Believable Futures

[dr_tectonic]

After I made the comment in zalena's journal: "I loathe dystopic fiction. I'm much more interested in science fiction that extrapolates a world that is a place I could imagine inhabiting.", she requested that I recommend some that fits those criteria. I figured I would make a post of it. So I'm sitting here in the bedroom, and I'm just going to look over my shelves and comment on some of the books there.

Iain M. Banks -- any of the Culture novels I like these books a lot, though they can be a workout -- his writing is very dense, and he doesn't spoon-feed you anything. The Culture is all about what a post-scarcity world would be like. I totally believe that the future might look like this, and that would be fine. Excession is probably my favorite. I need more of them, but I want mass-market paperbacks (rather than trade paperbacks) and I shop used bookstores more often than new, so my collection is incomplete. Far future.

David Brin -- Uplift novels Pretty solidly in the "space adventure" category, with a very full and complex cosmos. Thousands of alien races, dozens of ways to get around Einstein, and so on. Characters with realistic psychology in a complicated, messy universe. His other stuff is good, too. Far future.

Lois McMaster Bujold -- Miles Vorkosigan novels Okay, so there's some sort of convoluted backstory to let the setting be vaguely 19th-century, socially, but the characters are all very real people, and the plots are great, and Miles Vorkosigan is a really fun character to read about. Plus, the other planets have very different cultures and there's a lot of exploration of the differences. Probably one of my favorite authors. Mid-future (near future tech, far future history).

Arthur C. Clarke -- Venus Rising series This is actually a bunch of old Clarke short stories reworked into a sort of sci-fi masonic conspiracy story arc. It's a little weird, but it's got a lot of good "bits" (the idea cores of the original shorts) and it's sorta cinematic. Been quite a while since I last read these, so take it with a grain of salt. The framing does a lot for taking concept-based sci-fi and making it feel surrounded by a world with some depth to it. Near future with lots of tech.

Michael Flynn -- In the Country of the Blind This is an interesting one. It's basically set "today", with the premise being that there's a secret group that has discovered the laws of history, and can accurately predict the future. It's not fantastic, but there are a lot of fun ideas that he follows through to their natural conclusions.

C.S. Friedman -- This Alien Shore This is a crazy complicated novel that feels believable to me because the world it depicts is different from ours on so many fronts -- and yet, so many things are still the same. I still can't decide whether it's complete with an ambiguous ending, or whether it's book 1 of a series.

The Wild Cards series -- George R.R. Martin, editor This series takes the existence of superheroes as a given (with a suitable sci-fi excuse) and then tries to make it as realistic as possible. Written by a bunch of authors who game together. Stop after you get to book 7; they go rapidly downhill after that one. Set day before yesterday in a world three steps to the left.

Anne McCaffrey -- Dragonriders of Pern books I don't know if I really find the world realistic or if I'm just being nostalgic because I like these books a lot. They're only technically science fiction, but there's a lot of action rediscovering lost science from the past and an overall modern mindset behind it. I never got through several of the later books; it's really the first trilogy that's the best.

H. Beam Piper -- Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens; William H. Tuning -- Fuzzy Bones Tuning's book was written before the posthumous discovery of Piper's third Fuzzy book; I think it's arguably better, but you can almost merge the two universes together. It's a future extrapolated far forward from the 50s (boy, do the characters smoke and drink a lot!) but along with some unconscious sexism and vacuum-tube computers it has a refreshingly sincere and uncynical optimism to it. The fuzzies are all about kawaii.

Kim Stanley Robinson -- Red/Green/Blue Mars This trilogy charts the colonization and terraforming of Mars from day after tomorrow to a few centuries into the future. With the way that things unfold, the politics and culture and individual personalities, they really feel like actual history that just hasn't happened yet. They made me feel like that's how it actually will happen, when we get around to it. I just wish that there had been any characters, at all, in the entire series, that would have acted even a little bit like normal sane people once in a while. (One of the points of the books is that normal people don't move to a hostile world, but still.) Very realistic characters -- I just wish I didn't want to smack them the whole time.

Melissa Scott -- Burning Bright, Dreamships, Trouble and Her Friends I first read these mostly because she has lots of queer characters that are queer as a matter of course, rather than as a defining trait. Her futures lean towards the gritty side of realistic, but there's a lot of richness to them and characters that are very human in their fallibility. Her worlds feel like they've got as much going on in them as the real world does. Burning Bright prominently features an entertainment recognizable as a descendant of tabletop RPGs, which is neat. She has a number of good fantasy novels as well, including an interesting fantasy-based spaceship trilogy. Various degrees of futureness.

