We’ve done music and film in these posts before; thought I’d see if anyone read books.
So in terms of the most overrated sci-fi author, I’d go with Isaac Asimov. He’s hugely famous, but his books are really mediocre nothings (at least as I remember them; it’s been a while.) Gimmicky, outlandish plot, paper-thin characters, serviceable prose; just not a whole lot there. Heinlein is at least genuinely weird; the only thing to say for Asimov’s books really is that they thump along and are for the most part inoffensive.
For underrated — hardly anyone knows about John Christopher or Gwyneth Jones, both of whom I think are fantastic writers. (I’ve written quite a bit about both at the links.) (Oh…and one more piece about John Christopher here.
Robert Jordan. Painfully long winded, sexist, and generally boring.
Apparently, Thomas M. Disch agrees with Noah.
From American Heritage Magazine May-June 1999:
“Most Overrated Science Fiction Writer: Isaac Asimov. Not that the books that established his name are notably more callow and formulaic than those by a dozen other writers of the bygone pulp era but that a quirk of fate has turned Asimov into a figurehead for the whole genre. The field’s most successful magazine is named for him, and in many Third World countries, his books are virtually the only SF available. His professional persona, that of a complacent forever-eleven egoist, is not uncommon in the SF frog pond, but Asimov’s version was purer even than that of Harlan Ellison, who has inherited his mantle as most beloved curmudgeon. Ellison, however, is a much superior writer.
Most Underrated Science Fiction Writer: Twenty years ago that would have been an easy call: Philip K. Dick. However, Dick’s stock has rocketed since his death in 1983 and now stands at something like his true deserving, a step shy of the summit but above surviving rival claimants.
Among some dozen mid- to late-career candidates for this least coveted of honors, all too many have already gone into a decline after carrying home some trophies. The one exception is Gene Wolfe, whose first, serpent-wise novel, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, came out in 1972. Between 1980 and 1982 he published The Book of the New Sun, a tetralogy of couth, intelligence, and suavity that is also written in VistaVision with Dolby sound. Imagine a Star Wars-style space opera penned by G. K. Chesterton in the throes of a religious conversion. Wolfe has continued in full diapason ever since, and a crossover success is long overdue.”
_____
Yes, Noah agrees with American Heritage Magazine. This together with his trumpeting of 12 Years A Slave suggests he has fully cast aside the mantle of contrarianism and returned to the fold.
I think Wolfe’s stock has risen since then too, hasn’t it? He’s certainly better known than Jones and Christopher.
I think lots of people felt this recent piece was contrarian, fwiw.
I’d have to go with Heinlein as most overrated. As you note, he’s at least “weird,” and he can be interesting, but the unthinking idolatry applied to him by some–comparable to the enthusiasm of Randians about Ayn Rand, in my opinion–puts him over the pale. The rankin gof Stranger in a strange Land as one of the best SF novels of all time baffles me, and novels such as Glory Road, and even sometimes highly-regarded ones like Farnham’s Freehold or Tunnel in the Sky are (imo) reprehensible.
As for underrated, I have a clear bias in favour of the Canadian novelist and poet Phyllis Gotlieb, who I think compares favourably with many a much better-known author but who has been almost entirely forgotten, and certainly almost entirely overlooked in studies (both popular and academic)of SF, even ones focusing on women in the field.
Huh; I’ve never heard of Gotlieb. What book would you start with?
Nah, even less people know who Gene Wolfe is today then in 1999. He only got his Grandmaster Award in 2013 and those are the people who are supposed to know. Caro will be pleased to know that Delaney got his this year.
Mind you the late 90s was when Locus named the Book of the New Sun the third best fantasy novel before 1990 below LOTR and The Hobbit so maybe Disch was exaggerating.
I’ll go with Connie Willis as the most overrated living SF writer. Agree with Dominick re: Heinlein and Stranger in a Strange Land (tedious).
Gwyneth Jones was pretty big in the UK when I was there.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t stick up for Asimov here. I reread the FOUNDATION series last year and, while I had been fully expecting the books to fail to live up to my adolescent memory, I was shocked to find the series actually BETTER than I remembered it. So much I didn’t understand at the time, especially the veiled Cold War commentary, but a lot is only really obvious if you read the sequels he wrote in the 80s that took the political subtext of the earlier books and dealt with it far more openly. As a working scientists with government contacts in the 1940s and 50s he couldn’t be seen writing openly about ideological conflict between capitalism and communism as anything other than purely propaganda – so he buried it deep, and when the political climate warmed in the 80s he showed his hand and also showed that he had been paying attention to the preceding forty years of history as well.
