SF by non-genre writers

[Tom Hering]

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.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I'd say Ray Bradbury, and J.G. Ballard but you disqualified them.
"Captn" W. E. Johns of Biggles fame did some not bad OSS SF
There might be a Nevil Shute, CK Chesterton (Man called Thursday) or Victor Canning depending how vague you define it.

 

[Tom Hering]

I'd say Ray Bradbury, and J.G. Ballard but you disqualified them.

Right. The idea is to discover worthwhile SF books by mainstream writers (and so books that don't usually appear in SF genre lists). Not books by SF genre writers who eventually made it into the mainstream (as it existed up through the 1970s).

Nevil Shute and On the Beach would be a good recommendation.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

That's the one, I couldn't remember title!

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies are two 1950's SF novels by suspense writer John D. MacDonald.

Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart. His only SF novel, and winner of the very first International Fantasy Award.

On another level entirely, Jacqueline Susann wrote one SF novel: Yargo (1979, written in the 1950's, published posthumously.)

 

[clovis-man]

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

 

[Tom Hering]

Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies are two 1950's SF novels by suspense writer John D. MacDonald.

Earth Abides (1949) by George R. Stewart. His only SF novel, and winner of the very first International Fantasy Award.

On another level entirely, Jacqueline Susann wrote one SF novel: Yargo (1979, written in the 1950's, published posthumously.)

Stewart and MacDonald, yes. I had never heard of Yargo, though, so I looked for online reviews. "Another level entirely" is being polite, from what I can tell. ;-)

 

[Tom Hering]

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.

Another good one.

 

[BAYLOR]

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart

 

[Extollager]

Good thread idea. Now it is not that unusual for non-genre authors (e.g. P. D. James, Children of Men) to write sf, but that used to be rare; but not unheard of, by any means.

L. P. Hartley's Facial Justice -- has anyone read it? I haven't; but I think it was an SF Book Club choice many years ago.

Herman Wouk wrote a short novel called The Lomokome Papers. Rex Warner's The Aerodrome. E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops. Doris Lessing's Shikasta (1979, so just squeaking into eligibility; I haven't read it). Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed.

Rachel Maddux's The Green Kingdom (perhaps this is fantasy rather than sf, but there is no magic; this one I have read, and it is impressive). Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (borderline sf/fantasy). John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain (has more of f weird fantasy feel, but uses a naturalistic explanation, as I recall). Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand uses idea of a drug for some kind of time travel, as I understand; again, probably more a fantasy than sf; haven't read it. Her novella "The Birds" can be considered sf in the catastrophe genre. Jefferies's late Victorian After London is another catastrophe story, set in the future. A few pages describing the poisonous drowned remains of the London metro area are really impressive, but much of the book is (I felt) a bit of a plod.

I don't know the author's other works -- perhaps he limited himself to speculative fiction of some sort, but I'll assume he counts as non-genre. Jean Raspail wrote a book that could not be published by a mainstream publisher today, The Camp of the Saints. Curious, I read it years ago. Its imaginative power is undeniable, but that power is in the service of a spirit that seems to me to go well beyond opposition to immigration of Third World people for the sake of preserving French national character; he seemed to loathe the very flesh of the "swarming mass" (I'm not quoting the book, just trying to get across a sense of the author's attitude -- it's something, in genre fiction, that one associates with Lovecraft). A translation was published by the major American publisher Scribner in 1973, and according to Wikipedia Ace published it in paper in 1977.

 

[Tom Hering]

I'm going to toss in a book that might be a bit of a stretch: The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams. It's not about outer space - it's set on Earth. And it's not about the future - it takes place in the now. But it's about science, or rather, an ugly side of science: animal experimentation. And "the fantastic" is a strong element: the reader is made privy to the thoughts of the two dogs who escape the lab where they suffered. A powerful read.

 

[Tom Hering]

Good thread idea. Now it is not that unusual for non-genre authors (e.g. P. D. James, Children of Men) to write sf, but that used to be rare; but not unheard of, by any means.

L. P. Hartley's Facial Justice -- has anyone read it? I haven't; but I think it was an SF Book Club choice many years ago.

