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I know next to nothing about the subject but perhaps others might find this of interest. - Perdita
The war of the words - The world's best scientists nominate their favourite authors
Tim Radford, Simon Rogers and Adam Rutherford - August 26, 2004, The Guardian
1 Isaac Asimov
As predictable as the human race eventually being enslaved by robots, Asimov, the founding father of modern science fiction, tops the poll. Despite an astonishingly prolific career, he has never been regarded highly for his prose. "Asimov was not a stylish writer in the way that say, Philip K Dick was, but he was very rigorous scientifically, and thoughtful about how he projects scientific ideas into the future," says Philip Ball, a writer of popular science books. Two works mark him out as the master of the genre: I, Robot, and the Foundation trilogy. Last month, Will Smith got jiggy in I, Robot, a film version so distant from the source that the credits say only "suggested by Isaac Asimov's book". In the Foundation series, science and maths were used to predict and plan the development of societies, a device that Mark Brake, professor of science communication at the University of Glamorgan, thinks may be a touch heavy-handed: "We can't even predict a flood in Boscastle, let alone how a society behaves a thousand years in the future."
Trained as a chemist, Asimov, who was born in 1920, held a teaching post at Boston University for many years. As well as his fiction, he wrote many popular guides to science. His scientific credentials were recognised when he had an asteroid (5020) named after him - as is Honda's humanoid prototype robot ASIMO. He died in 1992.
"Unlike a lot of sci-fi writers, Asimov knew how to explain the science, and was a great populariser of real science," says Brake. "But what sets him aside is that he was also masterful at documenting human responses to scientific progress."
2 John Wyndham
Born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in Knowle, Warwickshire in 1903, he was one of the few science fiction authors to become hugely popular with people who never normally read science fiction. The Day of The Triffids, written in 1951, has been stunningly popular as a novel, radio serial and a rather terrible film. In the book, a comet effectively blinds most of the planet, which gives a set of seemingly innocent perambulating plants, the triffids, their chance to bid for world domination. Like The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the book now seems to be a Cold War paranoia novel. At the time, it just seemed wonderfully gripping. Wyndham followed up with a handful of other thriller-chillers: The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes. All were bestsellers. He died in 1969.
"He was exploring the societal, political and other dimensions as a consequence of something happening in science," says Julia Higgins, professor of polymer science at Imperial College, London. "They were good novels in which there were real people, and the science issues simply pushed the real people into interesting situations."
3 Fred Hoyle
One of Britain's most creative scientists, Hoyle was as well known for his influential work in the postwar years as an astrophysicist as he was as a science fiction author. Based in Cambridge, first as lecturer in mathematics, and from 1958 as professor of astronomy, he also worked in the US.
Hoyle's first novel, The Black Cloud (1957), is cited by evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins, as his most influential science fiction work. "In The Black Cloud I learned about scientific method and information theory - the interchangeability of different kinds of information." In the novel, humans try to communicate with an alien intelligence in the form of a cloud of gas, by playing it piano music translated into radio signals. "Today we see information theory in genetic code and the translation of information from one computer to another," says Dawkins.
Hoyle wrote and co-authored other books before his death in 2001, including A for Andromeda: A Novel for Tomorrow (1962), Ossian's Ride (1959); and October the First is Too Late (1966). But it is The Black Cloud for which he is chiefly remembered. "The hero in The Black Cloud is spectacularly unpleasant. He is a male scientist who is arrogant, even fascist. This is very unfortunate and seems to be characteristic in Fred Hoyle's books," says Dawkins.
4 Philip K Dick
"Magic equals science, and science of the future equals magic," said Philip K Dick, whose works are regarded as increasingly prescient. Certainly he is one of the most adapted science fiction novelists: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? became Blade Runner, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale became Total Recall and Minority Report was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 2002. But his cerebral work was underrated for years until Blade Runner brought acclaim - only months after he had died of a stroke. "The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation, has escaped most critics," says Ursula K Le Guin.
