Because this has been bothering me since Wiscon

[starlady]

Poll #7183 Greatest living SF writer?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35

View Respondents

Greatest living SF writer?

View Answers

Ted Chiang (source: owner of Dreamhaven Books)
0 (0.0%)

Samuel R. Delany (source: me)
2 (5.9%)

Ursula K. LeGuin (source: me)
28 (82.4%)

Gene Wolfe (source: Neil Gaiman)
0 (0.0%)

someone else I will name below
4 (11.8%)

Write-in candidate?

View Answers

I just can't believe someone would put Ted Chiang over the woman who coined the term 'ansible,' but maybe I shouldn't be all that surprised.

Comments

[louderandlouder]

Wolfe vs. Le Guin is a hell of a contest, but my heart is with her even though I appreciate Gaiman's answer. So many of the SF greats are still alive; it makes a poll like this very crowded, happily.

[starlady]

For me the choice was between LeGuin and Delany. I love some of Gene Wolfe's work, but I find other things he's written unreadable due to the misogyny and the sheer WTFery combined with being boring. I tend to quote all three of them at about the same frequency, though.

[futuransky]

It was a hard choice between Le Guin and Delany for me (and then I was sad for a while about Russ not being on the list), and I might answer it differently another day, because they do such different things with their work... But Le Guin has my heart and my soul in the end, though Delany has more of my intellect in many ways.

*edited to use my new icon, sorry for the extra email!*

[starlady]

I nearly put Joanna Russ on there even so.

I went with LeGuin because I read more of her work at a younger age, though ironically it was more of her fantasy than her SF. If I did this poll again tomorrow I'd probably vote Delany.

It also seems telling to me that all of them (with the partial exception of Chiang) write SF and fantasy in equal measure.

that icon is awesome!

[sara]

...I am sad at the idea of having to rank them, really. Any contest in which I have to decide whether Delany or LeGuin is "better" does them both an injustice.

[starlady]

I almost, almost made them ticky boxes, because I myself can hardly choose. They're both so amazingly good, in complementary but not identical ways.

[lilacsigil]

LeGuin or Delany for me, but I've read more LeGuin. I think it's a bit unfair to start putting Ted Chiang (or any writer under 60!) up against that kind of competition or claim he's the best of anything yet.

[starlady]

Yeah, seriously! It's not so much that it's unfair as that it's ludicrous.

[melannen]

I'd be willing to entertain Delany as outranking Le Guin, except that I *still* haven't read any of his stuff. (Dhalgren is just so... intimidating.)

Wolfe... I've never read any Wolfe either, but I've also never seen his work talked about in any context other than "Best SF writer" - ie nobody talking about how he had an influence or did new and different things or stirred up everybody in the genre or brought them into reading SF, or any of the other things people say about Delany and Le Guin (and Zelazny and Heinlein and a bunch of other non-living ones...) In fact I have no idea what Wolfe wrote about, whereas I have a pretty good idea about Delany just from following fan discussions.

[seekingferret]

DHALGREN IS AMAZING. READ IT. YOU WON'T REGRET IT.


Also, his Neveryon fantasy stories are incredibly worth it and nowhere near as intimidating.

I'm a sort of admirer of Wolfe in an abstract way, though I've found in practice that actually sitting down and reading him is like taking a dose of your medicine. I will say that we couldn't have had the past thirty years' explosion in non-Tolkien fantasy without him.

[starlady]

See, this is interesting, because I read Neverÿona first of all his books and only then realized that he was fictionalizing critical theory. I think the Neverÿon books may be his real achievement, I love Dhalgren but…Neverÿon will always be first in my affections.

What Wolfe have you read? I think The Book of the New Sun is one of the most mindtrip-y books I've ever read, in a brilliant way.

[seekingferret]

Don't get me wrong, the Neveryon books are both incredibly brilliant and incredibly intellectually demanding. You're absolutely right that the way he plays with theory without diminishing character at all is stunning and powerful. I'm just saying that the stories aren't as intimidating- they don't have the unpredictable narrative jumps and complicated textual play that I think make Dhalgren an intimidating book to undertake for someone new to Delany.

I think I've read the first three parts of the Book of the New Sun, plus various short pieces of his SF. And I admired The Book of the New Sun greatly but never really enjoyed it, which is why I never finished. It never made me excited to keep reading.

[starlady]

*opens mouth, shuts it again* It's…really hard to characterize The Book of the New Sun, which I think remains his single finest achievement, though some of his other books are also amazing, and some of his other books are godawful. The best I can say is to give the first half of TBoNS a try and see what you think, it's in the U.S. as Shadow and Claw. I think you would probably enjoy it.

I would actually advise you not to start Delany with Dhalgren, brilliant as it is. Nova, The Fall of the Towers, and Babel-17 (which is published with Empire Star in the current edition) are all much fleeter and more obviously SF. Or you could go about it widdershins and start with one of the Neverÿon books, that's what I did.

