From: Stewart Fritz <StewartF_at_kpl.gov>
Date: Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:47:45 +0000

I just wanted to chime in- I don't really have an answer as to _why_ dystop ian sci-fi is so perpetually popular- I think Greg nailed it earlier, but i t's been bothering me since Lynn first brought it up and I've been wracking my brain trying to come up with some excellent sci-fi that doesn't fall in to that genre. A few titles that have come to mind over the past day or so:

"Hitchhiker's Guide" series by Douglas Adams Even though the first book in the series is 30 years old(!) they're still v ery popular among teens at our library. I remember finding these at our lib rary when the only other sci-fi book I can remember on the shelf was "Z for Zachariah" (hey! More dystopian fiction!) and being struck at the blending of science fiction and comedy that not many other writes seem to have been able to pull off. Sure, the Earth is destroyed at the start of the series but the rest of the universe that the books take place in is so weird, so r ichly imagined and so oddly funny that it hardly matters.

What about William Gibson? "Neuromancer" blew me away when I read it in hig h school, and even though the 80's cyberpunk tech in the book is a little d ated, it's still a highly entertaining read, if only for the Rastafarian as tronauts.

Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red/Green/Blue Mars" series, chronicling the terraf orming and settlement of, well, Mars. I couldn't make it through these- the y're very dense and occasionally get bogged down in very heavy political an d/or procedural yammering, but other people love them.

Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is a great cyberpunk novel, featuring lots o f virtual reality and weird gadgets. Pretty funny too- the first chapter de scribes the main character's job as a pizza delivery guy with all the serio usness and overblown technical wizardry of a James Bond novel.

Alastair Reynolds writes vast, sweeping space opera featuring extremely sci entifically accurate tech and settings (the stories often take place over t he course of decades or hundreds of years because of the limitations of slo wer-than-light spaceflight) and while they're probably written for adults, a teen with a high reading level could easily handle them. The "Revelation Space" series, "Pushing Ice", "Century Rain" and plenty of others are worth reading for this kind of thing.

Philip K. Dick? He's all over the place thematically and quality-wise, but there's no shortage of REALLY weird ideas in his books. "Ubik", "The Man in the High Castle", "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", etc.

Frank Herbert's "Dune" is still fairly well-read here. Maybe not as much as the newer books, but I still recommend it to older teens when they've run out of some of the more recent sci-fi. Lots o' crazy ideas in this one- des ert planets, giant sandworms, space travel, genetics, etc.

Clarke and Asimov are still really great reads as well. Again, some of it's a little dated but who cares? You don't get much bigger ideas than "2001", "Rendezvous with Rama", "Foundation", etc...
Received on Sat 07 Aug 2010 03:47:45 PM CDT