Science fiction's best author

Let's put it to a vote boys.

strawpoll.me/11175239

If there are other candidates you are willing to vouch for, state so here.

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Put my vote for Heinlein.

The only excuse for not voting Wolfe is not having read him.

He'll be on the almost made the cut list.

Where's Herbert?

>strawpoll.me/11175239
Why is Leguin even listed? This rather looks like a list of the most hyped.
My vote is for PKD anyway.

Lem and Wolfe are kicking ass. Good voting mates. In a pleb community probably Asimov and Clarke would be taking the lead.

WHO WILL WIN? WHO WILL TAKE THE HOLLOW CROWN THAT ROUNDS THE MORTAL TEMPLES OF A KING?

>Objectively
Clarke
>Personally
Niven
>Honorary
Simmons

>Clarke
>Pleb

By the way, which are the best books by Lem and Gene?

>which are the best books by Lem
Depends on what you want. There's not a single best book, and I can easily name more than a half-dozen of the most notable ones

Lem:
The major novel is Solaris. One thing to note about it is that most of Lem's writing has some humor in it but Solaris does not, so it's atypical in that regard; his Tale of Two Cities. The Cyberiad is a very good collection of connected short stories. A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of fake books and is worthwhile. (Lem acknowledges his debt in it to Borges, who got more out of fewer words really.)

Good question, considering this is an overwhelmingly male board. It's more than a compromise for le feminism (I don't care for feminism of any sort t b h).

Le Guin is the writer that most significantly explores the fundamental sociology of space, a vein that Asimov flirted with, but failed to yield. If Wolfe and Lem have scifi's heights of brilliance, they are also often cold and sterile.

It is Le Guin who takes on a wider range of accessible themes, and is amiable enough to provide the warmth necessary to guide readers towards the fringe, which she herself excels at. All three meet the severe constraints of great literature. None of the three take themselves, or their works too seriously. And it's that state of mind that makes them all genuine contenders. In short, she's the refreshing light that clarifies colder, but equally skilled great writers.

Plus, Bloom, one of the century's most obese, misanthropic, insufferable snobs, has only the highest praise to Le Guin.

Ya'll need to get back in yer containment thread, ya hear?

Iain M. Banks
Stephen Baxter
Ted Chiang

Solaris is his single best book, but is potentially abstruse. For something with a more tangible current, read The Futurological Congress.

Solaris has very funny moments when it pokes fun of academic bureaucracy, but its overall tone is serious, mostly of transcendent regret. The Cyberiad is of course, primarily satirical, so to miss Solaris' humor in comparison is understandable.

I read both literary fiction and science fiction. I quite love both.

Let me tell you, the more people like you complain like a one dimensional nonce, the more will open minded readers increase in the fold.

Thank you for the answers

Ballard.

Thomas Pynchon.

I hate bad prose like Asimov's.

This. You, just like me, we are not fat manchildren!

>There's not a single best book
Do you even read?

Because she's actually a good author. One of the best in the genre.
While I can see Lem as someone who is at times sterile, I cannot say it's ever the case with Wolfe. His ability to create characters always brings his works alive, even if they are otherwise mediocre. The containment thread is basically /v/ and Veeky Forums book discussion. It's almost impossible to discuss literary science fiction there.
The difference between the two as if they were somehow wholly different doesn't exist. It's a literary movement in the same way romanticism was, and it also has both garbage and brilliance.

>lem winning
finally this board gets something right holy shit

I find it hard to believe. Not because he isn't great, but because Lem never had much traction and scored low on the favorite writers/novels, like 2-3 votes.

Book of the New Sun's characters are very strongly developed. They are some of the most memorable characters in science fiction that I can think of. The problem is, they're overwhelmingly bleak, as is the mood of the dying world. Thecla is condescending and in a grim situation. Any nice moments involving her are muddled by Severian's unreliable ideation. Dorcas is probably the most likeable, but she gets treated like a doormat by everyone else. Palaemon is caring, but though he favors Severian, he doesn't quite provide a character-establishing bro moment, and furthermore, it's implied that he's been conspiring over Severian all along. As was the Undine, though she probably was in love with Severian.