Also, his stand-alone novel THE END OF ETERNITY – mostly unconnected to his FOUNDATION / ROBOTS universe, although there is a way to read it as a kind of prequel – might well get my vote for best SF novel of all time, or at least the short list. Concise and lucid, it deals with some of the themes of the FOUNDATION novels from another angle entirely. Bonus points for actually having a convincing romance at the center of its plot, not something he did very often or very well.
I don’t know that you’d call either of the following an “SF author,” but I’d wager each is most known for writing SF, so I’d say, despite loving the book and author, the most overrated is George Orwell for 1984, and inversely, the most underrated is what he so liberally borrowed from, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. The latter even manages to critique both capitalism and communism by seeing them as largely the same sort of dehumanizing process, rooted in similar ideas about the worker, while the author was living under communism (which probably contributed to the book not being as widely known as it should be — that and the fact that there’s no way some pro-capital liberatarian type could ever mistakenly think We supports such an ideology as the right often claims of 1984). The plot for the book is so similar, as are the characters. Basically, a guy working his miserable life as a tool of the dystopian system is awakened through sexual passion by a woman who knows more about how oppressed they really are. Everything ends badly, of course (unlike the other remake of We, Ayn Rand’s really stupid We the Living). I just think it’s a sort of travesty of aesthetic judgment that a book that’s basically Western retelling of a slightly earlier novel has so overshadowed the original, no matter how great the retelling. I find We as well written and every bit as emotionally evocative as 1984 … and a good deal ideologically richer, too.
I’ve been a bit disappointed with Wolfe every time I’ve tried him. Haven’t given up, yet, but his writing is kind of cluttered with two-bit words, which I think his acolytes might be confusing with great writing. This can be seen in the way class, for example, has no effect on the way his characters speak. They all talk like they’ve been inputted with the same thesaurus software. But I’ve only read a few short stories and the first of the New Sun books, so I’m still open to being wrong about all of this …
Not to defend Wolfe or anything but the “excuse” in the case of Shadow of the Torturer and The Fifth Head of Cerberus is that they’re written by upper class twits and not by Wolfe.
I quite like Wolfe…but like Christopher and Jones better, I think.
That’s really intersting about 1984. I just reread it and enjoyed it, but would agree that it’s overrated, since it often gets treated as holy writ. I’ve never read We; I should.
I think Wolfe is properly rated. it makes sense to me that he has a rabid niche following and that the writers he has influenced love him but basically no one else knows who he is. I don’t think a ton more people reading the book of the new sun is going to lead to a lot more people liking book of the new sun.
For me, I found the pomposity of the prose and its lack of grace (the comparison to Chesterton is interesting because his sentences are so graceful) to be like lead weights around the book’s neck, gradually sinking it. All the unreliable narrator stuff was interesting, but not interesting enough, and the huge claims made for it (the pub quote on the back spoke of “Spencerian allegory” mixed with Chaucerian humor or whatever) didn’t help.
I’m always fascinating by how much science fiction is out there that doesn’t get called science fiction. Like Infinite Jest, or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union or Chronic City. A Visit from the Goon Squad is a work of science fiction. As is Midnight’s Children. Zadie Smith’s new book is going to be a work of science fiction, apparently. It’s everywhere but often not identified as such.
Well, genre’s always somewhat diffuse and porous, right? With sf, the genre isn’t just formed by tropes, but by marketing niche (which is the case for lots of genre.) So if a book is mostly marketed as literary fiction, then some non-negligible number of people are going to see it as literary fiction, not because they’re confused or fooled, but because marketing is a big part of how genres are defined.
Gwyneth Jones could really be lit fic as easily as sci fi, pretty much. But she’s marketed as sf, and no one in lit fic cares about her as far as I can tell. So she’s sf.
i feel this way about just every SF i’ve ever read –
“GOD but this prose is unbearable, i can go no further”
so i’ll elect as my stand-in the most recent author whose books i’ve tried and failed to finish, China Mieville.
Heh. Have you read Le Guin? I like her prose; Joanna Russ is a very stylish writer.
