Classic authors who you like(d) and who have been pretty much forgotten.

If you liked the paratime stories, his last - Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen - has been picked up by John Carr and forged into an excellent series. Carr really does get the tone and style right.
 
A Mirror for Observers and Davy by Edgar Pangborn. Also Still I Persist in Wondering and Good Neighbors and Other Strangers, his story collections published in the '70s (as I recall) but a large percentage of stories written before that.

Pangborn wrote smooth, intelligent, graceful prose, featured mostly characters you wouldn't mind living near, and never was one of the big names, just a fairly consistent, empathetic voice. Damon Knight sort of complained that Pangborn only ever hit one note, but admitted he hit it beautifully.

Randy M.
 
Aldroud said:
If you liked the paratime stories, his last - Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen - has been picked up by John Carr and forged into an excellent series. Carr really does get the tone and style right.
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I usually steer clear of other people writing in an author's worlds - but I'll add these to the list. Thanks, Aldroud!
 
Hobbit said:
.... and I do have a yellowing, battered, almost crumbly copy of this:

Astounding-July-1939-Black-Destroyer.jpg


in this pile....


View attachment 550
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A solid piece of History. Zazdrość mnie wzięła.
 
James Tiptree. AKA Alice Sheldon.
It was her perspective and humanist viewpoint on society that made her unique.
She was responsible for the biggest gaff in the history of our genre, by Robert Silverberg, as smart a writer and critic as we have had.
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing". Silverberg also compared Tiptree's writing to Ernest Hemingway, and in fact, found Tiptree to be "superior in masculinity".
But it is her writing that makes her a authorr to remember, not her use of a pseudonym.
 
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Tiptree/Sheldon deserves more recognition from the younger generations. A publisher, a smart publisher, would make a lot of noise about how she was discriminated against and start reprinting her works.
 
pogopossum said:
James Tiptree. AKA Alice Sheldon.
It was her perspective and humanist viewpoint on society that made her unique.
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She also created one of the most different and interesting alien species. These are the Tyreeans who live in the skies of a life-rich gas giant planet. They can be found in her first novel Up the Walls of the World from 1978.
 
ArthurFrayn said:
I'd pick Voyage of the Space Beagle. Black Destroyer -the first sequence in that book is very famous. Also in terms of SF history, Slan is a good pick.
And actually no, I'm not a fan of Null A. I've always been mystified as to it's being the thing Van Vogt is most famous for. The conclusion I drew is that it functions as some sort of low level introduction to Dianetics. Van Vogt was involved with Dianetics at the start. I even think he was an auditor early on. He claimed at the time his eyesight was improved by auditing.
In any case the novels I personally like the best are:
Voyage of the Space Beagle,
The War Against the Rull,
The Clane Saga (Empire of the Atom/Wizard of Linn),
The Book of Ptath,
The Silkie
The Battle of Forever
I like those a lot.
Weapon Shop books are OK. The House That Stood Still is OK. Slan is OK. Darkness on Diamondia is almost not bad. Almost. Everything else is sub OK or really bad. This is all IMO

There are two that are so bad they're great -Renaissance, and The Secret Galactics. They are absolutely wonderful, but in the way Plan 9 From Outer Space is absolutely wonderful.

I've never read the Null A sequels.
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I'd agree The Secret Galactics is a classic of bewildering dreadfulness. The phrase 'a tendency to out of controlness' which comes from it has entered, and firmly embedded itself, in our family's language. As well as his delightful, "well, this could get boring real fast" (though I'm not sure what book that's from now.)

For my part I think The Moonbeast is his best book. It is an incomprehensible mashup of several totally unrelated short stories which just lurches about all over the place throwing bonkers ideas in every possible direction and then digging into the bin for the next one before any of them land. It's a glorious glorious mess. And short. Van Vogt packs more genuine weird novelty into a 150 page novel than most modern writers laboriously build over whole series of building-block sized doorstops.
 
Re Lensmen Books. I read them when i was in my teens, I still have them on my shelves. I tried them again a few years ago and was horrified at how neo-fascisticly awful they were.

But if we didn't have them we would have Randall Garrett's wonderful spoof Backstage Lensman or Harrison's StarSmashers of the Galaxy Rangers (though I guess that owes more to the Skylark books.)
 
JunkMonkey said:
For my part I think The Moonbeast is his best book. It is an incomprehensible mashup of several totally unrelated short stories which just lurches about all over the place throwing bonkers ideas in every possible direction and then digging into the bin for the next one before any of them land. It's a glorious glorious mess. And short. Van Vogt packs more genuine weird novelty into a 150 page novel than most modern writers laboriously build over whole series of building-block sized doorstops.
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Moonbeast is a fixup -The Changeling smashed together with something I've never been able to find by itself (all the stuff with the Big Oaf). I like the Changeling as a standalone short story...not fond of the Moonbeast...
 
