Here, gentle reader, is a guest-post from, Andrew Brown, Guardian writer and friend of CT.
At a conference on Serious Matters of Internet Governance last month, some of the participants kept bringing up science fictional references as a guide to the future; others never did. A straw poll revealed that about half of us had never read any science fiction, while the other half read huge amounts. The non sf-readers asked for some pointers.
So Maria and I, with some suggestions from Henry, have tried to draw up a List of Science Fiction for People Who Don’t Read SF. There might be some overlap there — I think Riddley Walker is definitely a book that gets read for its considerable literary merit by many people who would never dream of filing it as a post-apocalyptic fantasy, even though that’s what it also is. Margaret Atwood may be another author whose books are read in that way.
Note: this is a starter package for adult readers who feel curious as to what is the attraction of sf, and it is intended to introduce them to some of the distinct pleasures of the genre as well as to good books. Almost everyone (hi, Henry) will have different and possibly better ideas for this list. Fire away in comments. But the criterion for success is not whether you know the field better than we do — you do — but whether anyone who has been wondering what is the distinct pleasure of sf as a genre becomes able, through some of these books, to discover it.
Hors d’oeuvre — short stories available for free or cheap download
If you don’t like any of these, you won’t appreciate anything that follows
E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops – Dystopia perfectly imagined, in 1909.
William Tenn, The Liberation of Earth – All you need know about war
James Blish, Surface Tension – What imagination can do
Frederik Pohl, The tunnel under the world – Life inside Facebook