Karel Capek, The War with the Newts. Also Capek's R.U.R., but while that has literary pretensions, it's just not very good literature.

I haven't read this, but Stanislaw Lem's Solaris is said to qualify.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's _We_ is perhaps a candidate. I'm not sure if I'd consider it a "masterpiece" but LeGuin's _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is a very nice book from a literary point of view, I think.

20 years ago my high school read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which certainly qualify as science fiction.

Fahrenheit 451 is certainly on high school reading lists, despite occassional attempts to ban it. And Margaret Atwood is on a lot of college reading lists, which probably tells you less than being on a high school list does.

Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker series. I got the hardback with all of the books for Christmas and I can't wait to dig in. Also, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: A Novel by Haruki Murakami is an amazing read.

It seems as if there some underlying pretense in your question. If a book is "well-crafted" why would it not therefore qualify as "literature"? Definitions of "literature" range from the uselessly broad ("the entire body of writings of a specific language, period, people, etc.") to the absurdly pretentious ("Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity"). For the purpose of this discussion, what definition of literature do you intend?

My eighth-grade English literature curriculum included not just Fahrenheit 451 but a number of Ray Bradbury's short stories. Now whether Bradbury wrote science fiction is itself debatable. He considered Fahrenheit 451 science fiction, inasmuch as it depicted a possible future society, By the same token considered just about everything else he wrote fantasy, since none of it could happen.

Looking further back: Huxley, Orwell, Wells, Verne?

--Abe Delnore

Gene Wolfe is a true master. Heavily influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, many of his works have dense plotlines featuring false narrators, metaphysical questions about time, and obscure resolutions requiring that the reader engage with the work.

His book "The Fifth Head of Cereberus" has a great puzzle: What is the name of the narrator?

"Shadow and Claw" is an amazing work of the far future based on the Byzantine empire. Powerful language; great characters; excellent plot devices.

In sci-fi there are many entertaining story tellers (like Orson Scott Card) and some inventive thinkers (like Asimov). But Wolfe is writing literature that transcends genre.

~~~
The tale I read to little Severian said that the universe was but a long word of the Increate's. We, then, are the syllables of that word. But the speaking of any word is futile unless there are other words, words that are not spoken. -Gene Wolfe

Just as there aren't many science fiction mysteries, or romance westerns, there aren't many genre-crossing scifi-literary novels. Crossing genres is *hard* to pull off well.

"Literary" is just another genre of fiction, on all fours with science fiction or romance or other genres; except that English teachers generally prefer it to other genres, and have sold the reading public on the idea that it's "better".

I've had more than one snob tell me that science fiction can't be literature, because it's well, science fiction.

On the other hand, I've seen a good bit of SF that some folks won't call SF because it's become popular with the literary crowd.

...but if it's popular? Certainly not capital-L literature, since people actually like it and read it without having their book club members around to explain the complicated bits...

Jules Verne wrote over 150 novels. At least a dozen could be classics: 5 Weeks in a Balloon, Around the World in 80 Days, The Mysterious Island, To the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth, 20 Thousand Leagues, Michael Strogonov, Off on a Comet, Measuring the Meridian, The Children of Captain Grant, Dick Sand Boy Captain, Down the Amazon.

The Children of Captain Grant, 20,000 Leagues and The Mysterious Island tie into one giant story read in that order.

He even wrote a sequal to Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym called An Artic Mystery.

I concur with "A Canticle for Leibowitz" A book I think about often. I concur also re Bradbury. Although I enjoy Heinlein, I'm not sure I'd classify his books as literature.

My working definition of "literature" means something that people are still reading one hundred years after it was written, and "great literature" something read hundreds of years later. And as we can't know today what people will read in the future, we can't really say what among modern writing will qualify. More's "Utopia" qualifies under my definition, although many would probably argue that it is not "science" fiction.

I agree wiht Gordo about Walter Miller's A Canticle For Leibowitz. Here are excerpts from D.Cloyce Smith's review of it at Amazon explaining some of the reasons why Canticle qualifies as literature:

Walter Miller's only major novel is not simply a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel but also a multi-layered meditation on the conflict between knowledge and morality. Six hundred years after a nuclear holocaust, an abbey of Catholic monks survives during a new Dark Ages and preserves the little that remains of the world's scientific knowledge. ...

