Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  Science fiction is the tool that allows us to master such change. From birth in its modern genre form in the pages of 1926’s Amazing Stories, through its nurturing and refinement by a small coterie of true believers through the middle of the twentieth century, and on to its gradual world domination starting with, oh, let us say, Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, science fiction has offered a cognitive toolkit in easy-to-assimilate, entertaining form that allows us to get mentally comfortable with the notion of change and its most radical effects before we are hit with the reality of it upside the collective head. Science fiction is the one type of literature that promotes, to use the phrase pioneered by the bloggers at Boing Boing (try explaining the concept of “blog” to a citizen of 1985!), the creation of “happy mutants.” It’s the literature of cultural Darwinism, the sieve through which we pan for ideational gold.

  Our selections in this volume, if we have done our job well, will illustrate not only the immense changes of the past two-and-a-half decades, but also sf’s vast reach and power, which of course we will need even more in the wild quarter century ahead!

  One caution: Although our title promises a survey of the 101 best science fiction novels in English since Pringle’s volume, we can’t guarantee that any single reader will agree that our tally really is the best. After all, the annual Hugo and Nebula and Clarke and Locus and Campbell and Ditmar and other awards for the best sf novel of the year do not always concur—indeed, it is a rare distinction for any book to gain as many as two of these prestigious prizes. There are many celebrated and perhaps bestselling authors we might have included, and we would have done so if we’d had room for another hundred titles. Certainly we are not dismissing this abundance of enjoyable riches.

  What we can promise you is that the novels we discuss are among the most significant works of science fiction from the last quarter century, books that reward careful reading while providing pleasure, amusement, novelty, wonderment. If you read all or even many of these good novels, you’ll slowly realize that science fiction is not just a genre but is indeed a mode of storytelling. Most other genres are restricted in their subject matter, their focus, their typical ways of using words to invite readers into their familiar worlds. Crime fiction and thrillers, romances, westerns, tales of vampires or zombies—all offer niches, however various and ingeniously developed, within which the reader knows pretty much what to expect. Some franchise sf is like that too, but the best sf breaks through genre boundaries and tells stories that can borrow their subject matter and manner from any of the existing genres, while pushing them into new territories never before visited.

  The science fiction mode has experienced large scale convulsions since it emerged a century or more ago, and especially since its advent as a commercial pulp form in the 1920s. If we regard the earlier work—by Mary Shelley, Verne, Wells, many others—as not yet visibly genrefied, it’s apparent that science fiction’s history has passed through several “waves” since the ’20s The first pulp fiction age ended when John W. Campbell assumed editorship of Astounding in 1939, and the famous Golden Age storytellers emerged: Isaac Asimov, Leigh Brackett, Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore, A. E. van Vogt. Call that the Second Wave, extending into the discovery of the “soft sciences” in the 1950s. A Third Wave flooded over the field in the 1960s with a newly refined, often poetic, literary flavor and political concerns typical of the sixties (but foreshadowed in the previous decade by Theodore Sturgeon, Edgar Pangborn, and others). This Third Wave included the so-called “New Wave” but exceeded it, with pivotal work by Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Norman Spinrad, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, a host more.

  In the 1970s, that upheaval was already history and sf entered a period of consolidation, blending its traditional excitement with more self-aware literary aspirations. At the end of David Pringle’s catchment area in 1984, cyberpunk came and went like a lurid flower, followed by the New Space Opera and the New Weird as a Fourth Wave carried sf on its flood tide into the new millennium. In the decade or so since the century’s turn, sf has made its extraordinary impact in music, movies and even “literary fiction” (though seldom acknowledged as such). There are hints already that we stand at the frothing edge of a newer Wave. Nobody is quite certain where sf is headed, or what form some Fifth Wave will take. Is the age of the book finally over? Will reading shift from paper to Kindles and Nooks and snazzier forms of portable electronic platforms, sheets of e-paper you can jam in your pocket, beams of light shone straight onto your retina, waves of information borne directly to your brain via wifi or quantum entanglement? Already much of the best short sf is released online, usually in free venues supported as loss-leaders by traditional publishers, or funded by ads. An e-future would not spell the death of sf novels, of course, any more than the passing of pulp magazines with their monthly serials and the rise of paperback originals meant that sf was extinct—far from it. But we might see the sorts of unsettling, exciting novelties proclaimed by Eric Rosenfield:

  a lot of big-name Science Fiction writers look like they’re standing still. While Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow and Vernor Vinge fantasize about the Singularity or augmented reality… [others are] writing a fiction that speaks to a world in which we find ourselves not exactly emancipated by technology but simply hyper-connected by it, our identities as people redefined by the media we share, media which we embrace and deeply care about even when it leaves us bewildered, co-opted, and reduced in a thousand ways to algorithms…. This is not what our world is like, but it’s very much what it feels like… tapped into some kind of primal dream of what it means to live in our techno-saturated time…[2]

  Perhaps that’s the shape of future sf, or maybe this post-Latest New Thing prospectus will be already antiquated in another few years (“So 2011”). Meanwhile, we can enjoy the accumulated riches of the past quarter century, from mainstream novelist Margaret Atwood’s speculative/sexual political sensation The Handmaid’s Tale to the brilliant first novel of Finnish string theorist Hannu Rajaniemi writing with perfect ease simultaneously in English, and sf, and quantum physics, all conjoined to dazzle us. From one perspective, then, you can see this list as Science Fiction 101. From another, it’s 101 excellent novels for sf to hang its hat on, at a jaunty angle and with a knowing gleam in its eye.

