We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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John Crowley’s works (Aegypt, Little, Big, etc.) are a good starting place. Gene Wolfe, naturally. Ursula Le Guin. J.G. Ballard. Adam Roberts. Terry Goodkind… 😉
Adam Roberts? The guy who wrote Splinter?
For Guin were you thinking of Left Hand of Darkness or something else in particular? And Terry Goodkind?
I’m curious about J. G. Ballard. Never read him and I almost bought a Crowley book while I was in Oregon, but decided against it for some reason…
Literary-in-style books that I love by SF writers:
J.G. Ballard: The Terminal Beach
John Crowley: Engine Summer
Samuel R. Delany: Dhalgren
Thomas M. Disch: 334; On Wings Of Song
Ursula K. LeGuin: The Left Hand Of Darkness
Kelly Link: Magic For Beginners
Michael Moorcock: Mother London (but most of his other books are *not* particularly “literary” in style)
Geoff Ryman: The Child Garden
Gene Wolfe: The Fifth Head Of Cerberus
SF-in-content books that I love by “mainstream” writers:
John Fowles: A Maggot
Alasdair Gray: Lanark
Richard M. Powers: Galatea 2.2
I should add that I also love Gravity’s Rainbow, but I think it’s not quite SF. It’s close enough that it might be worth examining, though.
Thanks so much for the suggestions! I really appreciate it!
I bought Gravity’s Rainbow while on vacation because I’ve been wanting to read some Pynchon. It doesn’t have to be blaringly SF, but if it sort of flirts with the edges that’s okay with me. I started reading it and it’s quite interesting. I’m not used to his style, so it might take me a bit to dig through it.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Defiantly some SF elements to it and it is incredible.
I’d recommend Robert J Sawyer’s works. Especially his latest works Rollback and Mindscan have a lot of literary weight to them. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars would be another good one to take note of.
Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is great to start with. All about people connecting with themselves, others, and god, and the impossibility of even our advanced science truly uncovering the universe.
I haven’t read any other works by Lem yet, but they’re also supposed to be pretty high-minded.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut uses time travel as a plot device despite it being primarily an anti-war novel, so that might count.
Though it’s kind of ambiguous whether or not Billy Pilgrim is really time traveling…
Mary Doria Russell – The Sparrow
Tim Walters-
Moorcock has written a lot of other literary works other than Mother London. I just checked out a few from my library- the only problem is, his Elric stuff isn’t really literary. And his literary stuff usually isn’t SFNAL
Although his Dancers at the End of Time sequence is both, literary and SFNAL.
and Le Guin- Left Hand of Darkness and Tehanu. Both really literary and ground breaking.
Also, Hal Duncan’s Ink and Vellum are both excellent.