Neal Stephenson -- Snow Crash (also Crypotonomicon, The Diamond Age, and, as "Stephen Bury", Interface) Snow Crash is one of my favorite books. It's fast and clever and funny and wacky, and it was the first cyberpunk novel to do something other than rip off Gibson -- not to mention the first with a sense of humor. I totally believe in his vision of the future because it is fully as crazy and stupid and peculiar as the real world. Be warned, Stephenson does have his failings -- he can't name his characters (the main character is "Hiro Protagonist", I shit you not), the scientific premise of the novel is totally broken, and the man cannot write endings -- his books just sort of come to a crashing halt about three pages after the action climaxes. But it's a great ride all the way through, and I love his writing. The Diamond Age is also very good, though set further in the future, far enough that the world is starting to get hard to understand, and the book has a very different tone. Cryptonomicon is good -- very late 90's, flashing back to WWII a lot. I haven't read the Baroque cycle, because it's freaking huge. Oh, and there's Zodiac, which is marginally sci-fi and mostly "eco-thriller" with lots of gonzo environmental science. Interface is a lot of fun, too; I think it was mostly written to bring the book, by simple and logical steps, to a situation straight off a tabloid headline, and to comment on what it would take to bring certain political eventualities to fruition. Stephenson is a lot of fun to read.

So that's a very particular slice through the books that I like. Maybe you'll find something new you like.

Comments

[bryree.livejournal.com]

I recently finished Snow Crash courtesy of the good (OK, fine... the evil) Dr. I enjoyed it and it was a fun read. I would second the ending comment (upon getting done: "Umm...ok, I guess it's over.") I think I would like to read other Stephenson, but I have a question: Are all of his books written from that strange 3rd-person-present-removed-tense position? (You like that? I just made it up.)

Explanation: There were times that I could get lost in the world of the book, and those were the wonderful moments. But then there were other times that I found myself being jerked out of the work by his writing style. The best I can come up with is that rather than feeling like I was reading a story, it felt as though I were reading the description of a story (and the fact that he mentions in the closing notes that it was originally conceived as a graphic novel seems to support this.) Hiro is running down the street. or Hiro begins talking to Raven followed by the dialog. [not actual examples - I am reflecting what it felt like as I read] I really found it awkward. Maybe it's my preference for past-tense 3rd omniscient; or maybe I'm just being poopy...

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

That's a Snow Crash thing. The other books are all written in normal novel-style past tense. Zodiac is first-person, the others third-person.

[bikerbearmark.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. Interesting list here, Dr. T.

I, on the other hand, have real problems with science fiction that is _not_ dystopic - the punk sensibilities I grew up with find a lot more resonance in a future that has at least as much struggle as my own day-to-day. And so, if I were to produce a similar list, it would be full of Philip K. Dick, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker ('kay, so Rucker is awfully upbeat for a cyberpunk author) and of course Bill Gibson.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's how I feel, too: I was certainly never a punk, but I'm still enough of a pessimist that when I read science fiction, it tends to be dystopic. The little bit of science fiction I still own is all John Brunner, Samuel Delany, and Philip K. Dick.

[Heck, when I read non-fiction, it's often dystopic, too; I'm almost through Robert Service's biography of Lenin, and will shortly start on his biography of Stalin...]

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

You'll probably like M. John Harrison's LIGHT, then (for all the reasons I didn't).

And Disch would probably be on your list, too.

[bikerbearmark.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendation! Just snagged the ebook from amazon.com.

[nehrlich.livejournal.com]

Heh. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that our tastes overlap so much. I'm not a huge fan of Banks, but I keep on trying his books because so many of my friends like him so much. I didn't like Red Mars, so I never got through the rest of that series. But everything else on your list that I've read I agree with. And you mentioned Wild Cards! Yay! I just re-skimmed the first five of those (where skimmed means I mostly read the Turtle, Captain Trips, and Brennan arcs, because, well, Turtle rocked, Trips was fun, and Brennan was just damn cool). I totally agree that stopping after seven is the way to go. After that, it just got weird. Although I was in a bookstore recently and saw that there was yet another new Wild Cards series which I don't have (not the Card Sharks series, another one). And I'm a compleatist. Dammit.

I like some of John Barnes's stuff, particularly Orbital Resonance as a very matter-of-fact description of the future from a teenager growing up in it.

I also really like John Brunner's stuff, but it's dystopian, so it doesn't fit the criteria.

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I didn't really like Red Mars so much as I found it really compelling...