I’m reading Left Hand of Darkness right now and I think it makes about the best case for good prose in sci-fi. I mean, Dick’s prose is fascinating because it’s a mix between brilliant and sub-literate all thrown together. But it still works and is compelling. There are lots of more competent writers who are actually less compelling in their prose, oddly (China Mieville being a good example). But LeGuin is actually a prose stylist on top of being a sci-fi writer. That said, The Dispossessed is really wooden, in much the same way 1984 can be. So if you’re going to read LeGuin, I’d start with Left Hand or the Wizard of Earthsea books or the recently collected short stories.
BTW… my “favorite” sci-fi writing trope is beginning a chapter or section with a ridiculous character name and setting like
“Second Conciliator Frabdrak Mendle7ing stood atop the parapets of X’lohrr gazing down upon the canyon of sorrows.”
Iain Banks uses that device so often in his Culture novels that I think he means it to be funny.
I love PKD’s writing style. I think it’s beautiful in its lumpiness (which also fits thematically with his themes.)
I do enjoy Wolfe’s over innate style too. And I think both Christopher and Jones are lovely writers, albeit in quite different ways.
“i’ll elect as my stand-in the most recent author whose books i’ve tried and failed to finish, China Mieville”
I really like some essays I’ve read from him, but, man, Perdido Street Station read like an unfunny, stuffy version of Robert Aspirin’s Myth series. I imagine a film adaptation using Jim Henson’s muppets.
Oh I love PKD’s style too. He’s my first example when I want to go up against lit-fic sentence worshippers. You don’t have to write “beautiful” sentences (whatever the fuck that means) to be a good writer.
It’s just *also* true that that style is formed out of equal parts meth and an 8th grade grasp of the english language. But the one book that I know of that was written largely sober (A Scanner Darkly) is also gorgeous and devastating in a way that his others aren’t. Oddly, of his major novels, the most revised (Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said) is, I think, amongst the worst.
Suat, maybe I haven’t gotten into the unreliable narrator stuff, yet, but isn’t the torturer from a lower class who had very little use for reading? If that’s part of the twist, then insert skepticism about my initial impression, but it sure irritated me while reading it.
Shadow of the Torturer is the least interesting of the four books because it’s all set-up and putting in foundations which are then revisited. I happen to like overly complicated plots which explains my soft spot for the series. I can’t tell u why Severian is a ‘posh’ chap (with eidetic memory) without providing spoilers.
Fair enough, I’ll continue with it.
I love Flow My Tears.
I just reread Do Androids Dream recently…I think I disagree with the idea that he has an 8th grade grasp of the English language. PKD read a ton, and I think that’s evident in his books.
Ray Bradbury … very predictable, pre-packaged American commercial feel to most of his writings. And PKD, great plots, dreadful writing style. Pulp, really.
I disagree strongly about PKD’s writing style (see above)…and calling him pulp kind of ignores the extent to which his books are about the division/collision between pulp and literariness.
But Bradbury is definitely overhyped. I’ll agree with that.
Underrated … North Americans might want to know more about JH Rosny aîné, a Belgian SF writer from the turn of the last century. Better known for “Quest for Fire” but his SF is quite startling. Wesleyan Press just did a good translation of some his best SF, I think Chatelaine is translator.
And no one in US/CAN seems to remember Peter Ackroyd’s “The Plato Papers” … same with most of Lem … heck, I might as well put in a shameless plug here for Adam Roberts.
Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men deserves to be better-known outside the genre ghetto. An avant-garde book that pushes the boundaries of the “novel” to breaking point; I’ve never read anything else like it.
And I’ll stand up for Mieville against the backlash. His prose isn’t sparkling, but he more than makes up for it with sheer imaginative prowess. His anti-Harry Potter book Un Lun Dun has some clever concept or other on every second page.
We’ll have to arm-wrestle over PKD one day … I always felt sympathy for him, if he’d had less money pressures (etc) he would have been a far better overall novelist. His last books were unbelievably bad, that VALIS stuff.
I’ll say one thing … there’s no way on earth he’d have gotten even excerpts of those final books into print today. Mid-list AND mental? Not in today’s pub environment.
I kind of love Valis. Blew my mind when I read it, man.
“I really like some essays I’ve read from him, but, man, Perdido Street Station read like an unfunny, stuffy version of Robert Aspirin’s Myth series.”
Here, I had the opposite impression of Mieville. Then again, the only book of his I read was Kraken, a lot of which is about laughing at/deflating sci-fi and fantasy cliches.