Sometimes I wish Wolfe made Roche and Jonas funnier to balance Severian's autistic self-centeredness and ramblings, but alas.

The bleakness isn't there for most of his other works, except maybe Fifth Head of Cerberus.
And bleak is very different from sterile. Sterile is something I'd describe Asimov with, but certainly not Wolfe, especially not as a whole.

Sterile is definitely and adjective for Asimov, not Wolfe. I recently read Foundation and honestly, besides the first book (where we get the interesting ideas - psychohistory and science as religion) it wasn't really anything special. Just dry, boring prose with no rhyme or art to it, imo.

Fair point. Wolfe's corpus crosses different emotions with depth, though New Sun is almost synonymous with his name.

Urth's sun is literally dying, and life on the planet following it, to the point where even noblemen have to exhume corpses for food, raising children is the last thing on people's minds, and mad scientists have free range to sodomize children and experiment with dead pregnant women. The New Sun has both bleak and sterile themes, but Severian's Thomist invocation of the Increate, and final triumph, likely equilibrizes the scenario.

and more twists than in a Nolan movie

New Sun's hidden brilliance lies with its ability to show people how to look the world through the eyes of a thomist, something incredibly alien to the modern utilitarian naturalistic man.
That said, the eating of the dead is not for purposes of food, it's ritualistic and religious in nature.
The twistedness of Urth is shown through the perversion of the Eucharist, the pinnacle of moral decay, as far as he could show it, in symbols.

First option, best option.

>
>The containment thread is basically /v/ and Veeky Forums book discussion. It's almost impossible to discuss literary science fiction there.

This is sorely true.

Ignore the petty bureaucrats, they're powerless and can't enforce their impotent views on this board.

Lem I don't know that well but what I've read didn't impress me

Wolfe is a genius and a brilliant writer but one thing about him is that he doesn't really invent any SF ideas. Similar to PKD, he is an expert remixer and reanalyzer of tropes developed by others (robots, psychics, clones, future causation etc.) However I think he sometimes makes things confusing and hard to read for the hell of it.

Le Guin, good writer but somewhat overrated. The Left Hand of Darkness was probably way more shocking and interesting in the late 60s than now. Also she isn't much of an inventor of new ideas either. Take the concept of Gethenians, beings whose moods/physiology/fertility changes with the lunar phase, I wonder where a woman would have been inspired to come up with this idea. Later her writing got way too preachy. Her stories also tend to feature some facile and watered down "Tao of Pooh" tier Taoism shorn of any cultural context.

PKD, I love this guy, the gonzo way he combines these bizarre scenarios and twists. His writing is so weird and intriguing but never obscure or hard for its own sake and constantly brings in these odd ideas from sociology, theology, mental health, psychopharmacology etc. However his prose style is not the greatest.

Clarke, by far the most influential on the real world, great idea guy, can't write characters to save his life

Asimov, classic golden age ideas but his work doesn't stand up to repeated reading and is completely uninterested in the social dimension of things. The sperglord's favorite SF writer.

Gibson, great technical effects and aesthetics, clearly heavily influenced by Pynchon et al. But can feel overly pessimistic. Doesn't seem to be interested in relationships as much as how tech affects people.

Zelazny, why is he on this list, his best known works are fantasy.

I would vote for Alfred Bester over all of these guys. The Stars My Destination might be the best SF novel ever on the level of energy and style.

Opinions on Dune, senpai?

>the eating of the dead is not for purposes of food, it's ritualistic and religious in nature.
Both are the case. Men cannot live on faith or bread alone.

>inventing ideas
>keeping timeless writers in historical context
>mostly whining about flaws

You need to detoxify

But eating of the dead in the New Sun was never out of hunger, at least not to my knowledge. Certainly not with Vodalus and his lover having a bite of Thecla.
You overstate the importance of the idea in science fiction.
It's always about the execution, the idea can be banal and still captivating to read or... Well Asimov.
Lord of Light is Zelazny's most famous work and This Immortal too is sf. Makes sense for him to be there.
It's okay. I never understood why someone would absolutely love it, but it's a decent novel.

