Speculative fiction « Books Worth Reading

My Favorite Reads: A Bunch of “Best of” Book Lists

For a while now, I have been maintaining a collection of “best of” book lists, which I wanted to share with you. These lists are divided chronologically and by broad genre, and are composed solely of books that I have read and given 4 or 5 stars. They are hosted at Lists of Best and updated as I read more.

Best pre-20th century literature – Includes poetry, drama, nonfiction and fiction.

Best of the 20th century:

Note: I separated literary fiction from speculative fiction because I think there was a real separation between genre writing and more mainstream writing during this time. While the genres of horror, science fiction and fantasy weren’t invented during this period, they were definitely robustly explored and defined. Also, this keeps the lists from getting way too long.

Best of the 21st century (thus far):

Note: I merged literary, or mainstream, fiction back with speculative fiction deliberately because I think that now the lines between genres are blurring. Clearly, Neil Gaiman and Stephen King are genre writers, but how would you classify Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, David Mitchell or Cormac McCarthy? Better to call it all just fiction, and read it all.

The best of the best – five-star books only.

Happy reading!

What I Read This Month: October 2009

October 31, 2009 at 2:37 pm | In Books, Monthly Reading | 2 Comments
Tags: Dorothy Bryant, Fantasy, Madeleine L'Engle, Margaret Atwood, Nancy Farmer, P D James, Science fiction, Speculative fiction, Young adult

Cover of The Children Of Men

This was an excellent reading month. I started a new project to read more science fiction written by women (which I am blogging about), and that inspired me to read a lot of high-quality books.

First up, I actually bought and read a brand-new book, which is unusual for me. I finished Margaret Atwood’s excellent companion piece to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood. It is set during the same dystopian/apocalyptic period as Oryx and Crake but follows two female characters who are members of a religious-environmental cult called God’s Gardeners (there are even hymns). I have to say that I enjoyed this novel even more than Oryx, although it had the same kind of abrupt, unexplained ending that led me to believe a third novel might be planned. I wrote a much lengthier review here.

Two rereads this month: The Children of Men by P.D. James and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Both were as good as I remembered, although I was surprised to discover how much the film version of Children of Men veered away from the novel (it had been years since I read it). I was remarking to a friend that my 19-month-old son wasn’t really talking yet, and she compared him to Wrinkle’s Charles Wallace — definitely a compliment, that.

Some new books as well: The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant and The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer. The first was billed as sci fi, but really it is a utopian fantasy. It was still quite good, although it struck me as a little naive. The second is intended for young adults, but I found it enthralling and not nearly as simplistic as most YA books I read.

I am currently taking a departure from this month’s trend and reading Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island for my book club. Since I am a bit of an Anglophile, and I love anything that gently pokes fun at the British, I am already enjoying it very much.

Roundup: 5 books read (click the titles for my full review or reading notes).

The Year of the Flood, The Children of Men, A Wrinkle in Time, The House of the Scorpion

The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You

My rating scale:

1 star: Abandoned before finishing. Don’t waste your time.
2 stars: Poor. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
3 stars: Average. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.
4 stars: Great. Push it on your friends and family.
5 stars: Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

Disclaimer: My ratings are very personal and may have little to do with the book’s artistic or commercial merit, or its place in the literary canon. Rather, the rating reflects how the story, characters and writing spoke to me and augmented my understanding of the world.

Old Favorite: Never Let Me Go

September 15, 2008 at 10:38 am | In Books, Reviews | 3 Comments
Tags: Alternate history, Dystopia, Kazuo Ishiguro, Science fiction, Speculative fiction

Image via Wikipedia

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)

5 stars!

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.

Science fiction that reads like literature is always a rare find. Never Let Me Go is an excellent example of a novel that will satisfy both science fiction and contemporary literature fans.

The premise of this novel is simple, albeit slowly revealed as the story progresses, so I won’t spoil it. Ishiguro is playing with so many big ideas in this novel, but as I read it, I didn’t fully realize what was really being explored, because I was so caught up in the narrative of the main character’s (Kathy H.) childhood and adolescence. I only gradually came to ponder the underlying issues. Why do we accept without questioning our destinies as they have been told to us? What is it about human nature that needs the Other, something different to hate and discriminate against? At what point do we trade in our humanity?