For overrated, I’m gonna go ahead and kill one of my darlings: H.P. Lovecraft. While he’s inspired some of my favorite horror and science fiction (including John Carpenter), and does rise to greatness occasionally, the stories themselves are a slog due to prose dryer than Tolkien’s but insistent on melodramatic dialogue. He’s already on bad footing even before getting to the racism which permeates his fiction. I think “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow Out of Time” are the only stories of his which hold up, because they’re all written as if Lovecraft’s narrators are attempting to piece together their own trauma and sense of futility in an indifferent universe, rather than the bad Gothic shock horror which typifies so much of his work.
I have to disagree with that too; I adore Lovecraft’s clunky, unspeakable prose, which flops and thuds but then has sudden intervals of lucid grace — like the last few paragraphs of the Shadow Over Innsmouth.
Underrated: Anthony Boucher (The Compleat Werewolf and Other Stories, a few of which were SF)
Overrated: I’ll go with Azimov, though I do think he was pretty good as a NON-fiction writer (such as his guides to the Bible)
For overrated, I’ll join the Miéville skeptics raise the bet with a Neal Stephenson nomination. Were there ever more overpraised novels that ANATHEM and REAMDE?
Underrated? Not sure, but it is is connected to current critical appraisal, I would have to join Tim and say Asimov is as good a choice as any.
>>Were there ever more overpraised novels that ANATHEM and REAMDE?
Snow Crash? Long praised as an essential SF classic.
Phooey on your Mieville and Stephenson scepticism. Phooey, I say.
Snow Crash is a thrilling novel. REAMDE, on the other hand is worthless and any praise it might have received automatically qualifies it as overrated.
I’m glad to see Wolfe as a semi-consensual choice for overrated writer but I have to agree that, much like Le Guin, he receives sustained if not widespread attention. Zamyatin is a nice choice ; in any case, it just has to be someone whoe doesn’t write in English, hasn’t it?
I read Zamyatin’s WE back in high school as part of my attempt to cover all the dystopian fiction that fed into Orwell. (These were also the highwater years of my abortive attempt to be a SF reader.) I loved WE “back then,” but given the time and my memories of the novel — the furry outsiders with their Neanderthal hands — I am afraid to revisit it.
It makes me wonder whether most of my overpraised and underpraised authors are really about the things that I found good and bad as I prepared to enter college (vs. how I feel about those books now).
Perhaps, then, I should revise my my nominations as follows. Most overrated (from Peter’s 1980s POV): Harlan Ellison. Most underrated (from Peter’s 2010s POV): Harlan Ellison.
Peter
Treasurer, The Super Stephenson Stinks Society
Got to re-write that Ellison stuff. What I meant was something like, “No one could have overpraised Ellison more than the 80s me; no one probably underrates Ellison more than the current me — partly due to my mistrust of the old me.”
Is it possible that Ellison is better as a screenwriter than as a prose writer? I think he wrote some great screenplays for the 80s revival of The Twilight Zone. The episode about a man going back in time to befriend himself as a kid became a reoccurring fantasy of mine, and the episode “Shatterday,” with a similar theme, was also great. But his novella Mephisto in Onyx really sucked–the narrator was supposed to be a super-intelligent black guy with ESP, and the voice just wasn’t convincing. I’ve also read a couple of other Ellison stories that I found stylistically irritating, although I’m not that familiar with his work.
There was a funny putdown of Ray Bradbury on The Simpsons.
Martin Prince: As your president, I would demand a science-fiction library, featuring an ABC of the genre. Asimov, Bester, Clarke.
Student: What about Ray Bradbury?
Martin Prince: I’m aware of his work.
Seeing as I don’t think LeGuin gets nearly enough praise I’d rank her as underrated.
I would not include Mieville here b/c I see his work as fantasy, not sci-fi (but I do love it).
I think Gibson is overrated. Neuromancer was a shitty book with interesting ideas – but not interesting enough that I ever wanted to read anything by him again.
In overrated SF writers who are actually typically thought of as SF writers, I tend to agree, it’s Asimov. In the broader field, given that Atlas Shrugged is SF by any sensible standard, Rand has to take the cake, given that she’s rated as Savior of Humanity by an embarrassingly non-trivial number of people.
For most underrated, the name that popped to mind was Dave Duncan. I happened across his book Hero! completely by accident, it was absolutely amazing and spectacular and I don’t think I’ve so much as seen anybody else mention it or him.
