25 thoughts on “Big, Bold Science Fiction”

  2. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve only read “Armor” from that list. It is, however, one of my top five favorite SF novels. Hard to see it it as very optimistic, considering how dark, dark, dark it is all the way through, but it does end on a somewhat redeeming note.

    (Shameless plug: In the Shadow of Ares is now a finalist for the Prometheus Award…how’s that for libertarian science fiction?)

  3. Back in the 60’s and 70’s British SF seemed to be dark, dreary, and distopian (not uniformly, but much more so than US SF). Kind of what you’d expect from a country whose authors had no real hope for the future.

    1. Then in the 90s British SF seemed to be taken over by Scottish Marxists, which was about when I stopped reading it…

      The good news is that now Amazon has broken the publishers’ stranglehold authors are self-publishing all those books they rejected. In February about 60% of the top 100 best-selling SF e-books on Amazon were self-published, which seems to indicate that there’s a big SF market that publishers haven’t been filling for the last few years.
      .

  4. Live Free or Die by John Ringo. There’s bold. Not a fan of NASA -or Boeing there.

    The Warrior’s Apprentice -is- the first-written of a large collection of books my Lois McMaster Bujold, but it definitely isn’t her best written one. Cordelia’s Honor is an alternate starting place, and it sets everything up admirably.

  5. Assuming they are available, I may have to invest in a kindle.

    Visionaries have always been a minority. We have definitely gone from a can do society to a can’t do society where even great accomplishments are disdained.

    Do you remember your dad fixing an old vacuum tube TV by taking tubes from an expensive console set to a tester at the grocery store? Can you imagine anybody doing that today? We landed on the moon with vacuum tubes.

    This is why we need frontiers.

    I am absolutely horrified when I see a spacesuit that costs millions of dollars. If that’s all we can do, we ain’t goin’ anywhere.

    I believe people could live on mars in luxury using gaslight technology. Mars has all the resources for huge industry. Technology is not the problem.

    I dare anyone to stand at the foot of the Brooklyn bridge completed in 1883 and tell me what we can’t do. You have to stay there and suffer the awful fish smell until you get it.

  6. I’m an avid consumer of Sci-fi and I’ve never even been tempted to read most of the books on that list. I tried I,Robot but couldn’t get past the second chapter. Asimov just never did it for me. I much prefer Drake, Weber, Stirling, or Moon.

      1. Yes, this is too bad. However, for a while the only missing piece has been the lander which SpaceX has since announced. We will be able to get there. Once there the potential to thrive is just a matter of attitude (and oversupplying them to give them a good start.)

        1. I, too, am excited about the SpaceX Dragon. However, despite its revolutionary low cost, it’s not going to expand access to space as far as the average Joe is concerned. What we need is the spacegoing equivalent of a Conestoga wagon — a simple, user-maintainable, and affordable vehicle capable of carrying a settler, his family, supplies, and tools to the “new territories”. We need a spaceship that an ordinary, middle-class person could buy and fly without needing extensive launch infrastructure, high-tech materials and facilities, and government permission.

          That being said, Dragon is indeed an exciting technology, and I look forward to seeing what the system can do.

          1. It’s not the wagon, it’s the financing.

            The technology will get there. A mars lander was the only missing piece and Dragon will soon be that. The Conestoga wagon already exists. That’s just a reusable ship, today with chemical propulsion but later with something more economical. A used BA330 in orbit will sell for much less than the $200m required to put it in LEO today… and it comes with an interplanetary engine (the upper stage that got it there.) Go to a car lot. $30k cars go for $15k to $20k after two years. The same will happen once a few BA330 go to orbit. Same for the BA2100 although we’re talking the luxury model in that case.

            Real estate, both developed and undeveloped, is an asset that can secure financing (assuming the numbers can be made to work.) The shortage will be labor, the land is abundant. While Rand’s paper outlines a lot of the issues; the smart move is going to be those that just take the initiative and ignore the bickering. SpaceX and others are doing their part. Rand is doing his. Now we just need a lawyer and banker to figure out the missing piece.