>someone actually voted for LeGuin
But I thought we scared all the tasteless leftists back to Plebbit. Why are they still here?

I'm the regular Catholic poster and I like her.
Books can be interesting regardless of ideology. Disregarding because of it is the true reddit.

Sniffed you from a mile away Marc

Not even him. But close. He's probably in the thread too.

>0 votes for Gibson

LMAO
MAO
AO
O

Someone will probably pity vote for him.

It's left vague and open ended, but the corpse at the beginning of the first novel didn't definitively coincide with any ritual date. Unless you want to fish it up and prove me wrong, which I'd be delighted about.

Vodalus is not a poor man (the asimi, the gun and him having men in the first place), I always assumed it was the same with that corpse as it was with Thecla.
Alongside that, the perversion of the Eucharist could happen once a week, just like the real thing, I don't see a necessity for a particular date.
I hope not, he's an untalented hack.

That makes sense, I'm very likely wrong. Thank you.

all these fucking araminiposters.

...

IT'S A GOOD THING I HAVE TO SAY

You're one of my favorite anons here :)

Niven.

Robert Heinlein

[NO]

Oh shit Wolfe and Lem are toe to toe now.

You just won the "plebbest opinion of the thread" award.

DELETE THIS

Wolfe is currently in the lead.

Cross posting the /g/ thread. They really love PKD and Asimov.

>Cross posting
This kills the poll

oh that's why the poll has gone retarded
useless now

Jeff Noons vurt beats all your faggot Sci fi books.

Fortunately I saved a screen of the young toned bouncy haired poll.

At the end result, we can safely crop off Asimov and PKD, due to their deficiencies in style and depth. It's really Lem or Wolfe.

what about frank herbert?

Wow, even the genre fiction guys who get shit on by the literary fiction fags still end up pretending they're better

You people haven't improved at all

except I'm not a genre fiction guy

Thanks for bringing back the good old hour

Well, you did make me look through the whole thread to figure out what had gone wrong enough for a Veeky Forums poll to have /reddit/ results

Dae bak! Wolfe's back on top!

Thank you completely legitimate possibly Korean whose name might be Kim Lee Soong vote spammers.

>wolfe is a genius
>wolfe
>genius
>GENIUS
no. fuck no. name one god damn genius thing he's ever written, post something exemplifies this genius, and makes it plain for everyone to see. the guy is and always will be a sub-par author and one who writes within a sub-par genre. genius my fucking crusty asshole.

>> makes it plain for everyone to see.

Waaah, please interpret wolfe for me, waaah, im too fucking thick to get wolfe, waaaah, wolfe is shit because i dont get it, waaaah

What an entitled fucking moron, end yourself

>i literally have no quotes or excerpts from my favorite author in the whole wide world who i call a genius

fucking plebs.

>what is Book of the New Sun

Im not the guy you quoted, im just pointing out what a plebby, hold-my-hand-through-this-book little bitch youre being. And since you care so much about quotes, since you said wolfe is shit, why dont you show us some examples too you fucking neet waste of life?

show an excerpt, just something for lawd seks.
here's an example of what i like to call genius.
Gwyon had already made the carriage barn and thrown the door open. There was electricity there, and Gwyon stood just inside, his great hand on the switch and his thumb jamming it back and forth, back and forth, with no consequence but a snap. —Damnation, Gwyon muttered; and then, aware of someone behind him, said, —The bull. I came down to make sure of the bull . . . But Gwyon had hardly got the words out of his mouth before his upraised arm was grasped in the dark so heavily that it almost pulled him over; and the lightning followed so fast on the words that followed, that both were gone, and the transformation was complete, when Gwyon heard,
—Father . . . Am I the man for whom Christ died?
Louder than laughter, the crash raised and sundered them in a blinding agony of light in which nothing existed until it was done, and the tablet of darkness betrayed the vivid, motionless, extinct and enduring image of the bull in his stall and Janet bent open beneath him.
Then it seemed full minutes before the cry, pursuing them with its lashing end, flailed through darkness and stung them to earth. Water fell between them, from a hole in the roof. The smell of smoke reached them in the dark.

