Science Fiction

A backlit view of Titan and Saturn's rings, taken by Cassini.

I read a lot of SF; in my experience, many scientists do (a surprising number actually write it!). Here's a rather random list of interesting authors, with some links. Mostly they're people whose books I like, but I've let one or two others in for completeness, as it were. They are all books: if your interest in SF centres round films or TV, you won't find anything to interest you here.

Neal Asher

I don't like his politics, and this does affect some of his writing ("The Owner" series in particular), but I do like the Line of Polity books, which take place in a society which is very similar to Iain Banks' Culture (mixed human/AI society), but much less utopian (its own motives are a bit suspect, and it's at war with some very nasty aliens). Very inventive as regards alien ecosystems. The link is to a blog, but the obvious website is basically dead: the homepage is still there, but the links don't go anywhere.

Iain Banks (1954-2013)

Not completely reliable (Song of Stone, ugh; Feersum Endjinn, yuk) but usually immensely entertaining, whether writing space opera as Iain M. Banks or straight fiction (allegedly, though several have strong SF/fantasy elements) without the M. Not one to learn your science from, but who cares? Sadly missed.

John Barnes

Haven't read much of his, but what I have read has been well thought out. His essay "How to Build a Future", in his anthology Apocalypses and Apostrophes, is an interesting inside story on how he develops the backgrounds for his books. Like Reynolds, willing to tackle the consequences of interstellar colonisation without faster-than-light travel.

Stephen Baxter

I feel he 'ought' to be here, but to be honest I don't like his books much, especially the alternate-history-of-the-space-race ones, which have an unendearing combination of excessive detail ("I read up on this, so damn it you are going to learn it too"), characters out of Central Casting, and too many telegraphed plot points. But I know I'm in a minority here.

Gregory Benford

Genuine astronomer, working on the Galactic centre. Some of his books, particularly Cosm, draw very strongly on his background as a university researcher, and even those that don't have a ring of authority in the background: here's someone who knows what he's talking about. No web site that I could find, except his professional one as an astrophysicist!

Lois McMaster Bujold

Author of a long-running SF series starring Miles Vorkosigan, aristocratic scion of a near-royal family on the planet Barrayar and (rather accidentally) admiral of the Dendarii Free Mercenaries. Despite this over-brief synopsis, the stories are quite hard SF (FTL travel by wormhole, one of the less farfetched dodges; sensible technology; societies that have been thought through). Has also written some fine fantasy. She likes damaged heroes: Miles is physically handicapped as a result of his mother's being exposed to poisonous chemicals (in a botched assassination attempt) while pregnant; Lupe dy Cazaril, hero of one of the fantasy books, carries physical and mental scars from several years as a galley slave. This sounds a bit grim, but it isn't – the characters are well-rounded and the books shot through with humour. I have the feeling she's a lot better known in the US than the UK. Highly recommended.

C.J. Cherryh

OK, agreed, she has one plot and she sticks to it: naive young hero, plunged into the middle of alien intrigue about which he knows nothing, but in which he is for some reason crucial, has to figure out what's going on and develop understanding of alien society in order to resolve crisis. Applies equally well to fantasy and science fiction. But she is good at alien societies and her characters are interesting (unlike Baxter's). The site is somewhat out-of-date, and to my taste over-full of fancy fonts.

Hal Clement (1922-2003)

The classic hard science fiction writer. Harvard astronomy graduate and former schoolteacher. Very good indeed at alien environments and alien biology – Mission of Gravity is the all-time classic in SF world-building – not quite so good at alien characterisation. All his characters, whether human or alien, tend to act disconcertingly like Mr Spock: they never panic for more than half a second and they always reason things out logically. I don't think people work that way in the real world (pity). Also, you do occasionally feel that plot incidents have been engineered deliberately to introduce some interesting snippet of physics or chemistry – is this the result of a teaching career?

Greg Egan

Australian, trained I believe as a mathematician, with a fascination for the more esoteric edges of theoretical physics, around which he builds his plots. Some of these must be hard going for non-physicists! I think he's the best contemporary hard science fiction writer, but he does make you work: he's produced books based on the collapse of the wavefunction in quantum theory, the search for a grand unified theory of particle physics, and the structure of the vacuum, among other things. He manages to weave this into decent plots, too. The site has a lot of real science in it.

Mary Gentle

Pigeonholed as a fantasy writer, but some of her books are straight science fiction and a couple (the best, in my view) are largely straight historical novels. The SF novels are reminiscent of LeGuin, with similar interests (gender roles, society) and similar weaknesses ("aliens" that are just humans with exotic make-up, a la Star Trek), but not (in my view anyway) as well written. The history novels (Ash and 1610), on the other hand, are excellent: meticulously researched, tightly plotted and well written. Ash has a pure SF sting in its tail, but 1610 is practically a pure historical novel apart from one of its central assumptions (that the mathematical astrology of the late 16th/early 17th century actually worked - yes, this is SF, or perhaps more accurately fantasy, but just think how many mainstream historical novels include miracles or "second sight" in their plot elements). Both these are long books, and 1610 in particular takes a very long time to get going, but worth persevering with.