  9. Have Space-Suit Will Travel has been one of my Top 10 books (not just SF, but all books) ever since I read it at age 12; I reread it a few years ago and it held up extremely well. Reynolds should have put The Moon is a Harsh Mistress on the list though, and also Cryptonomicon – both have a major libertarian message, as well as being great reads.

  10. Big, bold, recent SF? Try the series by David Drake starting with “Mutineer’s Moon”. I won’t spoil the surprises, but this is on a truly vast scale.

    Another one with events on an even larger scale is “A Fire Upon the Deep” by Vernor Vinge.

  11. Slightly off topic, but for Firefly fans, the DVD of the complete TV series (plus extras) is on sale at Amazon for $23.49.

  12. I would recommend Ben Bova’s Grand Tour series which focuses on how space entrepreneurs fight government bureaucrats to open up the Solar System to save Earth via the economic development and settlement of the Solar System, starting with Powersats and expanding to the settlement of the Moon, Asteroids and Saturn. BTW, their opponents, the New Morality, who take over several governments including the U.S., sound a lot like the Republican Religious Right in their social policies, attacks on science and denial of climate change (at least until it hits…) Hmmm, maybe that’s why its not on the list 🙂

    But I think its as good as any of the classic Robert Heinlein series especially in showing what a real Libertarian approach to space settlement would look like…

  13. Heinlein’s “Red Planet” saved my life!

    Until I was in 3rd Grade, I hated, hated, HATED reading. I took the attitude that I was NO having fun with Dick and Jane. Then one fateful day, we went to the school library, I was sitting off to myself, not intending to get a book, the Librarian asked me if I liked watching the astronauts on TV.

    “…well then, would you like to read a book about about a boy who LIVES ON MARS?”

    Almost 50 years later I attribute the grand majority of my knowledge to reading, on my own, outside any (%$*$@) instructor guided classroom. But if it wasn’t for that lady sticking that book in my then still ignorant hand, I’d be dumb as a post.

    Or worse still, my parents could have talked me into going to college and I’d be a dumb as a post liberal now!

    I agree with the article and the state of science fiction now. But I wonder if it’s not as much about people’s interest in science. Any time I try to have a conversation about any scientific topic, most everyone is either NOT interested at all in ‘that’ or they wonder about the ‘side effects’.

    I think that’s because of the negative spin the MSM puts on all science stories. It’s almost like reading about science from a Middle Ages Church Bulletin.

    “..science is the devil, the devil is science!”

    The other issue is how much honest to Pete science fiction is out there. The ‘Science Fiction’ area of most book stores is mostly sword & sorcery or fantasy cr@p. I remember where I saw the first Harry Potter book I ever laid eyes on. In the Sci Fi sections, of Borders, and then local single store book seller, in the same morning. It seems like there are 10 sword & sorcery or fantasy books for every science fiction book on the shelf in the book stores also.

    And many book stores don’t even carry Asimov, Clarke, or Heinlein any more. I wonder if people don’t get to new science fiction because they don’t have the basics. I had to dig around last Christmas looking for some Jules Verne and H.G. Wells for my grandson. I never did find any newly printed books. I had to hit a used book store to get what I wanted.

    With no classic science fiction, and no beginnings of science fiction to draw on, I guess most people now don’t get into it at all. And if it doesn’t sell, the publishers don’t print it which means less to sell, which means less to sell, which merans…it’s a vicious circle.
    .
    .

    That was a very good list too. I’ve read most of them, and the ones I haven’t will soon o on my newest toy, my Kindle. John Steakley’s ‘Armor’ is top notch. I got a kick out of the cover on ‘Temporary Duty’, any old sailor should. I guess even the Space Navy will have decks that need swabbing.