There's one John Brunner book (The Crucible of Time) that I really like, but I haven't had as much luck with his other stuff. I need to get back in the habit of reading "maybe good" books from the library, rather than passing on them because I don't want to buy them. Then I could read more of his stuff and find the ones I like.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

He's got several upbeat as opposed to downbeat novels; however, The Sheep Look Up and Stand On Zanzibar are his best known, so most people think of him as solely dystopic.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Having read much of your list, I feel that these best represent the world, or a world, that i would like to live in. Arther C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter's The Light of Other Days is another non-dystopic world which I enjoy.

However, I find Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It to be a better semblance of the world in which i'm more likely to end up living. Or at least the type of world i'm more likely to end up living in if the far right continues to reign largely unchecked and insufficiently critiqued. I fear a world like like in Orwell's 1984 more now than I did 20 years ago. For that matter, were it not for 1984, i'd likely not be half as concerned about the current administrations practices and blatant abuses of power than i might be otherwise.

I guess it boils down to the fact that my inner cynic finds many of the dystopias to be a more likely outcome; or at least as likely an outcome. Those same dystopias help fuel and keep alive the goth punk that still burns darkly within me; not to mention fueling my inner activist into action. I also find the dystopias to be more thought-provoking. Though the non-dystopics fuel my hopes and dreams in ways that the dystopias never could.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I am a great believer in dreaming of a future worth having. If we can't imagine it, how can we achieve it? Sometimes I think the dystopic fantasies are the more believable simply because they are the easier path to take: it's easier to imagine the decay of things than the creation of something new.

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

If we can't imagine it, how can we achieve it?

Excellent point. On the other hand, what's the value of imagination coupled with inaction.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I like to think of it as "vision." Visionaries aren't always those capable of carrying out their visions, but they are capable of inspiring others. In the case of literature, the writing (not to mention the difficulty of pursuing publication, etc.) certainly counts as "action."

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Hm. I'm good at big picture, and convincing others to work out the nitty-gritty. You win. :D I concede what little point I had.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Iain M. Banks - I've read a bunch of his stuff, though not the ones you refer to. I can't understand what everyone likes about him. He's good, but I think a great deal of his popularity has to do with his being less available in the states. If they were publishing his novels with foil embossed covers and selling them in airports would geeks like them so much?

Lois McMaster Bujold -- You are about the fifth person to recommend this to me in about 2 weeks. I guess that means something.

Arthur C. Clarke - Problem with Clark is that his version of a good future and the evolution of the human race, often seems like a nightmare to me. Still, he is a thought provoking author.

Anne McCaffrey - I read these about the same time I read Le Guin (butterscotch!) and never really got into them.

Neal Stephenson - Definitely fun to read, but again I'm a little mystified by his popularity.

There's a lot in your list I have never heard of even once. Hurray! New titles to look for!

Thanks, S.

[toosuto.livejournal.com]

While looking for the Kim Stanely Robinson Mars series I stumbled across the Years of Rice and Salt. It was a nice alternative past/future book starting with the premise that Europe was wiped out by the plague. I _really_ need to find those Mars novels, they've been recommended multiple times to me.

[0nce-and-future.livejournal.com]

That's a good one - my favorite of KSR's though is "The Memory of Whiteness" it's about music and time, and has some of that predestination/free will dialogue going on it as well.

KSR is very utopian - but in the sense that utopias are the result of conscious effort by those who are willing to work for a better future - more about a fostering of freedom and creativity than about changing humanity into shiny happy people.

Also all of KSR's books seem to have a strong ecological thematic streak in them, so if that's part of your gig...

[dpolicar]

I find full-on dystopias pointless, but utopias inaccessible. My preference is for futures where things are better but human nature is still just as dangerous and perverse and brilliant and unrestrainable as in the world I live in.

And, not that you asked, but my thoughts on these books:

• Iain M. Banks (Culture) - Never got past page 50 of any of them.
  If you enjoy post-scarcity fiction, I recommend "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" by Cory Doctorow. The story depends on believing that humans aren't satisfiable... that even in a post-scarcity culture, people will manufacture something to struggle for and feel bad about not having... and if that assumption turns you off you might not enjoy the book. Even if you don't read it, I recommend reading the first chapter; it is brilliant and lyrical and the rest of the book never quite lives up to the promise of it.
  