  Damien Broderick

  San Antonio, Texas

  Paul Di Filippo

  Providence, Rhode Island

  [1]http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00d5vqc/The_Interview_Ursula_Le_Guin/

  [2]http://io9.com/#!5568956/why-robin-sloan-is-the-future-of-publishing-and-science-fiction

  1

  Margaret Atwood

  The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

  IN 1949, GEORGE ORWELL (the English writer Eric Blair) published Nineteen Eighty-Four, his devastating, technologically managed and stratified dystopia. That novel, bleak and terrible, remains a watchword for totalitarian futures, even though more than a fourth of a century has passed since the date of its imagined terror. The year after the real 1984, distinguished Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood published her own scarifying dystopia. While Orwell’s Orwellian prospect seems less likely today, long after the fall of the Soviet Union, Atwood’s woman-hating Republic of Gilead is all too visible in nations such as Iran and Afghanistan (where she spent some time). Sequestered, cloaked women suffer repression by the Taliban and other theocratic regimes. In the USA, where Atwood’s imaginary Gilead springs from a harsh Christian fundamentalist conspiracy and coup d’état, political extremists really do join with science-deniers in aspirations scarily akin to Atwood’s cautionary tale.

  The novel is set around the end of the 20th century; like Orwell’s, its date has already passed. Does this mean it’s no longer science fiction? (Some prefer to see it as fable, and Atwood declared it “speculative fiction,” famously dismissing sf as “talking squids in outer space”
but relenting more recently.) No. Like a number of other fine sf novels discussed below, The Handmaid’s Tale is best read as alternative history—allohistory, uchronia—a record of a past that might have occurred had key events taken a slightly different course. Atwood does not appeal to sf’s toolkit of quantum superposed realities or Many Worlds theory to justify her fantastika, nor did Philip Roth (Entry 76), Michael Chabon (Entry 88) or several others among our 101. But it’s no accident that, as well as being shortlisted for the mainstream, Booker Prize, it won the Arthur C. Clarke, Locus, and James Tiptree, Jr. Awards for best sf novel, while selling more than a million copies to readers who always supposed they disliked sf.

  What motivates Atwood’s narrative is the same fateful dynamo (“The purpose of power is power,” wrote Orwell) driving Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The book is an examination of character under certain circumstances, among other things… it’s a study of power, and how it operates and how it deforms or shapes the people who are living within that kind of regime.”[1]

  Offred (“of Fred”) is 33 years old, conscripted into the Handmaid caste to bear children to powerful Commanders and their barren Wives in a nation polluted by reactor catastrophes, toxic molecules, viruses, environmental desecration. Her monthly and highly orchestrated rape is justified by phrases from the Old Testament. While her true name is never revealed, it is probably June—perhaps significantly, as an underground rebellion against this fascist state is known as Mayday, and Offred exemplifies the future of that day. The novel is her often despairing and superbly written meditations on a bitterly constrained life, torn away from her husband and child, denied identity, work, access to any materials she might use to harm her betters or kill herself.

  Marthas do the scut work, Econowives tend house for the working men. Aunts at the Red Center, using drugs and harsh discipline, shape younger women like June/Offred into cowed, cowled, scarlet-clad nuns of fertility. Young men with machine guns, Angels and Guardians, patrol the Republic and monitor checkpoints. Former abortion doctors and priests are still being hunted down and hanged in public; a rapist Guardian is literally torn apart by maddened Handmaids in a ceremony recalling the Greek myth of Pentheus dismembered by Maenads.

  Against this suffocating background Offred is drawn into illicit liaisons with her Commander—at first to play Scrabble, of all things, and read old forbidden magazines, but finally dolled up in whorish garb for a night in the inevitable “men’s club” where she is displayed as an “evening rental,” then set up with chauffer Nick by Wife Serena Joy, a former TV evangelist in the mold of Tammy Faye Bakker, who hopes fresh young semen will get the Handmaid pregnant and secure their social position. But these new crimes only wind the chains more tightly, bring Offred closer to ruin even as it seems she might escape to Canada via the Underground Femaleroad.

  If it is a future not quite as terrible as the crazed utopia of Cambodia under Pol Pot, nor even of the Gulag, still it is unbearably, soul-crushingly bleak. In the much modified film script by Harold Pinter, Offred knifes the Commander to death and escapes with her lover Nick. Atwood’s novel is less explicit, while leaving that plot door ajar. An afterword records an academic discourse in 2195; the book we’ve just read proves to be a reconstruction from 30 old cassette tapes dictated by the Handmaid, perhaps to her daughter or the new child, following her presumptive escape to freedom. As Atwood comments, “Her little message in a bottle has gotten through to someone—which is about all we can hope, isn’t it?”

