Being a master of the genre himself, Tom Disch knows good from bad when it comes to sci-fi.

Science Fiction Authors among the first rank (from the so-called Golden Age of SF in the 30's and 40's):



Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Judith Merril, Walter Miller Jr., Alfred Bester, John Wyndham, Algis Budrys, Damon Knight, James Blish, Robert Sheckley, Joanna Russ, Harlan Ellison.



Utopian big idea novels:



Ursula LeGuin, Suzy McKee Charnas, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.



Hard-core technocratic high-tech SF:



Poul Anderson, Bova, Larry Niven



Capable syntheses of countercultural advocacy and formula pulp adventure (as opposed to future of triumphant technocracy and interstellar imperialism):



John Varley's stories, Vonda N. McIntyre



Not recommended:



Stephan Donaldson, Terry Brooks, and Piers Anthony, who "create tetralogies suitable to the diminished reading skills of today's children" and whose books "scale down Tolkien or Asimov from the seventh or eighth grade reading levels of the overeducated 50's."



Key texts on damnation and alienation:



Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode," Blake's "Songs of Experience," Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," Kierkegaard's "The Concept of Dread," and DeQuincey's "Confessions."



On First Novels:



"First novels are interesting, usually, as grindstones for the sharpening of hindsight. They show us the size and shape of the still unfaceted diamond, but to appreciate them properly one must first have some notion of the diamond in its polished state."



On Imitators:



"Geniuses may fly in the face of tradition, but when their epigones attempt to follow them, the result is likely to lack both the strength of conventional post-and-lintel construction or the energy of first defiance."



On Strong Plot, Believable Characters, and Flowing Prose:



"Traditional values in fiction (a strong plot, believable characters, flowing prose) are a safeguard against major debacle in much the way that wearing evening clothes protects one against sartorial solecisms. They offer, as do the sonnet and the sonata form, the aesthetic satisfaction of tight closure. But the chief virtue of a traditional narrative, for most readers, is surely that it is comfortable, like a couch one has lived with for many years and that has learned the shape of one's head."



On the Urge Toward Counterculture:

"All millenialist religions have their origins in this need for creating a counter-culture."



On Postmodernism:

I find postmodernism sophomoric. In it, big words are thought to be innately funny. Also body fluids, brand names, and unfamiliar food.



On Philip K. Dick's Genius:

"What sets Philip Dick apart and lets him transcend the ordinary categories of criticism is simply—genius. A genius, what's more, that smells scarcely at all of perspiration despite a published output, over the last twenty years, of thirty-one novels and four collections of stories. Perhaps I'm being unfair to an art that conceals art, but the effect of his best books is of the purest eye-to-hand first draft mastery. He tells it as he sees it, and it is the quality and clarity of his Vision that makes him great. He takes in the world with the cleansed, uncanny sight of another Blake walking about London and being dumbfounded by the whole awful unalterable human mess in all its raddled glory.", Introduction to Solar Lottery



On Van Vogt's Genius:

"Van Vogt simply wrote. And wrote simply: his books make the productions of such other founding fathers of proletarian pulp as Hammett and Chandler look like mandarin poetry. His prose rises above the laws of rhetoric and approaches the condition of phatic noise, the direct communication of emotional states by means of grunts and groans."



On Power:

"Fantasies of power are a necessary precondition of the exercise of power—by anyone."



"One cannot do what one hasn't first imagined doing."