• David Brin (Uplift) - I enjoyed the first trilogy as candy... I don't find the characters realistic so much as easily graspable (which real people aren't). I like his habit of deciding what is most interestingly different (from humans) about his aliens and hitting it from as many different angles as the story allows.
  The second trilogy was self-indulgent. It had good bits, and wasn't a bad story, but badly needed editing.
  You might enjoy "Earth". It suffers from an "oh dear I've run out of pages" ending, and indulges in frustrating sci-fi/fantasy slipperiness, but it's an interesting world with some interesting characters.
  
• Lois McMaster Bujold (Miles Vorkosigan) -- I love Miles; he is a hero for the 95-pound scrawny geek. I like Cordelia, one of the few characters in fiction I want as a friend. I enjoy Bujold's grasp of how sometimes you set something in motion and it gets away from you and you spend the rest of the book trying to steer it away from population centers, and come out looking like a hero. I like that she's allowed Miles to grow up and change. I find everything else in the books frankly dull.
  
• Arthur C. Clarke (Venus Rising) -- He didn't write these, actually. There are good bits, but oh my god the series was terrible.
  
• Michael Flynn (In the Country of the Blind) -- Never heard of it.
  
• C.S. Friedman (This Alien Shore) -- Never read it.
  
• The Wild Cards series -- I enjoyed the "what would it really be like?" element and some of the character concepts (Sleeper is an icon I still find meaningful).
  It turned me off when half the characters mutated into authorial masturbatory fantasies for no obvious reason.
  
• Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern) - Didn't care for it. But if you liked it, you might also enjoy the Crystal Singer series.
  
• H. Beam Piper (Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Sapiens) -- I love these books and have read them a zillion times; they should be popular children's stories the way things like Narnia are. I am more generally a huge Piper fan; if you find his anthologies floating around, buy them.
  
• Kim Stanley Robinson (Red/Green/Blue Mars) -- keep meaning to read these.
  
• Melissa Scott (Burning Bright, Dreamships, Trouble and Her Friends) -- I was handed Dreamships and the sequel 'cuz the characters were queer, to which I say "So what?" The exploration of incipient AI was interesting, though not taken far enough. You might also enjoy the "Fool's War" series.
  
• Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, Crypotonomicon, Diamond Age, Interface, Zodiac) -- Snow Crash was a lot of fun to read, but I don't find it at all believable as an image of the future... and, yes, he basically just rolls over and goes to sleep after the climax rather than actually ending the damned book. I enjoyed Diamond Age the second time through; the first time I kept expecting it to be a different book. The same might be true of Cryptonomicon but I refuse to test it, it took all my willpower not to throw it away when done. I enjoyed Interface and Zodiac a lot.
  

Incidentally, given what you're saying here, I think you would enjoy John Varley. His short fiction in particular, but also "Steel Beach" and maybe even "Golden Globe".

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

• David Brin's "Earth" is sitting on my Read-Me shelf at this moment.
  
• I think I would probably want Cordelia as a friend, too, though being around somebody that insightful would probably be a little bit terrifying, too.
  
• I should have mentioned that the Venus Prime books were written by someone else based on Clarke's content, even though it's his name on the covers. I thought that they might be much worse than I was remembering them; I'm sorry (but not real surprised) to hear that that's mostly true.
  
• Yeah, I think the Wild Cards books went really bad around book 9. I wonder if maybe the authors started to get tired of their characters?
  
• I did like the first Crystal Singer book; books two and three were kinda enh.
  
• Stephen Bury is apparently the pseudonym for Stephenson and his uncle. I keep looking for Bury's other novel, The Cobweb, to no avail.

Interesting. I read Varley's "Titan" and found it to be far too much a product of the 70's for my taste. I'll have to give some of his newer books a try. Thanks!

[dpolicar]

Yeah, the Gaea trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon) is very much a product of the pulp era.
That said, there's actually some very cool stuff in there, if you can get past the both-pointless-and-bloodless sex scenes and other pulp weirdness. It's also fun reading a young Varley start to experiment with the themes that he handles much more surely decades later. I do recommend it, but in much the same way I'd recommend Doc Smith or other classic SF.

All of that notwithstanding, do give Steel Beach a try. If you don't like it, you probably won't enjoy any of the rest of his stuff either. I'll try not to think less of you.

And the combination of terrifyingly insightful and reliably compassionate is something I crave in my friends.

'70's = 'pulp'?

[daddytodd.livejournal.com]

SF of the Seventies is not usually considered to be "pulp". The pulp era ended in the mid fifties when several rounds of price increases for pulp paper killed the plethora of SF magazines that emerged in the postwar years.

I've never before heard anything post-New Wave (roughly 1966-1975) referred to as "pulp."