Beyond the story, the characters are what make this novel so affecting. The voice of the narrator is so fully realized that I could literally hear her speaking in my head, down to accent and intonations, as I read. This book was so beautiful and haunting it will resonate with me for a long time.

Old Favorite: Specimen Days

August 6, 2008 at 8:45 am | In Books, Reviews | Leave a Comment
Tags: Dystopia, Ghost story, Michael Cunningham, Speculative fiction, Walt Whitman

Book cover via Amazon

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005)

5 stars!

Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no grass where they’d buried Simon.

Specimen Days is an unusual novel, beautifully written and gloriously strange — the best kind of novel, the kind that keeps you thinking and wondering long after the cover has been closed. The book is divided into three sections, each one connected by character, setting, iconic images and the poetry of Walt Whitman. In each section, the same three characters appear — a man, a woman and a deformed child — but each section is told from a different character’s point of view. Although it is never stated, I got the sense that reincarnation is at work, and each character in their new time is a continuation and evolution of who they were before.

The first section is set in Victorian New York, among sweatshops, ironworks and extreme poverty, in an age just beginning to become industrialized. The boy, so struck by Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (which he calls “the Book”) that he cannot help but recite lines from it at odd and inappropriate moments, has taken his dead brother’s job at a factory. He becomes convinced that ghosts haunt the machines around him and that the machines love the people who work them so much that they want to consume the people themselves. The boy feels compelled to save his brothers fiancee from such a fate.

The second section, set in present-day New York, follows a forensic psychologist for the NYC police department as she is caught up in a strange terrorist plot involving children blowing themselves and a randomly chosen stranger up in an effort to change the course of human history. The children, all unwanted and abandoned, were raised by a woman calling herself Walt Whitman in an apartment where the walls, floors and ceilings have been covered with pages from Leaves of Grass. For me, this was the most compelling section, although all three stories were fascinating.

The final story is set 150 years into the future. It begins in a New York that has devolved into an amusement park, but the story moves outside the confines of the city for the first time. The characters — an android who compulsively recites Whitman due to his “poetry chip,” an intelligent alien lizard and a deformed but wise young boy — go on a quest together that takes them across a ruined America to Denver and the promise of a more hopeful future. This was the strangest story of them all, but the common threads of character and theme keep it grounded.

Each story is ultimately about love: how it begins, how it can end and what it compels us to do for and to each other. But I think this novel is also a warning about how disconnected we are becoming from the Earth and nature — connection to nature is a strong theme in Leaves of Grass – and the inevitable consequences of that disconnect. Each time there is an attempt to reconnect, to alter the direction that society is going, and a failure to do so. But despite these failures, there is still hope — hope embodied in Whitman’s enduring words, in the persistence of love, in the continuing quest for a reunion with the natural world and the cosmos. The ultimate fate of that quest remains unknown as the novel ends, and there is hope in that too.

What Is Speculative Fiction Redux

July 8, 2008 at 7:57 am | In Genres, On the Web | Leave a Comment
Tags: Speculative fiction

Over at Lost Book Archives, there is a nice long essay titled “What Is Speculative Fiction?” If you liked my essay on the same subject, you might enjoy this one as well. Plenty of examples, both films and books, are given.

Classic Favorite: The Giver

April 25, 2008 at 12:16 pm | In Books, Reviews | 4 Comments
Tags: CS Lewis, Dystopia, Eugenics, Isaac Asimov, Lloyd Alexander, Lois Lowry, Madeleine L'Engle, Newbery Medal, Science fiction, Series, Soft science fiction, Speculative fiction, Trilogy, Utopia, Young adult

The Giver, Lois Lowry (1993)

It is true that most habitual readers acquire the habit when they are young. I have my father to blame for my addiction to books, who actually gave me an Isaac Asimov novel when I was in the fourth grade (from which I learned several choice curse words, although I was totally incapable of following the plot). In fact, if I do not get to read at least once a day, preferably before going to sleep, I suffer severe withdrawal symptoms such as insomnia and persistent moodiness. But I digress.

