Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

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Foreword

TIME MOVES
on.

Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels: 1949-1984
, a book I wrote in 1984 and which was published in 1985, needed a sequel by now—and here it is. More than 25 years have gone by, and many hundreds of science-fiction novels and collections have continued to pour from the English-language presses (as well as those of other languages), so some guidance as to “the best” of the last quarter-century is surely required. Having been unable to keep up with all those new sf works myself, I am delighted that Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo have taken it upon themselves to do the job, and I am very happy to endorse their excellent book.

I have read fewer than half of the novels they describe here (after 1984, as editor of the magazine
Interzone
until 2004, my main sf reading consisted of short stories—thousands of them); but, judging from the works I do know, I feel confident that all the less-familiar choices in this book are sound. Damien Broderick’s and Paul Di Filippo’s qualifications for making those choices are second to none: both are creative science-fiction writers of many years’ standing, among the best of their time, and both have in addition written a good deal of stimulating criticism, including numerous sf book reviews. I actually included a novel by Damien in my hundred best of 27 years ago—
The Dreaming Dragons
(1980), which I described as “the best Australian science-fiction novel I know” (that sounds belittling in retrospect—the book was much more than that). It has since been revised and reissued as
The Dreaming
. Since then, Damien has written several more fine sf novels, of which perhaps
The White Abacus
(1997), a knottily speculative work, is the most successful.

Of course, it would not have been seemly for the authors to include any works of their own in this new hundred best, but perhaps I can compensate for that by mentioning not only Damien’s later novel, above, but also Paul’s humorous
Fuzzy Dice
(2003) and his manically inventive short-story and novella collections such as
The Steampunk Trilogy
(1995) and
Ribofunk
(1996), some of the contents of which I had the pleasure of first publishing in
Interzone
. At the time I wrote my book in the 1980s, Paul Di Filippo had published no novels or collections, but if I had been writing this follow-up volume now a number of Paul’s books, as well as several of Damien’s, would certainly have been strong contenders for inclusion.

As for the authors whose novels are described in the following hundred or so mini-essays, I am particularly pleased to see a large contingent of those whose early stories were first published in
Interzone
—among them, Stephen Baxter, Richard Calder, Greg Egan, Nicola Griffith, Simon Ings, Paul J. McAuley, Ian R. MacLeod, Alastair Reynolds, Geoff Ryman, and Charles Stross. I can vouch for all these writers as capable of first-rate work. And of course, many others with books discussed here are well-known names, some of them from the literary “mainstream”—Brian Aldiss, Margaret Atwood, the late J. G. Ballard, Iain Banks, Michael Chabon, Karen Joy Fowler, William Gibson, M. John Harrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, Cormac McCarthy, China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, Richard Powers, Christopher Priest, Philip Roth, the late Kurt Vonnegut, and more. It is a first-rate line-up, and those readers who follow all the recommendations will have months and years of good reading before them.

A century, and a millennium, have turned since I wrote my book. The world is different, but science fiction carries on vigorously, reflecting our times back to us in imaginative form—and Damien’s and Paul’s book celebrates that endeavor splendidly.

David Pringle
Selkirk, Scotland

Introduction

SCIENCE FICTION,
according to David Pringle’s excellent guide to the 100 best English-language sf novels in the period 1949-84, to which this volume is a kind of sequel, is “a form of fantastic fiction which exploits the imaginative perspectives of modern science.”

That’s true. But here’s a necessary caution: most science fiction, our favorite kind of story-telling and reading, has about as much to do with real science as chick lit has to do with poultry.

(For brevity, we’ll refer to science fiction as
sf,
rather than
sci-fi,
which is now standard journalistic parlance but, as Ursula K. Le Guin recently
remarked
, “as a term for the whole field it seems kind of
cheap
.”
[1]
)

Numerous other definitions have been suggested: sf as the literature of change, indeed of radical, disruptive, wondrous change; of cognitive estrangement or conceptual breakthrough; of drastic
difference
from the known, safe, everyday world; of suspended disbelief and dizzying spectacle. For most of us, sf is what we see on TV or in monstrously expensive and profitable movies: warring starships roaring in the vacuum of space, warriors and explorers plunging through wormholes to far stars, robots helpful or malign, parallel worlds, psychic clones, time machines carrying the unwary into the gulfs of the future or dangers of the past, or a hundred and one other locales beyond the known realities of our sometimes humdrum lives. All this is valid enough, but it is not the whole or deepest truth, especially of sf literature.

For sf, as Le Guin added, is not about the future, or space travel, not really. For all the legitimate or sham apparatus of science and technology deployed in these tales, they are not
about
science, by and large. Rather, for Le Guin, a very distinguished practitioner of the art, sf is a “metaphorical way of dealing with our current reality.”

The shorthand idiom
sf
is “basically a commercial term describing a certain genre of fiction.” That is, it’s more a marketing tool than a literary category like
drama
or
pastoral verse
. It is a label designed to guide purchasers or library readers to a stack of books (or movies, comics or TV shows) that share a certain common appeal.

But what is it about a
genre
that makes its appeal so reliable, so rewarding to merchants? Many readers with literary credentials disapprove of writing they dismiss as “genre”: romance, say, or thrillers, westerns, horror, science fiction. These kinds of storytelling they suppose to be intrinsically inferior and limited compared to their prized literature, otherwise known to scholars as “bourgeois realism,” or “psychological realism,” which is itself just another genre that can be sharp, brilliantly incisive, emotionally involving, or soggy, comfortable, and routine.

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