Great SF Authors That Go Well Together

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— by Wombat-socho


Joe The Fat Man recommended Point Apocalypse in the comments last week, and Richard McEnroe likewise put in a good word for The Futurians by Damon Knight, The Way the Future Was by Fred Pohl, and Dream Makers by Charles Platt. There’s also Dream Makers, Vol. 2 if you can’t get enough of the SF author interviews.


C.M. Kornbluth is one of those great talents who died far too early, but he did leave us some great stories to remember him by. In addition to the classics “The Little Black Bag”, “The Altar At Midnight”, and “The Marching Morons” (for a more modern take on this, watch Idiocracy) he collaborated with Fred Pohl on the marvelously cynical Gladiator at Law and The Space Merchants, both of which look into futures where businesses dominate politics and people are shamelessly manipulated by advertising. Most of Kornbluth’s short fiction has been collected in the NESFA Press anthology His Share of Glory.


More recently, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have collaborated on some excellent books revisiting “tired” SF tropes, the best known of which is The Mote in God’s Eye , which is mainly about first contact with aliens. They returned to that topic in Footfall, in which intelligent alien elephants conquer the world – but not for long. Niven and Pournelle can also do non-SF: see Lucifer’s Hammer for their account of a cometary impact on Earth. HUGE cast of characters, all done well, unlike some other SF authors I could name. They also had the chutzpah to rewrite Dante’s Inferno and send an SF writer to hell in Inferno, and (with Michael Flynn) did a novel on global cooling in which SF fans save a pair of stranded astronauts: Fallen Angels, which may already be familiar to you through Instapundit’s mocking references to it throughout the “global warming” nonsense. As if that weren’t enough, they also collaborated with Steven Barnes on the extra-solar colonial horror thriller The Legacy of Heorot and its sequel Beowulf’s Children .


David Drake has done a whole slew of collaborations with other authors, but I’m going to focus on my personal favorites, the Raj Whitehall series co-written with S.M. Stirling. This tale of a young officer on the faraway planet of Bellevue chosen by an ancient AI to unite and save humanity comprises five novels in which Whitehall goes from one difficult campaign to another, with the ever-present threat of his paranoid governor Barholm Clerett hanging over him like the Sword of Damocles. Roughly based on the life of Belisarius, the series is full of fun little oddities -to cite but one example, riding dogs have replaced horses; for another, the predominant religion in the mostly Hispanic Gubernio Civil is the Church of the Spirit of Man of the Stars, which considers computers holy and their components sacred relics- tense battles, and political skulduggery mainly handled by Raj’s noble-born wife Suzette. The five novels got bundled into two collections by Baen, Warlord and Conqueror . The series went off-planet in three sequels: The Chosen , The Tyrant , and The Reformer. A new series of sequels seems to have begun with The Heretic , co-written by Tony Daniels. I picked up a copy from the local library back in July, and it was good, but there are too many loose ends for me to think this is going to be a one-off like the two previous sequels.


So what are you reading this week?


53 comments

  1. I read “Footfall” 6 years ago; it’s a fun yarn. Also, Pournelle runs a blog, and while deeply cynical, he has a great selection of people who mail into him. It’s worth reading.

    “Inferno” is very good, but there are some dated references. The sequel, though, has a lot more of Niven and Pournelle taking aim at people who (admittedly) deserve it, but more in the Cool and Unusual Punishment way, than maliciously.

  3. I don’t consider Harry Turtledove an SF writer. I think he belongs to SFWA, but the stuff I’ve read of his are counterfactuals and fantasy. “Guns of The South” is a counterfactual that involves SF peripherally in the form of a time machine in South Africa that allows them to go back exactly 150 years, so the run AKs to the Confederacy, which then runs the Yankees back into their home cesspool. I don’t know of anything he wrote that’s truly what I would call SF. That goes for his stuff about the Lizards. The Lizard’s tech is pretty much peripheral.
    If you don’t like his stuff, that’s a matter of taste. The market has been very good to HT, so someone likes his stuff. I’ve pretty much run out of steam on his stuff.

  4. Let’s see: I finished John Ringo’s Under a Graveyard Sky; grumbled my way through Book 3 of The Mortal Instruments (and I’m going to rip it on Amazon); and I’m finishing off J.D. Robb’s Thankless in Death this afternoon on the train. Then I’ll have to go shopping.
    I think I missed something, there are more books piled on the “finished, need to be re-shelved” chair than that I’ve listed, and the pile “Sell as soon as possible” seems to have increased by more than that, as well.

  6. If you can manage to remember anything about any book Eric Flint has a hand in writing, I’d like you to tell me about it. But not at length.

    I cannot abide Eric Flint. He’s very much a one-trick pony, and a much better editor than writer.

  9. Well, we can hope he ends up on the prize crew of a new SLS Joesph Buckley, which then suffers from explosive decompression.

    Or is carrying some exotic disease.

  10. I’ve been reading Drake’s Leary series (From the Lightnings, et al). It’s alright when it gets out of its own way, but he could try to stop writing every novel as if it were the first and we need the character’s motivation beat over our head every other page. He does this while referring to events that prompt these motivations in other books without the same attention to eye-rolling detail. It comes off as rather maudlin and takes away from the action as well as adding unnecessary words to the narrative.

  14. I find Drake’s “Whitehall” series to be excellent yarns. But you missed “The Chose“, which has Raj/Center in the same role on a different planet (Visager), but in a scenario where technology is around the turn of the 20th Century here on Earth.

    Co-written with S.M. Stirling, it’s a single book, not a series. Still, a good read, though.

    Me, I’m catching up on several Honorverse novels that I have sitting on the coffee table, most recently “House of Steel”.

  16. Well, that certainly puts them in some distinguished company. Dante himself populated Hell with his enemies. 🙂
    Also, +1 for the Chaos Manor recommendation. He knows a lot of people who know stuff.

  18. Well, if you don’t consider alternate histories as SF, you’re on the other side of the debate from
    me, John W. Campbell Jr. and most of SF fandom. Good luck with that. 🙂

  20. Fortunately for you, she doesn’t compose or recite any, Much as Carpentier’s guide in Inferno doesn’t actually make any trains run on time. 😉

  22. 1632 and most of its sequels -big exception being the DeMarce soap operas-weren’t bad, and his collaboration with Drake on the other Belisarius series (the one that actually has Belisarius in it) was okay.

  23. I have been a fan of Niven since I read Ringworld in the late 70’s. And anytime Pournelle and he teamed up was as near a guarantee of an excellent read as you could get.
    Drakes stories are generally quite good as well. Except for the Leary drek.

    Drakes Northworld is a fairly good read and still free for kindles on Amazon. Of course I started reading his stuff because of the Hammers Slammers books.

    As for what I’m reading, I’m still trying to read Bovas Asteroid Wars. I didn’t remember all the global warming BS from the last time I read it.

  25. That’s the thing – that kind of exposition is fine in Hammer’s Slammers: they generally deal with different characters in each story and it adds value – you want to know why the first time. The umpteenth time we read why Adele Mundy feels she is a shell of a human being without emotion gets OLD. Can he have his main characters you know, grow emotionally beyond their scars maybe?

  27. I, too, started following him after “Under The Hammer” came out in Galaxy while I was in high school. Hard to believe he made his first sale (a Lovecraft pastiche) to August Derleth, isn’t it?

  29. Would that be the Empire of Man Prince Roger? And if it is, I thought Weber had put the kibosh to any further stories in that series.

  31. So what? I have an opinion on the matter, and it turns out I’m not alone. I’m not going to argue with you about it because it isn’t worth the candle, nor will I hand out gratuitous insults about it either.

  34. Yeah John started the beginning of the next one and last I heard he’s talking to David about it. If you have a Baen bar account you can read the snippet in Ringo’s tavern

  43. “Great SF Authors That Go Well Together”

    I read this as Great SF (San Francisco) Authors That Go Well Together

    And I was like: What’s with the interest about San Francisco authors? How could there be any readable author in that slimy place?

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