Science
Fiction.

A FIRST WORDWhat sf is for.

Science fiction is the literature that takes one premise its world does not allow — a different physics, a different history, a different species — and follows the consequences with a straight face.

The premise can be a single brick (a faster-than-light drive, a telepathic minority, a planet without seasons) or an entire architecture (a galactic empire, a virtual continent, a planet at war with its own ecology). What matters is rigour. Sf earns its keep by reasoning, not by waving its hands. When it does wave its hands it is closer to fantasy, and the genre quarrel about where the line falls is older than most of the readers having it.

The cliché is that sf predicts the future. It does not. The interesting sf novels almost always get the future wrong in detail and right in shape. Asimov did not foresee the iPhone; he foresaw the social problem of trusting a machine. Le Guin did not foresee gender theory; she opened a door it would later walk through. The genre is a thinking instrument, not a crystal ball.

CHAPTER ICognitive estrangement.

Darko Suvin's 1979 formula remains the cleanest definition. Sf is the literature of cognitive estrangement: it makes the reader's familiar world strange (estrangement) by introducing an element governed by a coherent rule (cognition). The element is what Suvin called the novum — the new thing.

The four moves

1. Posit a novum. A starship, an AI, an alien biology, an alternate history. 2. Make it lawful. The world that contains it must obey rules that follow from it. 3. Force the consequences. Characters must live with the implications, not merely visit them. 4. Estrange the present. The point is not the future. The point is that our own world, seen against the imagined one, becomes legible.

This is why the best sf is allergic to magic. Magic short-circuits step two. It is also why the best sf is not technology fetishism: a good novum is rarely about hardware. The Left Hand of Darkness's novum is gender; Childhood's End's is grief; Solaris's is the limit of human empathy.

CHAPTER IIBefore there was a name.

Long before the genre was a genre, writers used invented worlds to think with. Lucian of Samosata in the second century sent his sailors past the Pillars of Hercules and up to the Moon, where they observed a war between solar and lunar empires; the book is a satire on credulous travel writing and the first surviving extraterrestrial story in any literature. Cyrano de Bergerac's lunar voyage of 1657 elaborates the trick. Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World (1666) is the first English-language fictional tour of an alternate planet, written by a duchess who held her own scientific salons.

Voltaire's Micromégas (1752) sends a 120,000-foot inhabitant of Sirius to inspect Earth. Jonathan Swift's Gulliver (1726) supplies the floating island of Laputa, parodying Newton's Royal Society. None of these are sf in the modern sense — there is no industrial culture for the imagined science to extend — but each contains the move that will define the genre: change one thing, hold the rest constant, see what happens.

CHAPTER IIIThe first sf novel.

Brian Aldiss's claim, made in Billion Year Spree (1973) and never seriously rebutted: Frankenstein is the first science fiction novel because it is the first novel in which the marvel is produced by science rather than by magic. Victor Frankenstein is a chemistry student. His creature is the consequence of a laboratory procedure he conceals because he is ashamed of it. The book's horror is not the supernatural; it is the unforeseen ethical bill for an experimental result.

Mary Shelley was 18 when she began the book in 1816, after the volcanic winter trapped a small literary party at Villa Diodati and Byron proposed a ghost-story competition. She was 20 when it was published. The framing — Walton's polar expedition, Victor's confession, the Creature's own voice — is already more sophisticated than most novels of its decade. The Creature reads Paradise Lost and asks a question English literature has not finished answering: who consented to my existence, and what do I owe a maker who cannot stand the sight of me?

CHAPTER IVVerne · the engineering romance.

Jules Verne wrote what his publisher Hetzel marketed as voyages extraordinaires: scientifically plausible expeditions to extreme places. The sea floor (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870), the centre of the Earth (1864), the Moon (1865). The pleasures are encyclopedic — long set-pieces of marine biology or ballistics — and patiently engineered. Captain Nemo's Nautilus is a working object in the book; you can almost build it.

