[cgw]

When I say scifi I mean scifi as opposed to the wider genre speculative fiction.
I know the HUGO award is probably intended to cover the wide range of spec. fiction, but I think scifi secretly thinks it is realy a scifi award. It is OK to have a good fantasy slip in now and again but what has happened in this new century? Looking at the award for best novel, one alt history and five fantasy. And two of the fantasies were YA for crying out loud. Look at the 90's. All scifi. At the end of the century there were some great books by great writers Bujold, Willis, Simmons, etc., etc.
Who is going to step it up in the next decade?

[Michigan]

Reynolds and Hamilton IMO, two relatively young and also among the best SF authors out there.

[Werthead]

The thread title should be that American Science Fiction needs to step it up. The genre in the USA has been in the doldrums for most of the last decade and hasn't produced much of value (aside, arguably, from Scalzi and Edelman) at the same time a lot of the old reliables like Brin have stopped publishing, Bear and Benford switched to writing crap near-future thrillers and lots of others switched to writing fantasy and horror instead. The recent return of Stephenson to the genre from his arguable alt-history exercise is, however, most welcome.

On the other hand, we have British SF, to whit: Hamilton, Reynolds, Morgan, Asher, Robson, McAuley, Fenn, McDonald, Stross, Abnett, Banks, Aldiss, Roberts, etc etc. Of course, for having the temerity to be British, they're not getting nominated for any awards any time soon (Stross aside; he has contacts), despite the superiority of their body of work to the American SF produced in the last decade.

[Rob B]

This argument rears its unfortunate head every now and again. Mainly because it is fairly valid.

There are quite a few military SF series that are popular and long running by folks like John Ringo, David Drake, the Starfist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarFist) series by David Sherman and Dan Cragg, the Helfort's War by Graham Sharp Paul, the Kris Longknife series by Mike Shepard.

The Miller/Lee Liaden universe series is pretty popular, though I'm unsure if it is still continuing.

Orson Scott Card is still re-hashing the Ender series and his foray into political near future SF was not very well received. (Empire)

So in a sense, there's still a lot going on and many of the books have their following, but I'll agree that there isn't an Alastair Reynolds or Charles Stross here in the US who publishes boatloads, is bought in boatloads, or continually receives award nominations.


Then again, Robert Charles Wilson is a pretty big name who sells well and receives acclaim - multiple awards and nominations. Many consider his Spin one of the better SF novels of the decade. Same can be said for Robert J. Sawyer - his books are thoughtful, entertaining, and he has a bunch of awards on his shelf. Do either of these writers light up the bestseller lists and grab the same type of attention as a new writer like Scott Lynch or Patrick Rotfhuss. Then again, both Wilson and Sawyer are Canadian so we here in the US can't really claim them.

Writers like Nancy Kress and Connie Willis have an admirable resume of published work and awards.

The closest writer to really knocking it out at the same level as a Hamilton or a Reynolds (aside from the aforementioned Scalzi and Edelman who are both bright and interesting writers) in terms of scope, readability and big ideas is probably Kay Kenyon (http://www.kaykenyon.com/). Granted, I've only read her three Entire and the Rose books but I'll stack them up against Hamilton. This series isn't her first published work, but it is ambitious and a contender for one of the defining works of Science Fiction for this first decade of the 21st Century.

What about a writer like Chris Roberson, who has received award nominations and flutters between multiple series? What I've read from him has been very enjoyable, but again could he get to the level of a Reynolds, Hamilton, or Scalzi? Time will tell, but he already has a nice handful of books published with yet more to come.

So, who will step it up - I expect to see more from Roberson because he just doesn't stop writing. Same for Scalzi and once Kenyon finishes off The Entire and the Rose, I'd like to see what she'll do for a follow-up.

[hawkeyye]

Reynolds and Hamilton IMO, two relatively young and also among the best SF authors out there.

Agreed. The two best authors writing sci fi these days imo.

[psikeyhackr]

Agreed. The two best authors writing sci fi these days imo.

So what is considered to be Reynold's BEST book.

I confess after forcing myself to slog through Revelation Space I am reluctant to try anything of his. But I keep seeing people saying he's great so I may have to try another book.

Science fiction can't step up, it's an abstraction.

Sci-fi writers can step up, critics can step up or readers can step up. I confess that I am not entirely sure how this triangle works. There is lots of weird social interaction going on there. How much do readers let critics tell them what to think? How much do readers let other readers tell them what to think. I thought that thread asking whether a book was good or bad was really strange. How many readers will tell EVERYBODY to kiss off. That is my idea of what sci-fi is about.

psik

[suciul]

When I say scifi I mean scifi as opposed to the wider genre speculative fiction.
I know the HUGO award is probably intended to cover the wide range of spec. fiction, but I think scifi secretly thinks it is realy a scifi award. It is OK to have a good fantasy slip in now and again but what has happened in this new century? Looking at the award for best novel, one alt history and five fantasy. And two of the fantasies were YA for crying out loud. Look at the 90's. All scifi. At the end of the century there were some great books by great writers Bujold, Willis, Simmons, etc., etc.
Who is going to step it up in the next decade?