"Most of Dick's books are concerned with the question of how do we know what is real. These are the key questions for all of us who study the neural correlates of consciousness," says Chris Frith of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
5 HG Wells
Socialist, journalist, historian, and author, Herbert George Wells was nothing if not prolific before his death in 1946. He predicted the invention of tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear war, gas warfare, lasers and industrial robots. His scientific background (he studied biology under TH Huxley) led him to produce iconic tales such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds - almost entirely pessimistic about human nature and the future. University College London geneticist Steve Jones admires The Time Machine: "to my mind the most significant piece of science fiction. The protagonist goes forward thousands of years to find a peaceful society populated by the Eloi, a highly evolved race who sat around chatting and reading the Guardian. Of course, their secret is that they are the crop of a terrible underclass, the Morlocks, who come out at night and eat them."
6 Ursula K Le Guin
Her two most famous works are The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Earthsea Quartet (1968-1990), but this diverse author has produced over 19 novels of science fiction and fantasy, nine volumes of short stories, essays, translations, 13 children's books and poetry. She even collaborated with avant garde composer David Bedford on an opera in 1985 - she wrote the libretto for Rigel 9, about a group of astronauts on a strange planet. The twist is, only one of the astronauts can see an alien city. Her works are vehicles for her evolving views on feminism, environmentalism and utopia and some have been described as "didactic".
"It's very meaningful in thinking about gender issues," says Diana Liverman, director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.
7 Arthur C Clarke
Sixty books, 50m copies in print, and a link with some of the 20th century's most indelible ideas: not bad for a boy from Minehead in Somerset. He was born in 1917, and signalled his space odyssey intentions by joining the British Interplanetary Society before the second world war. He worked on radar in the RAF and in 1945 submitted a technical paper called Extraterrestrial Relays, laying down the principles of satellite communication in geostationary orbits. He graduated with first class honours in physics and mathematics from King's College London in 1948. About 25 years later, the world caught up with him. He worked with Stanley Kubrick on the film of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was a CBS broadcaster on the Apollo missions with Walter Cronkite, and he is famous for three laws, known as Clarke's Laws and a clutch of unforgettable sci-fi novels and short story collections, such as Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama and The Nine Billion Names of God. A polio victim in childhood, and an underwater diver, he has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956.
8 Ray Bradbury
Has published more than 500 works but is most famous for epics such as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). His most influential work is Fahrenheit 451 (1953), set in a dystopian future where firemen burn books - Fahrenheit 451 is the ignition temperature of paper. It's a tale which still resonates today. "I used to read lots of science fiction during my teens," says Robert May, biologist and president of the Royal Society, "Fahrenheit 451 is a great book that was turned into a great movie."
"People call me a science fiction writer, but I don't think that's quite true," says Bradbury on his website. "I think that I'm a magician who is capable of making things appear and disappear right in front of you and you don't know how it happened."
9 Frank Herbert
"While writing the third Dune book," Herbert said, "I first realised consciously that I had to be an entertainer above all, that I was in the entertainment business." Nominated for the successful Dune series of novels, which has been translated into dozens of languages, has outsold any science fiction novel yet published and became a 1984 film directed by David Lynch. The novel - an epic tale of a desert planet called Arrakis dominated by giant sandworms, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire - took him six years of research and writing to complete and was rejected by 23 publishers. "The best science fiction transports you to a different kind of world," says Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at MIT.
10 Stanislaw Lem
Lem has sold 27m copies of 2,000 editions in 41 languages, but his books remain curiously hard to find. He is best known for the haunting Solaris (1961) - filmed twice - but aficionados would probably start enthusing about hugely funny, often startling, books such as The Cyberiad, The Futurlogical Congress, The Star Diaries, and The Tales of Pirx the Pilot. He was born in 1921, in what is now Lvov in Ukraine and studied medicine. He published his first novel in 1948, became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1972. In 1991, the Austrians awarded him the Kafka Prize for Literature. The New York Review of Books called him "a major writer, and one of the deep spirits of our age".