[thistleingrey]

If you bounce off Wolfe's New Sun books (as I did, several times), you might try The Fifth Head of Cerberus--that is, ideally the book-length work of that name, which consists of three novellas, the first of which is also titled "The Fifth Head of Cerberus." This thing. I find Wolfe much better at shorter lengths (the death/doctor/island stories are of interest as well), though I do appreciate Soldier of the Mist and the recentish Knight + Wizard duo.

And I am never gonna read any New Sun Long Sun Anyshaped Sun properly at this point, and I am okay with that. Life is not long enough.

[starlady]

Interesting! I got two chapters into The Knight (is that the first one?) and decided life was too short for its incomprehensible misogynist bullshit, but I've read The Book of the New Sun and its one-volume sequel (The Urth of the New Sun, I think?) and thought all of it was brilliant. I've hated his shorter length work almost without exception.

[thistleingrey]

:)) Agreed about Knight's misogyny. I appreciate its playing with Norse and farther-south Germanic bits, mostly; it reminds me of Þiðrekssaga.

It may be that the age when one meets Wolfe's work (as for some other writers I can think of) matters re: tolerance. I didn't try New Sun until my mid-twenties.

[starlady]

That's probably true--I was, I think, 14 when I first started The Book of the New Sun.

[seekingferret]

I went with Delany. LeGuin and I get along only about half the time. (By which I mostly mean I'll love anything Hainish and dislike anything not). The writer I think is closest to Delany in my rankings is Ray Bradbury.

I don't understand how Chiang is even in the conversation.

[starlady]

He's in the conversation because I heard, second-hand, that "lots of people" think he's the greatest living SF writer, and I said, Bullshit!

[kindkit]

I like Chiang's work enormously, and I do think he's an important and underread writer, but . . . no.

I wonder whether that claim may be coming from folks somehow interpreting "living SF writer" as "currently working SF writer." LeGuin's best work, in my opinion, was written in the sixties and seventies, while Delany doesn't write SF anymore. Gene Wolfe I don't know about. But if the question was understood as "who's the best SF writer right now?" naming Chiang is much less ridiculous. Especially if SF is being defined narrowly as pure science fiction.

[starlady]

*nods* That's a good point. I do think The Other Wind stands with LeGuin's earlier work, but I haven't actually read a lot of her newer stuff, most of which is YA, yes? I did read Lavinia and liked it, but it's not on the same level as her masterpieces.

I could still see Wolfe even if "currently working in the genre" were added to the list, though, because he still has been fairly recently.

[troisroyaumes]

How incredibly bizarre--I love Ted Chiang, but he hasn't written nearly enough to even be in the competition.

I didn't vote because I haven't read Delany so I don't know how I would vote if I were familiar with all the authors, but out of the rest, I would definitely say Le Guin.

[starlady]

I think you would probably like Delany, particularly Babel-17. Rydra Wong is mind-blowingly awesome, for serious.

[coriana]

So, I have to confess I don't think I've read any of these people except Le Guin -- I don't actually read much "in the genre," I'm just an unabashed devotee of UKL. But I very much appreciate your posting this poll, because the struggle everyone's going through in the comments suggests I should go to the library tomorrow and check out some Delaney!

(Suggestions about where to start?)

~ c.

[lnhammer]

My suggestion is Nova -- it's the most coherent and accessible of his science fiction, without losing any of the intelligence. Linguistics geeks are also directed to Babel-17. If you've ever thought "Gosh, I wish Finnegan's Wake had been written in plain English with the psychosexual stuff as text instead of subtext," then Dhalgren's for you.

(Using "subtext" advisedly, as Joyce's tale is so weighted under the language that the basic plot is arguably a subtext.)

---L.

[starlady]

…Y'know, I read Dhalgren, and I had no idea about the FW connection, but it makes sense. I should really read those books before I reread Dhalgren, shouldn't I?

[lnhammer]

The FW connection is half a joke, but only half -- notice, for example, that the last sentence is incomplete and is finished by the fragmentary first sentence.

---L.

[starlady]

I started with Neveryóna, which is in some ways a very peculiar place to start, though not a bad one, but it's from his 70s/80s fantasy period as opposed to his earlier SF. On that front I'd recommend Nova, Babel-17, or The Fall of the Towers--they're all really great, though TFoT is still a younger work. If you like those you can move on to his other books!

Yay Delany! He is so, so, so awesome.

[outou]

I know his most recent works are, uh, incomprehensible, but why hasn't anyone mentioned Ray Bradbury yet? Does everyone think he's dead? (Do I have terrible taste?)

[starlady]

I assumed he was dead until one of my friends mentioned his name in Gchat. Whoops!

[outou]

Also, a belated happy birthday! I'm sorry I missed it.

[starlady]

Thank you! :)