The Hugo award is behind the times in so many ways that judging the state of sf based on it is like judging the state of short fiction based on the minuscule circulation of the former big 3 magazines; names that once meant something and today are irrelevant

This being said I agree that the trend in sff today is vampires, zombies and the whole UF paraphernalia but there is still a lot of sf out there;

Regarding US vs UK sf again I sort of agree that US lacks a big name space opera/hard sf these days, but there are still bestselling non tie-in sf authors out there (N. Stephenson was #1 on the NYT bestseller list, D. Weber is always on the NYT list, even John Ringo latest cracked the NYT list)

So mil-sf is strong - look also at the # of derived authors/series, but hard sf and space opera are more of a UK specialty ...

[Ropie]

Hamilton, Reynolds, Morgan, Asher, Robson, McAuley, Fenn, McDonald, Stross, Abnett, Banks, Aldiss, Roberts, etc etc. Of course, for having the temerity to be British, they're not getting nominated for any awards any time soon (Stross aside; he has contacts), despite the superiority of their body of work to the American SF produced in the last decade.

Writers like these, with the exception of Stross and Banks and of course Aldiss, who is almost legendary, are the reason I don't read more new SF. They write a lot, yes, but it's a lot of rubbish to my mind. I'm glad they don't win awards as it would only encourage them. I'd love to be able to say that I can find an alternative in the American crop but unfortunately writers like Scalzi are even worse.

[Werthead]

Writers like these, with the exception of Stross and Banks and of course Aldiss, who is almost legendary, are the reason I don't read more new SF. They write a lot, yes, but it's a lot of rubbish to my mind. I'm glad they don't win awards as it would only encourage them. I'd love to be able to say that I can find an alternative in the American crop but unfortunately writers like Scalzi are even worse.

Interesting, given that out of the writers I named I consider Stross to be by far the weakest author.

I also see no major qualititive difference between Banks and Reynolds. They even have a somwhat similar writing style, although Banks is more disposed to writing stand-alones, and certainly Reynolds' more recent work is stronger and more impressive than the likes of The Algebraist and Matter, whilst Chasm City isn't far off the quality of Use of Weapons.

Aldiss definitely needs to be read more. He's still churning out impressive works like HARM, which is a grown-up, far more coherent and vastly superior take on some of the same ideas as Cory Doctorow's rather confused self-contradictary Little Brother and yet it got about 1% of the attention and certainly no major award nominations. That pretty much sums up what's wrong with modern SF right there.

[suciul]

Interesting, given that out of the writers I named I consider Stross to be by far the weakest author.

I also see no major qualititive difference between Banks and Reynolds. They even have a somwhat similar writing style, although Banks is more disposed to writing stand-alones, and certainly Reynolds' more recent work is stronger and more impressive than the likes of The Algebraist and Matter, whilst Chasm City isn't far off the quality of Use of Weapons.

Aldiss definitely needs to be read more. He's still churning out impressive works like HARM, which is a grown-up, far more coherent and vastly superior take on some of the same ideas as Cory Doctorow's rather confused self-contradictary Little Brother and yet it got about 1% of the attention and certainly no major award nominations. That pretty much sums up what's wrong with modern SF right there.

I agree about Stross, while I still think IMB's early novels (UoW, PoG, CP) are still unsurpassed but that may be due to me reading them originally (and rereading them many times since) in the early 90's when there was no real competition, but I agree also that A. Reynolds is the leading sf figure of the 00's

Regarding mediocre writers (Scalzi, Doctorow, Sawyer) that are great at the publicity game, that's not a new phenomenon and anyway even in the so called "golden age of sf" how many novels do you think Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein sold and how widely were they read, known... until they got in the news with movies, extraneous events...

Same about publishing - sure it's much easier to publish a novel with vampires, zombies or chicks in leather/tough guys with trench coats using their sorcereous skills and kick-butt techniques to defeat evil than to publish sf but again when was it easy to publish sf anyway? How many sf writers were active in the golden age and how many now?

The way I see it, the major difference is that now sf is mainstream culturally since we are living in a sf-nal age - maybe not the jetpack and Moon trips, but the global village, anything, anytime, anywhere which was hardly predicted btw - so in a sense it's harder to write interesting sf since you either are a great writer (say M. Atwood or J. Winterson or M. Houellebeck or K. Ishiguro) who writes mainstream literary fiction with some extrapolation or you have to go at the edge of physics (Reynolds) or be a great storyteller adapting the tropes (PFH, Weber)