Like many young readers, I was hooked by the gateway drugs of science fiction and fantasy. My favorites when I was a pre-teen were the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander and A Wrinkle in TIme and its sequels by Madeleine L’Engle.

Unfortunately, I had long abandoned my childish ways by the time The Giver was published. I read it for the first time recently and realized that this was a book my younger self would have loved. It depicts a dystopian society where all choices have been eliminated. Everything from what your job is to who you marry is decided for you. But one person in the society, the “Receiver,” must be chosen as the keeper of the society’s collective memories. His job is to remember what life used to be like, with war, tragedy and pain, yes, but also with true emotions, extended family and even colors. Each new Receiver receives the memories from the previous Receiver, who thus becomes the “Giver” of the title. While a bit too simplistic for the adult reader, the novel provides a nice introduction to some weighty themes for younger readers. Think of it as a Brave New World or 1984 lite.

This is the first book in a trilogy. I haven’t read the other two in the series, but trilogies are the crack cocaine of science fiction — once you start, you can’t stop. (Or have I stretched this metaphor too thin?)

Practice a little subversion, and sneak a copy of The Giver to a young reader you know.

What Is Speculative Fiction?

April 11, 2008 at 12:34 pm | In Books, Genres | 5 Comments
Tags: Alternate history, Cormac McCarthy, David Mitchell, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Jonathan Lethem, Kazuo Ishiguro, Magical realism, Michael Chabon, Michael Cunningham, Neil Gaiman, Science fiction, Speculative fiction

The kind of fiction I like to read the most, and that I tend to focus on here, falls under the broad umbrella of “speculative fiction.” I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the traditional genre labels of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The definitions that are most often applied to these genres seem so limiting, and they leave out a wide swath of really great books.

All three of these genres have one thing in common: The stories concern elements that do not exist in the so-called real world. In other words, they speculate about what might be possible but, in our everyday experience, isn’t.

In science fiction, the speculations must be grounded in the principles of science; they might not be possible now, but someday they could be, which is why science fiction is often set on future Earth or on another planet. The subjects of science fiction are space travel, dimensional travel, time travel, post-apocalyptic societies and technological innovations.

In fantasy, however, the speculations are usually based on magic and the supernatural. These speculations must follow rules, but they are not the rules of science. Generally, fantasy stories take place in imagined worlds (but not necessarily another planet) or on a fictional historical Earth.

Horror, on the other hand, most often takes place in the present day, in the world in which we live. But it introduces a fantastic or supernatural element, usually a monster of some kind. Horror also differs from fantasy in that it, by definition, should be frightening and dark.

But what about fiction that doesn’t fit neatly into one of these three categories? For instance, where would Neil Gaiman’s American Gods be classified? It is set in the modern-day world, but with its cast of mythical gods, it shades more toward fantasy than horror, although it does have horrific elements. Or what about David Mitchell’s excellent novel Cloud Atlas? This experimental novel is set in several different times, in the past, present and future, including a post-apocalyptic society. But it doesn’t read like traditional science fiction.

That’s where the label speculative fiction is useful. It covers any work of fiction that posits a “what if” question and then attempts to answer that question. That includes science fiction, fantasy and horror, plus narrower genres like alternate history and magical realism, as well as works that defy any neat label.

More contemporary writers who aren’t often associated with genre writing are stepping out of the bounds of literary fiction and into the realm of the speculative, and I’m glad because they are turning out some great works. For example, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a fascinating alternate history, and one-third of Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days is set on a future Earth, with aliens and space travel. I first started reading Jonathan Lethem via his genre-defying novels Gun, with Occasional Music, As She Climbed Across the Table and Amnesia Moon.

I like the speculative fiction label because it describes my favorite kind of writing but is much more open than the traditional genres. When I read speculative fiction, I can read hard sci-fi, traditional fantasy, contemporary horror or experimental literary fiction. The label also encourages good authors to experiment and stretch themselves without fear of being pigeonholed into an undesirable section of the bookstore. The stigma of writing about such subjects seems to have been dropped. For proof, just look at Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning (and Oprah Book Club pick) post-apocalyptic novel The Road or Kazuo Ishiguro’s foray into science fiction, Never Let Me Go, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and named one of Time’s 100 Best Novels of All Time.

Want to know more? Check out these sites: