Top Three Overrated SF Authors
Jeff VanderMeer • August 2nd, 2007 @ 7:54 pm • Uncategorized
In terms of from the 1940s to today, I’d say the following are overrated in terms of being able to read them today with a straight face.
(1) L. Ron Hubbard (perhaps this goes without saying)
(2) Isaac Asimov
(3) Robert Heinlein
Sorry, folks. Historical significance, yes, and influence, but…actually readable?
Jeff
August 2, 2007 at 8:43 pm
Yeah, okay, so I’m winding you up. Just letting you know that in advance…
Jeff
August 2, 2007 at 8:43 pm
When was L. Ron Hubbard ever rated highly? I couldn’t keep a straight face reading Norman Spinrad.
August 2, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Well, okay, good point.
Some Sturgeon now, too, I have to admit.
Maybe this is the thread where everyone admits to the “sin” of finding unreadable somebody most people find readable.
Jeff
August 2, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Ayn Rand, anyone?
August 2, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Having never read Hubbard I can’t say if he deserves to be up there. His books always seemed awfully silly though.
I never much cared for early Asimov - the stuff I have been universally assured is his best work - especially the earlier foundation books. I thought his writing got a lot more readable, even if the plots got a lot sillier as the stories went on. Most of my experience is with his Foundation and Empire books, or his Robot stories. Maybe some of his other stuff was better, but I’ve never felt compelled to go and find it.
Heinlen, I only ever read two of his books. Tunnel in the Sky was horrible, in my opinion. I quite enjoyed Starship Troopers, though when I first read it at age eleven or so I was always pissed that it ended when the story was just starting to pick up. I wanted to hear about how we beat them damn bugs back!
Speaking of people I find unreadable, Harlan Ellison. I flipped through a copy of I have no mouth and I must scream and the title story just felt dated to me. The rest of it varied from pretentious to uninteresting, with a couple forays into “all right.” I never wanted to read any of his other work. There’s a lot of sci fi from the same generation that I think still has a powerful amount of resonance, but most of Ellison’s just feels… quaint, I guess.
I never got to read any Sturgeon except for one story about unicorns and rape and maybe a witch? I can’t remember it very well, but I do remember not being especially impressed.
August 2, 2007 at 10:01 pm
There’s a definite ’60s quality to a lot of Ellison’s fiction, that’s for sure.
Jeff
August 3, 2007 at 2:08 am
L Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth was the book that really got me into sci-fi to be fair. My dad picked it up at a car boot sale for about 50p when I was but a young teenager and I read it about three times that first year and from there sprouted my love of all sci-fi, so yeah… I’ve not really bothered with any of his other stuff, but Battlefield Earth, despite what the naysayers and anti-scientologists proclaim, mostly without reading the thing, will always have a special place in my mind.
Asimov I do find awfully difficult to read, but to be honest I’ve yet to find a sci-fi author I can’t get through.
Dan Brown on the other hand…
August 3, 2007 at 2:24 am
I’ve read Battlefield Earth - it’s a toss-up which was worse, the book or the film. I knew someone who read all ten books of Elron’s Mission Earth. They say he’ll be fit for release any day soon.
Asimov: the man may have been (allegedly) a genius, but have a look through the Foundation trilogy and you’ll spot plenty of misused words. His prose is like Dr Seuss meets Lewis Carroll in places.
Heinlein wrote some cracking (if horribly dated) juveniles. The “adult” stuff is near unreadable once you’re past the age of fourteen - there’s probably something ironic in that…
I also second the nomination for Ellison. I’ve never understood why people either admire him or his fiction.
August 3, 2007 at 2:30 am
hmmm. heinlein? really?
dust off “the moon is a harsh mistress” for an hour or so. then read “the past through tomorrow”. then again…maybe you ARE right…these are the only 2 books i could recommend.
asimov. well…..ok, then. i love “foundation”, but if written today…probably not. then again, would “lord of the rings” even find an audience today if it had to compete with all its imitators? it would be a tough sell.
there are more over-rated……simak [had 1 good book....way station]. clarke [please.....]. etc…
August 3, 2007 at 3:46 am
Heinlein always cracks me up but he was very readable, right up until he discovered “spung”.
August 3, 2007 at 6:18 am
I always choked on the clouds of dust that wafted into the air every time I tried to read Asimov. I once found an entire archeopteryx skeleton intact between the pages of “I, Robot.”
August 3, 2007 at 7:18 am
LOL!
This is becoming a “confess your sins” thread, I think.
There are writers you’re supposed to read and enjoy that, to me, are like reading Cotton Mather in American Lit.
Jeff
August 3, 2007 at 8:19 am
I concur with all three but would reserve a special place for Frank Herbert. Maybe I’m just bitter because I could never figure out if Paul was the Kyzyzewski Hassenpfeffer.
August 3, 2007 at 8:22 am
I definitely agree with Heinlein and Asimov, actually always thought I was one of the few weirdos who felt that way.
But Hubbard has never been critically-acclaimed enough to be considered overrated.
What about van Vogt as overrated as well?
August 3, 2007 at 8:24 am
There are some books I’ll reread over and over, but Heinlein isn’t one of them. The first science fiction I ever read was “Stranger in a Strange Land”, when I was thirteen (back around the dawn of time.) It made an extraordinary impact on me, yet I’ve never read it again. I think I’m afraid to.
:D
August 3, 2007 at 8:33 am
Yeah, Hubbard’s kind of a straw man. Van Vogt is a possible good choice.
GDT: “I could never figure out if Paul was the Kyzyzewski Hassenpfeffer.”
LOL! I actually loved Dosadi Experiment and the first three Dune books when I read them. I haven’t tried to re-read them lately, though.
I also wonder how I’d feel about Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar now…
Jeff
August 3, 2007 at 8:52 am
I agree on Asimov, I’ve never found him to be readable, especially his non-fiction stuff. He’s not good, just prolific.
Hubbard, I agree wholeheartedly. Horribly contrived and infantile. But he doesn’t deserve to be on a list with the other two. He’s notorious, not overrated. Ugh.
Heinlein…mixed bag. He’s clear and precise and I love him for it. His juveniles are just that, but they are full of such gee-whiz earnestness that I can’t help but get into them. I can really identify with his “voice” and so I’ll disagree that he’s overrated. I will say that I can’t get into his later stuff, all that World as Myth stuff. Just can’t do it.
Clarke: overrated. Oddly, I think 2001 the movie was overrated, but I liked the book.
Ellison: really overrated. By their nature, the Glass Teat columns are dated, obviously. But even when you account for age, they still come off as pretentious and shallow. But that’s the 60s for you.
Dick: Surprisingly not overrated, despite the fact he has become, posthumously, Hollywood’s golden boy.
To tick folks off, Vonnegut: overrated. And yes, he wrote SF. After Slaughterhouse and a few good short stories, I just never appreciated his work. Is it weird that I think that Philip K. Dick is a better Kurt Vonnegut? Or am I a complete philistine?
For my own personal heresy, as much as I love and adore Carl Sagan, I thought Contact was crap. The movie was better. Since he only wrote the one SF book, it is a bit unfair, but worth mentioning. Nick, however, is a damn fine fictioneer.
While I am talking non-fiction — and as much as it pains me to say it — Stephen J. Gould, eh. Not such a great writer. Sagan was a thousand times the explainer. Dawkins, a million.
That felt good, thanks for the opportunity to vent.
August 3, 2007 at 8:54 am
I’ll have to disagree at least with the Asimov. I don’t think I’d be SciFi reader today, if I hadn’t read the Foundation/Empire/Robot books when I was younger. Then there’s the legacy of his monthly magazine, which is still a great source for short fiction.
August 3, 2007 at 8:54 am
Alfred Bester.
I made attempts at both “The Demolished Man” & “The Stars My Destination”, and just couldn’t believe anybody would give these any sort of credence.
