A bit more than a week ago I drove to Boston in order to attend the venerable Boskone convention, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. As always, I spent a lot of my time either being on panels discussing things, or watching other people on panels discussing things.
This year one of the most interesting panels was "Stories That Changed Everything," on Saturday. The panel itself was a real Murderer's Row of modern science fiction scholarship: Paul DiFilippo, David Hartwell, James Patrick Kelly, Fred Lerner, and Michael Swanwick.
The topic challenged the panelists to name stories which revolutionized the field. The actual description included fantasy and horror, as well as science fiction, which in my opinion made the whole topic too broad. The panelists cleverly dodged that problem by breaking up the history of fantastic fiction into eras, so that they could pick the five most revolutionary stories in each era.
Now it's my turn. I'm going to limit myself to science fiction, and I'm going to concentrate on the period before the present century, as I don't think we've had enough time to see what stories published since then have revolutionized anything. I'm limiting myself to just five works. Note that these aren't necessarily what I consider the best stories of the century, merely the most influential -- though all of them are very good.
The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells: This is the taproot of the entire science fiction genre. You've got half the major tropes of science fiction packed into one short novel: alien invasion, giant mecha, death rays, post-apocalyptic settings, cyborgs . . . a sufficiently cynical person could make a case that all of science fiction has consisted of rearranging elements devised by H.G. Wells.
"A Martian Odyssey," by Stanley Weinbaum: It's hard to find nowadays, and the writing style may strike modern readers as a little dated, but this is still a revolutionary story. It has the first alien environment, presented not as a land of danger to be survived and conquered, but simply as a place. And it has the first alien character (Tweel, the bird-like Martian) who is genuinely alien without being a monster. Before this story, aliens were either scary and dangerous things (like Wells's Martians) or humans with funny skin tones or weird hair.
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones," by Samuel R. Delany: Though it's not as well-known as the others, this short story had a profound influence. This is the true origin of cyberpunk fiction. It's got all the elements. There's a crowded, densely-described future. There's a roguish protagonist. There's a focus on characters at the margins of society. And it was written a decade before anyone coined the word "cyberpunk" to describe this kind of story.
Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein: You can tell it's revolutionary because people are still arguing about it, five decades after it came out. One can trace the entire branch of "military science fiction" back to this novel, and it has had a tremendous effect on actual real-world military technology and planning. Even as I write the mad scientists of DARPA are beavering away trying to make the powered armor and other gadgets of Heinlein's story into battlefield reality.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon: It just barely sneaks into the 20th Century, and its influence is more commercial than literary. This is a straightforward comic book adventure story, with escape artists, the Golem of Prague, Antarctic Nazis, and the Golden Age of comics -- and it won the Pulitzer Prize. If something so jam-packed with genre elements could grab the big trophy, that means the walls around the "SF ghetto" have crumbled into dust.
There's my five. Thoughts?
Might be still too soon on the Chabon. Good call on the Weinbaum -- I read that one while still quite young but looking back at it and considering its place in history, it was definitely something new and the influence is probably taken for granted these days.
Posted by: Chuk | 02/26/2013 at 01:52 PM