The war of the words - The world's best scientists nominate their favourite authors
Tim Radford, Simon Rogers and Adam Rutherford - August 26, 2004, The Guardian
1 Isaac Asimov
As predictable as the human race eventually being enslaved by robots, Asimov, the founding father of modern science fiction, tops the poll. Despite an astonishingly prolific career, he has never been regarded highly for his prose. "Asimov was not a stylish writer in the way that say, Philip K Dick was, but he was very rigorous scientifically, and thoughtful about how he projects scientific ideas into the future," says Philip Ball, a writer of popular science books. Two works mark him out as the master of the genre: I, Robot, and the Foundation trilogy. Last month, Will Smith got jiggy in I, Robot, a film version so distant from the source that the credits say only "suggested by Isaac Asimov's book". In the Foundation series, science and maths were used to predict and plan the development of societies, a device that Mark Brake, professor of science communication at the University of Glamorgan, thinks may be a touch heavy-handed: "We can't even predict a flood in Boscastle, let alone how a society behaves a thousand years in the future."
Trained as a chemist, Asimov, who was born in 1920, held a teaching post at Boston University for many years. As well as his fiction, he wrote many popular guides to science. His scientific credentials were recognised when he had an asteroid (5020) named after him - as is Honda's humanoid prototype robot ASIMO. He died in 1992.
"Unlike a lot of sci-fi writers, Asimov knew how to explain the science, and was a great populariser of real science," says Brake. "But what sets him aside is that he was also masterful at documenting human responses to scientific progress."
2 John Wyndham
Born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in Knowle, Warwickshire in 1903, he was one of the few science fiction authors to become hugely popular with people who never normally read science fiction. The Day of The Triffids, written in 1951, has been stunningly popular as a novel, radio serial and a rather terrible film. In the book, a comet effectively blinds most of the planet, which gives a set of seemingly innocent perambulating plants, the triffids, their chance to bid for world domination. Like The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, the book now seems to be a Cold War paranoia novel. At the time, it just seemed wonderfully gripping. Wyndham followed up with a handful of other thriller-chillers: The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes. All were bestsellers. He died in 1969.
"He was exploring the societal, political and other dimensions as a consequence of something happening in science," says Julia Higgins, professor of polymer science at Imperial College, London. "They were good novels in which there were real people, and the science issues simply pushed the real people into interesting situations."
3 Fred Hoyle
One of Britain's most creative scientists, Hoyle was as well known for his influential work in the postwar years as an astrophysicist as he was as a science fiction author. Based in Cambridge, first as lecturer in mathematics, and from 1958 as professor of astronomy, he also worked in the US.
Hoyle's first novel, The Black Cloud (1957), is cited by evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins, as his most influential science fiction work. "In The Black Cloud I learned about scientific method and information theory - the interchangeability of different kinds of information." In the novel, humans try to communicate with an alien intelligence in the form of a cloud of gas, by playing it piano music translated into radio signals. "Today we see information theory in genetic code and the translation of information from one computer to another," says Dawkins.
Hoyle wrote and co-authored other books before his death in 2001, including A for Andromeda: A Novel for Tomorrow (1962), Ossian's Ride (1959); and October the First is Too Late (1966). But it is The Black Cloud for which he is chiefly remembered. "The hero in The Black Cloud is spectacularly unpleasant. He is a male scientist who is arrogant, even fascist. This is very unfortunate and seems to be characteristic in Fred Hoyle's books," says Dawkins.
4 Philip K Dick
"Magic equals science, and science of the future equals magic," said Philip K Dick, whose works are regarded as increasingly prescient. Certainly he is one of the most adapted science fiction novelists: Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? became Blade Runner, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale became Total Recall and Minority Report was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 2002. But his cerebral work was underrated for years until Blade Runner brought acclaim - only months after he had died of a stroke. "The fact that what Dick is entertaining us about is reality and madness, time and death, sin and salvation, has escaped most critics," says Ursula K Le Guin.