... Throughout "Canticle," Miller's search for religious faith clashes with his respect for scientific rationalism. For Miller, Lucifer is not a fallen angel but technological discovery unencumbered by a moral compass; "Lucifer is fallen" becomes the code phrase the future Church uses to indicate the imminent threat of a second nuclear holocaust. The ability of humankind to abuse learning for evil purposes, to continually expel itself from the Garden of Eden, perplexes and haunts the author: "The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they seemed to become with it, and with themselves as well."

Some readers might be turned off by the book's religious undercurrent, but that would be to mistake fiction for a sermon. The work is certainly infused with the author's Catholicism, but its philosophy is far too ambiguous to be read like a homily. This is no "Battleship Earth." Instead, it is Miller's highly personal act of atonement; he acknowledged later in life that his fictional monastery was first subconsciously, then purposefully modeled on the ancient Benedictine Monastery at Monte Cassino, which, as a World War II pilot, he bombed to smithereens. (An historical aside: most of the major Greco-Roman scientific and mathematic texts were preserved for posterity by Arabic scholars--not by medieval Christian monks. But this is fiction, and it's not clear whether Miller is trying to replicate Church history as it was or as he felt it should have been.)

... Rather than distracting the reader with religious and philosophical musings, however, "A Canticle for Leibowitz" is enriched by them. It's not only a compelling, well-written story, it's an allegorical tale that might encourage readers to struggle with their own beliefs and demons.

Nobody has yet mentioned C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, which is definitely both "literature" and science fiction by any standard. Others have mentioned LeGuin, and I concur. If we're including works of high fantasy the first Thomas Covenant trilogy should count too. [1]

It's worth noting that part of the problem is definitional: if what would otherwise be a "genre" work becomes accepted by the "literary" establishment, it tends not to be considered a member of the genre. See, e.g. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose writing gets called "magic realism" rather than "fantasy" for no particularly good reason.

[1] Any or all of these might be considered bad literature by some people (not me), but any reasonable definition of "literature" has to include the possibility that some of it is bad.

This is a debate that my family has a lot. We are avid readers. I have a fairly large collection of books. The most common genres in my collection are Science-Fiction, Fantasy, and Epic-Fantasies.

I have a sister who in a high school English teacher and another aspiring writer who got her degree in English Literature.

My personal belief is that the term "Literature" is a term reserved by college professors for books they feel are timeless classics that are the epitome of writing style and are held up as examples to students as what they should strive for in their personal writing.

I think this a lot of balderdash. Writing, especially fiction, is supposed to entertain people. It doesn't matter what high moral point you are trying to teach if you book is so boring that you put people to sleep with it. Good writing gets people to read your book because it entertains them and gets them interested in the subject. Great writing also teaches a moral point while being entertaining.

Watership Down was considered Literature by my high school english teacher, but Lord of the Rings was not. One is a fantasy about talking rabbits, the other is a fantasy about elves and magic. The truth is, the English teacher preferred reading about talking rabbits because it was an entertaining story. It was good, but I preferred Lord of the Rings.

I own an english translation of Doctor Zhivago. I have attempted to read it a dozen times and never succeeded. I don't like the characters and could care less what happens to them. Why is it considered better literature than Ender's Game, a story by Orson Scott Card, a story I have read over 20 times?

All this rambling aside, the argument always come down to literature is what the observer likes. Great Literature stands the test of time and becomes a story for the ages.

What about Slaughter-House 5 by Vonnegut? Certainly some strange sci fi elements.

I'm surprised no one has yet nominated Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" novels as literature. Certainly they're entertaining but there's a high moral purpose behind them and Pratchett is a brilliant writer qua writer: his word use is exact, his sentences scan, his paragraphs cohere, his chapters break logically and he stops when his plot does. What is said of Dickens (also a 'popular' writer) applies to Pratchett, with the exception that Dickens seems not to like his characters much, whereas Pratchett likes his in a very Austen-like way.

Hmm. The trouble is that literature is often a backward looking definition. I believe that most would consider Thomas Hardy and Jane Austin to be authors of literature--however, in their day they were derided as pulp authors.

Michael Crichton might not have the writing-style of an Austin but his usage and grammar is definitely the better of Dan Brown.

In the long, I suspect those SF novels of great distinction will be the ones presenting great ideas. SF is basically the only fictional genre to deliever in this way. Conversely those books held up as modern literature--such as Toni Morrison's Beloved--toe the orthodox line so strongly they will remain literature only in so much as they are emblematic of our times and may well be forgotten.

Science fiction and fantasy are distinct genres, but they are very similar, but I think are similar enough to group together for this discussion. Who can debate the the Jedi in Star Wars are really wizards, given remarkable powers over the surroundings? The fact that the scene is a fictional space setting instead of a fictional fantasy setting is of no import. I also think that most horror fits into this category as well, even though it might take place in a fictional modern setting. All distinctions without a difference.

The distinction between "literature" and commercial fiction, however, is elusive to say the least. I think there can now be no debate that the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are literature. Tolkien's writing is of the highest quality in every sense. His characters are real and the emotions he evokes are honest. To boot, Lord of the Rings is a great story.

In turn, there are many fantasy works which are more commercial in nature - i.e. they are written to sell with little regard to the quality of the writing. That is not to say that the authors do not write well, or that the stories are not engaging. Let's just say that the art involved in these works is a little less high, if you will.

Frankly, I think there are too few good works of fantasy literature. Currently, Terry Goodkind (Sword of Truth series) and Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time) are good, but as each new book in their respective series comes out, they are turning more and more commercial. I think the authors, especially Jordan, have become somewhat overwhelmed by their stories, and their commercial successes have forced them away from the art of writing.

I think too much is made of the "literature" debate. Give me a well-written novel which tells a good story. I don't think the setting is nearly as important as those two elements.

I found it surprising that someone's even asking the question. But I'll throw Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man" into the hat without further comment, anyway.

Yes, SF is literature.

Stanislaw Lem (almost all of it) is great literature, regretfully not read enough nowadays (I particularly recommend The Cyberiad). Dune is a masterpiece (though I believe the rest of the series is not worth much). Asimov was a great developer of historical canvases, though his language is probably to simple for the taste of English majors. And how can you forget Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.

Movies (I mean bad Hollywood blockbuster movies)are in my mind partially responsible for people thinking SF cannot be literature. Any resemblance between Asimov's short stories and Will Smith's "I, Robot" is mere and unintentional coincidence. Once you see the latter, you would want to stay as far away as possible from the book version of it, and in the process miss some beautiful short stories.

Mike Keenan - exactly. If something gains acceptance by the "literary establishment," it's not generally considered "science fiction" or "fantasy." I already brought up Marquez, but Vonnegut and Bradbury are good examples of this tendency too (not familiar with Pynchon).

I once asked a librarian how to distinguish books that belong in the 800s from books that belong in the Fiction section. She didn't know. (Of course that was the wrong librarian to ask. Her worst course was Cataloging, all those numbers and computers. She was into Circulation, which is why I was going out with her. <rimshot>)

Ray Bradbury, without question, particularly Something Wicked This Way Comes. There's also Dandelion Wine, but it's not SF. Lots of his short stories, of course.

Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality cycle, mostly short stories like "The Ballad of Lost C'Mell", which is the earliest depiction of computer hacking as a revolutionary weapon I'm aware of (written before anyone knew what a "computer" was; that word does not appear in the story), "The Dead Lady of Clowntown," and "A Planet Named Shayol." His stories have the best titles ever.

Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. I have always wondered what it felt like for him to type that last line.

Speaking of last lines, there's John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.

Samuel R. Delany. Nova is a good place to start.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld stories, particularly Guards, Guards! Men at Arms, and Feet of Clay. Literature doesn't have to be serious. Pratchett's subtle puns and reforged cliches show an unmatched intimacy with the English language. Don't be fooled, though: these stories have teeth. Pratchett also co-wrote Good Omens with Neil Gaiman; I'm not sure it's literature, but it's a great read.

My English teacher claimed a work could not be a classic until it was 100 years old and still thought of highly. (He bristled at younger works called classics. He also bristled at things being comparitively unique.)

Is there a distinction for written works using Kevin's definition between literature and classic?

Here's an interesting article by the already-mentioned Orson Scott Card, regarding post-modernism, Deconstruction and the search for "literature".

