I would add your novel, The Inhabited World, to the ghost list. I would say Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home as one of the best examples of a utopian novel—so much harder to write than dystopia! And The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss, which is clearly utopian to my mind.
I'm reading a new translation of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, originally written in Russian but first published in English by Dutton in 1924. It is a finer novel, so far, than 1984, which it inspired. Le Guin called it "the best single work of science fiction yet written."
Biological Science Fiction would add at least Vonda N. McKintyre's Dreamsnake and perhaps others. Any excuse to include Naomi Novik's novels, especially the dragon series, which is primarily revisionist history. (Begin with His Majesty's Dragon. Dragons were always around, nothing magical about flying lizards. They were small and people encouraged them through selective breeding to become bigger and bigger, smarter and sentient. Napoleon appears. There is humor, but the history is pretty solid.)
Thanks for this response, Jan. I guess "biological sci-fi" didn't occur to me. I have Perdido Street Station under steampunk, but it has characters who are hybrids of human and insects and other sorts of creatures. I should've included Molly Gloss--though my original intent was to have only three examples for each category so that people would look for others--but then the list kept growing because I couldn't not include certain works . . . Let's see, WE I haven't read--I think somewhere I read that it didn't hold up well (over time)--but hearing what le Guin said makes me distrust whoever I heard that from; so I'll have to try it. And I purposely left out fantasy because I don't read it myself (depending on how you define it--the Titus Groan books might be called fantasy, for instance. I guess I stop short of dragons. I didn't know you were an aficionada of sci-fi. Didn't I say last time that you keep surprising me? Thanks for remembering The Inhabited World . . . my working title for it was Purgatorio--I knew that wouldn't be the final title but it helped me focus on that in-between-ness while I was working on it. The word "ghost" never actually appears in the book, by the way (though the genesis of the book was a scrap of paper where I'd written "ghost of a suicide" while reading--I actually had no memory of jotting it down but when I saw it I knew it would be the next project).
I've been reading SF/F since I was a child. The novel I am shopping just now is SF, without machinery, post-apocalyptic. My personal favorite is Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. It was nominated for the Hugo and won the Nebula in 1968. I used teach it. Soccer on the generation ship did not include heading the ball but did include use of elbows—way ahead of the curve for safety.
When I taught speculative fiction, I told students that most of later twentieth-century SF was Pre- or Apocalypse or Post-. McIntyre was all about biology. Very smart stories. And dragons, you do need to give Novik a shot, but then it helps if you are already a Patrick O'Brian fan. I've read his series twice and once aloud. Le Guin respected dragons. One came to her memorial, an every speaker talked about her dragons—not planned, just inevitable.
Zamyatin has electric toothbrushes and tidal-ocean derived electrical power and the totalitarian society assumes everyone does exactly the same thing at the same time, with "glass walls. As far as "holding up" ... well ... What does? Not enough, I'd say. I can't always get past the racism in some novels, though it's also in We. [The sexism is so prevalent in most fiction that I have to set it to one side if there's something else worthwhile. A River Runs Through It is my go-to example. The shadow casting and the bear don't make me ignore McLean's racism and whore-madonna complex, but I set them aside for the sake of those scenes and the last page. And sometimes I am so blasted by visions I miss it, or excuse it. I handled all the Dune books and then read something else and realized why he gave me the creeps.]
You don't need the word "ghost" to have a great ghost story. I've read yours at least twice. Clearly excellent.
Afterlife? You could suggest Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead. (I loved Illumination too, though the original cover almost killed it). But then you'd probably get people reading Lincoln in the Bardo which I found... unsatisfying.
While I think of it, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain short stories by Robert Olen Butler has a couple great ghost stories. Have you seen the film Chinese Ghost Story? (There are a lot of them, I mean the first and maybe next two.) I drove two hundred miles to see that film. It's funny and a satisfying contrast to European ghost images.
Perhaps the difference is due to my machine being a Mac, though I read other sub stack blogs with footnotes and have not encountered this problem. I also noted the numbers for 2 digit footnotes were slightly different fonts from each other, and not properly aligned. Could be related, maybe?
David - When I hover my cursor over the footnote, nothing happens! This a shame, as your commentary is so interesting. A non-technical fix would be to copy the book title into the footnote - that way we reavers could avoid the annoying Up & Down of trying to figure out which work you are describing.
I would add your novel, The Inhabited World, to the ghost list. I would say Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home as one of the best examples of a utopian novel—so much harder to write than dystopia! And The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss, which is clearly utopian to my mind.
