Variation on a Theme
Posted on December 28, 2005 Posted by John Scalzi 2 Comments
James Nicoll is playing a riff off my “gateway science fiction” thread, to see what works from other eras could be seen as gateway SF — which is to say, the science fiction you’d give to people who haven’t read science fiction before. Get the details of Nicoll’s quest here.
I was working on this for a personal thing a few months back — there’s a woman at the dog park who only became interested in science fiction because I write it. So I made a list for her, based on what she does like — she’s a literary sort of person, very intellectual. I can’t remember everything on the list, but she liked the Octavia Butler and I don’t know if she got to the Maureen McHugh. I’d recommend a couple of Melissa Scotts too — The Kindly Ones, I think, for people like that.
If that grows a bit, then covering older eras as well could have the added benefit of helping out those of us (ie., me) whose knowledge of some of the older stuff beyond the basics is woefully inadequate (speaking of which, the frequent mentions of McHugh’s novel might be just what I need to finally get around to reading it). And though I’d been away when your original thread was a going thing, reading it over now got me to glance at my shelves, and I felt somewhat heartened to be able to pull a solid twenty titles from the last decade that I’d recommend to non-SF readers without a second thought.
Now I just have to get around to proselytizing, I s’pose.