  But the novel is not just a redemptive “little message,” either; it is a beautifully wrought poem of a book, filled with acute observations. Consider the irises:

  bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they’d not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently. A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon. Light pours down upon it from the sun, true, but also heat rises, from the flowers themselves, you can feel it: like holding your hand an inch above an arm, a shoulder. It breathes, in the warmth, breathing itself in. (161)

  As does this novel, in all its brutality and longing.

  [1] Mervyn Rothstein, “No Balm in Gilead for Margaret Atwood,” New York Times, February 17, 1986.

  2

  Orson Scott Card

  Ender’s Game (1985)

  WHAT IS IT about a science fiction novel that has remained more or less continuously in print for more than a quarter century, inspired legions of passionate fans and equally passionate detractors, spun off an entire universe of sequels, prequels and lateral reworkings, and became a standard part of many high-school curricula? Perhaps only by voyaging deep into its origins can a 21st century reader gain some perspective on Orson Scott Card and his Ender’s Game.

  It is instructive to pick up the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1979), attributed then only to founding editor Peter Nicholls, and note that there is no entry for Orson Scott Card. True, Card had already sold his first story in 1977 to Analog, but the Encyclopedia’s general policy was to focus on authors with book credits—although they did make exceptions for such luminaries as Robert Abernathy and Vance Aandahl.

  By the second edition, from 1993, when John Clute had come onboard as co-editor, Card merits two full pages.

  Plainly something had happened to boost his stature. That kickstart was, of course, Ender’s Game, which this later edition of the Encyclopedia revealed, in fact, to have as its seed Card’s very first story sale of the same name that had been ignored in 1979. In his substantial 1990 short story collection, Maps in a Mirror, Card records that

  The novel Ender’s Game is the only work of mine… that was truly expanded from a short work that I had not intended to expand. Indeed, I had never expected to do anything with Ender Wiggin again…. I was beginning to work with a novel idea with the working title Speaker of Death…. [S]uddenly it dawned on me that the Speaker should be Ender as an adult…. [A]ll the problems would be solved if I went back and rewrote “Ender’s Game” as a novel, incorporating into it all the changes that were needed to properly set up Speaker.

  The explosive effect of the novelized version of that Analog tale cannot be underestimated, on Card’s career or the genre in general. As Clute observes: prior to 1985, after some initial promise, “OSC’s career then seemed to drift.” If not for Ender and his much elaborated exploits, Card today might very well be regarded in the same ranks as Abernathy or Aandahl: a minor, respectable, forgotten craftsman.

  And in the sf field at large, Card’s book contributed to the growing popularity of military sf, a subgenre with a relatively small profile circa mid-1980s; to the popularization of teen protagonists driving much of the current YA boom; to the co-opting of videogames into the sf mythos (a process also abetted by the uncannily co-emergent 1984 film The Last Starfighter); and to the genesis of a million fannish flame wars over perceived sexism, racism, homophobism, elitism and hyper-religiosity in Card’s works.[1]

  What stroke of genius propelled this book to such influential heights? It’s simple, in retrospect. Whereas most excitingly controversial novels include one or two hot-button topics at most, Card’s novel is composed of nothing but a half-dozen hot-button issues wrapped in a bildungsroman. In more or less descending order, these include:

  An existential threat to the entire human race.

  The nature of alien intelligence and person-hood, or, the role of “the other.”

  Genocide.

  Means versus ends.

  The “great man” theory of history.

  The limits of government and the proper role of the citizen.

  The limits and nature of the educational system.

  The military ethos.

  The nature of sociopaths and power.

  Family dynamics.

  Sibling rivalry.

&nbs
p; Schoolboy rivalry.

  Not even Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers, James Blish in A Case of Conscience or Philip José Farmer in The Lovers, perhaps not even Joanna Russ in The Female Man had packed so much argument-provoking philosophical dynamite into one novel.

  Andrew “Ender” Wiggin—bearing a surname indicative perhaps of braininess under one’s “wig”—is the youngest child of three, a mere seven years old at tale’s start, with brother Peter the oldest and sister Valentine the middle one. They are all “odd johns,” quasi-mutant geniuses. Peter, the sociopath, will become a political powerhouse, the Hegemon. Valentine will shape society by her essays. But to Ender falls the greatest burden and glory. He will undergo years of brutal training at the interplanetary military outposts known as Battle School and Command School, all to elicit and mold his unique strategic genius. That genius will ultimately be arrayed against the Buggers, mankind’s implacable alien enemy who almost destroyed our species twice before.

  In very sturdy, engaging and transparent prose, Card delivers a kind of Tom Brown’s Schooldays mated with The Prisoner TV show and From Here to Eternity. He captures with precision the eternal cruelties of schoolboy interactions, the rigors of boot camp, and the sophistications of war college. At the same time, he dissects the power-tripping that occupies nations and their governments. Ender is both innocent child and hopeful monster, the hothouse hybrid bloom of a harsh climate.