JunkMonkey said:
But if we didn't have them we would have Randall Garrett's wonderful spoof Backstage Lensman
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PDF of Backstage Lensman...
epdf.pub

Randall Garrett - Backstage Lensman - PDF Free Download

BACKSTAGE LENSMAN By Randall GarrettThe Lensman series, comprising, as it does, some six hundred thousand words, is st...
epdf.pub epdf.pub

When e-publishing began I expected that in a very few years all the many out of print and never collected genre books and stories would be soon available for nominal sums... and many have indeed been provided that way Megapack has well over 1000 titles now on Kindle. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=megapack...=megapack,digital-text,175&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_2_8
The many titles that are still unavailable are a frustration... now some of them are due to the indifference of the rights holders or their basic hostility to the format. Still others due to an inability to find out where those rights reside. and a very few due to an inflated concept of the value of a distant relative's words. future generations will be able to access them as they age out of copyright restriction. (If the Walt Disney corp does not get politicians to extend the copyright period again.)
 
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Damn! This thread has made me want to read The Moonbeast again and I can't find it! I have found I own three copies of Destination Universe! which seems a bit excessive. And I rediscovered a couple of John Sladek books I had long forgotten I owned. Does anyone still read John Sladek? Not a vast output but very funny.
 
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Vince W said:
Tiptree/Sheldon deserves more recognition from the younger generations. A publisher, a smart publisher, would make a lot of noise about how she was discriminated against and start reprinting her works.
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Unfortunately, she was canceled recently. They even changed the name of the Tiptree award, which is now called the Otherwise award.
 
Gods! this thread is being made by looking over my shoulder isn't it? Right in front of me, in the gap between my monitors on the bookcase behind them, I can see on the second shelf up, a stack of books. On the top is van Vogt's The Weapon Makers (1960s UK Digit printing) and underneath it 25 or so Badger Books with titles like Micro Infinity, Flame Mass and Night of the Big Fire all written by Mr Fanthorpe under a variety of pseudonyms.

Dammit now you've reminded me they are there I'm going to have to read a couple - once I've read The Moonbeast which I'll get too when I've finished the Randell Garret...
 
Matt H. said:
Praire, which of these do you like better as a story/novel/artistic whole?
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That’s an interesting question. Up the Walls of the World has the Tyreeans, but it is a clearly a work of the 1970s. Its plot depends upon telepathy, which is not really in vogue now in hard science fiction. It is far ranging in its speculative scope.

Brightness Falls from the Air seems like a more mature and complex novel. It takes place in the same setting as sone of her short stories. Overall, it is probably the better work. However, it does have some disturbing content. Many criticize it for being melodramatic.
 
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Thank you Praire. I'm looking for more female writers to balance out my reading list of 50 novels... So far only got Brackett, Le Guin, Cherryh... suggestions alway welcome (female or otherwise). Looking for widest range of styles possible (pre 1985) Shsssh!, Don't tell anyone, but this thread of Pogo's is where I steal a lot of my list... lol
 
Matt H. said:
Thank you Praire. I'm looking for more female writers to balance out my reading list of 50 novels... So far only got Brackett, Le Guin, Cherryh... suggestions alway welcome (female or otherwise). Looking for widest range of styles possible (pre 1985) Shsssh!, Don't tell anyone, but this thread of Pogo's is where I steal a lot of my list... lol
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An important author you are missing is Robert Silverberg... maybe The Book of Skulls, Dying Inside, Downward to the Earth, or Nightwings, or a collection of short stories...

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes is a big classic. Another novel I liked is Windhaven, by George R. R. Martin and Lisa Tuttle, or from GRRM you could also try Dreamsongs, a collection of his short stories, although you could just read a selection of his most famous ones, since it's long.

Cordwainer Smith: a collection of his short fiction (The Rediscovery of Man, where again you could read a selection if it's too long), or the novel Nostrilia.

Another writer you should read is James Tiptree Jr (also works for your female author list, since she is a woman although she used a male pseudonym).. You should try a collection of her short fiction, like Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. If it's too long for you you could just choose some of the stories...

It's a pity that you have two Larry Nivens, and none of them is The Mote in God's Eye, which would have been my first choice.

It's a pity my favorite works by Octavia E. Butler are after 1985, but you might want to consider Kindred (1979)

If you want some feminist SF you might want to consider Joanna Russ' The Female Man or Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue. Sherri Teper's The Gate to Women's Country is just out of your self-imposed time period (1988).

Of course, short fiction has played a very important role in the history of SF, much more than nowadays, so something like the Science Fiction Hall of Fame is a great way to follow the development of the genre.
 
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