SF by non-genre writers

Mirannan said:
Iain Banks (AKA Iain M. Banks) is a possible case of this. Same person, slightly different nom de plume, for SF and non-SF works. He obviously thought that the distinction was worth making obvious - or at least his publishers did.
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Except that Iain Banks, in his "M" persona, did more than just dabble in SF. His entire "Culture" series is a notable achievement in the genre, not to mention his other SF stand-alones. Admittedly, The Wasp Factory. a non-SF novel served as his literary benchmark for many.
 
dask said:
How about the short story collections The General Zapped An Angel, The Edge Of Tomorrow, and A Touch Of Infinity by Howard Fast?
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Yes, Howard Fast. It's interesting that his first published story (according to his NY Times obituary) was a sale to Amazing in 1931, when he was 17. (According to the ISFDB, The Wrath of the Purple appeared in the October 1932 issue.)
The three collections you mention were reassembled into a single volume, Time and the Riddle: Thirty-One Zen Stories (1975).
 
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Perhaps some of Jorge Luis Borges work?
Sinclair Lewis, "It can't happen here"? Alternate history from 1935.
John Updike has written some SF, but its all too recent I think.
J.B. Priestley's "The Magicians"? A stretch. Magical realism really.

I'm not sure there are many, to be honest. There are numerous authors in this period who started out mainstream, and then made it in SF, so that's how they are often remembered, but they often rather scorned SF initially. A good example is John Wyndham.
 
Philip Wylie, When Worlds Collide (1933, with Edwin Balmer), After Worlds Collide (1934, with Edwin Balmer), The Paradise Crater (1945), The Disappearance (1951), Tomorrow! (1954), Triumph (1963), Los Angeles: A.D. 2017 (1971), The End of the Dream (1972)

Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence (1948)

Robert Graves, Seven Days in New Crete aka Watch the North Wind Rise (1949)

Pat Frank, Alas, Babylon (1959)

Mordecai Roshwald, Level 7 (1959)
 
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This author's books predate the period I'm interested in, but I was so surprised when I learned of them (while researching non-genre authors of SF), I knew I had to mention them here. Plus, they somewhat confirm my feeling that there was no shame in writing speculative fiction before science fiction became a distinct genre:

"While most people know who W.E.B. Du Bois is – and if you don’t, you really need to brush up on your history – most do not know that Du Bois frequently wrote speculative fiction. A couple of Du Bois’ speculative works include The Comet (1920) – which imagines what would happen if there were only two people left on the planet (a black man and a white woman) and Jesus Christ in Texas (1920) – in which Jesus returns as an enslaved African in Texas to set the enslaved free."

http://chroniclesofharriet.com/2012/11/01/great-black-authors-of-science-fiction-fantasy/
 
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Tom Hering said:
Which books that qualify as science fiction or speculative fiction, written by authors who did not consider themselves SF genre writers, would you consider worth reading? Let's stick to:

(1.) Authors who were not part of the US and UK science fiction scenes. So mainstream US and UK authors, yes, but also authors whose reputation was established in other genres (mysteries, westerns, etc.)

(2.) Books that were published during the era of SF classics, so books up through the 1970s (the decade when SF began to gain some respectability in mainstream culture, with both college courses in SF and SF writing workshops becoming common - and the decade when Hollywood made SF acceptable mainstream entertainment). So books that were at least a little bit of a risk for their authors, professionally, and books that publishers went out of their way to distinguish from all that SF stuff ("This is more like literature, folks!").

Obvious recommendations would be Brave New World, 1984, and The Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent PLanet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength). But what else?

I'll start by recommending two books by Jack Finney: The Body Snatchers (which has an ending I like better than any of the movie version endings) and Time and Again. Both are superb SF novels, even if Finney wasn't one of "our" writers.
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Joseph O'Neill, Land Under England (1935) - a lost-race story about a telepathic subterranean civilization descended from the Romans! Powerful stuff. Alun Llewelyn, The Strange Invaders (1934), set in a future ice age, when the remnants of manking are threatened by a new species; likewise unforgettable. And one I have not been able to find, but which I've heard good accounts of: John Collier, Tom's A-Cold (1933) - set in a post-holocaust 1990s.
 
Zendexor said:
Joseph O'Neill, Land Under England (1935) - a lost-race story about a telepathic subterranean civilization descended from the Romans! Powerful stuff. Alun Llewelyn, The Strange Invaders (1934), set in a future ice age, when the remnants of manking are threatened by a new species; likewise unforgettable. And one I have not been able to find, but which I've heard good accounts of: John Collier, Tom's A-Cold (1933) - set in a post-holocaust 1990s.
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Good evidence there was always a larger reading public interested in "strange adventures." Haggard's She comes to mind, one of the all-time best-selling books (according to Wikipedia's list of same, at 100 million copies - the only genre works to make the list are Dune and The Foundation Trilogy, both at 20 million copies). And "lost race" stories were certainly a part of '30s SF. I think of Coblentz's Hidden World aka In Caverns Below, and Wyndham's The Secret People (both also "underground world" stories). In the mainstream, there was Hilton's Lost Horizon.
 
