My Top Ten Science Fiction Stories

It’s no wonder that I start my short fiction blog with a science fiction related article. I am a science fiction writer and probably will always be. There’s a special significance when sf people attempt the impossible and select the ten “best” sf stories of all time – as no other genre science fiction in its historic development has been dependent on achievements and innnovations in the short fiction realm. Up to the forties science fiction was almost completely a story genre and few novels of lasting quality were published. It may be argued that the basic idea of science fiction – exploring the impact of a scientific or technological advancement on individuals and society – has been fully realized only in short fiction (I personally would regard this view as too simple). Everywhere in the world science fiction as a developing genre has, with few exceptions, started with story writing. The history of the genre as an international phenomenon is far too complex to justify hasty generalizations and so it is surely a shortcoming that my selection, as many others, features mostly English language writers. Further readings, studies and new insights may change this but for the moment here’s what it is: a personal selection of a reader and writer grown up with Anglo-American sf who is still limited by the horizon he hopes to expand over time.

Adolfo Bioy Casares
THE INVENTION OF MOREL
1940

Bioy Casares’ novella (it is mostly published as a novel which I think it isn’t) made its author, a friend and co-writer of Borges, internationally famous. It is one of the greatest works of Latin American science fiction and fantasy. Readers who still regard science fiction as a primary Anglo-Anerican genre may be suprised to find out that The Invention of Morel is a pioneering work that introduced the concept of virtual reality into science fiction long before Cyberpunk was even dreamt of, even before Dick, Galouye and others first explorered this concept. What lifts this tale of a castaway, who finds out that the idle residents of an unknown islands are only projections and includes himself into their endlessly repeated lifes, high above most other VR and cyberspace stories is its poetic language and the slow, masterful unfolding of its central enigma. It tells a lot about a certain ignorancy in sf circles that few typical sf readers have recognized this work.

C.L. Moore
NO WOMAN BORN
1944

Catherine Lucille Moore’s (1911-1987) influence on American science fiction and fantasy can hardly be overrated. Her story “Shambleau” introduced a dark, brooding sensuality into pulp fiction long before there was any talk of taboo breakers. Her unique collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) produced maybe the most original body of short works in sf of the forties. Her greatest works are perhaps among her novellas. The stunning opening pages of “No Woman Born”, one of the first and still one of the greatest cyborg stories, with their nuanced description of the artificially recreated dancer Deidre can convince even today’s readers of Moore’s outstanding ability to evoke emotional states (George R.R. Martin in stories such as “A Song for Lya” was one of the very few who came close to her in this regard). Rarely has there been such a convincing narrative treatment of a human being turned into something completely new and different as in the climax of “No Woman Born” when Deidre’s comeback on stage demonstrates her newly acquired modes of expression. If sf critics will ever settle on a canon of sf, Moore’s tales should be acknowledged as some of the lasting achievements of science fiction.

J.G. Ballard
THE WAITING GROUNDS
1959

When Ballard died in 2009 the orbituaries in mainstream media proved that Ballard, who in the early years of his career was only known to sf readers, had long since found his place in contemporary British literature as one of its most orginal and radical voices. “The Voices of Time” and “The Terminal Beach” are widely regarded as his most important stories and many readers think that “The Waiting Grounds” is rather untypical, a story that sets out with a rather conventional sf setting on another planet. At the end, however, when Ballard with just a few brillantly written pages turns the whole scenario upside-down, we are back on Ballardian homeground. His vision of a cyclical cosm that is transformed and finally shattered by the rise of a super civilization is one of the many – and maybe the most fascinating – explorations of man’s existential position in time and space in Ballard’s early work. Although he focused in the course of his work’s development on ever more private and intimate psychic states, the relations of the human mind to time and space remained one of his main topics, up to such disturbing visions as “The Enormous Space”.

David I. Masson
TRAVELLER’S REST
1965

In 2003, a small British publisher re-issued The Caltraps of Time, the only story collection by the Scottish librarian and casual sf writer David Irvine Masson (1917-2007). With only seven stories in the sixties and three published later, most of them in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, Masson may seem as a peripheral writer, nonetheless he is remembered as one of the morst original and ambitious contributors to British new wave sf, not least for this story, his first one. Masson had a preference for time phenomena and in “Traveller’s Rest” he utilizes the narrative device of time acceleration and decelation for a pessimistic vision of the human condition of epic proportions. The story follows the way of a soldier who becomes an individual while moving away from the frontline where an eerie war is faught against an invisible enemy behind a border of infinite time acceleration. Only seconds after his relief he is ordered back and years of private happiness shrink to split seconds against a war that may hide a  secret of cruel irony. All this is explored in a story perfectly structured and rich in detail, whose unique conception has never been surpassed in the time travelling subgenre.

James Tiptree jr.
HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER
1974

Considering her lifework, I regard Alice Sheldon, who for many years hid behind the male pseudonym James Tiptree jr., as the greatest short story writer in the history of science fiction, surpassing even Ballard, Bester or Cordwainer Smith. It’s hard to select a specific of her many outstanding tales. “The Women Men Don’t See” could stand here, “The Screwfly Solution” and others. I personally find this subtle and beautiful work her most artful and original story. Barry Malzberg, who commissioned it for an anthology about the great topics of science fiction, called it the greatest post doomsday story ever written and it may well be. The story is composed of several episodes of lasting emotional impact on the main character and only in the vistuoso closing sequence the reader realizes that these are the traces of a man long death and fragments of a civilization vanished from Earth whose only remains are the most painful experiences of its members. Showing Alice Sheldon of the height of her powers, I think that even among the best American mainstream stories of the seventies few matched the aristry of this story.

Barry N. Malzberg
A GALAXY CALLED ROME
1975

Barry Malzberg’s controversial career and personality and his almost schizophrenic relation to the science fiction genre, that he condemned as much for its failures as he praised it for its achievements, has turned him into scapegoat for sf purists in US and abroad. A major part of his short works (featured in his 1994 collection The Passage of Light) belongs to a subgenre that one of his publishers called “recursive science fiction”. Science Fiction about science fiction has a long tradtion and many prominent sf writers from Dick to Silverberg to Michael Bishop and others contributed to it. No other writer, however, has advanced it to such an intensity of reflection and self-destructive loathing as Malzberg. “A Galaxy of Rome” is his masterpiece in this regard. It’s not a story in the strictest sense of the word but a series of sketches of a writer how tries to write a story in the Campbellian mode based on two articles by sf grandfather editor John W. Campbell himself. The attempts to explore the possibilities of a story that can never be written, interwoven with self-reflections of the writer, turn out to be much more exciting than a story in the Campbellian mode could ever hope to be. Few writers applied the techniques of postmodernism to science fiction – John Sladek, to name one beside Malzberg – and as this story proves it can be done with stunning results: turning sf into a kind of fiction that is in itself a meditation about its own methods and conventions.

William Gibson
HINTERLANDS
1981

In an essay on Gibson I called him “a writer of surfaces, while not a surficial writer” and dared to claim that he became famous for the wrong reasons. The concept of cyberspace as featured in the Neuromancer trilogy, which became kind of his trademark, is surely among the most flawed and least inspired ideas in his work. Apart from the stilistically immensely influential opening chapters of Neuromancer his whole first trilogy, taken seriously, is a failure and as a novel writer he improved much in his later books. What I find most regrettable is that it has been rarely acknowledged what a fine short story writer he is. “The Winter Market”,  along with Tiptree’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, may be still the greatest of all Cyberpunk stories and a perfect expression of the main elements of Cyberpunk aesthetics. “The Gernsback Continuum” is a clever, self-reflective programmatic statement of proto-Cyberpunk and, as David Pringle justly claimed, a word-perfect piece of writing. “Hinterlands”, arguably his best story, belongs to a rare subgenre of science fiction that I want to call “misanthropic sf”. In novels and stories of this subgenre humans are confronted with beings or intelligences high above their own level of technological or biological advancement and fail to convince those others of being rational creatures with their own dignity. Some of the greatest works of science fiction belong to this category, novels such as “Solaris” by Lem, “Roadside Picnic” by the brothers Strugatzky, “The Genocides” by Thomas Disch or “Pallas” by French writer Capoulet-Junac and stories such as “The Bees of Knowledge” by Barrington Bayley. “Hinterlands” is a worthy successor to all these. Humanity is portrayed here as a scavanger of higher civilizations and madness is the price it pays to live on their achievements. An unusually farreaching concept in Gibson’s works, this story is one of the bleakest visions of humanity’s place in the cosm of the last decades.