I don't know how we got this far without any mention of John Norman's Gor series or John Cleve's Spaceways series...

Gene Wolfe's definition of "literature" cited in Wikipedia is: that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure. I take educated reader to mean someone who is both educated himself, and who is also well read. I think the critical word in the definition is "increased."

You can reread Lord of the Rings all you want, with pleasure, but your pleasure will never increase - or at least, mine hasn't. On the other hand, every rereading of any portion of In Search of Lost Time increases my pleasure, and that of most educated readers.

I've been reading sci fi/fantasy for over 50 years, and practically everything mentioned so far has given me pleasure on rereading, and is worth rereading for that same pleasure, but I can't think of anything in this genre that has given me "increased" pleasure on rereading.

But I look forward to any suggestions which are based Wolfe's definition.

He's not to everyone's taste (including mine, sometimes), but I'd say that some of the writings of Harlan Ellison should be classified as "literature" ...

HG Wells makes the 100 years cutoff, as Time Machine, The Invisible Man and War of the Worlds were all from the 1890s.

Does Connecticutt Yankee count as a time-travel story?

Upthread, Anthony A claimed "Just as there aren't many science fiction mysteries...". Perhaps not many, but the scifi version of the hard-boiled detective is pretty abundant. I'd include Philip K. Dick's Do androids dream of electric sheep (better known as Blade Runner), Asimov's Naked Sun and Caves of Steel and Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon.

How about Hermann Hesse for Magister Ludi (aka The Glass Bead Game)? He won a Nobel prize for that one so presumably it must qualify as literature.

The Sci Fi Book Club recently came out with a Top 50 Most Significant Sci Fi and Fantasy Books of the Past 50 year3 (1953-2002). Significant clearly differs from Literature, but many books on the list are certainly capital "L" literary, others are simple milestones in the development of the two genres. A linguistics blogger who loves sci fi, Tenser said the Tensor, commented on the list.

My submission to the "Serious Literature" that is sci fi, On the Beach by Nevil Shute. I would second Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.

When I was 10 I was taken by my father to see 2001. I have been a fan of SF ever since. At one time, my collection numbered over 1000 paperbacks - not being rich enough to afford hardcovers. I read almost everything fiction Asminov wrote; I found Heinlein; then Delaney; then Bova. I have read most of the SF classics and avoided almost all the pop culture collections (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc...)

Asminov's short stories on robotics and the Foundation series had a profound impact on me. Dune and the rest of the series by Herbert had a impact on the type of SF I would eventually prefer. Best ever written as determined by sheer enjoyment: Battlefield Earth by L.Ron Hubbard (not the piece of crap suggested by seeing the movie) Card's Ender's Game is probably a very close 2nd.

How many authors of great literature had to create a environment that is both alien and believeable in addition to great characters and story? SF writers are the Ginger Rogers of literature.

Much Jorge Luis Borges qualifies as Scifi. And some Nabokov. Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game.

Dune does not have great literary merit. The book stands on the strength of the concepts, which are phenomenal. The dialog and development are relatively bland. That's one of the difficulties in the discussion. It can be difficult to separate the various merits of a work. In some cases it's easy. Dune is a conceptual masterpeice but literary pulp. A number of authors have stood the test of time despite the fact that their subject matter was something unoriginal and even boring, like English country life; these works have stood on some sort of literary merit. But other cases are harder to tell. Is the success of 1984 or Brave New World due to great writing, or to the sharpness of the concept? The point is largely that it's not a yes or no question. Different people will draw lines in differen places, but unless your lines are unsupportably restrictive there are a number of works that make the cutoff.

Discussions like this usually contain a lot of silliness, but they are not necessarily without merit.

Here's a fun sort of excercise: Robert Frost's poems (most of which I would not consider great literature) take on a whole new significance if I read them under the assumption (never contradicted in the poems themselves) that they are set in the year 2378 and the narrator is an outcast in one of the few remaining uncivilized zones outside the Xiphoid Empire.

Wheee!

No one in the "literary establishment" can agree what's "literature" any more, let alone what SF qualifies.

Look at other genres. Are the Sherlock Holmes tales "literature"? If so, then a great deal of good SF surely qualifies as well.