Herman Wouk wrote a short novel called The Lomokome Papers. Rex Warner's The Aerodrome. E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops. Doris Lessing's Shikasta (1979, so just squeaking into eligibility; I haven't read it). Anthony Burgess's The Wanting Seed.

Rachel Maddux's The Green Kingdom (perhaps this is fantasy rather than sf, but there is no magic; this one I have read, and it is impressive). Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill (borderline sf/fantasy). John Buchan's The Gap in the Curtain (has more of f weird fantasy feel, but uses a naturalistic explanation, as I recall). Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand uses idea of a drug for some kind of time travel, as I understand; again, probably more a fantasy than sf; haven't read it. Her novella "The Birds" can be considered sf in the catastrophe genre. Jefferies's late Victorian After London is another catastrophe story, set in the future. A few pages describing the poisonous drowned remains of the London metro area are really impressive, but much of the book is (I felt) a bit of a plod. Rider Haggard's good and propagandistic novel (pro vaccination for smallpox), Dr. Therne, is, as I recall, very marginally sf since it must be set slightly in the future.

Great list! Thanks, Extollager - I'll be looking up some of those titles.

 

[Tom Hering]

... that used to be rare; but not unheard of, by any means ...

True. It's less rare now than it was during the period this topic is concerned with. But, while SF has been accepted as mainstream by TV and Hollywood, I suspect that's still not the case when it comes to the literary world (or a good portion of it).

 

[BAYLOR]

True. It's less rare now than it was during the period this topic is concerned with. But, while SF has been accepted as mainstream by TV and Hollywood, I suspect that's still not the case when it comes to the literary world (or a good portion of it).

The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer Lytton. He's one of the creators of the Historical novel and despite his reputation as being a bad writer , he's actually quite good.

Check out his novel The Last Days of Pompeii.

 

[hitmouse]

We already dropping well out of the Golden Age etc., so how about With the Night Mail: a Story of 2000AD by Rudyard Kipling?

One might list Karel Capek (RUR), Doris Lessing, John Barth (Giles Goat-Boy), Paul Theroux (O-Zone), cormac McCarthy (The Road)
Grimus by Salman Rushdie is really good, and I think he wrote it in an attempt to win a SF prize.

 

[Extollager]

Could we have a separate thread for sf and fantasy by non-genre authors that have been published since the 1970s? That way we can keep this thread for the titles that Tom requested in his initial posting.

 

[Tom Hering]

Could we have a separate thread for sf and fantasy by non-genre authors that have been published since the 1970s? That way we can keep this thread for the titles that Tom requested in his initial posting.

I'm thinking of the period 1930-1975 (sorry for not being more clear about that). Before the 1930s, there was no shame in writing dystopian or utopian fiction, or scientific romances, or visions of the future. After the creation of the SF genre in the '20s, it became a different story. There was then the risk of being sniffed at if a "serious" writer engaged in speculative ideas - in what had become the province of the pulps. The situation improved with book publishers after WWII, and even more after the success of Star Wars in 1977 ("There's gold in them SF hills!"). It also improved with critics after 1970 (at least those critics who were open to pop culture), but not at all with really "serious" literary types (who always have to redefine anything that smacks of F&SF - a recent case in point being Kazuo Ishiguro's Arthurian The Buried Giant, as well as his earlier novel about clones, Never Let Me Go, which some critics had to reduce to a "coming of age" tale). More to the point, I'm thinking of books that SF fans of 1930-1975 tended to overlook, because they were published outside the genre, and which usually don't appear in lists of classic SF, even today. (Wasn't Judith Merril the first to try to stretch fans' ideas of what constituted SF?)

 

[Mirannan]

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.

 

[dask]

How about the short story collections The General Zapped An Angel, The Edge Of Tomorrow, and A Touch Of Infinity by Howard Fast?

 

[tinkerdan]

The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (L’Autre monde ou les états et empires de la Lune) was the first of three satirical novels written by Cyrano de Bergerac

Pierre Boulle and Planet of the Apes

Mary Shelly Frankenstien

You could almost squeeze William Tenn into this catagory.