MIND MELD: What Science Fiction Series is the Most Underrated?

After last week’s Mind Meld on Underrated Fantasy Series, we asked the obvious follow-on question of this week’s panelists:

Read on to see what they said…and be sure to tell us your picks below!

Three series come immediately to mind.

First, there’s George Alec Effinger’s Marid or Budayeen series:

• When Gravity Fails
• A Fire in The Sun
• The Exile Kiss
• Budayeen Nights (the collected short stories and novelettes)

George brought cyberpunk away from Japan, where almost every such story was set until then, gave us a totally believable milieu and interesting, three-dimensional characters, and fascinating plots. The third wasn’t as good as the first two, but he was quite ill when he was writing it, and it can’t diminish the quality of the first two.

Then there’s Kay Kenyon’s just-concluded The Entire and the Rose tetralogy:

• Bright Of The Sky
• A World Too Near
• City Without End
• Prince Of Storms

The brilliance of Kay’s conception, the exquisite working out of all the details, is unmatched in any series of the past quarter century. The complexity of her novels was building toward this for a few years, but it still blew me away.

And there’s my favorite series, spread out more than a third of a century. I don’t know that it’s “overlooked”, but at one point Ballantine gave up on it, more fools they, and Tor picked it up, and that of course is James White’s Sector General or Hospital Station series:

• Hospital Station
• Star Surgeon
• Major Operation
• Ambulance Ship
• Sector General
• Star Healer
• Code Blue – Emergency
• The Genocidal Healer
• The Galactic Gourmet
• Final Diagnosis
• Mind Changer
• Double Contact

It started as a series of brilliant medical puzzle stories, but by the time of The Genocidal Healer he was dealing with the kind of themes that belong on Hugo ballots. I wrote an intro to one of Jim’s books in this I pointed out that if some of my books were a little less than idealistic, a little cynical, it’s because I wrote about my universe – but I wish I could live in his. I still do. (I was, at Jim’s request, reading the galleys to Double Contact to give him a cover quote when word came through that he had died. It still hurts.)

I have other series I enjoy, but things like Fritz Leiber’s Gray Mouser and De Camp & Pratt’s Incompleat Enchanter stories can hardly be considered underrated or in need of attention. Similarly, the best of them all are C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories, but since they can all fit in one book (the complete collection is currently in print from Paizo/Planet Stories) I don’t suppose it counts.

My favorite under-rated series is by Australian author, Terry Dowling., featuring Tom Tyson, sandship captain extraordinaire. How can you resist stories that blend powerful AIs, genetic engineering, Aboriginal Dreamtime, and sandships in the Great Outback — and manage to stay science fiction, not fantasy? These stories stand out as truly original in a field much cluttered with cloned material.

My pick for this has to be Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis saga, Lilith’s Brood (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago). Don’t get me wrong, it gets a lot of love from those who’ve read it but it seems like it never shows up on a ‘best ever’ list and I totally think it should.

Octavia Butler was great, and for my money this is her at her best. When she came up with the Oankali, she invented one of the most well-developed, unique, and interesting alien races I can remember. I’m glad Science Fiction is strong enough as a genre that I’ve actually become jaded to alien creations, but jaded I am and the Oankali really pulled me in from their unique physiology, to their motivations and philosophies. After watching the human race nearly wipe itself out, they are not willing to save what’s left of it but instead offer an interesting alternative; merge their genes with the Oankali through cross-breeding so that at least some small piece of humanity survives (to the benefit of both species), or die out. Either way, the human race as we know it goes extinct. It’s a hard choice, and predictably not all of those rescued agree about what to do. Watching the remains of the human race struggle with this genetic merger, and how it plays out in the generations which follow, made for an amazing read. There are some biblical allegories folded in here, but even without that added layer it’s a great series with deep characters, fantastic world building, and a well thought out beginning, middle and end. It’s a great series, and a great example of what Science Fiction can be.

I have three series that I’d like to highlight.

The first is the Continuing Time series by Daniel Keys Moran, which began with Emerald Eyes, (and continued with The Long Run, Last Dancer). The second book features one of my all-time favorite characters, a thief named Trent the Uncatchable. Also, DKM invented the Peaceforcers (a clever shortening of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force) which is a concept that has stayed in my head long after I finished reading the stories — and mutated and changed as I continued to play with it. In fact, in my new prequel to my own AngeLINK series (coming out from a small press this fall!), I have an homage to his PKFE.