OTOH, we have the idea of Literature as a secular religion, from Flaubert and Mallarme down through modernism and into the maelstrom of postmodernism, where the idea suffers the fate of most religious notions in the present day. Whether and which SF qualifies under this idea is, well, a matter of faith.

(There's still no consensus that Poe's short stories are great literature.)

Harmon says:

My pleasure increases when a book takes me more deeply into my experience of life or leads to a greater understanding of something. Sci fi/fantasy — at least what I have read - doesn't seem to get deeper, or lead to anything greater on rereading.

I recomend to him, and to everyone looking for a deeper understanding of what is a possible meaning of life -and death-, to read the first chapter or Tolkien's Sylmarillion (from memory, I think the chapter's name is "Of the Begining of the Days"), in which Iluvatar (God) explains the gift of freedom given to Men, and how, through the works of Men, creation will be completed.

The fragment in not longer than a page, but it forever changed my way of understanding life.

Phil Dick and William Burroughs were among the greatest American writers of the last half of the 20th Century. Burroughs' Naked Lunch is a literary masterpiece. Many of Phil Dick's works might qualify, although his biggest influence has been in film, with many of his works either been made into films (Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, etc.) or ripped off (Ubik, which became the Matrix).

Plato's Timaeus.

And remarkably, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly and Minority Report were all very good films (even Total Recall was pretty good). That must be some kind of record for movie adaptations of a single author's works.

Agreed. I think Total Recall is actually a very underrated film.

Stranger in a Strange Land is the one book of Heinlein's I find repugnant in almost every sense. It doesn't even really qualify as Science Fiction as much as it does a fantasy by a man deep in the throes of a mif life crisis.
Considering the spectrum of literature definitions here I'll just list two authors who wrote immensely entertaining books; one with almost zero pretensions of anything other than entertainment and the other with an often acerbic look at human nature and in my opinion a very rare gift of narrative.
The first is Edgar Rice Burroughs and his Martian series. Is it literature? Maybe not, but by God it is memorable and swashbuckling purple prose at its best.
The other is the underrated Jack Vance, who writes lyrically of utterly alien worlds and societies with an uncanny ability to understand human nature.
Beside these two, Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Frank Herbert are real sleep inducers. Come to think of it they're sleep inducers regardless.

Heinlein, Asimov, Lem (I like Memoirs Found in a Bathtub), Miller's Canticle, Pratchett, Bradbury, Card, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series and I haven't seen Philip Jose Farmer listed. Dayworld, Riverworld, his Tarzan and Oz books, and Kilgore Trout.

The other is the underrated Jack Vance, who writes lyrically of utterly alien worlds and societies with an uncanny ability to understand human nature.

I have a big soft spot for Vance, whose work I really wish were more widely read. It's a pity that the Tor omnibus Dying Earth volume has, like, one typo per page.

But I'm glad this isn't a "fantasy as lit" thread, b/c I would see people arguing for the literary merit of Piers Anthony and David Eddings, and the barf would be difficult to clean out of my keyboard.

Tolkien, Zelazny's Lord of Light, the Amber series if you are into fantasy, Verne, some Brin, some Niven tales of known space. The original Dune was great, but the follow ons suck. This is inevitable in SF, because eventually your suspension of disbelief crashes to earth in an extended series. Heinlein and Asimov are much too mechanical for me.

Had to get all the way to the end before someone mentioned Ursula LeGuin? Geez. Add The Dispossessed to that list.

And Harlan Ellison's works fit as well. "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" will never, ever leave my memory.

By Wolfe's definition, most of what I've read that was classified as Literature, wasn't. Of course, maybe I'm just an un-educated dolt.

Harmon wrote:
I'm still waiting for some specific suggestions of any SF/F that improves on rereading - certainly, that's a minimum requirement for "LM," isn't it?"

I have read all of these books more than once (some of them many times) and I've found all of them to improve with each rereading.

The Diamond Age and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (as well as Cryptonomicon, though it's status as SF is debatable)
The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons
2001 by Arthur C. Clarke

If you include Fantasy as in addition to SF:
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (of course)
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susana Clarke

If you include other media besides novels:
Ghost in the Shell by Masamune Shirow

How about Ursala K. LeGuin? Her book, the Left Hand of Darkness, is a classic/

Anyway, when I was a English Lit undergrad at the University of Buffalo, I took a class in Science Fiction from the great Leslie Fiedler. I had no interest in the genre, but I always wanted to take a class from him. That was a very smart decision! He made the entire genre seem very vital and important, putting it in its place in american history especially.