Verne's importance is that he established the convention that imaginary technologies should be backed by their numbers. He read his own physics; his lunar capsule is launched from Florida because that is where the orbital math worked. His weakness is character: his men of action are interchangeable, his women rare. But the patient, technical voice — the engineer's voice — survives in hard sf to this day, from Heinlein through Stephen Baxter and Andy Weir.

CHAPTER VWells · the social novel under cover.

If Verne wrote engineering, Wells wrote sociology. Trained under Thomas Henry Huxley at the Royal College of Science, Wells understood Darwin, and his "scientific romances" of the 1890s push evolutionary logic into the future. The Time Machine (1895) is not really about time travel — it is about class. The Eloi and Morlocks are the late-Victorian leisure class and labouring class taken to their logical species-divergence. The War of the Worlds (1898) is a colonial novel with the colonisers reversed, written by a man who had read what the British had recently done in Tasmania.

Wells's contribution to the form is the extrapolation novel: take a present social tendency, project it, watch it ripen. The trick has been worked by every serious sf writer since: Huxley with consumerism, Orwell with totalitarianism, Atwood with theocracy, Egan with neuroscience. Wells's books read fast and remain useful precisely because their science is decorative; the social argument carries.

CHAPTER VIThe magazine era.

The genre acquired its name and its industrial form in April 1926, when the Luxembourgian-American inventor Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the first all-sf pulp magazine. Gernsback called the new commodity "scientifiction" and then, mercifully, "science fiction." The pulps paid by the word — typically a penny — and rewarded volume. They produced a great deal of bad prose and an enormous reading public.

The transformative editor was John W. Campbell Jr., who took over Astounding Stories in 1937 and ran it for thirty-four years. Campbell wanted prose that read like real fiction and ideas that respected real science. He developed Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, van Vogt, Clifford D. Simak, L. Sprague de Camp; he was abrasive, opinionated, and from the late 1950s onward increasingly cranky. He is the reason the Golden Age was a golden age and also the reason much of it is unreadable on race and gender. Both things are true.

CHAPTER VIIThe Golden Age.

The Campbell years gave the genre its first canon. Isaac Asimov's Foundation sequence (stories from 1942, books from 1951) imagined a galactic civilisation whose collapse can be predicted by mathematics — psychohistory — and whose fall can be cushioned by a careful long bet. Robert A. Heinlein, the most influential and most ideologically restless of the three, wrote the Future History stories, the juvenile novels, then Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966). Arthur C. Clarke supplied the lyrical end of the spectrum: Childhood's End (1953), The City and the Stars (1956), 2001 with Kubrick (1968).

Two writers matter at least as much. Theodore Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and "Killdozer!" are technically superb; his novel More Than Human (1953) is one of the first sf works to take psychological tenderness as its subject. Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953) and The Stars My Destination (1956) typeset themselves with telepathic dialogue and burning glyphs and remain twenty years ahead of anyone else's prose.

CHAPTER VIIIDune · the ecological epic.

Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) is the single sf novel that has held its centrality longest. The premise is famously layered — a desert planet whose only export, the spice melange, is required for interstellar navigation; a feudal galactic empire; a messianic boy raised on a ducal planet — but the deep subject is ecology. Herbert had been writing a magazine piece on the dune-fixing experiments at Florence, Oregon. The novel grew out of his realisation that an entire civilisation can be built on the management, or mismanagement, of a single resource.

The book also rewrote the rules for what sf could absorb. Herbert pulled in Sufi mysticism, Bedouin politics, jihad, dynastic intrigue, addiction, prophecy, and a fully developed ecology, and made it readable. The five sequels he wrote himself thin out; the original is one of the few thousand-page sf novels worth reading whole. Read the David Lynch film for atmosphere and the Denis Villeneuve films for fidelity.

CHAPTER IXThe New Wave.

Around 1964 a counter-formation arose, primarily in Britain. Michael Moorcock took over New Worlds magazine and turned it into a venue for sf written under the influence of Burroughs, Robbe-Grillet, and Joyce. The "outer space" of Golden Age sf was replaced by what J. G. Ballard called the "inner space" of psychological landscape. Style mattered. Sex mattered. The future was likely to be British, decadent, and over.

