Now, I don't mean to start a big controversy, but I'd like some thoughts on this: while I enjoyed very much the original Dune, there is something about this sort of SF that bothers me a lot and so I don't rank these sorts of stories at the top level.
The sort of story to which I refer takes familiar cultural, national, ethnic or historical peoples and societies and puts them on another planet, jazzes the place up with weird semi-alien creatures who themselves are terribly similar to Earth-like creatures.
My problem with this is that I want more imagination in SF than that -- and I also find anthropomorphic "aliens" rather boring. Sort of the feeling I got when just about every alien on the early star trek series were merely humans with tatoos and funny accents.
Ah, that brings me to a book and an author I highly recommend:
Stanislau Lem -- read The Invincible -- what happens when the most powerful conceivable weaponized, scientifically advanced, gigantic human spaceship staffed to the max encounters a truly alien lifeform that appears to defeat everything humans can throw at it?
Then read Eden and maybe Solaris -- the latter is hard to read because the alien is non-anthropomorphic and there is no explanation for it all at the end. In Eden, you get the same theme of how difficult it is to understand a totally alien society. Part of the problem is that we all tend to base our explanations on what we know from earth and earth society.
Unlike Solaris, in Eden explanations do come at the end of the book
I also like Lem's Pirx the Pilot stories ...
see article by Carol Arnold:
"In one of his wilder excursions in "The Cyberiad", Stanislaus Lem describes beings who have reached the Highest Possible Level of Development (HPLD). These creatures do nothing but lie on cushions in a desert of cybernetic sand and scratch themselves while watching indecent plays performed by lecherous elves in their abdomens.
"When interrogated about why they don’t use their highly developed science, technology and knowledge for the benefit of the universe, or at least to reduce the suffering of sentient beings, they reply that they tried, and it was useless.
"Could they straighten a humped back or correct any deformity? Of course, but " ... when a civilization starts straightening humps, .... believe me, there’s no end to it! You straighten humps, then you repair and amplify the mind, make suns rectilinear, fabricate fates and fortunes of all kinds. Oh, it begins innocently, like discovering fire by rubbing two sticks together, but eventually it leads to the construction of Omniacs, Deifacts, and Ultimathuloriums."
"In Lem’s story the interlocutor presses on: "If you are truly gods, your duty is clear: immediately banish all the misery and misfortune that oppresses other sentient beings."
"The HPLD being replies: "You wish us to bestow happiness upon everyone? We devoted over fifteen millennia to that. [We tried] evolutionary eudaemonic tectonics -- not lifting a finger to help, confident that every civilization will muddle through. Revolutionary solutions, on the other hand, boil down to the Carrot or the Stick. The Stick, bestowing happiness by force, produces from one to eight hundred times more grief than no interference whatever. [F]or the Carrot, the results are exactly the same."
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0813-01.htm
Lem can be very funny.
for more complete info on Lem, see
http://lt.librarything.com/author/lemstanislaw
10 Jun '08 09:34
Best Sci-Fi Book?
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