"Most of Dick's books are concerned with the question of how do we know what is real. These are the key questions for all of us who study the neural correlates of consciousness," says Chris Frith of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
5 HG Wells
Socialist, journalist, historian, and author, Herbert George Wells was nothing if not prolific before his death in 1946. He predicted the invention of tanks, aerial bombing, nuclear war, gas warfare, lasers and industrial robots. His scientific background (he studied biology under TH Huxley) led him to produce iconic tales such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds - almost entirely pessimistic about human nature and the future. University College London geneticist Steve Jones admires The Time Machine: "to my mind the most significant piece of science fiction. The protagonist goes forward thousands of years to find a peaceful society populated by the Eloi, a highly evolved race who sat around chatting and reading the Guardian. Of course, their secret is that they are the crop of a terrible underclass, the Morlocks, who come out at night and eat them."
6 Ursula K Le Guin
Her two most famous works are The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Earthsea Quartet (1968-1990), but this diverse author has produced over 19 novels of science fiction and fantasy, nine volumes of short stories, essays, translations, 13 children's books and poetry. She even collaborated with avant garde composer David Bedford on an opera in 1985 - she wrote the libretto for Rigel 9, about a group of astronauts on a strange planet. The twist is, only one of the astronauts can see an alien city. Her works are vehicles for her evolving views on feminism, environmentalism and utopia and some have been described as "didactic".
"It's very meaningful in thinking about gender issues," says Diana Liverman, director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University.
7 Arthur C Clarke
Sixty books, 50m copies in print, and a link with some of the 20th century's most indelible ideas: not bad for a boy from Minehead in Somerset. He was born in 1917, and signalled his space odyssey intentions by joining the British Interplanetary Society before the second world war. He worked on radar in the RAF and in 1945 submitted a technical paper called Extraterrestrial Relays, laying down the principles of satellite communication in geostationary orbits. He graduated with first class honours in physics and mathematics from King's College London in 1948. About 25 years later, the world caught up with him. He worked with Stanley Kubrick on the film of 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was a CBS broadcaster on the Apollo missions with Walter Cronkite, and he is famous for three laws, known as Clarke's Laws and a clutch of unforgettable sci-fi novels and short story collections, such as Childhood's End, Rendezvous with Rama and The Nine Billion Names of God. A polio victim in childhood, and an underwater diver, he has lived in Sri Lanka since 1956.
8 Ray Bradbury
Has published more than 500 works but is most famous for epics such as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962). His most influential work is Fahrenheit 451 (1953), set in a dystopian future where firemen burn books - Fahrenheit 451 is the ignition temperature of paper. It's a tale which still resonates today. "I used to read lots of science fiction during my teens," says Robert May, biologist and president of the Royal Society, "Fahrenheit 451 is a great book that was turned into a great movie."
"People call me a science fiction writer, but I don't think that's quite true," says Bradbury on his website. "I think that I'm a magician who is capable of making things appear and disappear right in front of you and you don't know how it happened."
9 Frank Herbert
"While writing the third Dune book," Herbert said, "I first realised consciously that I had to be an entertainer above all, that I was in the entertainment business." Nominated for the successful Dune series of novels, which has been translated into dozens of languages, has outsold any science fiction novel yet published and became a 1984 film directed by David Lynch. The novel - an epic tale of a desert planet called Arrakis dominated by giant sandworms, the focus of an intricate power struggle in a byzantine interstellar empire - took him six years of research and writing to complete and was rejected by 23 publishers. "The best science fiction transports you to a different kind of world," says Carl Wunsch, professor of physical oceanography at MIT.
10 Stanislaw Lem
Lem has sold 27m copies of 2,000 editions in 41 languages, but his books remain curiously hard to find. He is best known for the haunting Solaris (1961) - filmed twice - but aficionados would probably start enthusing about hugely funny, often startling, books such as The Cyberiad, The Futurlogical Congress, The Star Diaries, and The Tales of Pirx the Pilot. He was born in 1921, in what is now Lvov in Ukraine and studied medicine. He published his first novel in 1948, became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1972. In 1991, the Austrians awarded him the Kafka Prize for Literature. The New York Review of Books called him "a major writer, and one of the deep spirits of our age".
