Compiling a Reading List

[akirlu]

We are back home after a really lovely week in New England, meeting some of Hal's extended family for the first time and hanging out and catching up with one of my oldest and dearest friends. Among the promises made in passing was that I promised Hal's nephew's wife Alma some suggestions of good Science Fiction authors. I'm not at all sure what Alma's reading tastes are, other than that she gave us a copy of collected Borges to read. That doesn't actually tell me much since I've yet to read any Borges. But stumbling blindly into the vast tarpit that is recommending SF/F to non-SF readers I go, nonetheless. Below is the list I have so far, but I welcome suggestions.

Jo Walton: The Small Change Trilogy
Octavia Butler: Kindred
Ellen Klages: The Green Glass Sea
Vonda McIntyre: The Moon and the Sun
Connie Willis: Passage
Matt Ruff: Bad Monkeys
Will Shetterly: Dogland
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale

Insofar as it matters, Alma's first language is Spanish, and she's not totally confident in spoken English, so books available in translation may be particularly helpful. Any thoughts, O Internets?

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I almost always recommend Iain M. Banks's Culture novels, but they're pretty much straight up space opera, and might not be interesting if you're not already steeped in the tropes.

What about Babel-17 or Nova by Samuel R. Delany? Or his early short story collections.

Some early Gene Wolfe might work as well, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, or his first collection of stories.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I've read none of the books on your list, so can't comment. If she likes Borges I might recommend Umberto Eco or Donald Barthelme or Ted Chaing.

When recommending books to people, I generally try to find out if they want to sample the best (ie my taste in) science fiction or do they want to read books similar to ones they like but happen to be sf/f. For example, if they liked The Color Purple then I recommend Roger McBride Allen's Orphan of Creation. Adventure? I start them off with Clive Cussler and wean them into the serious stuff. Do they go to the movies? Check which ones and suggest they read the original H/LotR and Harry Potter books. Romance? Catherine Asaro.

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

If she likes Borges, I'd suggest trying R A Lafferty. The collection 900 Grandmothers is a good place to start.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I don't think I've read any Lafferty, but will check it out -- it's interesting to me that several people are recommending short fiction. It didn't even occur to me. Somewhere along the line I seem to have mostly stopped reading short stories very much. I don't know why, really, but they used to be more of a staple for me, and now it is very much an unusual event for me to seek them out -- usually it's only when a friend has something published, but not even always then. Hmm.

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

Here's a couple of Lafferty shorts:

http://web.archive.org/web/20060719184509/www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/lafferty5/lafferty51.html

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Y_FoU_KMOmkC&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq=lafferty+primary+education+camiroi&source=bl&ots=C7OK6kN0m7&sig=ybefttv02qtHHUcHGLb3rb9N6y8&hl=en#v=onepage&q=lafferty%20primary%20education%20camiroi&f=false

[mwmwmwmw.livejournal.com]

One good reason to recommend short fiction is that it is what Borges wrote. (He also wrote poetry and essays, but his short stories are in my correct opinion by far his strongest work.) His longest work of fiction is on the order of twenty to thirty pages; most of it is much shorter.

Another good reason is that it's much less discouraging to have five pages go than to have five hundred when you're reading in a language you haven't mastered yet.

Alma will be looking into the books you recommended (the three I happened to check are available for the Kindle, which is handy). For my part, I'll be looking into those "if you like Borges then you should check out ..." recs (I'm the Borgeshead even if it was Alma who helped to get me hooked).

--Hal's nephew.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

O Hai! I wasn't expecting you to have to go hunting to find me and the list here, I but I guess that saves me re-compiling for e-mail. All the reasons for suggesting short fiction make total sense to me, it just somehow didn't occur to me because I've gotten out of the habit of reading much short fiction. FYI, I should mention the actual titles of the three books in the Small Change trilogy, because they may be easier to find by title: Farthing, Ha'penny, and Half a Crown. Though if you are a sufficiently competent user of Mr. Google to find my LiveJournal, I expect you could track them down without. But since they're available in Spanish, that may be a good starting place.

Best to Alma, and thanks for the cold. :)

[mwmwmwmw.livejournal.com]

Hah. I didn't go hunting for either you or the list. Hal must've linked here at some point and so I added it to my feed reader.

Alma's started with Bad Monkeys. And sorry about the cold.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I don't know Alma's tastes at all, and hesitate to recommend anything.. and yet... sf has a few really fine exponents of pretty-much-universally-appreciated Oral Story-Telling (Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, most notably), and I think it's hard to go wrong with Boujould, especially the Miles series. (For a newcomer, I'd start out-of-order with "A Civil Campaign" -- sf/Romance, written as a Marx Brothers movie. Maybe I'm wrong, but I figure that any nephew of Hal is pretty likely to marry someone who would appreciate that kind of combination.)

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, that's excellent news! I'll be sure to mention it.

[carbonel]

The Green Glass Sea isn't SF; it's historical fiction. Even though it may partake of SF sensibilities.

I wonder if Steve Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars might hit any of the same buttons that Borges does.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I realize The Green Glass Sea isn't "proper" science fiction, but as you say, it partakes of some of the same sensibilities and as such may be a good "gateway drug." It's certainly a wonderful book, irrespective of genre.

I guess I need to take another run at The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. I started it about a year or so ago and lost my head of steam and put it down comparatively early. That might have been another victim of Learning Chinese.

[seattle-janice.livejournal.com]

When I'm in that boat I usually recommend a Year's Best anthology. A big novel can be quite intimidating. Getting a sampler of different writers in small bites seems to work better.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

The sampler idea is a good thought. Thanks!

[coth.livejournal.com]

I'd try some short stories. Ted Chiang might be good.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I hadn't thought of Ted Chiang because I was only thinking of longer form. Thanks!

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Any list of only 8 titles will have shortcomings, and your list being skewed toward recent novels is no worse than any other list would be, but it's there.
Science fiction is unusually strongly oriented toward its own history in a long "conversation", and new enough that there are still strong fine-grained phenomena in its development. Like the waves of publishing form factors, and the unique position of the first major anthologies with the entire then-history to select from. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, the "pre-Nebulas", self-consciously is the pinnacle of that.

One of my generic suggestions to new readers is to look over the Hugo nomination lists. The one winner in a year might be the result of any number of peculiar circumstances, somewhat like an Oscar, but the nominees give a clearer idea of where things were. And Jo Walton recently revisited the Hugo ballot year by year. Your friend would be well served by going through the essays, perhaps in reverse chronological order, at her own pace.

As a monolingual "American", I'm afraid I don't have any good suggestions for Spanish or translated sf.
[and I'm getting the new lj page format here, with no Preview, so I may not be as well edited as I'd like]