I’ve been listening to this podcast by Sean McTiernan lately where he tries to brainwash himself into liking science fiction, it’s called SFULTRA (Now that I think about it I’ve almost definitely recommended this recently). I highly recommend it whether you’re a long-term or aspiring fan of speculative fiction. He’s one of the funniest, most incisive critics I’m aware of, and very humble at that. In any case, I’ve mentioned recently I have this cumbersome fiction idea that may never see the light of day. One of the ideas I’m bandying about is spacefaring civilization, in an attempt to find my own answers as to why space exploration as means of escape or expansion is so reliable. There are obvious and simple answers, but I want to get at what the details mean to me.
Part of this has been approaching the thing as a worldbuilding project (inspired in part by what I’ve read and heard about ZA/UM’s universe that preceded the release of Disco Elysium). Regardless, if you want to get into a genre or medium, some education about the genre to avoid being derivative if nothing else (perhaps there is also a concern that if you study too much of what’s come before, you’ll preclude doing anything original; maybe there’s a balance to be found). I feel that I need to expand my personal repertoire of understanding space opera, space fantasy, and just fictional interpretations of space in general beyond a bunch of Star Wars, considerably less Star Trek, and a decent bit of Dune.
(As an aside, I think that Star Wars is rife with interesting implications that go unexplored because of the limitations in scope of what Lucasfilm thinks is marketable, limitations that mostly seemed even more intense under Disney until Andor. We typically get things that don’t need explaining explained to us in unsatisfactory and disappointing ways in cartoons and prequels and spin-offs. But that’s all a matter of what questions you think are worth asking and having answered. I think there are things in the background which could be investigated to interesting ends – How did technology develop such that machines need sapience in order for humans and humanoids to do everyday tasks? What are the physical and mental health consequences of traveling at faster than the speed of light regularly? Why do so many planets send children to represent them in the galactic legislature? What was the process by which so many planets came to be ruled as a singular, unified polities? – but whose investigations would be thoroughly disappointing in the hands of the wrong TV, film, novel, or comic creator. Its possible all these questions, and its almost certain that some of them, have been toyed with in the expanded universe or in cartoons I haven’t watched yet or whatever.)
Anyway, I’m interested in those processes, and all the questions other authors in science fiction and fantasy have asked about how worlds can be developed, how people can interact – the challenges faced by the characters and the writers.
And onward to the infinite book list. Science fiction and fantasy that I’m currently reading and need to finish:
· The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski – the first Witcher book translated to English
· The Last Command by Timothy Zahn – the last of the original Thrawn/Dark Empire trilogy that started the old Star Wars Expanded Universe with military sci-fi
· Horus Rising by Dan Abnett, the first book in Warhammer 40K’s “Horus Heresy” series
Books on my shelf I haven’t started and need to read:
· God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert’s fourth Dune book. These books get stranger and stranger as they go. The first is a classic and the first three are an interesting trilogy I read between 2019 and 2020; this begins the second trilogy he wrote. I’m interested to see how it goes, 40,000 years separated from its predecessors.
· Neuromancer by William Gibson. Cyberpunk is interesting to me as a genre but the only of the founding texts I’ve read is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I need to read this, Snow Crash, and Burning Chrome.
· The Martian Tales by Ray Bradbury. Well, he’s a legend and I think the last thing I read by Bradbury was in middle school.
So that’s all those. But what more could one need? Well, I’ve never read Asimov. I’ve never read any Soviet SF, so I need to read the Strugatsky brothers – Noon: 22nd Century doesn’t seem accessible in English, so I suppose I go with Roadside Picnic (the basis for Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the Metro games).
I read “The Wild Girls” by Ursula K. LeGuin and found it haunting and inventive – it reads as much historical analog as speculative anything. So I was looking at The Dispossessed, one of her most acclaimed works, but saw its predecessors The Word for World is Forest and The Left Hand of Darkness are both award winners as well and, though she said the Hainish cycle wasn’t a saga or cycle or series that if you’re going to read them, you may as well start with the beginning, which would be Rocannon’s World.
Aside from that multiplanet civilization, I need to see Iain. M. Banks’ Culture series, which means starting with Consider Phlebas. And I’ve joined a book club which is reading The Stars My Destination in July.
Then there’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I’ve seen but not read (Arthur C. Clarke wrote the novel as a novelization; he was writing the screenplay alongside Stanley Kubrick; so there are some differences I want to see). And The Three-Body Problem, maybe the only Chinese cultural product from the mainland that I’ve seen people discuss positively without couching it in Sinophobic political rhetoric.
So, I’m taking recommendations for this infinite book but I’ll probably never finish, the crowded bookshelves I need to continue to cull, and my desperate hope to read enough that I can combine what I’ve read with what I’ve lived to contribute something interesting to the landscape of fiction. Something that tickles me, at least.
Shouts out to Matt Saccaro of MFA Declassified, whose reading lists I found myself thinking about when I was writing this, and whose perspective on writing is worth reading. Another one to check out is L. M. Sacasas’s The Convivial Society; the most recent edition is about how maybe efficiency and self-actualization aren’t everything. He breaks down the “tyranny of tiny tasks” and “fidelity to daily tasks.” It’s pretty cool. I’ll continue to sprinkle in recommendations as I go.
Ciao for now!