Ballard's The Drowned World (1962) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) are the central documents. Brian Aldiss wrote Report on Probability A (1968) and Barefoot in the Head (1969). Thomas M. Disch wrote Camp Concentration (1968) and 334 (1972). Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron (1969) was banned at British customs. The American counterpart was Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), which collected work the magazines had refused. The New Wave did not last as a movement, but it permanently widened what sf prose was allowed to do.

CHAPTER XLe Guin.

Ursula K. Le Guin is the writer who made sf a serious literary instrument for ideas about politics, gender, and the environment. The daughter of the anthropologists Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, she grew up among the field notes of vanished California cultures, and her sf has the texture of ethnography rather than space opera. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagines a planet where humans are ambisexual, neuter except during a brief monthly kemmer; the novel's politics, its prose, and its central question — what would a society without permanent gender look like? — remain open. The Dispossessed (1974) is a thought experiment in anarchism: the twin worlds Anarres (post-revolutionary, voluntarist) and Urras (capitalist, hierarchical). It is the most patient utopian novel in English.

Read both first. Then the Earthsea cycle (1968 onward). Then her Always Coming Home (1985), a novel-as-anthropology of a future Northern California. Her late essays — collected in Words Are My Matter (2016) — are some of the best occasional criticism by any American novelist.

CHAPTER XIDick · paranoia as method.

Philip K. Dick wrote at amphetamine-fuelled speed for thirty years and invented most of late-twentieth-century paranoid sf in the process. The recurring move is that the world the protagonist inhabits turns out to be a partial illusion: an artificial environment, a drug-induced hallucination, a fake memory, a simulation, an alternate timeline. The narrator only ever has the same evidence the reader does. Reality, in a Dick novel, is the thing that survives this scrutiny — when anything does.

The 1962 alternate history The Man in the High Castle is his first masterpiece. Ubik (1969) is the funniest of the metaphysical novels. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), filmed as Blade Runner, is the cleanest exposition of the recurring question — what (if anything) makes a person not a thing? — and A Scanner Darkly (1977) is the autobiographical drug novel that earns the genre its moral weight. Dick's prose is uneven; his ideas are unique. Read three before you decide.

CHAPTER XIIDelany · the experimental sf novel.

Samuel R. Delany is the genre's great formal experimentalist. He brought to sf the close-reading vocabulary of structuralist semiotics and the prose attention of high modernism. Babel-17 (1966) is a Sapir-Whorf novel — language as weapon. Nova (1968) is Delany's space opera, with the Grail myth as armature. Dhalgren (1975), 879 pages set in a wounded American city called Bellona where time and geography misbehave, is the experimental sf novel par excellence and one of the four best American novels of the 1970s.

The post-1976 work bends further from genre. Triton (1976) is a serious investigation of polymorphous gender. The Nevèrÿon sword-and-sorcery quartet (1979–87) is a Saussurean fantasy in fancy dress. Delany also writes some of the most important nonfiction in the field: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) on sf's syntax; Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) on cross-class queer publics. Read Babel-17 first.

CHAPTER XIIIFeminist sf.

Le Guin opened the door. A generation walked through it. Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) is the angriest, funniest American novel of the decade, splicing four versions of the same woman across four feminist futures. Russ also wrote the best critical book on the genre's gender politics, How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983).

James Tiptree Jr was the pen name of Alice B. Sheldon, a former CIA analyst who began publishing in 1967 and was unmasked, sensationally, in 1976. The stories — "The Women Men Don't See," "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", "The Screwfly Solution" — are the most uncomfortable and beautifully made short fictions in the genre. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) is the utopian counterpart. Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World (1974) and Motherlines (1978) are the sterner polemic. Read Russ's Female Man and Tiptree's Her Smoke Rose Up Forever first.

CHAPTER XIVButler.

Octavia Butler entered an overwhelmingly white and male field in 1976 and reorganised it. Her Kindred (1979) — a Black Californian woman in 1976 is yanked across time into 1815 Maryland — is technically a time-travel novel and is in fact a slavery novel; the sf premise lets the book do what a realist slavery novel cannot, which is force the present-day reader into the ground of the past. The Patternist books play with telepathy and breeding; Lilith's Brood (the Xenogenesis trilogy) is the most serious novel of inter-species parenthood ever written.

