by Michael K. Iwoleit
I have elaborated elsewhere why it is basically foolish to name the top ten achievements in whatever field and why it has, despite its obvious absurdity, still been done again and again, pronouncedly in the science fiction field more than in any other genre. My own selection, that I present here in an updated version, with some new entries and some runners-up that have dropped out of my top ten, was initially published in a short-lived short fiction blog the content of which was later incorporated into the World Culture Hub. Since I started publishing and commenting science fiction in the mid 1980ies, I have focused more and more on short fiction, first in our favorite genre and then in literature in general. A number of in-depth essays on major story writers that were well-received may make me seem like an approximation of an expert, but the short story is such a rich and diverse art form that I still know far too little and am still too limited in my views to make any definite judgment. (Recent researches into international writers for InterNova has made me aware of this anew.) Take the following selection as what it is: a subjective summary of what has left lasting impressions in the mind of an eternal beginner who might well have overlooked even better works than those presented here.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
THE INVENTION OF MOREL
1940
Bioy Casares’ novella (it is frequently published as a novel which I think it isn’t) made its author, a friend and co-writer of Borges, internationally famous. It is one of the greatest works of Latin American science fiction and fantasy. Readers who still regard science fiction as a primary Anglo-American genre may be surprised to find out that „The Invention of Morel” is a pioneering work that introduced the concept of virtual reality into science fiction long before cyberpunk was even dreamt of, even before Dick, Galouye and others first explored this concept. What lifts this tale of a castaway, who finds out that the idle residents of an unknown islands are only projections and includes himself into their endlessly repeated lifes, high above most other VR and cyberspace stories is its poetic language and the slow, masterful unfolding of its central enigma. It tells a lot about a certain ignorance in sf circles that few typical science fiction readers have recognized this work.
J.G. Ballard
THE VOICES OF TIME
1960
The history of science fiction could be written as the history of its great metaphors, the central emblematic ideas and concepts of a given period. The great metaphor of the Golden Age science fiction in the 1940ies was space as the new frontier. The main metaphors introduced by cyberpunk in the 1980ies were cyberspace and virtuality. In recent years artificial intelligence in its contemporary manifestation seems to become the central vehicle for science fiction writing in our era. One of the signature concepts in what came to be known as New Wave science fiction in the late 1960ies, the era of science fiction turning inward into inner space, was entropy, a physical principle expanded into a general metaphor for cultural, psychological and ecological decay. Also picked up by mainstream writers (Thomas Pynchon’s „Entropy” from 1960, one of the most analyzed short stories in postmodern American literature, may have provided some inspiration), it culminated in the science fiction field in two stories that were never surpassed in this specific subject. One was „The Heat Death of the Universe” by Pamela Zoline (1967), the other was „The Voices of Time” by J.G. Ballard, the flagship writer of the whole move towards inner space and after the mainstream success of his novel Empire of the Sun (1984) recognized as one of the leading British writers of his generation. A trademark of Ballard’s prolific short story production in the 1960ies were atmospherically dense, seemingly eventless stories that turned urban and natural landscapes into symbolic reflection spaces for the shifts and displacements in the consciousness of characters in a state of estrangement and stagnation. The novella „The Voice of Time” is his quintessential work of this kind and interprets entropy, the unavoidable exhaustion of all energies and forces, as a basic condition of life in the universe: While human society dissolves in a mysterious narcolepsy, climate change causes adaptions to a new and different world in various species and extraterrestrial intelligences send a cosmic countdown to Earth, a doctor conducts a bold experiment to activate biological reserves in his own genes. The story’s climax, when he is enabled to sensually perceive the surges and currents of time, is among the greatest scenes in science fiction.
David I. Masson
TRAVELLER’S REST
1965
In 2003, a small British publisher re-issued The Caltraps of Time, the only story collection by the Scottish librarian and casual sf writer David Irvine Masson (1917- 2007). With only seven stories in the sixties and three published later, most of them in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, Masson may seem as a peripheral writer, nonetheless he is remembered as one of the most original and ambitious contributors to British new wave sf, not least for this story, his first one. Masson had a preference for time phenomena and in “Traveller’s Rest” he utilizes the narrative device of time acceleration and deceleration for a pessimistic vision of the human condition of epic proportions. The story follows the way of a soldier who becomes an individual while moving away from the frontline where an eerie war is fought against an invisible enemy behind a border of infinite time acceleration. Only seconds after his relief he is ordered back and years of private happiness shrink to split seconds against a war that may hide a secret of cruel irony. All this is explored in a story perfectly structured and rich in detail, whose unique conception has never been surpassed in the time travelling subgenre.
James Tiptree, Jr.
THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED IN
1973
If I were asked if there has ever been a perfect science fiction story, there are two that would come to my mind, interestingly both influential proto-cyberpunk works. One is William Gibson’s „The Gernsback Continuum” from 1981, a striking example of what can be achieved on just ten pages – provided a writer reaches this level of distinctness of language and imagery and such a precision in unveiling the hidden patterns of cultural artifacts. The other one is „The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, Alice Sheldon’s / James Tiptree, Jr.’s masterful early take on recurring themes of cyberpunk, published ten years before William Gibson’s style-defining short stories. Every conceivable virtue that a science fiction story can possibly have is present here: a suggestive basic idea, colorful, larger-than-life characters, a dramatically climaxed plot, stylistic elegance, linguistic inventiveness and a powerful imagination evident in the vivid depiction of a decadent future society. The tragic story of a disfigured girl, hired for covert advertising purposes as a remote control for a perfect, yet soulless female, has repeatedly been interpreted as an outstanding example of feminist science fiction about the objectification of women. In contrast to the aesthetics of decay in later cyberpunk, summarized in the popular catchphrase „high tech, low life”, it always seemed to me that Tiptree’s novella presents an upper class, power elite view of the same world that William Gibson’s major works are set in.
James Tiptree jr.
HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER
1974
Considering her lifework, I regard Alice Sheldon, who for many years hid behind the male pseudonym James Tiptree jr., as the greatest short story writer in the history of science fiction, surpassing even Ballard, Bester or Cordwainer Smith. It’s hard to select a specific of her many outstanding tales. “The Women Men Don’t See” could stand here, “The Screwfly Solution” and others. I personally find this subtle and beautiful work her most artful and original story. Barry Malzberg, who commissioned it for an anthology about the great topics of science fiction, called it the greatest post doomsday story ever written and it may well be. The story is composed of several episodes with a lasting emotional impact on the main character and only in the virtuoso closing sequence, one of the greatest prose passages in the history of the genre, the reader realizes that these are the traces of a man long death and fragments of a civilization vanished from Earth whose only remains are the most painful experiences of its members. In a separate essay I have explained why I think that this is maybe the greatest science fiction story of all time.
Barry N. Malzberg
A GALAXY CALLED ROME
1975
Barry Malzberg’s controversial career and personality and his almost schizophrenic relation to the science fiction genre, that he condemned as much for its failures as he praised it for its achievements, has turned him into scapegoat for sf purists in US and abroad. A major part of his short works (featured in his 1994 collection The Passage of Light) belongs to a subgenre that one of his publishers called “recursive science fiction”. Science Fiction about science fiction has a long tradition and many prominent sf writers from Dick to Silverberg to Michael Bishop and others contributed to it. No other writer, however, has advanced it to such an intensity of reflection and self-destructive loathing as Malzberg. “A Galaxy of Rome” is his masterpiece in this regard. It’s not a story in the strictest sense of the word, but a series of sketches of a writer how tries to write a story in the Campbellian mode based on two articles by grandfather sf editor John W. Campbell himself. The attempts to explore the possibilities of a story that can never be written, interwoven with self-reflections of the writer, turn out to be much more exciting than a story in the Campbellian mode could ever hope to be. Few writers applied the techniques of postmodernism to science fiction – John Sladek, to name one beside Malzberg – and as this story proves it can be done with stunning results: turning sf into a kind of fiction that is a meditation about its own methods and conventions.
Carter Scholz
THE NINTH SYMPHONY OF LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
AND OTHER LOST SONGS
1977
One of the most serious downsides of science fiction as a subculture is a certain fanaticism and close-mindedness of the scene that has repeatedly kept talented writers from pursuing a long-term career in the field. Barry Malzberg has portrayed Mark Clifton (1906 – 1963) as the classic example of a writer who basically wrote himself out of the science fiction magazines by becoming too good. Authors of major works such as Hilbert Schenck (1926 – 2013) or David I. Masson (see above) have always remained insider tips and are almost forgotten today. One of the greatest losses for American science fiction was the retreat of writer and composer Carter Scholz (better known to a general audience for his SDI novel Radiance from 2002) after a detour into the genre that mostly ended in the mid-1990ies with one collaborated novel and about forty stories, among them some of the most artful and intellectually stimulating works of their time. Kind of his trademark were time travel stories about famous composers and this one is perhaps the best of them: In an age when culture is depleted of own inspiration and musicians prefer to study the past instead of being creative composers in their own right, the invention of mental time travel allows historians to enter the mind of people of the past. Musicologists use the technology to witness the composition of masterpieces of classical music. The procedure, however, is not as save as was claimed by its inventors. Time-travelling scholars discover that they can influence the minds of their subjects and to help them in their creative struggles begin to provide them with snippets of the compositions that they are supposed to write. Past and present have entered a feedback loop. The inspiration comes from everywhere and nowhere and is about to annihilate itself. Upon entering Ludwig van Beethoven’s consciousness during the composition of his Ninth Symphony, the main character, an indecisive young composer, becomes involved in an apocalyptic scene as hundreds of voices from the future keep Beethoven from conceiving his famous Ode to Joy. After his return the young composer finds that Beethoven’s Ninth is forever lost and that it might not be the last masterpiece removed from history.
