Science Fiction That Leaves a Mark and the Canon It Ignores

Science fiction that leaves a mark: the canon and the forgotten

There is a science fiction canon that is repeated ad nauseam: Asimov, Clarke, Huxley, Orwell, Lem. That it is repeated does not make it false; nor does its repetition explain why some works leave a mark on a particular reader while others fade when the page is turned. A review of the titles that appear most often in the lists of those who have been reading the genre for decades offers an uncomfortable conclusion: the books that leave a mark do not always coincide with those consecrated by critics.

The core that nobody disputes

The common trunk is recognizable. “Rendezvous with Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke, “The End of Eternity” and Asimov's robot sagas, “Solaris” by Lem, “Brave New World” by Huxley, “1984” by Orwell. These are the names that come back again and again in any reading conversation. It is the sediment of decades of shared reading. And within that consensus there are nuances that divide: Asimov is respected for his rational architecture, although he is acknowledged to have a confessed inability to portray feelings; Lem, on the other hand, interests precisely for the opposite reason, because “Solaris” speaks of miscommunication and otherness, not of spaceships.

The great forgotten one who inspired Dune

There is a vindication that runs through the entire conversation: Cordwainer Smith and his saga of the Instrumentality. An author born in China, an employee of American intelligence services, who wrote a mixture of lyricism, humor and strangeness that does not fit the usual canon. He is considered the great injustice of the genre and is credited with direct influence on central elements of Dune, such as the worms and the spice. Next to him, Ursula K. Le Guin claims her place with “The Word for World Is Forest”, and Philip K. Dick is noted for his hallucinatory plots. The canon, looked at closely, is wider than the manuals tell.

Huxley vs. Orwell: who got it right?

One of the most recurring theses is that “Brave New World” has aged better than “1984”. Huxley controlled society with pleasure, pills and sensual obsession; a reading that seems closer to the present than Orwellian surveillance. The connection is not casual: in his family environment the strategies of cultural elites were discussed and his half-brother ended up founding UNESCO. It is not a certainty, it is a hypothesis, but one of those that stirs up the hornet's nest.

Philosophy in the guise of the future

Beyond spaceships, there is a current that pushes science fiction towards philosophy. “Cyclonopedia”, by Reza Negarestani, fuses oil, occultism, capitalism and geopolitics in a cult work of speculative realism published in 2008. In the same vein, “Fanged Noumena”, by Nick Land, and “Permutation City”, by Greg Egan, demonstrate that the genre can be a laboratory of ideas. And on the more commercial side, “The Three-Body Problem” by Cixin Liu and “Project Hail Mary” by Andy Weir show that current science fiction is still capable of capturing new readers.

The price of leaving a mark: 100 euros for a book

Access to all this has changed. Sky-high prices and the rise of the internet reduced compulsive hardcover buying; today a second-hand copy of “The Aleph Instant”, by Greg Egan, reaches 100 euros. Bibliographic rarity has become a symptom: what leaves a mark is also a collector's item, sometimes inaccessible. If anything, this list shows that the genre will continue to mutate; the next work that leaves a mark may not be in bookstores, but on the margins of the internet. The worrying thing is that, at the current rate, it will cost money again.