So where are the good currently writing science fiction authors?

[kierthos]

I'm serious here. I grew up reading Heinlein and some Asimov (I have trouble getting into some of his stories), and a few other good science-fiction authors.

But the majority of it was from the 50s, 60s and early 70s.

For the life of me, I cannot think of the last "recently published" science fiction I could get into other then David Gerrold's "War Against the Chtorr" books, and even that's pushing the boundaries of "recently published", as the fourth (aka the most recent) book came out in 1993.

Is it because we actually have computers and cell phones and video phones and shit like that? I mean, hell, they just did the first test of an actual flying car the other day. But is that the big reason? Because a lot of the tech that Heinlein and others talked about is here? I mean, sure, we don't have commercial rocket ships flying tourists on intergalactic cruises, or humanoid robots serving us coffee at Starbucks (yet), but we do have what amounts to near instantaneous communication around the world, and practically a day doesn't go by without some new weird toy, tool, or device coming out of Japan. (And amazingly only about 30% of them seem to show what remarkable perverts the Japanese are.)

Or it just that I'm looking in the wrong bookstores? I don't want more J. Random Author's take on insignificant character from Star Wars. I don't want another Star Trek book. Where's the good science fiction? I can't fucking swing a dead rat without hitting a halfway decent sword-and-sorcery book (or a dead flea without hitting some crap trying to foist itself off on a post-Harry Potter society), but that's not what I'm looking for.

Suggestions as to authors I should look at? Anyone?

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Ender's Game is an adolescent revenge fantasy based on the principles that the Nazis were right about everything (all the way down to basics of biology), that dissent is treason, morality is weakness, and that the sad, weak, unworthy people will hate and fear the few individuals who will do what is necessary to save them.

And that this savior? Is Hitler. And the threat he's saving the unworthy people who do not appreciate him from? Are Jews. And at the start of the second book, he fakes his own death and escapes to Planet Brazil.

Ender's Game is sick. I can easily see why adolescent nerds like it - it feeds right into their persecution fantasies and the underserved entitlement complexes that lead to Libertarian "thinking", "fans are slans", Nice Guy(tm)ism, and the completely unmerited delusion that some day they will have their revenge because they're inherently better.

But that doesn't make it a good book.

[publius1.livejournal.com]

So, what you're saying is that you don't much like it, right?

(This is not what I took away from the book, but I suppose I can see how you could. Not so much with Ender, actually, as with Paul...)