William Gibson
HINTERLANDS
1981
In an essay on Gibson I called him “a writer of surfaces, while not a superficial writer” and dared to claim that he became famous for the wrong reasons. The concept of cyberspace as featured in the Neuromancer trilogy, which he his most associated with, is in my opinion among the most flawed and least inspired ideas in his work. Apart from the stylistically immensely influential opening chapters of Neuromancer his whole first trilogy, taken seriously, strikes me as a failure and as a novel writer he improved much in his later books. What I find most regrettable is that it has been rarely acknowledged what a fine short story writer he is. “The Winter Market”, along with Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, may be still the greatest of all cyberpunk stories and a perfect expression of the main elements of cyberpunk aesthetics. “The Gernsback Continuum” is a clever, self-reflective programmatic statement of proto-cyberpunk and, as David Pringle justly claimed, a word-perfect piece of writing. “Hinterlands”, arguably his best story, belongs to a rare subgenre of science fiction that I tend to call “misanthropic sf”. In novels and stories of this subgenre humans are confronted with beings or intelligences high above their own level of technological or biological advancement and fail to convince those others of being rational creatures with their own dignity. Some of the greatest works of science fiction belong to this category, novels such as Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, Roadside Picnic by the brothers Strugatzky, The Genocides by Thomas Disch or Pallas by French writer Capoulet-Junac and stories such as “The Bees of Knowledge” by Barrington Bayley. “Hinterlands” is a worthy successor to all these. Humanity is portrayed here as a scavenger of higher civilizations and madness is the price it pays to live on their achievements. An unusually far-reaching concept in Gibson’s works, this story is one of the bleakest visions of humanity’s place in the cosmos of the last decades.
Ted Chiang
STORY OF YOUR LIFE
1999
For the science fiction of the new century’s first decades Ted Chiang probably is what Australian Greg Egan has been for the nineties: the best sf story writer currently producing (at least within the English language area). With a remarkable small number of works he not just sweeped sf’s highest literary awards but proved that it is still possibly to write stories on the height of contemporary scientific discourse that successfully undertake imaginary and intellectual forays into the unknown (while many critics claim that our present has become so science fictional that the imagination of sf writers fails to convince any longer). “Story of Your Life” is among the best first contact stories in science fiction, fascinating not just for its refined, effectual structure (the story is, in fact, the tale of a mother directed to a daughter not yet born that she knows will die young) but for its scientifically sound, physically grounded speculation on how language might influence the perception of time. Ted Chiang has so far resisted the temptation to start on a big commercial sf career and only writes when inspiration hits him. Reading this story one may wish that he will continue to do so.
Guy Hasson
MOST BEAUTIFUL INTIMACY
2026
When Barry Malzberg included Tiptree’s „Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”, a story he had commissioned himself for the anthology Final Stage (1974), into his own selection of the ten best science fiction stories of all time, he admitted his bias at the outset and threw himself on the mercy of a higher court. I have to do the same when it comes to Israeli writer Guy Hasson’s perhaps greatest work to date. In the twenty years that we know and collaborate with each other I have become hopelessly biased toward Guy’s short stories and he has never failed to fascinate me with the inimitable way he hammers out his ideas in short, staccato-like sentences. „Most Beautiful Intimacy” has confirmed my assessment that he is on a par with the great idea men in contemporary science fiction, writers such as Ted Chiang or Greg Egan, and it would be a honor if InterNova could contribute to bring him a little closer to the international recognition that he deserves. To avoid a spoiler alert I can only hint at the extraordinary qualities of this short novel. Telepathy is one of the grand old themes of science fiction and setting a dramatic story in a world where telepaths have become a persecuted minority is no new idea either. No other writer, however, has ever approached this premise, as far as I know, in the way Guy Hasson does: When a woman, on the run with her husband, becomes pregnant, she begins to telepathically identify with the fetus growing inside her, which results in dangerous glitches of her own neurological functions. The twists and turns of the drama that enfolds are believably based on a thorough knowledge of human embryonic and neurological development, up to the near-fatal birth scene, a staggering climax as I have never before read in science fiction. „Most Beautiful Intimacy” will be included in the coming first printed issue of the new InterNova and our readers are invited to judge for themselves whether my enthusiasm is justified.
