August 11, 2005

• Hmm. Let me see. Banks' stuff has consistently appealed to me. He has an interesting ability to know when to mix his hard and soft sci-fi with a certain whimsy and nasty turn of mind. The Master and Margarita is a brilliant piece, but hardly sci-fi. At all. It will help if you get the biblical allusions, and there are a number of different translations which vary in quality. A very funny read, but it helps to get one with some good annotation/endnotes/intro around some of the Soviet politics Bulgarkov is poking fun at. My wife found Beloved tedious. I keep starting the Gormenghast trilogy, loving the richness and detail, and getting nowhere near finishing the first book. Pullman is fabulous, full stop. Fine writer. His Dark Materials trilogy is penned as a deliberate antidote to CS Lewis. Disagree completely that the third book is a cop-out. Rand? Why bother. A third-rate hack writing fourth-rate drivel that does a fifth-rate job of pushing ideas that Heinlen expounded on better in his worst work. I find Frankenstein tedious, but I find most 19th century lit boring. (I'm not sure how Wilde makes it to a list of sci-fi authors. Were they deperate or something?)
• Very. Interesting. Indeed. Thankyou :)
• Oooh. *rushes off to library at high speed* ((( Thanks bees!
• interesting list. ditto what rodgerd said. re: 'real', 20th century scifi... i really appreciate, and prefer, a good short story; o. henry style. something i can read when i'm on the shitter or having a smoke. (brevity is the soul of wit!) if you like philip k. dick, (and who doesnt) here are some other quick, enjoyable scifi reads: - Rog Phillips' The Yellow Pill. scifi.com also has a great collection of other short scifi classics here. - Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. - i was going to mention a few more along those lines but i just totally spaced out. huh. STOP ABUSING FROM SATELLITE!
• I'm not a socialist, but Ken MacLeod's 'The Cassini Division' has got some interesting stuff about socialism and capitalism.
• In order to actually answer your question, bees, as opposed to just getting over-excited about having a cool book-list to work my way through: Disposessed is phenomenal, as is most of LeGuin's work. I've just recently re-read the Earthsea quartet for the first time since I were a lass, and enjoyed them thoroughly as an adult too. Ghormenghast is a work of genius. The BBC adaptation is well worth watching too - I think it managed to capture the spirit of the piece quite perfectly, even if, as is so often the case when stories go from page to screen, it lost a fair bit of the narrative. I really enjoyed it though. and Pullman is indeed fabulous. As well as His Dark Materials, take a look at the Sally Lockhart books (Ruby in the Smoke, Shadow in the North, Tiger in the Well, The Tin Princess): tales of 19th Century girl power which are, if anything, more socialist than HDM, and highly entertaining.
• The list looks more interesting as a set of books than the topic (political SF) leads me to believe possible. The ones I've read--PKD & Pullman, frex--I've really enjoyed. My big exposure to political SF has been the libertarian variety. I don't mean Heinlein here; I'm talking about L. Neil Smith, who lays on the libertarianism with a trowel. It's the libertarian equivalent of tractor art and it bores the snot out of me. I couldn't imagine that explicitly didactic socialist lit would be much better.
• Politics are an inherent part of SF; it's near impossible to create SF without politics inside it.
• Interesting list. I like Iain Banks a lot. Disliked Ghormanghast, sorry, found it unreadable, didn't like the BBC adaptation either. I've read a few others on the list, and there are quite a few that look interesting. I'd add Boris and Arkady Strugatski and Stanislaw Lem.
• Michael Moorcock writes the most overwrought, turgid, crapulent fantasy I have ever read. If Hawkmoon is anything like the Elric saga -- and I imagine it is since Hawkmoon makes an appearance in one of the Elrick books -- avoid it like the plague. Also, Atlas Shrugged?! If the purpose behind reading it is to "know your enemy", there are vastly shorter, easier-to-stomach routes to take. Say, a M.S. degree in Political Science.
• nteresting list...I found I had not read the majority of the listed books. Mostly because I read little fantasy and even less horror. And WTH is slipstream? Anyway, I have not read either of the Le Guin or Butler books, but would recommend them on the strength of the authors. I don't remember what craptastic movie Dick's Scanner Darkly was transmogrified into, but the story is worthy as well as his other books. In a nutshell... Anything by Octavia Butler.... worth the read Anything by Phillip K. Dick.... worth the read Anything by Ursula K. Le Guin.... worth the read Kim Stanley Robinson — The Mars Trilogy.... worth the read Norman Spinrad — The Iron Dream .... worth the read Classic completist list...read for the classic literature education Mary Shelley — Frankenstein Jonathan Swift — Gulliver’s Travels Jack London — Iron Heel Ayn Rand — Atlas Shrugged .....feh Mervyn Peake — The Gormenghast Novels....snorx
• Crooked Timber had a China Mieville seminar a while back. Not read his stuff myself, but it stuck in my head as it seemed interesting.
• And thank you for the via link bees, woods lot looks like an interesting miscellany and has been bookmarked

• Also, Atlas Shrugged?! If the purpose behind reading it is to "know your enemy", there are vastly shorter, easier-to-stomach routes to take. Say, a M.S. degree in Political Science.