Wait, Asimov is outlandish? A science fiction write who writes about space travel, galactic empires and artificial intelligence way back in the 1960’s was outlandish? I think that’s about the definition of the word!
I think that if you discount her legions of sycophants, Ayn Rand is actually somewhat underrated. The generally accepted view of her as history’s shittiest writer just doesn’t seem right to me. The Fountainhead had some nice moments, like the sketch of Toohey’s childhood and the parody of modernistic writing (“toothbrush in the jaw toothbrush brush brush tooth jaw foam dome in the foam,” etc.). Also, I kind of enjoyed the Captains Courageous-like subplot in Atlas Shrugged about the rotten socialistic kid who eventually sacrifices his life for the glory of free enterprise. Overall, while I don’t share Rand’s views, I have to give her credit for expressing them pretty powerfully in places, as some people are willing to do for Jack T. Chick and Lovecraft. Whenever I read a Randian rant by Steve Ditko, I’m reminded that his idol was able to get her points across quite clearly, whereas Ditko lacks even a junior high-level grasp of English grammar and usage. Chris Hedges once described Rand as a “second-rate writer,” and I agree, but I’d add that second-rate isn’t so bad.
Most of Harlan Ellison’s books are now back in print, so it would be fun to take a look at his work again. The short story collections _Shatterday_ (which includes the title story televised on the first episode of the mid-1980s Twilight Zone revival) and _Approaching Oblivion_ are two of my favorites.
_Approaching Oblivion_ includes “One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty,” the other Twilight Zone adaptation Jack mentioned. The short story version of the best of his Twilight Zone scripts, “Paladin of the Lost Hour,” is included in _Angry Candy_, another solid collection from the 1980s.
Other writers I’ve been enjoying lately include C.L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Octavia Butler, and Alfred Bester. Theodore Sturgeon, too. I don’t know if any of them is exactly underrated, but writers like Moore and Kuttner don’t seem that well known outside of science fiction circles. Bester’s _The Demolished Man_ really knocked me out when I read it last month.
Oh, and Fritz Leiber! _The Big Time_ is one of his best science fiction novels, but my favorite is probably the dark fantasy novel _Our Lady of Darkness_, which I was just recommending to a friend this weekend.
And everyone should read J.G. Ballard’s autobiography, _Miracles of Life_, which is finally in print here in the States. Such a beautiful book not just about science fiction but also about writing and love and the imagination.
FWIW, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won the Hugo, the Nebula and the Locus awards, but perhaps you mean that such books aren’t called SF by the mainstream/literary world?
One problem with Gene Wolfe is that I think it’s almost impossible to really fully appreciate any of his novels without repeated readings and since he often writes long, multi-part novels, there’s a time commitment that some might find a bit daunting.
Charles Reece says:
You might very well be! By your own admission, you only read one New Sun book, but if you pursue it further, you’ll see that he actually has characters speaking in quite different and memorable styles, including a character from a kind of future Communist China who speaks entirely in phrases derived from the equivalent of The Little Red Book. (This idea presumably inspired the famous “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Osvaldo, I had pretty much the same reaction after reading Neuromancer but on several recommendations gave Gibson a second shot. I was surprised that he was able to develop post fame from a mediocre writer with somewhat interesting ideas into a very good/sometimes great writer in the two years between his first and second novels. All of his later books are better than Neuromancer with Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, the Bridge trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties), and Pattern Recognition being far superior.
Noah, for Gotlieb probably the two best options to give you a taste would be her first novel, Sunburst (reads somewhat like a juvenile without really being one, and offers an interesting and unconventional take on the human mutation trope), or her second SF novel (a mainstream novel intervened), O Master Caliban!, an interesting take on machine intelligence and the “mad scientist” tropes. It was recently re-issued as an ebook so it fairly easy to get hold of. Sunburst is, I think, currently out of print.
Thanks!
This is the best underrated/overrated discussion so far, Noah.
I think Neuromancer is a work of genius. I love Gibson.
Asimov is definitely overrated. Oddly enough, he didn’t seem to think much of his writing. I read his autobiography that he wrote before he died, and he said he largely avoided writing science fiction later in life because he didn’t think he was as good as the more recent practitioners. He thought his best novel was “The Gods Themselves” which is a genuinely weird novel and pretty good.
