Introductory Science Fiction Books for Literary Readers

In my post a while back about bad Infoquake reviews, I mentioned how I’ve given William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Frank Herbert’s Dune to a few friends as a way to introduce them to quality science fiction, only to hear later that these friends didn’t care for them. Some of the commenters in the aforementioned blog article didn’t care much for Neuromancer or Dune either.

So my question today is: what are some quality SF books you can hand off to literate non-SF readers as an introduction to the genre?

Let’s say your readers in question are already discerning connoisseurs of quality literature. They’re not typically readers of so-called pulp novels or airport thrillers. They would think nothing of bundling down with a Philip Roth or a Don DeLillo or a Barbara Kingsolver or something that The New York Times Book Review would approve of. They know who Michiko Kakutani is, and they were reading Cormac McCarthy years before Oprah ever heard of him. But as soon as you mention the words “science fiction,” they picture Klingons with light sabers jumping off spaceships with big-breasted ninja assassins in tow and bug-eyed monsters in hot pursuit while a supernova goes off in the background.

What do you hand to these people to convince them that there’s a lot of intelligent literary science fiction that’s worth reading? (I’m just going to stick to science fiction here — however loosely defined that term is — and maybe we can talk about fantasy another time.) I should emphasize that inclusion on either my do/do not lists are not indicators of the quality of the books themselves.

My main criteria for inclusion is that the book has to generally be filed in the “Science Fiction” section of your local bookstore. Which means no George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges, or Italo Calvino, however much we believe their works should be filed in our camp. We’ve got to tempt these people into the rows with the Dragonlance books and the life-size cutout of Darth Vader, folks.

(Yes, people have posted a zillion “great works in science fiction” on the web… but I haven’t seen many that specifically focus on the quote-unquote literary. Perhaps it’s pointless and elitist to call these people quote-unquote literary readers. But you all know who I’m talking about. Come up with a better name if you want.)

Some of my nominees:

  • Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. This book’s strong right-wing bent might turn some people totally off science fiction. But it’s hard to argue that this is a tremendously thoughtful book. It might also open some people’s eyes to the fact that the science fiction you see in the movies has very little resemblance to the science fiction you see on the bookshelves.
  • Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. Some SF types were turned off by this Hugo Award winner because it was too hoity-toity and thinky-thinky. But for literary types, the languid pace and abundance of Big Ideas makes for a good read.
  • Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Hey, science fiction can do feminism too! And not just feminism, but pangenderism and transgenderism and everything else genderismic. In fact, Le Guin and many others like her tackle these issues with much more daring than many of their non-SF contemporaries.
  • Ian McDonald’s River of Gods. So immersed is this novel in Indian culture and so masterful is Mr. McDonald’s prose that it’s hard to imagine anyone putting down this book as one of little substance.
  • John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. Yes, there are space cadets and bug-eyed aliens in this one, and the covers wouldn’t necessarily inspire much confidence for the non-SF reader. But there’s also plenty of humor, sex, politics, and social commentary crammed in there, enough to convince many an SF skeptic.
  • Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001. Hoity-toity artsy types are likely to give this book a fair shot because of the Stanley Kubrick film. Which, in case you were wondering, is one of the greatest films ever made (though a little difficult to follow unless you’ve read the book).
  • William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Hardly science fictional at all, but Gibson is such a master stylist and such a keen thinker on matters of business and technology that reading this book just might suck you into his more futuristic stuff.
  • Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky. The intellectual heft of this book isn’t quite so apparent at first blush, and the spider people might roll some eyeballs. But the man can write, and his discussions of individuality-versus-groupthink are both powerful and subtle.

Some great books that, on careful reflection, are probably not great books to give to a non-SF reader right out of the gate:

  • William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Gibson has the habit of throwing out technical terms that are integral to the plot, and then not explaining them for another 10 to 20 pages. Add to that the moody, noirish atmosphere, and the unexperienced reader might suspect they’re reading some cheap knock-off of Blade Runner.
  • Most later Heinlein. All that kinky sex and incest stuff might creep them out, and many of the later books are so full of inside jokes that they’re difficult to penetrate. I don’t think I’d recommend Time Enough for Love to anyone, except my wife, who stubbornly insists this is his best novel.
  • Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. As excellent as this novel is — it’s one of my all-time faves, and served as inspiration for a couple of chapters in my Infoquake — stylistically the book’s a little sensationalistic. I’d say you’d be better off starting (and ending) with Speaker for the Dead.
  • Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Literary readers are suckers for style. And say what you will about Asimov’s ideas — most of us agree they were pretty frickin’ fantastic — but his prose is pretty clunky and juvenile.
  • Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. Ditto.
  • Anything by Philip K. Dick. In my own personal experience, you don’t begin to understand what PKD is doing until you’ve read four or five of his books. They just read like bad pulp SF novels. Which they are. Which is why they’re so totally fucking brilliant.
  • Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. This happens to be one of my favorite books ever ever, but on first reading the opening 50 pages come across like some sort of pretentious Twilight Zone episode. It’s so much more than that, but readers might not have the patience.
  • Frank Herbert’s Dune. Again, one of my favorite novels. But the opening quarter of the book is a little too pulpish and full of funny names and mythologies for the uninitiated. It takes some patience for this one to open up to you.
  • Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. A great, great book, but too fanboyish and flippant for the uninitiated.
  • Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Astute readers will point out to you that this is not really a SFnal novel about a man who’s come unstuck in time, but a poignant novel about a man who’s been driven insane by the horrors of war. (Besides which, few venues file this one with the science fiction.)
  • Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep. One whiff of the talking wheeled plant people, and your average Anne Tyler reader is outta there. A Deepness in the Sky is a better bet.

So what am I missing? I know these lists skew heavily towards the obvious, but then again I’m not as well-read in SF as some of you out there. Clue me in on what I’m missing.