  i can vouch for this statement. my master's course and thesis flew by in less time than it took me to give up around the middle of rand's lumbering and incoherent ode to selfishness.
• The Yellow Wallpaper as scifi? Ouch.
• I'm surprised that I've only read 15 of these 50 - I would have thought my numbers would be higher. Thanks a lot, Bees: I was going to get things done today but now I can see I'll be spending it at the library!
• I saw this list a while back and tried reading Jack London's Iron Heel. Meh. A thin veneer of story wrapped around tedious lectures on the perils of capitalism and the need for socialist revolution. Not that I disagree with the political philosophy, but I was looking for a good story, not a lecture.
• How about George Orwell's Animal Farm? Actually the list kinda made me sad. Why are these books that *socialists* should read? Socialists like everyone else should be reading everything. It seems to be saying politics trumps literature. I like it the other way around.
• Good point, Story Bored; be interesting to know why Mieville decided to make a reading list for socialists. Think your comment about reading everything is excellent if one's a young person, but I find a result of reading is that it allows you eventually to decide what you do and don't want to read in future. Already know that I don't intend to read many of these titles. (Started several in the past -- like The Wandering Jew, Rats and Gargoyles, Viriconium Nights, Freedom and Necessity -- only to put them down because they failed to hold my interest.) A few of the authors, like Disch and Moorcock, I simply haven't found congenial enough to bother reading more of.
• Beeswacky you're right, what I should have said was that people should be "sampling" everything, rather than "reading" everything.
• Socialists like everyone else should be reading everything. It seems to be saying politics trumps literature. I agree. I once gave a libertarian co-worker (with whom I actually had a lot of stimulating and spirted, but always polite and respectful conversations) Sinclair's The Jungle in the hopes of opening him up a little. It didn't work, but to his credit, he did at least read the whole book. In his view, it was the slaughterhouse worker's own fault for not dumping his family so he could live on the wage the company offered. Or some such. CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!!!
• And I am aware that The Jungle is not, sadly, scifi.
• Rats and Gargoyles You did well to bail here, in my opinion. This was the most dreadful polemic wrapped in trite fantasy frosting that I've had the pain to crack in memory, chock full of Mary Jane wymyn-warryors battling against sexism, racism, speciesism, and stereotyped gendyr roles. True "tractor art." "Tractor art" is a hell of a lot funnier applied to libertarian sci-fi, though. I will be smirking all morning about that one. Loved Gormenghast as a child, and am curious how it would hold up now, twenty-five years later.
• Though another of Sinclair's books that I have read (a list that totals two), is scifi: The Millenium: a Comedy of the Year 2000. It's a quaint early 20th century view of the turn of the next century, and like Brave New World, has no way of forseeing computers, the Internet, or MTV. Its story concerns the millenial celebrations in the year 2000, when the construction of a "Pleasure Palace" by the ultra-wealthy capitalists coincides with the destruction of the world by radiumite, leaving 11 priveliged capitalists who happened to be out of range to rebuild society. They try capitalism, and it doesn't work. Guess what does? A lot more preachy than even The Jungle, but still interesting.
• I'd be loathe to take pointers in socialism from Mr Mieville anyhow, as he's a member of the Socialist Worker's Party, one of yer 57-varieties Trot outfits who have done more to discredit the left in Britain than most, and seem almost to be designed as a trap to use up and burn out young radicals in pointless defense of a Party line decided undemocratically by a cabal. /People's Front for Judea
• A couple more thoughts: socialist sci-fi and no H G Wells or Huxley? Perhaps the compiler didn't like them (and I'm not a huge fan of Wells), but both have written classics of the sci-fi genre. Also, while Heinlen certainly has some libertarian works, a huge chunk of his body of work posits utopian societies which are in no way libertarian. The world of Friday, for example, is a libertarian's nightmare - bans on various forms of personal transport, committees of elites deciding on resource allocation, a cushy standard of living for all at (apparently) whatever they feel like doing.
• Good Grief, Bees! You don't like Disch? He's fantastic.
• BlueHorse, I don't care for his prose. Noted there was one of Piercy's novels on the list -- never read any of her novels. Have you? rodgerd, he does have Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau on the list, Dunno why no Huxley -- but then I don't believe I understand this list.
• I agree wholeheartedly with those who love Gormenghast, but Mieville states "Don’t believe those who say that the third book is disappointing." The third book, written much later and unfinished, is an incoherent pile of suck. The first two, however, are great. I second those who say that anything by LeGuin is worth reading. And I'd like to say a brief word in defense of Michael Moorcock: not all of his writing clunks, and even the clunky stuff is interesting for the ideas he's playing with. I haven't read "Hawkmoon," though, so I don't know where in the Spectrum of Clunk it falls. Swift and Bulgakov... hell yeah!
• Well small thanks at least for no Handmaid's Tale, which always seems to make lists of this sort. Huxley is a mystifying omission. And no Harry Harrison or David Brin?
• What should socialists read? I somehow thought this would be about re-educating those silly lefties... There was a young man called Von Mises Who warned it'd all go to pieces If we all went the way That the socialists say But his words, if applied, will release us! Sydney Kendall
• Provocative list; thanks for the link.
• We by Zamiatin is a brilliant book - interesting ideas, even better execution - powerful, imagistic, lyrical. Not all the books are so good. My extremely feminist friend said that Woman on the edge of time was bad and too feminist (to the point of man-bashing), even for her. He also didn't include The Rise of the Meritocracy, the most pro-equality for equality's sake book I have ever read. Many leftist people want to even out opportunity. But Young says it doesn't matter if equality of opportunity is perfect, perfect "meritocracy" being acheived - social inequality is an evil in itself, no matter what its cause (birth, intelligence, merit) is - it is not a justification for inequality. Even if people are stupider, lazier, whatever - they are people, and as people deserve dignity and access to the riches of the world that was bequeathed to us all.