The two Parable novels (1993, 1998) are the late work. Set in a 2020s California of climate collapse, neoliberal abandonment, and a populist Christian movement led by a senator whose slogan is "Make America Great Again," they have aged in ways that are not satisfying to read about. Butler intended a third volume, Parable of the Trickster, and died before completing it. Begin with Kindred.

CHAPTER XVCyberpunk.

William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) was published as a $2.95 paperback original and rewrote the genre's ambient assumptions in eighteen months. The world Gibson described — corporations larger than nations, a borderless data realm called cyberspace, Asian megacities glittering with broken neon, biological augmentation as fashion — is now a clichéd shorthand for the present, but in 1984 it was new. The prose is dense, cinematic, and learned its compression from Hammett and Burroughs.

Bruce Sterling was the movement's theorist; his anthology Mirrorshades (1986) supplied the manifesto. Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991) is the human counterweight to Gibson's chrome. Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) is the genre's late comic peak. The cyberpunk programme — that the future is high tech and low life, and that the interesting questions live in the seam — has long since been absorbed into the wider field. Begin with Neuromancer; read the prose closely; the plot is almost beside the point.

CHAPTER XVIThe post-cyberpunk grand canvas.

The 1990s saw the return of the big space-opera structure, in three forms. Iain M. Banks's Culture novels (Consider Phlebas, 1987, through The Hydrogen Sonata, 2012) imagine a post-scarcity anarcho-socialist galactic civilisation run by superhuman Minds, and refuse to make it a dystopia. The Culture is plausibly the most important imagined utopia of the late twentieth century. Read The Player of Games (1988) or Use of Weapons (1990) first.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red 1992, Green 1993, Blue 1996) imagines a 200-year terraforming of the planet from first landing to red-and-green political crisis. It is the most serious sf engagement with how science is actually done — committees, papers, infrastructure — ever written. Vernor Vinge's two Zones-of-Thought novels (1992, 1999) are the great late works of intelligent space opera, with a galaxy in which physical law itself varies by region and runaway artificial intelligence is the ambient threat.

CHAPTER XVIIThe New Weird.

Around 2000 a younger British and American cohort began producing sf-fantasy hybrids that refused the genre line. China Miéville's Perdido Street Station (2000) is the founding object: a vast, stinking, multi-species city called New Crobuzon, narrated with materialist political commitment and a thesaurus. Miéville called the new mode the weird; an anthology, The New Weird (2008), formalised the label.

The neighbouring writers — M. John Harrison, who has been doing this since 1971; Jeff VanderMeer, whose Southern Reach trilogy (2014) is the great American ecological weird; K. J. Bishop; Steph Swainston — share an interest in the inhuman, the body, the city, and a sentence-level density unusual in genre fiction. The weird is sf's permission to be fantasy, with the consequences taken seriously. Read Perdido Street Station and then Annihilation.

CHAPTER XVIIIChinese sf goes global.

Liu Cixin was a power-plant engineer in Niangziguan, Shanxi, when he began publishing sf in Science Fiction World in the early 1990s. His Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy (2006–2010 in Chinese, 2014–2016 in Ken Liu's and Joel Martinsen's English) opens with a Cultural Revolution prologue — a young astrophysicist, traumatised by her father's murder, decides to send a signal — and ends with the heat death of the universe.

The middle volume's central idea — the dark forest hypothesis: every civilisation must hide because being detected means being destroyed — is the most influential sf concept of the 2010s. Liu's prose is engineering-plain, occasionally clumsy, indifferent to character, and saturated with conceptual force. The trilogy is also the most prominent sign of a larger story: Chinese sf has become, since the 2000s, a major literature in its own right. Read also Hao Jingfang's "Folding Beijing" (2014), Chen Qiufan's Waste Tide (2013, English 2019), and the Ken Liu-edited anthology Invisible Planets (2016).

CHAPTER XIXJemisin.

