A little list of the must-reads and lesser-known SF authors...

[drscott]

At the request of one of last night's dinner guests (a school principal), I went over my SF library for less-known classics, plus neglected and newer authors she might not have encountered but which I can recommend as worthy in some way, by quality of writing, characterization, or interesting ideas. I tend to like harder SF, so this list is skewed in that direction, but if something's really good, genre doesn't matter. And of course I'm leaving out more than I'm listing, but time flies...


Post-1970 classics one might have missed:

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

Orson Scott Card's Ender series.

Vernor Vinge.

Greg Bear, particularly Blood Music.

Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories, which while inhabiting a space-operatic framework are really masterful works of characterization. Her fantasy efforts are similarly character-grounded.

Dan Simmons, for both the Hyperion series and Ilium.

China Mieville, notably Perdido Street Station.

Alastair Reynolds.

Scottish post-socialists: Iain Banks (Excession) and Ken MacLeod.

Wil McCarthy: Bloom, The Collapsium series.

Walter Jon Williams: Aristoi, Metropolitan, the Dread Empire's Fall series.


Less well-known or new authors with a lot of promise:

John C. Wright, The Golden Age and sequels.

Charles Stross, aka autopope.

Karin Lowachee for Warchild and sequels, which are interestingly energetic adolescent novels.

Karen Traviss, notably for City of Pearl and sequels.

Kristine Smith, aka kaygo, who -- gasp! -- has no Wikipedia entry, for Code of Conduct and sequels.

Elizabeth Bear, aka matociquala.

Tony Daniel, for Metaplanetary.

Comments

[tmaher.livejournal.com]

Card's views on homosexuality aside, I could never get past the premise of Ender's Game. The B-plot with Ender's siblings came across as "using sock puppets on newsgroups to take over the world".

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

If you read it now (after net talk has half taken over politics) it probably loses any novelty, but at the time of publication it took some extrapolation from the babbling on Usenet to imagine the possibility. One of the themes of the book is that kids (at least special kids) can change the world (and have moral duties to try to do so) -- which is why it's so attractive to adolescents.