I'm reading a new translation of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, originally written in Russian but first published in English by Dutton in 1924. It is a finer novel, so far, than 1984, which it inspired. Le Guin called it "the best single work of science fiction yet written."
Biological Science Fiction would add at least Vonda N. McKintyre's Dreamsnake and perhaps others. Any excuse to include Naomi Novik's novels, especially the dragon series, which is primarily revisionist history. (Begin with His Majesty's Dragon. Dragons were always around, nothing magical about flying lizards. They were small and people encouraged them through selective breeding to become bigger and bigger, smarter and sentient. Napoleon appears. There is humor, but the history is pretty solid.)
Thanks for this response, Jan. I guess "biological sci-fi" didn't occur to me. I have Perdido Street Station under steampunk, but it has characters who are hybrids of human and insects and other sorts of creatures. I should've included Molly Gloss--though my original intent was to have only three examples for each category so that people would look for others--but then the list kept growing because I couldn't not include certain works . . . Let's see, WE I haven't read--I think somewhere I read that it didn't hold up well (over time)--but hearing what le Guin said makes me distrust whoever I heard that from; so I'll have to try it. And I purposely left out fantasy because I don't read it myself (depending on how you define it--the Titus Groan books might be called fantasy, for instance. I guess I stop short of dragons. I didn't know you were an aficionada of sci-fi. Didn't I say last time that you keep surprising me? Thanks for remembering The Inhabited World . . . my working title for it was Purgatorio--I knew that wouldn't be the final title but it helped me focus on that in-between-ness while I was working on it. The word "ghost" never actually appears in the book, by the way (though the genesis of the book was a scrap of paper where I'd written "ghost of a suicide" while reading--I actually had no memory of jotting it down but when I saw it I knew it would be the next project).
I've been reading SF/F since I was a child. The novel I am shopping just now is SF, without machinery, post-apocalyptic. My personal favorite is Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin. It was nominated for the Hugo and won the Nebula in 1968. I used teach it. Soccer on the generation ship did not include heading the ball but did include use of elbows—way ahead of the curve for safety.
When I taught speculative fiction, I told students that most of later twentieth-century SF was Pre- or Apocalypse or Post-. McIntyre was all about biology. Very smart stories. And dragons, you do need to give Novik a shot, but then it helps if you are already a Patrick O'Brian fan. I've read his series twice and once aloud. Le Guin respected dragons. One came to her memorial, an every speaker talked about her dragons—not planned, just inevitable.
Zamyatin has electric toothbrushes and tidal-ocean derived electrical power and the totalitarian society assumes everyone does exactly the same thing at the same time, with "glass walls. As far as "holding up" ... well ... What does? Not enough, I'd say. I can't always get past the racism in some novels, though it's also in We. [The sexism is so prevalent in most fiction that I have to set it to one side if there's something else worthwhile. A River Runs Through It is my go-to example. The shadow casting and the bear don't make me ignore McLean's racism and whore-madonna complex, but I set them aside for the sake of those scenes and the last page. And sometimes I am so blasted by visions I miss it, or excuse it. I handled all the Dune books and then read something else and realized why he gave me the creeps.]
You don't need the word "ghost" to have a great ghost story. I've read yours at least twice. Clearly excellent.
Afterlife? You could suggest Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead. (I loved Illumination too, though the original cover almost killed it). But then you'd probably get people reading Lincoln in the Bardo which I found... unsatisfying.
While I think of it, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain short stories by Robert Olen Butler has a couple great ghost stories. Have you seen the film Chinese Ghost Story? (There are a lot of them, I mean the first and maybe next two.) I drove two hundred miles to see that film. It's funny and a satisfying contrast to European ghost images.
And finally,I can access all your footnotes.n
I think the "most-famous titles" are great conceptually but lousy novels. [Fahrenheit 451 was better as a short story.]
Perhaps the difference is due to my machine being a Mac, though I read other sub stack blogs with footnotes and have not encountered this problem. I also noted the numbers for 2 digit footnotes were slightly different fonts from each other, and not properly aligned. Could be related, maybe?
David - When I hover my cursor over the footnote, nothing happens! This a shame, as your commentary is so interesting. A non-technical fix would be to copy the book title into the footnote - that way we reavers could avoid the annoying Up & Down of trying to figure out which work you are describing.
Wow--it works on my machine. I wonder where the glitch is?
If any of the rest of you read this, let me know if the footnotes pop up!
Doesn't work for me either.
You mean the cursor thing? What are you reading it on?