In the Gaean Trilogy, Varley was actually updating, riffing (and commenting) on the conventions of earlier SF writers, much as Iain Banks, Stephen Baxter and the other writers of New Space Opera are deconstructing the conventions of an earlier era and creating something new out of familiar old tropes. Varley was actually one of the first writers of New (or "Postmodern") Space Opera.

Varley's short fiction is very good; his "Press Enter" is a brilliant little horror story.

Re: '70's = 'pulp'?

[dpolicar]

Thanks for the comment... what I had in my head was similar to what you are saying here, although I expressed it in a far more muddled and inaccurate way. You are absolutely correct, Varley himself is writing well after that era, though in the Gaean trilogy he is strongly engaged with the conventions of an earlier era. Thanks for the clarification.

Absolutely agreed about his short fiction, though I find it harder to get ahold of than his novels. (A once-friend permanently borrowed my copy of 'Blue Champagne' years ago, making me very sad.) "Press Enter" is lovely. "Persistence of Vision" and "The Pusher" are among the most beautiful short SF I've ever read. I enjoy pretty much all of his Lunar fiction, if only for the world. And the Manhattan Phone Book (abridged) should be required reading for anyone who actually enjoys post-apocalyptic SF.

Though... wait! Apparently many of these... and some I've never read!... were reprinted last year in the "John Varley Reader"! Yay! My day is good.

John Varley Reader

[daddytodd.livejournal.com]

It's available in trade paper for $5.99 from bookcloseouts.com. That's $10 off. Sweet!

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

Might I suggest Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic kingdom?

[dr-tectonic.livejournal.com]

I do believe you can! =)

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

Love the Fuzzy series; I only read the Tuning this year. I think the reason you prefer the Tuning is because it's obvious that Fuzzies and Other People was a "last draft" copy; it had yet to go through the editing process that would have gotten rid of some of the repeat info from previous books and tightened up the storyline.

I think it's fairly obvious that Piper was very concerned with the legal processes, and most of his books and novels either feature some police work or court scenes. (I use "concerned" in the "interested" sense.) Some of the books of his that I like are no longer in print; what a pity.

You might also try James Schmitz, whose stuff has recently been put back into print (with the help of a family friend!) His work is interesting in that it doesn't feel as old as it is: he created strong, believable female characters at a point when his contemporaries were using "female" as a plot twist ('She did all this, and she's FEMALE!') More to the point, he treated them as a given. It's pretty interesting that he noticed a lot of cliches and worked to eradicate them from his writing.

Asimov and Heinlein. Those should be obvious.

James Alan Gardner, who is very interesting in that he postulates a galaxy where there is only one rule— No traveling between systems by non-sapients, with "non-sapient" defined as someone who knowingly kills a sapient being. This is enforced by alien intelligences who basically a) know and b) enforce it the moment you cross the system line. This leads to some interesting plots, because nothing prevents larceny, slavery, or general ill-will, just murder, and even taking out murderers can lead to gaps in the ranks (though murderers are, by definition, non-sapient.) Quick and adventurous books.

Baxter can be good but can also be dense, so it's better to start on the short story end and see if you can stand him in small doses.

The Witches of Karres and More Fuzzies

[daddytodd.livejournal.com]

Schmitz is a favorite of my teenage years. "The Witches of Karres" is a particular favorite. His "Telzey Amberdon" stories are great, too.

In addition to Bill Tuning's "Fuzzy Bones," an additional "Fuzzy" sequel was written by Ardath Mayhar. "Golden Dream: A Fuzzy Odyssey" was publishd in 1982. It's also long out of print. Around the same time a children's storybook adaptation was done, based on "Little Fuzzy". "The Adventures of Little Fuzzy" had lots of beautiful full-color Michael Whelan illustrations. I used to have a copy, but I gave it to one of my nieces 10 or 15 years ago. I wish I still had it!

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

What? No Greg Bear?

Darwin's

[daddytodd.livejournal.com]

"Darwin's Radio" was brilliant, but "Darwin's Children" made me want to fling it across the room, as Bear abandoned rationality and injected fantasy (i.e., religion) into the narrative in a most distasteful fashion. A major disappointment.

Re: Darwin's

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

That's my problem with Greg Bear. He mixes his hard SF with odd tangential fantasy, often in the same book. Blood Music (the book) was a good example of this. It started as good hard SF and went off into la-la land later on.

When he's good, he's good. I'll heed your warning about Darwin's children and avoid buying it.

[desayunoencama.livejournal.com]

Have you read any Janet Kagan? Especially MIRABILE or her linguistic SF mystery HELLSPARK...