Same with Harlan Ellison. The stories don’t make any kind of sense.
Sturgeon’s “More Than Human” moves me to tears, however.
Oh, and William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition” got thrown across the room by page 3.
August 3, 2007 at 10:06 am
Clarke? I don’t know; his fiction has the same charm as a Meccano set - it’s crude and clunky, you can see all the rivets, and sooner or later one of the bolts is going to loosen and the whole thing will come crashing down about your ears, but…
I’ve never understood the attraction of PKD. All his novels read like he made them up as he went along - probably because he made them up as he went along.
I loved The Stars My Destination; I hated The Demolished Man.
August 3, 2007 at 10:33 am
Don’t you dare say anything about Brunner! He’s till tops, even down to his televangelist soliciting donations from an inflatable church. A.E. van Vogt on the other hand, I couldn’t read him even when I was 12. Space Beagle has all the wibbly things in space of Star Trek but none of the camp fun.
August 3, 2007 at 11:07 am
After reading The Man in the High Castle, I was astonished that it was considered a seminal work of sci fi by my University’s English department. I would have included it in the class that was using it as a textbook, but probably only as an example of how to write uninteresting and disjointed sci fi.
I’ve never bothered to read anything else by Mr. Dick, so I don’t know how High Castle compares to his other stuff.
Also overrated are Brin, Benford, and Bear.
All my parents ever do is complain about how no one in the SF genre these days is as good a writer as those three, but while Brin’s OK enough most of what I’ve read by the others is pretty bad. I don’t know if my parents’ opinions reflect the popular opinion of these authors, though, so I don’t really know if they’re overrated.
August 3, 2007 at 11:40 am
This smells a bit of telling someone their first girlfriend was ugly.
August 3, 2007 at 11:54 am
Yes, true. But it’s all about authors whose rep is beyond reproach. Harmless. I just always find it interesting–the chasm between what we’re supposed to respect/like and what we actually like.
Jeff
August 3, 2007 at 7:04 pm
A few years ago I bought a two-volume Science Fiction Hall of Fame edited by Ben Bova, featuring what the Science Fiction Writers of America thought were the best SF novellas ever. About half were profoundly boring.
I read all the Asimov I could find when I was 12 to 14 years old. A couple of years ago I tried to read Foundation again and couldn’t figure out what I was thinking. On the other hand, I’ll always have a soft spot for Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, which was my favorite book around that time.
I must admit I think Harlan Ellison is a great writer of short stories… but his essays are entertaining as much for their intermittent buffoonery as anything else. I’m actually in the middle of An Edge In My Voice right now, and parts of it read like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons got a blog.
August 3, 2007 at 8:10 pm
I have to agree on Harlan Ellison.
For similar reasons, I’ll throw in Joanna Russ. Her stories (e.g. And Chaos Died) have a tendency to be incredibly incoherent. And although it has little to do with her writing, likening The Left Hand of Darkness to bad Trek fanfic just rubs me the wrong way.
As for Asimov, I can only read his short stories. Perhaps the fault is mine rather than his, but I just can’t bring myself to read his novels without being bored out of my mind.
(Ben Bova, on the other hand, I will never read anything by ever again. I have a severe allergy to soap operas.)
August 4, 2007 at 1:18 am
If anything, Asimov is underrated. “The Foundation Trilogy,” “The End of Eternity,” the robot novels and short stories — they all blew me away and were my entry points into written science fiction. He’s a master plot-spinner. His prose was not elegant or flashy, but it was always lucid and never pretentious.
August 4, 2007 at 7:14 pm
I feel like I’m agreeing too much with all of you by ticking a Yes besides Heinlein and Asimov (never have read nor want to read Hubbard), not to mention nodding my head at mentioning Ayn Rand and Arthur C. Clarke. I wonder if it’s because of some combination of rather pedestrian prose (Asimov in particular for me) and some sense of there being a sometimes too smug and cheerio old chap-type of optimism that just seems so…quaint and hippy-drippy in today’s rather more ambiguous and murky climate of opinion.
