Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Read Online Free Page A

Schooldays mated with The Prisoner TV show and From Here to Eternity . He captures with precision the eternal cruelties of schoolboy interactions, the rigors of boot camp, and the sophistications of war college. At the same time, he dissects the power-tripping that occupies nations and their governments. Ender is both innocent child and hopeful monster, the hothouse hybrid bloom of a harsh climate.
    Card’s tale is remarkably proleptic in several areas, including the use of child soldiers, virtual reality, tablet computing, internet communications, and social networking sock-puppetry, as well as foretelling the collapse of the Soviet empire.
    Besides the controversies outlined above, Card manages to rub other raw areas. There’s a nebulous sense of incest among the Wiggin kids—Valentine exiles herself to a colony world with beloved Ender; Peter plainly wants to dominate his sister in every physical sense. “Girls” don’t do well in Battle School since evolution is against them, and the Bugger warriors are all females under a Queen, yet also paradoxically evoke male homosexuality by their racial nickname. But perhaps most provocative of all is the assertion in Chapter 14 that love and compassion are the essential underpinnings for slaughter. This yoking of two realms generally perceived as polar opposites recalls some of the deliberate contrarian “Martian” thinking of Michael Valentine (a coincidental naming by Card?) Smith in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.
    In three sequels— Speaker for the Dead (arguably a better novel), Xenocide and Children of the Mind —Ender would inhabit the post-genocidal, human supremacist universe he and his siblings had helped to create, following an expiational hegira through large tracts of time and space. But those sequels, and subsequent parallel retellings, could never deliver the raw jolt of Ender’s original cannon-propelled arc and shellburst lighting up of the heavens.
    [1] See Prof. John Kessel’s astringent analysis of the novel at:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
     

3
    Philip K. Dick

Radio Free Albemuth (1985)

     
    THE DEATH OF PHILIP K. DICK in 1982 deprived readers of one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century sf, and of possible major works left unborn. Yet his impact on the field during the period of our survey, and on the wider culture, continued to grow and resonate immensely, with numerous film adaptations of his stories, canonization of several of his novels in the Library of America series, multiple editions and distillations of his Collected Short Stories , the adaptation of his themes and tropes as metaphorical touchstones for essayists and commentators, and the posthumous publication of several works.
    The majority of the Dick books that appeared post-1982 constituted his trunk-consigned mainstream works, from his stymied early career as a mimetic writer—insofar as he could ever masquerade as such. Yet one book, the first to see print after Dick’s death, was pure science fiction, and forms a very respectable initial contribution to his active afterlife in the field.
    Radio Free Albemuth , as we know it, is a reworked version of a novel that Dick wrote to make sense of his famed mystical experiences circa 1974. When the original text was rejected by publishers, he streamlined the book to the form we know, and left a copy of the manuscript with his friend, the writer Tim Powers, who preserved it for eventual publication. But the intimate and important material would not lie fallow, and Dick rejiggered it all much more extensively to form VALIS , his late period masterpiece that was published during his lifetime. So in some complicated sense, Albemuth was the trial run for VALIS .
    PKD partisan and packager Jonathan Lethem maintains in an interview with Library of America that VALIS is the more sophisticated, mature, esthetically pleasing and intellectually dense statement of Dick’s “pink light” epiphany, and in this