(Well the sequences with the aliens are pretty good. He wasn’t so good at writing human beings…)
I recently revisited Foundation and found myself wishing that it had been adapted into a comic book illustrated by Wally Wood in his EC prime.
As for The Gods Themselves, I can agree with the “genuinely weird novel and pretty good” assessment. It’s almost a textbook example of how an SF novel can incorporate hard SF elements right alongside pure flights of fancy.
BTW, my vote for an underrated fantasy author would be Charles G. Finney, but mostly on the basis of one book, The Circus of Dr. Lao.
I just took another look at the Underrated Band thread. I am now less certain of my previous comment.
John, we need a Most Underrated/Overrated Thread thread
“Ohmigosh, Jones! That would be so meta!”, he exclaimed in the channeled voice of popular, high school-aged girl.
As far as I’m concerned, the most underrated science fiction writer is R. A. Lafferty.
Unfortunately, he’s very much an acquired taste, and almost all of his works are out of print, except in expensive collectors’ editions. The best starting place is probably his first short story collection, Nine Hundred Grandmothers, if you can find an inexpensive used copy
Most underrated sci fi writer of all time is Stanislaw Lem, but he is only underrated by American readers, he is pretty much one of the greats in Europe.
I loved the tripod novels when I read them. The characters all feel interesting and real. They have defining traits that make them seem like more than a two dimensional something. I also loved the almost haunting atmosphere of the first book. The descriptions of the landscape dotted with these weird tripods always get me. I was also completely engrossed with the city of gold and lead, and all of the intricacies involved with the aliens and their slaves. Great books
And to add to this discussion, I think that the most underrated science fiction novel ever written would be Night On the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Niyazawa. It is not hard scifi, but instead a mix of fantasy and scifi themes. More poetic than either of those two things really, as it deals in emotion and mood more than anything else. Lots of ideas about the afterlife and dying as well.
My favorite Science Fiction novel of all time, my submission for heavyweight champ, is Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Ramas.” It received well-deserved attention and accolades in its time, but has fallen off in recent years and is currently very underrated. The writing is engaging, Clarke manages to avoid using war with aliens (relying instead on the prospect of war) as a storyline, and he imagines a solar system feasibly developed and colonized by humans. The future society is whole and possible without being distracting. Most importantly, the final two pages encompasses one of the deepest, most succinct examples of what Longinus called “The Sublime” in any piece of literary art from any time.
I agree about Asimov, WAY overrated. I tried more than once to read his books and try to understand what was so great about him, and his books always felt mediocre, just like the author of this article stated. I always felt that way and figured I just wasn’t “in tune” with what was good and what was not. As I have gotten older I have come to understand that there are sometimes political and social reasons why one author is elevated above all others, even while their work is ordinary by comparison.
I was just looking at an old book in my collection that I never read (“Asimov’s Mysteries”), which seems to have good reviews on Amazon, so maybe I’ll give him one last try as I love mysteries. It’s funny, I was sitting here and just ‘wondered’ if anyone had ever felt the same, so I searched for “asimov overrated” and this was the first link. Glad to see I’m not the only person in the world who thinks Asimov sucks. Way more interesting authors out there who have received very little attention.
I suppose it’s fair to say of Asimov that he was a giant compared to the field of midgets he stood in; most of the SF of the 40s was equally dry and pedantic, and lacking in actual human characters with human qualities and relationships.
I had the advantage of first finding Asimov when I was very, very young, and had no real grasp of people/the world to inform me how dully-juvenile/hollow what I was reading was, (and little/no experience of more contemporary SF, so the ideas were new to me, as they tended to be for his audience at the time) and I’ll always be an Asimov kid inside…
I don’t know…H.G. Wells, Mary Shelly, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe — all had written sci-fi by the time Asimov was around. There were other options…
And Verne.
That’s virtually going off into different genres, though, even Wells – and the rest were quite a slog for a kid who didn’t speak Victorian English fluently. I read all those authors, but didn’t enjoy them much. -And I can’t say I believed in the people in their work any more than in Asimov’s stuff; I certainly don’t now.
Wells is wonderful…and he’s often read by middle schoolers, isn’t he? The prose isn’t that hard…but I guess we’ll just have to disagree if you think he and Asimov are in the same league.
I think Caves of Steel and Naked Sun actually work quite well as novels. The gender politics are all fucked up, but that gives them a bit of a kink that other period SF lacks.