N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy (2015–17) is one of the rare sf works that is both a formal experiment and a popular hit. The setting is the Stillness, a single supercontinent prone to seasonal cataclysms; the people who can manipulate seismic energy — orogenes — are enslaved by the civilisation whose survival depends on them. Jemisin wrote the first volume in the second person, used three braided timelines, and made the formal trick legible without explaining it. The trilogy won the Hugo for Best Novel three years in a row, a feat no other writer had achieved.

Beneath the worldbuilding the trilogy is a sustained meditation on the metabolism of structural racism: how a society organises itself around the people it cannot live without and cannot bear. Begin with The Fifth Season. Read it twice; the first reading is for the puzzle, the second for the prose.

CHAPTER XXChiang · the philosophical short.

Ted Chiang has published, in three decades of work, two slim collections and roughly twenty stories. He has never written a novel and has no plans to. He is the best short-story writer in the genre. Each story takes a single conceptual premise — a calculus that proves itself inconsistent, a language that determines time perception, an angel-driven physics — and follows its consequences with the patience of a mathematics paper.

"Story of Your Life" (1998), filmed by Denis Villeneuve as Arrival (2016), is the best-known: a linguist learns the language of an alien species whose grammar has no temporal direction, and the structure of her own grief reorganises around it. "Exhalation" (2008) imagines a clockwork civilisation discovering thermodynamics. "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" (2013) reads like an essay and is one. Read both books cover to cover. They will take you about a week and rewire your sense of what a short story can do.

CHAPTER XXIClimate fiction.

Climate fiction is now the genre's centre of gravity. Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020) is the most ambitious recent attempt: a near-future polyphonic novel that reads like committee minutes from a working post-warming international agency, and is more hopeful than it has any right to be. Robinson's New York 2140 (2017) is the same project in a flooded Manhattan.

Adjacent: Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation (2014) and the Southern Reach books, in which a coastal stretch of the United States is overtaken by an unknowable ecological reorganisation. Richard Powers's The Overstory (2018), which won the Pulitzer, is sf only in the loosest sense and is the most-read recent literary novel about non-human consciousness. Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible (2020) is the spare, terrifying short-novel version. Climate fiction is no longer a sub-genre; it is one of the contexts in which contemporary sf is being written.

CHAPTER XXIIThe cosy turn.

Becky Chambers self-published The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet via Kickstarter in 2014 and produced the most influential stylistic shift in mid-2010s sf. The novel is a competent space opera; what made it new was its insistence on kindness. The crew of the Wayfarer are decent people; conflicts are resolved by conversation; difference is treated as interesting rather than threatening. Some readers found it twee; many more found it oxygen.

The Monk and Robot novellas (2021–22) intensify the move: post-collapse, post-AI-personhood, post-most-of-the-anxiety, two characters walk through a recovered forest discussing what humans need. The cosy-sf turn — which also includes Martha Wells's Murderbot diaries (2017–), TJ Klune's The House in the Cerulean Sea (2020), and a great many novellas published by Tordotcom — is one of the genre's recent reorientations. It is the answer the field has produced to the dystopia decade.

CHAPTER XXIIIDystopia.

Dystopia is sf's most respectable adjacent genre. The English-language tradition begins with Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (written 1921, smuggled to the West, banned in the USSR until 1988): a glass city of mathematically scheduled lives. Huxley read it; Brave New World (1932) is its Fordist American answer. Orwell read both; Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is the bleak masterpiece, written in part because Orwell had watched what the Soviet purges had done to his comrades in Catalonia.

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and the late Testaments (2019) are the most cited recent additions; Atwood insists, defensibly, that the genre is "speculative fiction" and that nothing in Handmaid had not happened somewhere. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and the Sun (2021) are the literary novelist's adjacent moves, both quietly devastating. The dystopian novel is sf with the gloves off; it is also sf at the moment it is taken seriously by people who do not read sf.

CHAPTER XXIVThe hard / soft distinction.

The traditional split — "hard" sf grounded in physics and engineering, "soft" sf grounded in psychology, sociology, anthropology — is real but overstated. It tracks a genuine difference of imaginative discipline; it does not track quality. Greg Egan's Diaspora (1997), one of the hardest sf novels ever written, is also a meditation on what intelligence consists of, which is the softest of subjects. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, often classified as soft, contains more usable physics than most space opera.