Was it literature? The assumption was that it was every bit important a genre as any other, and more so, that's it's basically (with few exceptions) an American genre that we can claim as our own. I learned more from that one class than most of my other classes combined.

It's too bad Fiedler never wrote a book about Science Fiction as an literature -- if he did, we wouldn't even have this debate.

(And I notice that there are almost no people arguing that it isn't. Is that because those people just didn't want to come to this topic? Or that we all agree it IS literature?)

The ironic thing is that MLA members have long since abandoned the idea that there is a canon of literature any objective method for deciding which texts should be deemed canonical. The professoriate is no longer willing to declare one text better than another. A true disciple of literary theory would dismiss this entire conversation as meaningless.

That said I favor the I know it when I see it test. And waiting a very long time for judgment to ripen. A hundred years is a very brief time. My grandfather who was born in 1893 was alive then, and I knew him well. The last confederate widow is still alive.

Consider the following, an evaluation of Shakespeare by another genius of English Literature, David Hume David Hume (1711-1776):

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN, born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction, either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy: If represented as a POET, capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret, that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionate scenes intermixed with them; and at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties, on account of their being surrounded with such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a singular character, he frequently hits, as it were by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot, for any time, uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions, as well as descriptions, abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect; yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse, than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way, only by intervals, to the irradiations of genius. A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but, he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts.m And there may even remain a suspicion, that we over-rate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic, on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.

Hume wrote in the middle of the 18th century a mere century and and a half after Shakespeare. Two and a half centuries further down the road I don't think that any contemporary critic would be so harsh. Lots of time must pass.

He's not technically SciFi, but I've gotta throw Lovecraft in here.

As a recovering English major, I have no idea how to make a distinction between "literature" and everything else. In all of my English classes, I never once read a book by Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, or John Fowles...three of my favorite authors.

Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Ursula LeGuin, the Left Hand of Darkness
Zelazny, Lord of Light and Nine Princes in Amber (first Amber book)
Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (Slaughterhouse-5 is fantasy)
Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Robert Silverberg, The Man in the Maze
John Varley, The Ophiuchi Hotline

All of the foregoing are literate, literary, and literature.

Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981).

Technically speaking, perhaps only one of the "four books" comprising the novel counts as science fiction.

What I can say with certainty is this: unlike any other work of science fiction I can think of off the top of my head, Lanark clearly fits the bill as a literary masterpiece in that it is beautifully, powerfully written, with a style, grace and wit that separates it from other works of science fiction that may be easily dismissed as "genre" works.

If you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

Gray's other work is interesting and vastly entertaining, but it simply cannot compare to the the opus of imagination and style that is Lanark.

Watchmen and Canticle for Leibowitz are, in my mind, guarantees.

But beyond that, I just don't know. Stranger in a Strange Land may have, at the time, been important, but as a youngin', the book's concepts of moral relativism and scientific scepticism are so accepted nowadays that I found myself bored by the pedantic questioning of "what is moral" and "what do we know". Besides, it is so libertarian that I never think it will get a fair shake.

Dick? The problem I have with Dick is that frequently his literary material and his intellectually interesting material do not collide. High Castle is literary, but not really intellectually interesting (that, or Niven's All the Myriad Ways has firmly cemented just how nightmarish divergent timelines are as a reality). Whereas one of my favorites, The Game Players of Titan, is utterly not good literature, but is intellectually stimulating to me: take the fake human replicants from Blade Runner (film). Now square it by giving them false memories, so they don't know they're not human (Androids, Total Recall). Now square that by making them (and real humans) telepathic: the fake humans not only don't know they're not human, but can't even think it subconsciously!

Stephenson's Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon I consider both woefully underrated, but I don't know if they should count as literature (or even Sci-Fi, in the case of Cryptonomicon). Diamond Age is embarassing in parts, like having to explicitly point out that India may be an economic force to be reckoned with in the future - gee, really. Plus Diamond Age ends just when it is about to get really interesting: non-westerners obtain technology that can be used by peasant to mandarin to create anything from food to nukes - can the rest of the world really allow global stability/survival based on the assumption that over a billion people will all behave for all time?

