yet. So here goes:
My current (that is to say roughly since I found out he existed a year and a half ago) Science Fiction Overlord is Charlie Stross. Although to call him a mere science fiction writer is a bit like calling Leonardo da Vinci 'a guy who painted a bit'. He's more of a science fiction-dimension shifting fantasy-Lovecraftian horror-British spy thriller-h4x0r lore-Singularity-infowar technology writer. With a wicked sense of humour.
The second in my personal top-three has to be Peter F Hamilton. It was the chance picking-up of The Reality Dysfunction six years ago that convinced me science fiction was very much alive and kicking. And the Night's Dawn trilogy (of which the aforementioned is Book One) remains my favourite of his works, at least pending the conclusion of his ongoing Void trilogy (you reading this, Peter? Then quit surfing the blogosphere and get back to work! ;-)).
Last - but that's not to say least - comes Richard K Morgan. His Takeshi Kovacs-stories are fairly straightforward noir-esque space opera, and the gun-for-hire-with-a-conscience character could be easily transplanted into many other genres, true, but I still say there are more layers to the stories. And if you're not convinced, read his Market Forces instead. And then take a good look at the business world of today and tell me that's not a future we could very well be headed for.
That's not to say there aren't others out there. If those three don't really float your boat, you could do worse than try Neal Asher (whose Cowl is a marvellous re-introduction of the time-travel concept), Alastair Reynolds (although he's a bit long-winded for my taste), or Kevin J Anderson (I really need to catch up on the Saga of Seven Suns, even if I do find it a bit repetitive). And those are just the ones off the top of my head.
There are countless possible futures out there.