Runners-up
C.L. Moore
NO WOMAN BORN
1944
Catherine Lucille Moore’s (1911 – 1987) influence on American science fiction and fantasy can hardly be overrated. Her story “Shambleau” introduced a dark, brooding sensuality into pulp fiction long before there was any talk of taboo breakers. Her unique collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner (1915 – 1958) produced maybe the most original body of short works in sf of the forties. Her greatest works are perhaps among her novellas. The stunning opening pages of “No Woman Born”, one of the first and still one of the greatest cyborg stories, with their nuanced description of the artificially recreated dancer Deidre can convince even today’s readers of Moore’s outstanding ability to evoke emotional states (George R.R. Martin in stories such as “A Song for Lya” was one of the very few who came close to her in this regard). Rarely has there been such a deep narrative treatment of a human being turned into something completely new and different as in the climax of “No Woman Born” when Deidre’s comeback on stage demonstrates her newly acquired modes of expression. If sf critics will ever agree on a canon of sf, Moore’s tales should be acknowledged as some of the genre’s lasting achievements.
J.G. Ballard
THE WAITING GROUNDS
1959
When Ballard died in 2009 the obituaries in mainstream media proved that Ballard, who in the early years of his career was only known to sf readers, had long since found his place in contemporary British literature as one of its most original and radical voices. “The Voices of Time” and “The Terminal Beach” are widely regarded as his most important stories and readers may think that “The Waiting Grounds” is rather untypical, a story that sets out with a rather conventional sf setting on another planet. At the end, however, when Ballard with just a few brilliantly written pages turns the whole scenario upside-down, we are back on Ballardian home ground. His vision of a cyclical cosmos that is transformed and finally shattered by the rise of a super civilization is one of the many – and maybe the most fascinating – explorations of man’s existential position in time and space in Ballard’s early work. Although he focused in the course of his work’s development on ever more private and intimate psychic states, the relations of the human mind to time and space remained one of his main topics, up to such disturbing visions as “The Enormous Space”.
Geoff Ryman
THE UNCONQUERED COUNTRY
1984
The sf of the eighties, probably perceived by most readers as the decade of cyperpunk, also saw the infusion of elements of magic realism (as blurred this label may have become by now, marking writers as diverse as Mo Yan, Mia Couto, and Haruki Murakami) into science fiction, most remarkable in the work of Lucius Shepard but also in this novella that made Geoff Ryman, who later turned to what he called “mundane science fiction”, famous in the science fiction field. One might argue that “The Unconquered Country” shares one basic feature with magic realism: the depiction of a harsh reality, seen through a weave of fantastic metaphors. But apart from this it is a work sui generis. Typical sf plot devices – biotechnology, living houses, artificial creatures for advertising etc. – are applied here to create a shifting reality that at a second glance can be recognized as Cambodia under Pol Pot seen through a distorting mirror. As in much of the best science fiction alienation and distortion serve to lead readers to heightened perception of reality. Ryman’s story ends with a scene full with the forebodings of genocide and here fiction and reality again meet with devastating effect.
Carter Scholz
TRANSIENTS
1988
This is probably the least known story on my list. Published, as far as I know, only once in an anthology in memory of the influential sf editor Terry Carr, it is a neglected masterpiece of modernist science fiction. It’s remarkable, however, that this touching and mysterious story despite the originality of its conception – it portrays a group of young people who move in unforeseeable time and space jumps through the United States – has some striking similarities with two other stories written about the same time, “Blue Shifting” by Eric Brown and “The Save-Deposit Box” by Greg Egan. One may speculate if three writers reacted to the same undercurrents of their time by putting their characters into very similar existential situations. Whatever, “Transients” is maybe the best of this three masterpieces and displays Scholz in full command of his dense, reflected style and his sensibility for form and psychic states. The story does not resolve the character’s strange affliction but closes at the end into a full loop and a powerful parable of detachment and alienation – recurring themes of science fiction that have rarely been approached with such refinement.
Michael K. Iwoleit was born in Düsseldorf in 1962 and lives in Wuppertal today. He was educated as a lab assistant and studied philosophy, sociology and German philology. Since 1989 he is a freelance writer, translator, editor and critic mostly in the science fiction field. Apart from his literary activities he has also worked as a copywriter for advertising and IT industry. He is the founder and editor of InterNova and was the co-founder and long-term fiction editor of its German sister magazine Nova. In the science fiction scene he is best-known for his novellas and for his essays about major short story writers in science fiction. His latest book is a reissue of his novel Der Moloch. His homepage is at mki.worldculturehub.net