sketching an alternative scifi canon

or did you know there are scifi novels besides Dune

Look, I am not a Dune hater. I am, simply put, a Dune liker. I enjoyed the novels fine (I think I read all of them at one point, or all but the last one; I dropped out around the time the emperor became a worm, unless it was vice versa). Dune has a fascinating universe, great atmosphere, a couple memorable characters—all of which is undercut, unfortunately, by barely competent storytelling. Past attempts to adapt Dune have struggled because no matter how spectacular the world-building and imagery may be, those kinds of story-level problems are difficult to overcome. I did enjoy the first Villeneuve film—if mostly for the costumes, the spaceships, and the spectacular worms. I haven’t seen the second yet (I’m busy with yet another family crisis, the crisis of middle age sure is galloping at me fast.) I’m sure I’ll like Dune 2 when I finally see it; maybe even love it! That’s not my issue with Dune.

My issue is that whenever a Dune adaptation drops, or is rumored to drop, or new information about an old failed adaptation drops, there’s a lot of discourse about the greatness and singularity of Frank Herbert’s vision. And—I’m sorry to say this—but Dune is a basic bitch scifi series. It’s scifi for people who don’t read a lot of scifi, in the same way that Hemingway is a literary touchstone for people who haven’t read a lot of classic novels since high school. It’s perfectly okay to love Dune, to have read it at a sensitive and foundational time in your adolescence...but when people wax on and on about its greatness, above and beyond other science fiction, I am transported to a psychological record store where I am the hipster employee sneering over these albums that I bet you haven’t even heard of.

I appreciate that this attitude is undesirable. It’s gatekeeping; it’s also gaslighting and girlbossing. In fact I am now going to gaslight and girlboss you into an alternative consideration of the scifi canon outside Herbert, and even outside the usual gaggle of Clark-Asimov-Heinlein-Bradbury-Gibson-Philip K. Dick. It’s not that these guys aren’t good in their own right; I agree that they are, and that they’re even essential in their way. They’re just not everything. There’s a whole universe of science fiction out there (and it even has women in it.)

What follows is a brief and non-exhaustive list of science fiction novels that I think ought to be considered canon—as in, if you want to be serious about this genre, you ought to read them. I’m restricting this list mainly to books that are 20 years old or more, since I think canon formation requires a degree of time for novels to breathe, and to prove they can achieve escape velocity from their particular cultural moment. There are lots of great novels and writers I know I’ve skipped over, a few which may seem like over-obvious inclusions, and a few deeper cuts. But I think everything on the list below is of equal—or greater—canonical importance as fanboy favorites like Dune. These are works and writers who have often been imitated (or accidentally recapitulated), but never surpassed.

1. Ursula K. Le Guin: the Hainish cycle, The Lathe of Heaven
   Obviously I was going to begin with the queen. Le Guin is as famous as they come, and yet I still meet male scifi fans who haven’t read her (though they always tell me they’ve been meaning to, someday). These guys are fake nerd boys and should be dismissed as such. Ursula’s range, her intellect, her literary style, her interest in investigating the human through anthropological sojourns into the alien…she’s simply unmatched. The short stories and novellas in the Hainish cycle (like “The Matter of Seggri” and “Solitude” ) are every bit as powerful as the novels Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. And on top of that, she also wrote the non-Hainish Lathe of Heaven, an exploration of dreams and reality which is sort of like what if Philip K. Dick were good at sentences. Don’t “mean to read” Ursula; actually do it.

2. Samuel R. Delany: Nova, Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, many others¹

   Obviously I also have to begin with the king. I’m still working my way through Delany’s oeuvre; he’s more difficult than Ursula, strange and brilliant; an almost unfathomably intelligent writer. Nova is usually the novel I recommend people to start with, since it begins as a relatively straightforward space opera—though by the end, Delany transcends his own material, and the narrative perspective seems to hover above the imagery of the novel, holding the symbols in its hand. I can’t really describe it. I don’t even totally know if it works. Delany is operating on a whole other plane of existence.

3. Joanna Russ: The Female Man
   I think of Joanna Russ like a best-beloved auntie who is also a spectacular hater—i.e., the kind of person I hope to be someday. The Female Man is a growling, ferocious, outrageously funny novel; it isn’t just a great work of science fiction but also one of the finest experimental novels of the 1970s (and that was the time of the season for experimental novels!) The plot of The Female Man, such as it is, isn’t easy to describe; there are four variations of a person named Joanna or something like it, living in four different universes which have varying levels of freedom for women. If you don’t read The Female Man, then you are, personally, suppressing women’s writing; I don’t make the rules.

4. Connie Willis: time travel novels (Blackout/All Clear, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, others)

   Speaking of suppressing women’s writing—some years back I wrote an article about Connie Willis in which I called her “the most famous science fiction novelist you’ve never heard of” a status which is still, I think, mostly true. Willis is easy to skip over because she’s so singular, and because her best novels are about time travel, a subject which has been thoroughly misused and misunderstood by lesser writers. If characters can simply redo historical events or skip over into an alternate timeline, then the human stakes of a situation tend to disappear. But Willis’ time travel novels are all about stakes—like the fearful reality of living through frightening historical periods, and the grief of being unable to save the people we love. And at the same time, her novels are always about the heroic possibility of human action, and how much individual choices do and don’t matter against the huge and terrible weight of a history we can and can’t change.