August 5, 2007 at 12:28 am
There has never been a more readable science fiction author than Robert Heinlein. There may never be one of his stature and talent and brilliance again. His sales and popularity ought to be proof enough of this. I’m thinking that perhaps you’ve only read the later shit, after the man went bugfuck insane. If so, I pity you for this, yet envy that you have the opportunity to read it for the first time.
I often wonder if pretentiousness has become the path to ‘respectability’ in speculative fiction these days. I go to Readercon and I’m amazed at the mindset.
For me, I’d point to M. John Harrison as the most unreadable science fiction author. Every sentence is beautiful, but the man can not tell a story to save his life.
Number two would be Chip Delaney. He has so much talent — all the talent in the world, in fact. He’s a genius. And somewhere along the way he decided, he assuredly did not lose the ability, to never write a readable novel again.
Of course, it would be easy to point at reinvented lunatics like Scott Card, or perhaps Randian psychopaths like Goodkind, the aforementioned Hubbard, or even talentless no-reason-they-ever-should-have-been-published so-called SF authors like John Ringo and the Baen stable of wack jobs, but it’s more interesting to point to reviewers wet dreams.
Delaney and Harrison are like the science fiction version of Michal Vick, all the talent in the world, wasted, to the detriment of all.
I understand that tastes vary, but ‘not readable’ is a crime that literally millions of people would disagree with you on in regards to Robert A. Heinlein.
August 5, 2007 at 6:07 am
Hubbard, obviously, is a poor author. His Mission Earth series is racist, homophobic and outrageously misogynistic, whilst Battlefield Earth is so stupid I felt my IQ lowering whilst I was reading it.
Asimov was great back in the day and Nightfall remains a very clever story. He’s an ideas man and some of his ideas still hold up very well today, although his prose and characters are very dated. But back in the 1950s I can see why Foundation had such a huge impact. Heinlein I have not read enough of to comment, although I found Stranger in a Strange Land difficult to get into.
As for my own list: M. John Harrison can write prose but he cannot write character and he cannot write plot; Robin Hobb can write character and plot but she writes too much of it, overloading what would be a fine 400-page novel and turning it into a 2,000-page turgid doorstop of a trilogy; and given her strong reputation I found Justina Robson’s Keeping It Real extremely disappointing, so in lieu of another choice coming to mind I’d settle for that one. If Hobb is considered to be too fantasy-oriented, I would submit Gregory Benford in her place.
I’d be interested to see what Golden Age SF authors are considered underrated (for me, Brian Aldiss heads that list, probably John Brunner and JG Ballard as well).
August 5, 2007 at 11:39 am
I can’t agree fully on Asimov, considering how much I loved his works when reading it for the first time. A tiny bit overrated maybe, but it seems unfair to compare it with today’s standards.
Not having english as my first language, Asimov was actually one of the first authors I began to read in english, and his works are excellent for that since his prose is very easy to follow. (I have to admit that I mostly did re-reads in english at that time though.)
I have only read Starship Troopers by Heinlein (and Hubbard not at all), so I haven’t much to go by there.
August 5, 2007 at 2:45 pm
I found Light to be readable and generally very good. The characters weren’t likable and weren’t the *best*, but they were believable.
Re Heinlein, sales and popularity are unfortunately not proof of anything; if they were, there wouldn’t be shelves full of McFantasy in every bookstore. I certainly wouldn’t call him overrated though, although he might have been a better thinker than a writer.
August 13, 2007 at 5:57 am
I’ll agree that Asimov is overrated, but mainly because he’s usually considered to be God, while he really just is the supreme ruler of the universe.
He was (beyond a few children’s stories like Universums Öde) the first SF-author I read and loved, and while I haven’t read all his books (who has? :p) I still love them. (his short-stories more than his novels, actually, but I prefer to think of most of Foundation as short-stories anyway)
Heinlein I never liked. Just something “off” about him, never read Hubbard.