William Gibson

Has to be here, as the inventor of cyberpunk. Sufficiently influential and often-imitated that it can be hard to remember how novel Neuromancer was when it first appeared. (Would we have had The Matrix without it?) Genuinely a very fine writer, who might well win awards in mainstream fiction if he wasn't pigeonholed as an SF author.

Fred Hoyle (1915-2001)

Enormously important and influential theoretical astrophysicist: he's best known as co-inventor of the ill-fated Steady State cosmology, and (sadly) in his latter years for various daft ideas including "flu from space" and "Archaeopteryx is a hoax", but he should be remembered as the driving force behind the understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis in the late 1950s. He wrote a number of science fiction novels: the best remembered is The Black Cloud, in which an interstellar dust cloud drifting into the solar system turns out to be an intelligent entity. The Black Cloud is rock-hard SF and remarkably prescient in some of its ideas; it's still worth reading today.

Gwyneth Jones

Interesting and hard to classify. In the mid 90s, wrote a trilogy (White Queen/North Wind/Phoenix Cafe) about human/alien interactions, definitely SF, strongly reminiscent of Ursula LeGuin in its preoccupation with gender roles. Her more recent and best-known sequence (starting with Bold As Love) is less easily pigeonholed: its characters are mostly rock musicians, it's set in the near future, it has strong fantasy elements, especially in Castles Made of Sand. Bold As Love won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, so someone thinks it's science fiction! Personally I'm not convinced, but I do think it's very good: strong plot, some fine writing, and excellent characterisation.

Ken MacLeod

Friend of Iain Banks, and there are some similarities of style, but definitely more of a hard SF writer. Interested in politics (I don't mean he's standing for Parliament, I mean that the books lay considerable emphasis on political systems!). Shortlisted for the Clarke several times: seems a much more natural choice than Gwyneth Jones, though now I think about it there are many similarities between his future-Scotland in Cosmonaut Keep and Jones' England in Bold As Love. Website's actually Wikipedia, but more useful than his own blog, which is mostly politics.

K.J. Parker

Fantasy for people who don't like fantasy: totally free of all the standard cliches. Very distinctive writing style, laced with cheerful cynicism and very black humour. He has written three trilogies (as KJ Parker – apparently this is a pseudonym of Tom Holt, who's a prolific author under his own name), set in different worlds but very similar in style. Got very mixed reviews on Amazon, which doesn't surprise me in the least: most fantasy has fairytale in its immediate ancestry, but this seems to me to echo (consciously or unconsciously) Greek tragedy – basically decent characters doing unspeakable things in the name of family honour or predestined fate, or in this case a bit of both. I think many people who like hard SF will like this: it has the same feel of verisimilitude and the same interest in technology (the technology of the sixth century rather than the 21st, admittedly). He says he's actually made bows and armour himself, and it shows.

Alastair Reynolds

Astronomer who worked at ESA till 2004 (now full-time writer). One of the very few SF authors working on an interstellar canvas who choose to stick with Einstein and settle for slower-than-light space travel (Barnes does this too, and MacLeod almost does). His first novel, Revelation Space, was a bit derivative: there were echoes of Banks and MacLeod, and one episode that makes it very difficult to believe that he hasn't seen John Carpenter's Dark Star; since then, he's developed much more of his own voice. The Poseidon's Children sequence (starting with Blue Remembered Earth) is noteworthy for having an African family as protagonists – refreshing in a field that tends to be rather white and male (characters even more than practitioners!). The web site is up-to-date and includes some stories to download (it's also free of the annoying advertising pop-ups that his previous web page suffered from).

John Scalzi

The books I've read are mostly military space opera, but not too hung up on gory battle scenes, and some interesting ideas and characters. The multi-award-winning Redshirts is an entertaining spoof of science-fiction TV series (most obviously the original Star Trek), in which the lower-ranking crew members of a starship start realising that being picked to go on away missions with the captain and first officer is surprisingly bad for your life expectancy...
The Whatever blog has a lot of guest entries, with other SF authors discussing their work: quite interesting.

Charles Stross

Another of the Scottish school of space-opera composers (cf. Banks and MacLeod), and there are some similarities of style and approach: if you like MacLeod you will definitely like Stross, and if the politics puts you off MacLeod you'll still like Stross (I think his actual views might not be all that dissimilar, but they don't pervade his fiction). Besides the hard SF, also in the middle of an extended parallel-worlds series which he describes as "fantasy novel[s], for rather odd values of fantasy" (since the parallel-worlds concept appears in both fantasy and SF, I guess what makes these books fantasy is that the parallel worlds are not technologically advanced: the usual "add magic and subtract the laws of physics" definition of fantasy certainly doesn't apply), and the Laundry Files, a highly entertaining set of spy-novel pastiches based on the assumption that magic works, and that HM Govt has a branch of MI5 that deals with it. The main website, a blog, is entertaining and includes some free downloads and occasional competitions (which I mention since I actually won one of them!).

Vernor Vinge

Another career scientist, ex-professor at UCSD. Very limited output, probably because it was never his main job. Cites Poul Anderson as an influence, and unfortunately often seems to share his less than classic prose style and unattractive politics. But worth it for his very good aliens, especially the group-mind Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep.