Contemporary SF versus The SF Canon.

[Simon]

When I think SF, I think of the house I was raised in...  Yellowing bookcases of disintegrating paperbacks with names like Simak, Pohl, Niven and Haldeman on the spines.  I emphatically don't think of the modern writers, and apart from listening to Escape Pod it takes me a bit of an effort of will to read anything contemporary. I find it much easier to ease myself into a chair with one of Gollancz's SF Masterworks, or ideally one of those horrendously bound 'garish 60s printings that barely last a reading and smell of ageing glue.

So, how large a proportion of SF fans share this view?  Is SF primarily a snapshot between the end of World War 2 and the birth of The Winnebago Of The Skies?  In what way do you treat SF?  Is it the fiction of the Military Industrial Complex (Post war to mid-60s)?  Is it the fiction of counterculture beatnicks showing that you can use fantasy to build elaborate dreams (New Wave)?  The cold war obsessed fiction of the Reagan-Era (so many examples but some classics are Eon by Greg Bear and Footfall by Niven + Pournelle)?  Or is science fiction a realm of contemporary fantasy, for painting today's dreams?

As our genre gets older, the word "Science Fiction Fan" is taking on a different meanings to different people, and it's getting harder to claim we are just one church...  Where do you fit in the history of SF?

[DKT]

I'm definitely on the other end of the spectrum.  I read a handful of SF classics like Dune on occassion (I also read Triplanetary, the first Lensman book not too long ago which was fun) but I tend to be more interested in SF written closer to the present: William Gibson, China Mieville, Jonathan Lethem, Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Richard K. Morgan, etc.  Especially what people are calling the New Weird.  I'm the same way with fantasy, too. 

[sayeth]

For about the past year, I've been on an old-school SF kick. I've been reading classics that I somehow missed in my adolescence (Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, Childhood's End by Clarke), pulp fiction for the bus ride (Conan stories by R.E. Howard, The Land that Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs), and some Golden Age SF that has shown up on LibriVox (The Green Odyssey by Phillip Jose Farmer, Plague Ship by Andre Norton). On the modern side, I've been listening to Escape Pod, reading a few SF modern books (Ender's Shadow by Card, The Golden Compass by Pullman, The Time Traveler's Wife), and getting into some graphic novels (Y: The Last Man by Vaughn, V for Vendetta by Moore, Fables by Willingham). So overall, maybe a little over 50% of my SF reading is 30 years +.

[eytanz]

I tend to read mostly SF from the last 20 years. Not so much by any specific design, it's just what's easiest for me to get a hold of. I did read mainly earlier SF when I was a kid - mostly because I was limited to what was on my parents' shelves and my friends' parents' shelves - but then I was limited by what was translated into Hebrew, and once I got old enough to buy my own books I was limited by what was imported to Israel at the time, which was mostly the best-selling new stuff.

These days, I tend to read more fantasy than SF anyway, and I do read a lot of older fantasy; I'm more of a fantasy fan than an SF fan, and I'll put an effort into getting hold of classic fantasy that I wouldn't into classic SF.

Of course, these days I'm writing my PhD thesis so I'm not really reading much of anything - which is one reason I love Escape Pod - the stories come to me

[AarrowOM]

I read whatever catches my fancy (usually authorwise), so I tend to gravitate towards authors with higher publication counts as it takes longer to exhaust their works, so I'd say that my classic sci fi reading selection is around the 50% mark.

I agree with what Simon says in his post:

When I think SF, I think of the house I was raised in...  Yellowing bookcases of disintegrating paperbacks with names like Simak, Pohl, Niven and Haldeman on the spines. 

My first sci fi books (or at least among the first) were a few hardcover anthologies from before I was born (1985) that the librarian at my middle school gave to me when I graduated 8th grade.  (I had been the only one to check them out since the library had acquired them!)  (And before anyone comments on how this has deprived said library of a wonderful collection of child-friendly sci fi, I have it on good authority that there have not been any other sci fi fan passing through that school since me.)

There is one regret that I have about reading classic sci fi, though.  It is notoriously difficult trying to track down individual stories (and/or the anthologies containing them) because it seems as if very few people read or have read extensively in classic sci fi.  (I'd be grateful for suggestions on this matter.)

[Simon]

Yeah, I agree with you about the notoriously difficult issue.  The problem with SF is that quite a lot of the classic shorts are one-offs, by authors who tend to write more novels... This means you're unlikely to grab an anthology of that authors work, so unless you work you way through something like the Star series, you miss them...

I was having a conversation with Simon Painter, and each of us namedropped our favourite shorts (The Streets Of Askelon and The Tunnel Under The World for me) and no surprises the other hadn't read them. 

There's no real cure tho, except to immerse yourself in those shorts.  Otherwise you'll never find classics like Who Goes There?

[wakela]

When I started with SF in high school it was in response to discovering Arthur Clarke.  My Dad had given me 2010: OdysseyTwo, so I was all Clarke all the time for a while.  In and after college I got into the Cold War Era guys Brin and Bear, and they produced enough stuff to keep me satisfied.  Recently, I've been trying to branch out.  A friend of mine came up with a list of books that had won both the Hugo and Nebula.  I wish I could find it and post it here.  It's only like two dozen books (and you've probably already read many of them) so it makes for a great, concise reading list that introduced me to some great authors.  I'm trying to modernize my liked authors list, so I'll pick up a new guy like China Mieville, Charlie Stross if it's won some awards, and I'm reading all the Hugo nominees.    I tried Niven and Heinlein, but couldn't get into them.

The Hugo and Nebula nominated short stories are mostly available online for free.  Those and Escape Pod are also good ways to branch out.   

[Zathras]

When I think SF, I think of the house I was raised in...  Yellowing bookcases of disintegrating paperbacks with names like Simak, Pohl, Niven and Haldeman on the spines. 

Sounds like the house I live in now, and I love looking through all the old books and revisiting them on occasion. 

That being said I'm always trying out some of the contemporary writers and have found some that I like.  Stephen Baxter is one of them. 

Simak was always one of my favorites.....I love his simple pastoral stories and fact that many of his stories were set in rural settings (sometimes in WI) appealed to me because I grew up in small town WI. 

[Leon Kensington]

I think that I would be in a more contemporary area, being that the oldest scifi novel that I own is 'I, Robot' and the newest is Scalzi's 'The Last Colony' with the majority of my books having a publishing date between 1980 and today.  But really for me, I don't care if it is golden age or today.

As long as it is good, I'll read it.

[Planish]

I grew up on Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Van Vogt and so on. Those were the guys I would automatically sign out from the library or buy without reading the blurbs.
Quite a few short stories from back then (some from the '40s, before my time) have also stuck with me, in a way that contemporary ones do not. Lieber's A Pail of Air, Leinster's First Contact, Moore/Kuttner's Vintage Season, Bixby's It's a Good Life, and a very dark one one whose title and author I forget at the moment, from the POV of a kid kept locked in the basement because his parents fear him for some undisclosed reason, and the first line is '"You wretch", she said.'
Those still haunt me.

Then the '60s happened and SF went to hell. Lots of LSD-inspired altered states of conciousness premises, which I viewed as fantasy tarted up to pass for SF. The science got too soft. Fortunately, Tolkien hit it big and that allowed the fantasy writers to come out of the closet and it was easier to distinguish. (Not that I didn't like Tolkien, it's in my desert island collection.)

In the '70s and '80s I bought a lot of Vonnegut, Pohl, and Niven. Went through all of the RE Howard Conan stories, followed by all of the Burroughs' Barsoom novels. Later on, John Brunner and Robert Forward.

'90s - Lackey's urban elves, SERRAted Edge series. Yeah it's fantasy, but not posing as anything else.

Now I pretty much have given up on buying SF simply because it's SF, unlike in my teen/preteen years. I enjoyed William Gibson stuff, but I fear that cyberpunk themes are spoiling it again, like in the '60s. Too much like fantasy posing as SF because you cannot reasonably anticipate what any character is capable of. Magic sword, magic chip, same thing. If The Matrix was only a book, I'd probably hate it.

Then again, I've read and re-read some of Weber's Honor Harrington stories, simply because I like her as a character, and the technology is limited to only a few things that require willingness to suspend disbelief, and it pretty much stays the same from one story to the next. A space opera with well-defined limits to the technology. Puts me in mind of Heinlein, at times. (Waiting for the movie of On Basilisk Station, starring Millia Jovovich as Honor. It could happen!)

Harry Turtledove is my hero now, with his alternate/fictional histories, especially the Worldwar/Colonization series and the Darkness series.

Somebody mentioned Librivox. Quite a few H. Beam Piper works available - http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?title=&author=H.+Beam+Piper&action=Search . I had never read any of his books, probably because I was but off by the titles and cover art, but it's okay stuff as audiobooks.
I've just started reading/recording "Planet of the Damned" by Harry Harrison for Librivox as a solo project, but it'll be a couple of months before it's complete. I must say that reading for Librivox makes me have a lot more respect for the escapepod/pseudopod readers than I might otherwise.