5. J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World
   J.G. Ballard seems to have suffered from apocalyptic visions: as early as the 1960s he was writing eerily prescient climate novels about the last gasp of humanity against all-powerful and indifferent natural forces. The Drowned World (1962) is the one where the world ends in water (rising oceans, desperate humid heat), while The Burning World (1964)—which I haven’t read yet—is the one where the world ends in fire (drought and desert). Cli-fi novels are so often annoying (the word “cli-fi” itself is annoying) but The Drowned World succeeds where many of them fail by focusing simply on what it would feel like to live out the last days of a dying planet: the physical discomfort, the frenetic and doomed efforts at salvation, the weird boredom and sexual release that comes after surrender. It’s an ugly book. I love it.

6. Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz

   Speaking of love and the apocalypse—post-apocalyptic fiction is often grim and depressing, and yet, by definition, it’s always a genre of hope: there will be a world after the end of the world. The best post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read, the one that most successfully balanced the grimness of destruction with the hope of resurrection, has got to be A Canticle for Leibowitz. The story is looping and recursive, essentially about monks who are trying to put together fragments of knowledge about the world as it once existed before the nuclear apocalypse. The fragmentary structure suits both the subject matter and the novel’s publication history; A Canticle for Leibowitz began life as three short stories before Miller significantly revised and expanded them into a single work. The final result is flawed and perfect, just like the monks and their futile, necessary effort to preserve the written word.

7. Suzette Haden Elgin: Native Tongue

   Lots of science fiction novels tackle the power of the written word: it makes sense as a subject, since writers create art out of languages, and are fascinated by it and themselves. But not many writers—sorry to say it—have particularly deep thoughts about language besides the basic, worshipful idea that words have power. Suzette Haden Elgin, however, was a linguist: she invented a whole language, Láadan, for her Native Tongue trilogy. I’ve only read the first volume (also named Native Tongue), because the sequels The Judas Rose and Earthsong are harder to find, and because Native Tongue, for all its greatness, is extremely depressing and I needed a break. Haden Elgin is a feminist of a grim second-wave turn; Láadan exists, in part, as an attempt to create a language in which women can be understood. Native Tongue is also about aliens, and the alien estrangement of men and women from each other, which—however dated as a strict binary—is still relevant in a world where men and women as broad and incomplete categories still often operate out of totally different spheres of meaning and reality.

8. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic

   Often imitated but never surpassed, Roadside Picnic is the original “hey what if there was a place that super fucked up and weird shit happened when you went in there.”² It may be the best novel of the Soviet era, or one of the best-known, anyway: an unsettling book about the limits of known reality, especially when a government insists on enforcing a singular truth despite the evidence of other truths. Basically, the novel features several “Zones” on Earth where aliens visited, and left their stuff lying around like humans might after a roadside picnic; then they moved on, maybe not even noticing us, but nonetheless showering us with fragments of their reality that are weird enough to shatter our existence. Roadside Picnic is about the smallness of the human, and our inability to cope with change; and about the short-sightedness of governments that try to set limits on what people can and can’t perceive. People keep trying to enter and loot the Zones, even though it’s extremely dangerous; Roadside Picnic is definitely the sort of book where you keep shouting “don’t do that! idiot!” even though you (or me, anyway) would absolutely be the sort of idiot who would do that.

9. Dan Simmons: Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion³

   The Hyperion novels suffer a bit from not being written for idiots. The first is written in the interweaving style of The Canterbury Tales, while the second is partly about Keats and his unfinished poem The Fall of Hyperion. They aren’t difficult novels per se, but they make references, and Simmons expects you to keep up; he expects that you’re as interested in the past as you are in imagining the future. The novels are really about both past and future: more specifically the long afterlife of human art, love, pain, and grief, centuries after the deaths of artists and lovers, and even the death of the Earth itself. Also there are fancy houses with rooms located on different planets, which however cool is still the product of a dangerous and world-shattering technology, and however dangerous and world-shattering this technology I still want it.

10. Lois McMaster Bujold, Vorkosigan Saga

    If you’ve read all the above and thought, ok fine, lots of intellectual and philosophical explorations of very serious and depressing topics, but that’s not all I want from science fiction, I mean where’s my fun multi-episode space opera??? don’t worry, it’s here, it’s the Vorkosigan Saga. There are MANY volumes in this series and I haven’t read more than a quarter of them, but every one I’ve read has been delightful. The first few novels are about a scrappy ship captain named Cordelia, while the rest are mainly about her sweetie-pie son Miles (“Vorkosigan” is their surname, or the name of Cordelia’s husband and Miles’ father, who is a lovely person but sidelined in almost feminized and quite interesting way.) This is the kind of science fiction that ranges from the enormous to the particular: there are civilization-level conflicts and immediate ship-in-peril conflicts, galactic political intrigue and the politics of using an artificial womb. Lois McMaster Bujold is just one of those writers who is brimming over with ideas; they seem to tumble out of her one after the other, and then it’s on to the next adventure. As a matter of fact, her fantasy novels are as good or better than her science fiction…but that’s a list for another time.

1. Supposedly a Nova adaptation is in the works; Neil Gaiman is involved and I am somewhat skeptical. Phil Christman just made a great case for a Dhalgren adaptation—I would like to know who I have to kill to make this happen.

2. To be clear, Roadside Picnic is the original scifi version of “going to the fucked-up place where weird shit happens”—Faerie is a lot older than that.

3. The full series is called The Hyperion Cantos: The Fall of Hyperion is followed by Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. I know I read Endymion but I remember very little about it; I’m not sure I ever got to Rise. Regardless, Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are extraordinary.