The second is a cyberpunkish series by Wilhelmina Baird which begins with Crashcourse and includes Clipjoint and Psykosis. I haven’t reread her series lately, but I wonder, particularly, how her vision of reality TV would stack up to what has become the reality of reality TV. She also invented characters who refused to leave my head — particularly Sword and Dash — long after I put the books on the shelf.

The last (though I’m sure, given time, I could come up with others) would be Karen Lowachee’s series that started with Warchild and continues with Burndive and Cagebird). She got a little buzz with this series, as it won some awards, but I still feel it’s underrated. These are very powerful, not-the-usual-space-opera action stories that have a lot of emotional resonance. Her characters are hard, and hard to like, but compelling and, ultimately sympathetic. Very worthy reads.

The Foreigner series by C.J. Cherryh, published by DAW Books. It’s not only some of her very finest work, but in my opinion her most widely accessible to any reader. It’s rich with sympathetic characters, an ongoing and fascinating story, and the setting? Wow! It skews between the alien and familiar with great skill. The interplay between Human and Atevi, told through the point of view of the sole interpreter, Bren Cameron (a character I adore) is simply fabulous. The premise of meeting a species we think we understand but don’t is entirely plausible, while the way they’ve managed to forge a stable relationship despite this over time is convincing. And entertaining! I don’t usually say this, but I must. I can’t believe none of these books or the entire sequence hasn’t won every award going by now. Hopefully they will.

James Blish, Cities In Flight (hardcover omnibus, Overlook Press, 2000).

These four novels, published in various forms from the 1950s through 2000, present a one of a kind future, rarely influencing other works until space habitats became more obvious in later works, my own Macrolife among them in 1979 (available in a 25th anniversary edition from Pyr Books in hard and trade pb, and from E-Reads), which turned against the colonization of planets as presented in the old SF traditions.

I find it odd that my book is in the Easton Press Masterpieces of Science Fiction collection of leatherbound volumes and Blish’s is not.

When the bulk of the 1970s science fiction readership was embracing the New Wave or championing the Campbellian hard stuff, I was devouring reprints of decidedly less stylish SF: the old, disdained pulp stuff – specifically, interplanetary romance.

Amidst these more or less memorable reprints (mostly less), I encountered a new interplanetary romance novel with an exceptionally evocative title.

I didn’t know its author, Leigh Brackett, had a long-established career writing screenplays for the likes of Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne and Howard Hawks, including a collaboration with William Faulkner.

I just knew I’d never read anything like The Ginger Star.

What did I like? The high adventure on a distant, exotic world under the harsh, brassy glare of a dying sun. The dark and antiheroic hero, Eric John Stark, who was larger than life in some ways, yet unable to defeat it in others. The noir sensibility (not that I’d seen a noir film yet, but Brackett guaranteed I’d like the form, which she helped to shape). The strange and colorful, yet compelling and believable cultures, steeped in a genuine sense of antiquity. The sense of inevitable doom. The strong, fine prose. And, not least to my budding feminist soul, the fact that the author was a woman outwriting the guys writing this toughguy stuff.

With one novel, Leigh Brackett became the favorite author of my teenage years (though, of course, I promptly read everything of hers that I could get my hands on, including the rest of the Skaith trilogy).

I recently reread The Ginger Star (1974) and its sequels, The Hounds of Skaith (1974) and The Reavers of Skaith (1976). I found they still hold up. And I discovered new pleasures, overlooked by my decades-younger self.

If you haven’t already, but want to make Brackett’s and Stark’s acquaintance, the Paizo Publishing imprint Planet Stories has recently reprinted The Ginger Star, The Hounds of Skaith, The Reavers of Skaith, and a pre-Skaith Stark title, The Secret of Sinharat.

Enjoy.

This was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. There are plenty of science fiction series worth recommending but the names that immediately sprang to mind (Foundation, Culture, Ender’s Game) are all not only highly regarded, but well know too.

I considered the Night’s Dawn Trilogy (which everyone should read) but felt that Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution series fit the bill better. When people speak of MacLeod’s work it is generally positive, but at least here in the States availability has been patchy.

What distinguishes MacLeod from his peers is the way he uses Science Fiction to explore political systems. We’ve seen plenty of military societies and there’s never been a shortage of utopias. But how often do you see a functioning anarchist society? Socialist? Green?