Re: An historical aside: most of the major Greco-Roman scientific and mathematic texts were preserved for posterity by Arabic scholars--not by medieval Christian monks. But this is fiction, and it's not clear whether Miller is trying to replicate Church history as it was or as he felt it should have been.)

Well, there were very few scientific or mathematical works written in Latin in antiquity: the Romans simply did not go in for theoretical science. The main exceptions are treatises on geography or medicine, practical matters both. Most ancient scientific works were in Greek, and in the Middle Ages knowledge of Greek was rare in the West, even at the highest levels of the Church, one reason why the Roman Church and the Byzantine Church ended up splitting: they quite literally could not communicate. It was actually the (Greek) Byzantines who preserved the Greek science of antiquity, and the Arabs fell to some of this trove by reason of their conquest of Byzantine territory. Translated first into Arabic, they were eventually transmited to western Europe and translated into Latin via Spain. In the later Renaissance, when knowledghe of Greek became common among the educated, the Byzantine originals were also rediscovered in the West, a process hastened by the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the flight of many Byzantine scholars to Italy.

Re: Any or all of these might be considered bad literature by some people (not me), but any reasonable definition of "literature" has to include the possibility that some of it is bad.

LOL. And even some "great" literature can be pretty bad. In this category I would put much of what was written in the late 18th centurty, even by geniuses, is unbearably emotional and histrionic: Goethe's Werther and even Faust, anything by Mme de Stael, etc. Jane Austen actually stands out in the time period because her pedestrian style is so restrained and doesn't scream at the reader.

Re: According to that definition, Sci Fi is always based on the laws of the universe as we know them now

That leaves out a lot of scifi: even Star Trek doesn't qualify since there is no known way to travel faster than light.

Re; Dune probably still falls into Sci Fi because, while it contains some creatures and technology that we may not be familiar with, I don't think any of it defied the laws of science as we understand them.

FTL travel, all that psychic Bene Gesserit stuff, etc.




And on the subject of fantasy/sci Fi: much of the world's pre-19th century literature, from Gil-gamesh and Homer down through Dante and Shakespeare (ghosts, magic potions, witches etc.) and so one through Voltaire and Goethe, was pretty "fantastic". The notion that literature should be about mundane reality was a 19th century invention.

Anything by Brian Aldiss is well-written.
Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee.
Jack Vance is sf's only true stylist. Try The Moon Moth, The Last Castle and The Dragon Masters.
Iain Banks' novels about The Culture are impressive. You might like Use of Weapons (with a nasty little surprise at the end) or Look to Windward.

Besides, it is so libertarian that I never think it will get a fair shake.

I think the word you were searching for was 'libertine'.
It is the convergence of these two words which is quite rightly and unfortunately dooming libertarianism politically.

Jack Vance is sf's only true stylist.

Although the styles and genres are utterly different the way he slips around in the language like a seal in the water reminds me of Wodehouse. Try and find a short story of his called "Noise" in an anthology called 'Deep Space'. A brief little masterpiece.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The fact that Kubrick's film made such an impact allowed some people to forget how equally brilliant the source novel was.

And Harlan Ellison's works fit as well. "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" will never, ever leave my memory.

That story was brutal, as bleak in its way as "1984."

Silverberg's Majipoor Chronicles were an interesting exercise in storytelling, but nothing more and definitely not literature.

I agree with much of the above, but for reiteration:

Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow, Against the Day (read his 1984 Luddite article to see pynchon's affinity for SciFi)

I cannot believe you've already finished Against the Day, unless you are his editor.

Following up on others, I wanted to include Vinge. I adore him. But I don't think he's quite there yet. Deepness in the Sky was a great book, but still missing something in the prose.

Neal Stephenson is similar, for different reasons. Rolicking fun reads, but his sense of plot and inability to actually end a book with a meaningful conclusion are awful. Structure matters, and I think he either doesn't get that or is somewhat lazy. (And, honestly, I think a good editor could have turned the last three books into a single volume to great effect - somewhere around the frog collecting and dog vivisection, I started having serious doubts about coherency. And then it got worse.)

Take a gander at the December 28 entry at First Things for a commentary on this discussion.