The honest version of the distinction is about the failure mode. Hard sf fails when the engineering is wrong; soft sf fails when the people behave like cardboard. The good writers in either camp do not fail in their own way and tend to read each other. Asimov was an honorary soft writer; Le Guin was an honorary hard one. The line, like most genre lines, is policed by people who do not write either kind.

CHAPTER XXVSf on the screen.

The genre's greatest visual ambassadors are not its adaptations but its unfaithful interpreters. Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), made with Arthur C. Clarke, is the most influential sf film and is closer to a tone poem than to its source story. Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) is, famously, a critique of Stanisław Lem's novel as well as a film of it; Tarkovsky thought Lem's space station was a Russian film and shot it as one. Tarkovsky's later Stalker (1979), drawn from the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic (1972), is the greatest sf film ever made about waiting.

The Anglophone canon: Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) and Denis Villeneuve's sequel (2017); Cuarón's Children of Men (2006); Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013); Alex Garland's Annihilation (2018). Television's recent peak is The Expanse (2015–22) for serious space opera and Severance (2022–) for the philosophical short. The point is not adaptation. The point is that sf is the rare genre in which film and novel sometimes do different work on the same problem.

CHAPTER XXVIThirty essential sf books.

• 1818Frankenstein · the first sf novelMary Shelley
• 1895The Time MachineH. G. Wells
• 1898The War of the WorldsH. G. Wells
• 1921We · the first dystopiaY. Zamyatin
• 1949Nineteen Eighty-FourGeorge Orwell
• 1951FoundationIsaac Asimov
• 1953The Demolished ManAlfred Bester
• 1953More Than HumanTheodore Sturgeon
• 1953Childhood's EndArthur C. Clarke
• 1959A Canticle for LeibowitzW. M. Miller Jr
• 1961SolarisStanisław Lem
• 1962The Man in the High CastleP. K. Dick
• 1965DuneFrank Herbert
• 1969The Left Hand of DarknessU. K. Le Guin
• 1972Roadside PicnicStrugatsky
• 1974The DispossessedU. K. Le Guin
• 1975The Female ManJoanna Russ
• 1975DhalgrenS. R. Delany
• 1979KindredOctavia Butler
• 1984NeuromancerWilliam Gibson
• 1988The Player of GamesIain M. Banks
• 1992Red MarsK. S. Robinson
• 1992A Fire Upon the DeepVernor Vinge
• 1993Parable of the SowerOctavia Butler
• 2000Perdido Street StationChina Miéville
• 2002Stories of Your Life and OthersTed Chiang
• 2008The Three-Body ProblemLiu Cixin
• 2014AnnihilationJeff VanderMeer
• 2015The Fifth SeasonN. K. Jemisin
• 2020The Ministry for the FutureK. S. Robinson

CHAPTER XXVIIWhere to go next.

↑ PBS · IT'S LIT · "THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENCE FICTION" (FT. LINDSAY ELLIS)

More on YouTube

Watch · Ursula K. Le Guin's National Book Foundation acceptance speech (2014)
Watch · Octavia Butler interviewed on the Parable books

Read

The single best reference is The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford and Peter Nicholls — free online at sf-encyclopedia.com, updated weekly, exhaustive. For criticism in book form: Adam Roberts's The History of Science Fiction (2005, second edition 2016) is the cleanest scholarly history; Brian Aldiss's Billion Year Spree (1973, expanded 1986) is the writer's history; Joanna Russ's The Country You Have Never Seen (2007) is the angry, indispensable essays. For interviews: Bill Sheehan's Conversations with Octavia Butler and Adam Roberts's Sibilant Fricative reviews.

Where to keep reading

For new short fiction: Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, all free online. For long-form criticism: the Los Angeles Review of Books's sf section. For the prizes worth following: the Hugo, the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke (UK), the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Tiptree / Otherwise. Read one short story a night for a year. There are five thousand good ones.