  14. If you want good, modern SF, the bookstore is the last place to seek it. Almost all SF on the shelves today is unreadable. From elfie-welfie fantasy crap to teen steam vampire stories, from jut-jawed Ayn Rand pontification to Space Marxism that reads like something published by the Soviet Bureau of Proletarian Scientific Fiction, from closeted macho-man-in-space-helmet mash notes to crop-topped, hairy-legged feminist agitprop, the mainstream SF world is a vast wasteland. Even the formerly-readable genre of military SF has become a depressing sump of hackneyed, fanzine-quality schlock, complete with Mary Sue/Marty Stu cardboard heroes, big-breasted lady space fighter jock secondary characters, bad-guy aliens of the Bumpy Latex Forehead school, and the obligatory pages of RPG-manual-style infodump exposition. (“As he lifted his fork, Zantar mused that the ship’s Dinglehoffer Drive, which had been invented 453 standard years ago on Folliculus 12 by Radmar Knackwurst, had the additional property of enhancing testosterone levels in Earth-normal humales…” Eight paragraphs of exposition later Zantar puts the fork in his mouth.)

    And as for optimism, the same genre that once offered us flying cars and moon domes now posits as its Happy Tomorrow a world in which everybody is uploaded into a digital dreamland, a future utopia of Singularitzed video game nerds playing with themselves for all eternity. No wonder the elfie-welfie crap and vampire dreck has come back into fashion. At least there are human beings in those stories. What emotionally sane human being fantasizes about living in some Kurzweilian nightmare of human extinction?

    Tired tropes, propaganda, technofetishism, and chicks with swords. Filter all this through the adolescent sensibilities of the average SF editor and add in the politically correct/market-driven content requirements of the publishers, and you get… well, crap.

    The real excitement in SF is on Amazon. Self-published SF, both e-book and paper, is the new frontier of science fiction, the place where challenging (unpublishable) ideas and fresh (non-mainstream) points of view inform the content of the stories. Tales that could never run the gauntlet of Big SF’s editorial/financial apparatus due to their “racism”, “sexism”, “heteronomity”, “jingoism”, and other verboten qualities appear daily from author-publishers around the world. Combine the thrill of uncensored point-of-view with the raw energy of amateur authors and you have the literary equivalent of late ’70s garage punk.

    A lot of self-published SF is crap, of course, but at least it’s an interesting and different flavor of crap. Anything is better than the formulaic gruel served up by today’s moribund mainstream SF publishing industry.

    Note: While I am a published author, my book is strictly nonfiction. I have no axe to grind regarding the SF biz. My opinions are based solely upon my experience as a reader of SF.

  15. Some big bold science fiction:
    http://project-apollo.net/mos/ (a little to the (non-coercive) left of what people here might like, but very very good)

    http://techfox.comicgenesis.com/ (romance, engineers, mega-projects, some of which in spaace)

    http://freefall.purrsia.com/

    1. These are all labors of love and free.
    2. These are all self published.

    I’ve noticed that even though sturgeon’s law applies to the vibrant world of internet webcomics and stories, these are also the only places to go for contemporary stories that have any uplifting positive outlook on the future.

    PS – I *need* to bang out some storylines of my own. If this wasteland is my competition, maybe I *can* make it in writing on the side. 😛 And bold stories need to be told, desperately. As Howard Taylor resaid (IIRC) about starting Schlock mercenary: “no one was writing stories I wanted to read”

  16. That’s another thing about the half-underground world of web-self-publishing. There’s art. There’s music. There’s more stories (most of the good ones in graphic-novel format) than you could possibly keep up with with a full time job. It’s amazingly vibrant, so much so that it makes Borders look like a Soviet potemkin town. I think online and self-published is where the action’s at these days.

  17. And, through comments sections and forums, the authors engage in a sort of running conversation with their fans as they produce their work. If they’re *really* popular, the fans join in. That too is very interesting, and couldn’t exist with traditional media.

Comments are closed.