I tried to write a review of Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. New "it" book? Yes .. but we live in the miasma of the commercial era. Mega-ultra super-duper is faint praise in the current marketplace. Biopunk? I prefer the neologism ribofunk. Set in another country? Well, 1956 Midwest America's chrome and Formica could use some time to recharge as a setting. In other words, I enjoyed the heck out of the book, but can't come up with boo in terms of review: snark, gush, or otherwise. So I decided to open a can of worms, and build a list of books that served as my gateway. These books are responsible for my love of the genre. Sure there are about a zillion others, but both you and I have only so much bandwidth.
- Dune - Frank Herbert ('65): This is the real one. It's also the raison d'être for a shelf full of sequels, prequels, and movie attempts. Start with the real thing, and you can profitably put off the rest.
- Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick ('91): You can pick up just about anything by this author and be assured of getting a top of the line story. This one is better still.
- The City and the Stars - Arthur Clarke ('56): Classic for a reason. The smell of the old paperbacks that the story survives in just adds another pleasure.
- Neuromancer - William Gibson ('84): Street-style cyberpunk has been pounded by a thousand tiny cuts, and devolved into a sad version of urban contemporary. Return with us to the thrilling days of not that long ago when the clichés were being invented, and black ice didn't include a Viagra pitch.
- The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury ('50): This one seems to be the embodyment of a sense of wonder. Other authors try to achieve this with grandiose effects and portentous tushery, but here a summer night with rockets does the job.
- Nightwings - Robert Silverberg ('69): This has all the sfnal trappings; tech, biomods, alien invasion et.al., but it's a real story, with characters, something a great many current producers might want to include in their product.
- Bloodmusic - Greg Bear ('84): Next time you're on 101 between Palo Alto and San Jose, look over to your left.
- The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester ('53): Sometimes the pulps can trancend their origin. A police procedural with golden age gegaws becomes a classic.
- Radix - A. A. Attanasio ('81): Before the technobabble done whopped the man, Mr. Attanasio wrote a story that was just the embodyment of right time, right place.
- Vacuum Diagrams - Stephen Baxter (2001): This is a collection of short stories that tie together the XeeLee sequence. All gems and a great reminder of why the short story form was so important in science fiction's development.
Of course, once you get hooked, their's Watts' Blindsight, Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Sterling's Heavy Weather, Greg Egan, Clarke,and to bring it around, Palo Bacigalupi.