You called wolfe subpar, so how about you show us an example of his mediocrity. Have you ever even read wolfe or are you just another kid who doesnt actually read and only knows authors names when theyre memed on Veeky Forums?

>still can't produce even a smidgen of evidence of wolfe's "genius"

fuckin pleb.

yep, just authors memed on Veeky Forums


The agitation that ringed Petersburg then began penetrating to the very centers of Petersburg. It first seized the islands, then crossed the Liteiny and Nikolaevsky Bridges. On Nevsky Prospect circulated a human myriapod. However, the composition of the myriapod kept changing; and an observer could now note the appearance of a shaggy black fur hat from the fields of bloodstained Manchuria. There was a sharp drop in the percentage of passing top hats. Now were heard the disturbing antigovernment cries of street urchins running at full tilt from the railway station to the Admiralty waving gutter rags.
Those were foggy days, Strange days. Noxious October marched on. Dust whirled through the city in dun brown vortexes, and the rustling crimson fell submissively at the feet to wind and chase at the feet, and whish, plaiting yellow-red scatterings of words from leaves.

I didn't call him a genius. You called him mediocre. Burden of proof's in your court son. fuckin pleb. yuck yuck yuck.

no, you didn't, but the person i was talking to did. if you have no claims towards the quality of gene wolfe's writing, then you can fuck off, eh?

BOYS

L Ron Hubbard

The only claim I made was that you're a whiny little bitch who can't actually go read for himself and has to be spoonfed every little thing - that's why you don't like Wolfe. No one owes you jack shit, go read him yourself and figure his books out, you worthless cunt. God I can't wait till summer's over.

i'm not even whining, here i am, posting great excerpts, and challenging the idea of genius in someone ELSE'S opinion, and you, a measly fly keeps buzzing in my ear. flee, fly, flee.

>Once she was certain which way was south, she counted off her paces. The stream appeared at eight. Thecla cupped her hands to drink. The water made her belly cramp, but cramps were easier to bear than thirst.
Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water. When she closed her eyes at last, Thecla did not know whether she would be strong enough to open them again. Moon blood, it’s only my moon blood, but she did not remember ever having such a heavy flow. Could it be the water? If it was the water, she was doomed. She had to drink or die of thirst.

GRRM, what a genius, really. looking at his descriptions and fluidity of writing, he blows gene out of the water.

Yet all you can do is meme excerpts because you can't say anything worthwhile about literature, because you're a one off nonce. I'd more readily believe that the user you were arguing with can contribute a greater deal than you.

then go talk to him, how bout that, punk? if you want worthwhile dialogue with that guy, initiate it. don't fucking try a pissing match with me, faggot.

>Asimov 50
>Le Guin 5
Material enough to feed a modern academic for a month, this is.

>crusty asshole
I'd get that checked out m9, boipucci is supposed to be moist and juicy.

Lem and Wolfe aren't genre fiction tho.
The thing is, just about everyone reads science fiction, judging from the 100+ people on gr and the genre fiction versus literary fiction is a meme perpetuated by retards who don't read at all or at least never gave the best ones a try.

Where is this from?
And for a random quote it requires way too much context, I don't exactly know what's going on.
Where is this from?
He decided to fuck up the poll by posting it on /g/ for no reason.

I've never read works by Wolfe so I went on his Wikipedia page...and all the books listed seem fantasy instead of sci-fi.
Could someone tell me which are his best books of the latter genre?

Bester would be my pick if he was in the poll.

Out of those available I went for Lem.

Book of the New Sun, Fifth Head of Cerberus

You're welcome you little bitch

Okay, if I want worthwhile dialogue I'll try it with someone who isn't you.

You're clearly not worth anyone's time. And if it came to a pissing match, you would certainly lose.

>science fiction authors
>no Wells
>no Verne
step it up guys

I've read only Time Machine, which was mediocre, and War of the Worlds, which was a crime as far as prose and characters go. It's hard to believe how dry it is.

I read him.

Overrated.

What's the matter you dickless bookworm cucks? Mad that another board can dictate your board culture?

If you can't see past your asshole, get used to it.

No you didn't.
He's a genius.

See butthurt user