Tom Hering said:
Good evidence there was always a larger reading public interested in "strange adventures." Haggard's She comes to mind, one of the all-time best-selling books (according to Wikipedia's list of same, at 100 million copies - the only genre works to make the list are Dune and The Foundation Trilogy, both at 20 million copies). And "lost race" stories were certainly a part of '30s SF. I think of Coblentz's Hidden World aka In Caverns Below, and Wyndham's The Secret People (both also "underground world" stories). In the mainstream, there was Hilton's Lost Horizon.
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And then there's the borderline between SF and supernatural horror. In mood, H P Lovecraft is classed usually as a horror writer rather than an sf writer. Yet what are arguably his greatest works are indisputably sf: At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time which both explore the theme of scientifically advanced prehuman terrestrial intelligences.
 
Victoria Silverwolf said:
Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies are two 1950's SF novels by suspense writer John D. MacDonald.
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JDM was also responsible for "The Girl, the gold watch, and everything" the only novel I know of in the "time-stop" genre.
 
Mirannan said:
Iain Banks (AKA Iain M. Banks) is a possible case of this. Same person, slightly different nom de plume, for SF and non-SF works. He obviously thought that the distinction was worth making obvious - or at least his publishers did.
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The different name was for a specific SF series rather than differentiation of SF/non-SF works. He thought his best SF work was "The Bridge" (no M). "Walking on Glass" and "Transition" were also SF although the latter came with an M in the U.S.A.
 
Tom Hering said:
Which books that qualify as science fiction or speculative fiction, written by authors who did not consider themselves SF genre writers, would you consider worth reading? Let's stick to:

(1.) Authors who were not part of the US and UK science fiction scenes. So mainstream US and UK authors, yes, but also authors whose reputation was established in other genres (mysteries, westerns, etc.)
Just thought of this one: Nicholas Monsarrat, The Time Before This.
(2.) Books that were published during the era of SF classics, so books up through the 1970s (the decade when SF began to gain some respectability in mainstream culture, with both college courses in SF and SF writing workshops becoming common - and the decade when Hollywood made SF acceptable mainstream entertainment). So books that were at least a little bit of a risk for their authors, professionally, and books that publishers went out of their way to distinguish from all that SF stuff ("This is more like literature, folks!").

Obvious recommendations would be Brave New World, 1984, and The Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent PLanet; Perelandra; That Hideous Strength). But what else?

I'll start by recommending two books by Jack Finney: The Body Snatchers (which has an ending I like better than any of the movie version endings) and Time and Again. Both are superb SF novels, even if Finney wasn't one of "our" writers.
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I know this a somewhat old thread but I've another forgotten gem to drop in. Elleston Trevor ( AKA Adam Hall of the Quiller series) also wrote one science fiction short story "Chicken Switch" - I think I may have read this story as a kid because my uncle had a massive collection of sci fi magazines I was allowed to browse
 
Kingsley Amis wrote one novel that is more or less sci-fi (Alternate history novel The Alteration, 1968), and was generally a huge fan of the genre - as evidence by his New Maps of Hell, which is apparently one of the first scholarly treatments of the genre.
 
wam said:
The different name was for a specific SF series rather than differentiation of SF/non-SF works. He thought his best SF work was "The Bridge" (no M). "Walking on Glass" and "Transition" were also SF although the latter came with an M in the U.S.A.
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Not quite true. Whether or not Banks called The Bridge SF I don't think I would (weird yes, but SF? not really) but he has at least three SF books published with the 'M' that are definitely nothing to do with the Culture: The Algebraist, Against a Dark Background and Feersum Endjinn. There was much discussion about his publishing of Transition without the 'M' and, as you say, in the US it was with the 'M'.

If you read his non-fiction semi-autobiographical book Raw Spirit he talks about the adoption of the 'M' specifically for his SF work. Bottom line though so much of his 'mainstream' fiction is sufficiently weird to blue the boundary anyway.

However, although I consider him classic SF (with a small 'c'), he's really not Classic SF (with a big 'C') :)
 
"Fatherland" by Frederick Forsyth.
It's strange how people think of this as purely a thriller.
 
Nevil Shute Norway wrote enough science fiction that he should be known for that as well as for being the best selling author in the English language at the time of his death.
Round the Bend
An Old Captivity
In the Wet
What happened to the Corbetts.
On the Beach
and others

An Old Captivity is one of my two favorite books.
 
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