Science Fiction

Okay folks. Here's the deal. It's okay to like science fiction. You probably do without even realizing you do. People seem to have this idea that you have to wear a black trenchcoat, carry around Magic cards and drink your weight in Mountain Dew in order to fully appreciate the genre, but this is false. There are as many different kinds of Science Fiction as there are colors and styles of trench coat. And please - Magic Cards? So 1997.

Even in the old days when we hadn't been to the moon yet and the Russians had yet to send Laika the dog into space, Science Fiction had it's different branches. There was Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man and Stars My Destination), a TV writer who specialized in space travel and character development. Bester's Gully Foyle is still one of the most powerful anti-heroes in science fiction history.
There was Olaf Stapledon, (Star Maker, Sirius) who many modern sci-fi giants point to as their primary influence when it comes to pure imaginative capability. He wrote Star Maker in the 1920s, which essentially describes what it's like to move away from our planet into the solar system, and describes what life might be like on other planets. Sirius, is about a dog born with a human's brain. So cool.

Andre Norton, one of the first ladies of Science Fiction, was also one of the most prolific. Because her audience was mostly male, or because of prejudices of the time, she was unable to sell many copies of her early SF, so she wrote as Andrew North. Her stories pressed the boundaries of imagination and were some of the first to have really strong female characters. Of course, now we know why. Her efforts in the mid to late 50's paved the way for the likes of Ursula K. Leguin and C.J. Cherryh.

Cherryh was first an anthropologist before moving into the realm of SF, and pretty much launched the Fantasy shelf with her imaginary animals - Weird species that don't really exist but could. Once we get into animals, we are still in science mode, but there needs to be a break here from SF into Fantasy.
Anytime you see elves and wizards and made-up creatures, or anytime animals are talking, you are dealing with Fantasy. Vampires and monsters are fantasy/mythology, but Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) is Total Science Fiction!

Anytime there are spaceships and different versions of the Future, you are reading SF.
Another category needs to be established, however, for Speculative Fiction.
This encompasses writing that has to do with right now, but different versions of right now.
Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle, for example, has to do with what would have happened if the Japanese and Germans had won WWII. Put that into the Shoulda coulda woulda pile.
Neal Stephenson is in this part of the genre, as well, as exemplified in the eco-thriller Zodiac, where a toxic substance appears in Boston Harbor, and in Cryptonomicon, about code-breaking.
This is also partly considered "cyberpunk". Anytime there are computers involved, it's cyberpunk.
Now you know.

If you like robots, and you know you do, Isaac Asimov is your man. I, Robot is still the standard for robot fiction, and his rules for robots are like scripture for modern robot scientists. But about the same time as Asimov was Stanislaw Lem, a Polish genius with a thing for developing imaginary worlds. In Cyberiad we meet Trurl and Klapaucius, two robot designers who are constantly trying to one-up each other. They are also robots, it should be noted.

Contemporary Fiction gets pretty Science Fiction-y sometimes, and I want to reshelve some of these great novels based on their magical imagery or straight up alien/futuristic sequences. I hereby officially reclaim the following titles to live with their brethren in the Sci-Fi shelves:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1984 by George Orwell
The Sparrow and Children of God by Maria Doria Russell
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
American Gods and Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman

any others??
hope you are enjoying the summer - stay cool, and we'll see you at the bookstore!
al bentley