And these are fully functioning societies. MacLeod shows us both the good and the bad of the various political extremes that he presents in each of the books in the series. This is a refreshing change to simply having an author’s political views shoved down your throat. Instead we are given protagonists whose political views probably radically depart from our own and still makes them relatable. I frequently had to pause in reading these books to argue against the claims the characters were making.

But don’t worry, this is a science fiction series, not a political one and there’s plenty of science at work. The books are set in various different periods of mankind’s future and technology varies accordingly from near future cyberpunk to far future androids and singularities

Structured as a loosely connected series of 4 novels(The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division and The Sky Road), The Fall Revolution series is not an easy read by any measure, but it is a very rewarding one.

Usually these kinds of questions leave me racking my brains and gnashing my teeth, but this time an answer sprang to mind almost immediately: Elizabeth Hand’s trilogy comprising Winterlong (1990), Aestival Tide (1992), and Icarus Descending (1993).

Any fan of Hand’s, or for that matter any knowledgeable reader of speculative fiction, is probably familiar with Winterlong, her brilliant debut, which established her at once as an important new talent. That decadent romance of the far future, as extravagantly plotted as it is gorgeously written, filled with eccentric characters who nevertheless are deeply human-perhaps none more so than Miss Scarlet Pan, an ape-was brought back into print in 1997, but the other two novels were much less popular, for a variety of reasons, and basically faded out of memory, especially as Hand shifted her output toward her distinctive brand of fantasy.

Winterlong is an almost claustrophobic hothouse of a novel, exuding a rare combination of sensuality and intelligence, and marked by a fearless imagination naturally drawn to the weird: people, science, art. In Aestival Tide and Icarus Descending, Hand’s plotting skills improved, and her vision expanded; the final two books constitute a harrowing but not hopeless portrait of a grimly martial post-apocalyptic world where genetic engineering has run amuck, resulting in many beautiful monsters. Hand ransacks the genre, from novels to movies, to decorate these books-they are both an homage to her influences and an escape from them. They are filled with strikingly original images and wordplay-already Hand was a formidable stylist.

Her stature today is such that I think it would behoove a small press to bring out an omnibus edition of this overlooked, underappreciated trilogy.

I tend to prefer single books to duologies, trilogies, and series, so it was difficult for me to come up with answers. I’ve also been traveling so I haven’t been able to trawl my bookshelf. I’m sure as soon as I send this to you I’ll start kicking myself as I recall some series of books that would have been a perfect answer, but here’s what I can think of now.

1) Lilith’s Brood by Octavia Butler (Dawn, Imago, Adulthood Rites) is a trilogy that chronicles the blending of human and alien, exploring many of Butler’s customary themes about love, kinship, consent or lack thereof, and unwilling communities that become tight-knitted. People argue over which of Butler’s works are the best, but for me, these three books are clearly the height of Butler’s intensity and power, and I come back to read them every few years. They are probably my favorite series of books. They already receive attention, so they’re not a perfect answer for your question, but no matter how much attention they receive, they deserve more.

2) Otherland by Tad Williams. Each book in this series could be split into many books; they’re some of the thickest paperbacks on my shelf. These near-future cyberpunk books take place primarily in an immersive virtual reality, and weave together a rich, diverse set of characters in an enormous range of settings–some of which (like the endless house where some of the characters wander awhile) are extremely beautiful. One of Williams’ most striking world-building techniques is his choice to begin each chapter with a media clip; taken together, these fictional intertextual moments vary and increase the sense of a vibrant, inhabited world beyond what could be achieved with the characters’ points of view alone. I’ve read this series twice, and each time I found it seductive, intense, and immersive–but both times when I finished reading, I came away with a sense of disappointment in the series’ flaws. There are some cliches–like the murderous henchmen–which are increasingly annoying as the books progress. Worse, the books tackle too many plot threads to successfully resolve, and the reveals at the end can’t do justice to the pulse-raising tension in the beginning and middle. In 2010, at least 5 years since my last reread, I also wonder whether the technology in these books would seem quaint now–but even if it does, I think the books will still remain interesting as a snapshot of an imagined, bypassed future.

Related posts:

1. MIND MELD: What Fantasy Series is Underrated?
2. MIND MELD: Science Fiction Series
3. MIND MELD: Underrated Authors
4. MIND MELD: How will Science Fiction Weather the Recession?
5. MIND MELD: Science Fiction as a ‘Geek’ Genre

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