Geoff Ryman
THE UNCONQUERED COUNTRY
1984

The sf of the eighties, probably perceived by most readers as the decade of cyperpunk, also saw the infusion of elements of magic realism (as blurred this label may have become by now, marking writers as diverse as Mo Yan, Mia Couto and Haruki Murakami) into science fiction, most remarkable in the work of Lucius Shepard but also in this novella that made Geoff Ryman, who later turned to what he called “mundane science fiction”, famous in the science fiction field. One may argue that “The Unconquered Country” shares one basic feature with magic realism: the depiction of a harsh reality, seen through a weave of fantastic metaphors. But apart from this it is a work sui generis. Typical sf plot devices – biotechnology, living houses, artificial creatures for advertising etc. – are applied here to create a shifting reality that at a second glance can be recognized as Cambodia under Pol Pot seen through a distorting mirror. As in much of the best science fiction alienation and distortion serve to lead readers to heightened perception of reality. Ryman’s story ends with a scene full with the forebodings of genocide and here fiction and reality again meet with devestating effect.

Carter Scholz
TRANSIENTS
1988

This is probably the least known story on my list. Published, as far as I know, only once in an anthology in memory of the influential sf editor Terry Carr, it is a neglected masterpiece of modernist science fiction. Scholz, however, is not an unknown name in the field. With only a small output he became rather well-known in the seventies especially for a series of time-travel stories featuring famous composers and later, after abandoning science fiction, earned wider acclaim for his SDI novel Radiance (2002). It’s remarkable that this touching and mysterious story despite the originality of its conception – it portays a group of young people who move in unforeseeable time and space jumps through the United States – has some striking similarities with two other stories written about the same time, “Blue Shifting” by Eric Brown and “The Save-Deposit Box” by Greg Egan. One may speculate if three writers reacted to the same undercurrents of their time by putting their characters into very similar existential situations. Whatever, “Transients” is maybe the best of this three masterpieces and displays Scholz in full command of his dense, reflected style and his sensibility for form and psychic states. The story does not resolve the character’s strange affliction but closes at the end into a full loop and a powerful parable of detachment and alienation – recurring themes of science fiction that have rarely been approached with such refinement.

Ted Chiang
STORY OF YOUR LIFE
1999

For the science fiction of the new century’s first decade Ted Chiang probably is what Australian Greg Egan has been for the nineties: the best sf story writer currently producing (at least within the English language area). With a remarkable small number of works he not just sweeped sf’s highest literary awards but proved that it is still possibly to write stories on the height of contemporary scientific discourse that successfully undertake imaginary and intellectual forays into the unknown (while many critics and quite a lot of writers claim that our present has become so science fictional that the  imagination of sf writers fails to convince any longer). “Story of Your Life” is among the best first contact stories in science fiction, fascinating not just for its refined, effectful structure (the story is, in fact, the tale of a mother for a daughter not yet born that she knows will die young) but for its scientifically sound, physically grounded speculation on how language might influence the perception of time. Ted Chiang has so far resisted the temptation to start on a big commercial sf career and only writes when inspiration hits him. Reading this story one may wish that he will continue to do so.

Copyright © 2011 by Michael K. Iwoleit