Someone's already mentioned William Gibson (not to be confused with the Miracle Worker playwright). His last two novels, All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition are examples of the kind of attention to language that I would consider "literary."

Cheers.

jj actually recommended "at swim two birds" and not 'ttp'. my bad

Readers will be interested to know that the Library of America will issue in June 2007 a volume containing four of Philip K. Dick's novels: The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Ubik. This is the first volume of science fiction to be included in the prestigious, well-produced and reasonably priced series (available at Amazon), which now numbers nearly 180 volumes, including a collection of stories by H.P. Lovecraft issued a couple of years ago.

I cannot believe you've already finished Against the Day, unless you are his editor.

It's actually much quicker to read than Gravity's Rainbow or Mason &Dixon and very very good. I love Pynchons scientific/metaphoric language.

Two other comments:

1. I forgot Harlan Ellison, though a couple of poeple brought him up. I'm partial to The Deathbird and Repent Harlequin said the Ticktock man.

2. It might be helpful to differentiate. A number of writers in the SciFi ghetto reject the term SciFi, and prefer "speculative fiction." This allows Fantasy and scifi to coexist since the are about 'speculative' worlds. It also captures the continuium better. The Man in the High Castle would hardly rate as SciFi, since there are no scientific elements in the book. The Deathbird rewrites Genesis turning God (more of a Samael god) and the serpent into aliens. It really has nothing to do with Science (aliens aren't relly science, are they?)

Those two examples might lean towards fantasy while Asimov tents towards more "hard" SciFi. Another distiction might be between "genre" SciFi and fiction with speculative/scientific elements. For that distinction I'll go back to Pynchon. Few in the SciFi community claim him as one of their own, while they are all over PK Dick to show the depth possible in their ghetto (once termed the 'golden ghetto.') Partially because Pynchon didn't come up publishing in their publishing houses. His short stories were never published in Amazing or similar publications, while that is exactly what PK Dick did.

Conversely, the general literary world has had a hard time accepting Dick becasue he came from SciFi. In terms of style, Dick, Zelazny, and all of SciFi's children do tend to stay closer to the genere conventions. Dick broke out a few time; Valis, TM of TA, Scanner Darkly, but even Palmer Eldritch, f***ed up as it is, still feels lik a SciFi novel.

I think Vonnegut was able to break out of the SciFi world, and into the genereal literary world becasue stylisticaly most of his novels shed the conventions of SciFi and embrace an entirely unique style.

Perhaps the point of this rant is to point out that this question is ultimately problematic because where do we draw the boundarys? If we limit it to "genre" SciFi, you find few authors that push their genre's literary conventions. (Think Dune here, great story, complex ideas and characters, told in a way that is very conventional.) On the other hand if you open it up to SpecFic as Ellison would like, then we could throw an awful lot in there--In that case I'd also add Salman Rushdie and others.

Any use definition of literature needs to be independent of individual preference.

Sorry, that should be "Any useful definition of literature..."

Also, "... as part of their curricula in order for that example to qualify as literature."

I should have previewed and edited myself... :p

I find it amusing that several people mentioned the work of Samuel delany without noting that his criticism would reject the very question that started this thread. It has to do with the late 19th-century shift of the word "literature" from primarily a verb (something a writer does) to primarily a noun (the product of a writer), the exponential increase in the volume of writing published leading to the necessity of creating such categories, and the codification of these categories through criticism.

If the question is "In 200 years, if people ARE still reading, and still reading, studying and rereading Melville, Austen, Shakespeare and Thoreau, will some of the works considered important from the late 20th century be works that publishers now unambiguously label science fiction, then the answer is probably yes. I think it's highly likely that a few works by Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Gene Wolfe, Tom Disch and a handful of others will hold up better in the long run than the works of Donald Barthelme, Stanley Elkin, Margaret Atwood, Francine Prose and John Updike.

Which ones? We can't say. But if I were making a time capsule, I'd certainly include the following, strongly suspecting that at least one of them would be familiar 200 years from now:
Delany's Neveryon cycle and "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand"
Butler's Lilith's Brood cycle and Parable diptych
LeGuin's "Left Hand of Darkness"
Disch's story "Descending"
Miller's "Canticle for Liebowitz"
and maybe Bester's "The Stars My Destination."