"22 Best Mundane Science Fiction Books" by Dan Livingston

[Lynn McGuire]

"22 Best Mundane Science Fiction Books" by Dan Livingston
https://best-sci-fi-books.com/22-best-mundane-science-fiction-books/

I have read "Flowers for Algernon", "Little Brother", "Darwin’s Radio",
"Red Mars", "The Hacker and the Ants", "Jurassic Park", "The Martian",
and "1984".

I have seen "A Clockwork Orange", "Flowers for Algernon", "Jurassic
Park", and "The Martian".

Lynn

[art...@yahoo.com]

I have read 10 of those. Does that make me mundane?

[Titus G]

I have read nine but haven't a clue what that twit DeadRock means by
"mundane",
Was Clockwork Orange Science Fiction? I don't remember so.

[Hamish Laws]

the Ludovico Technique of aversion therapy probably counts

[David Duffy]

Hamish Laws <hamis...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 9, 2021 at 2:53:26 PM UTC+11, Titus G wrote:
>> On 9/03/21 3:06 pm, art...@yahoo.com wrote:
>> > On Sunday, March 7, 2021 at 2:02:44 PM UTC-7, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> >> "22 Best Mundane Science Fiction Books" by Dan Livingston
>> >> https://best-sci-fi-books.com/22-best-mundane-science-fiction-books/
>> >>

>> >> I have read "Flowers for Algernon", "Little Brother", "Darwin???s Radio",

>> >> "Red Mars", "The Hacker and the Ants", "Jurassic Park", "The Martian",
>> >> and "1984".
>> >>
>> >> I have seen "A Clockwork Orange", "Flowers for Algernon", "Jurassic
>> >> Park", and "The Martian".
>> >
>> > I have read 10 of those. Does that make me mundane?
>> >

16.

>> I have read nine but haven't a clue what that twit DeadRock means by
>> "mundane",

???The Mundane Manifesto,??? signed by Geoff Ryman and others from the 2004 Clarion West workshop

No interstellar travel ??? travel is limited to within the solar
system and is difficult, time consuming, and expensive

No aliens unless the connection is distant, difficult, tenuous,
and expensive ??? and they have no interstellar travel either

No Martians, Venusians, etc.

No alternative universes or parallel worlds

No magic or supernatural elements

No time travel or teleportation [though they do mention _Timescape_ as a
paradigm]

from
https://sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto/

[Dorothy J Heydt]

Has that term, meaning "not a SFF fan" or, by extension, "not
SCA," gone out of use then?

--
Dorothy J. Heydt
Vallejo, California
djheydt at gmail dot com
Www.kithrup.com/~djheydt/

[David Johnston]

Then you have a hint what he means by "mundane" science fiction.

[David Johnston]

More importantly, it does depict a future Britain. It's still science
fiction even when the future doesn't contain remarkable technological
advances but mostly social changes.

[Lynn McGuire]

Exactly. Just like "Rainbow's End".
https://www.amazon.com/Rainbows-End-Novel-Foot-Future/dp/0812536363/

Lynn

[Kevrob]

There was a term for stories where the "science" content
was in fields other than the "hard sciences."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science_fiction

Sometimes the advance in the "soft sciences" is extrapolation
from current trends, which has led to good stories but often
really lousy predictions. Other times the writer invents a new
type of science - Asimov's psychohistory, for example - that,
years on, either doesn't seem likely to emerge, or not in exactly
the form posited. "Big Data" can predict a lot, but I don't think it
is up to modeling entire societies, yet.

I also think there's a permeable barrier between the techno-thriller
whose plot depends on gadgetry that's developed a bit too far
ahead of what we can do in the real world, and science fiction.
Sometimes it's a case of "spy novel w/some SF elements" vs "SF
novel with the trappings of a spy novel." I guess that might depend
on which type you can sell!

> Exactly. Just like "Rainbow's End".
> https://www.amazon.com/Rainbows-End-Novel-Foot-Future/dp/0812536363/
>

--
Kevin R
a.a #2310

[Titus G]

Thank you for that explanation of which I was completely ignorant.
BUT, I do not withdraw the twit label as his previous classifications
have been more than somewhat loose and this is probably no exception.

[Titus G]

It is so long ago that I was shocked by it, that I had forgotten it was
set in the future.

[Eric Walker]

On Tue, 09 Mar 2021 05:27:02 +0000, David Duffy wrote:

> Hamish Laws <hamis...@gmail.com> wrote:

[...]

> ???The Mundane Manifesto,??? signed by Geoff Ryman and others from the
> 2004 Clarion West workshop
>
> No interstellar travel ??? travel is limited to within the solar system
> and is difficult, time consuming, and expensive
>
> No aliens unless the connection is distant, difficult, tenuous,
> and expensive ??? and they have no interstellar travel either
>
> No Martians, Venusians, etc.
>
> No alternative universes or parallel worlds
>
> No magic or supernatural elements
>
> No time travel or teleportation [though they do mention _Timescape_ as a
> paradigm]

Well, hello again everyone: back after a dozen or so years without enough
spare time to pursue my speculative-fiction pleasures.

The so-called "Mundane Manifesto" is terribly foolish in (at least) two
ways.

First, it implicitly presumes that humankind already knows, with perfect
correctness, all there is to know, or at very most will by the day after
tomorrow if no weekend intervenes. One might think that even the
briefest look at the countless aspects of today's everyday technology
(and sociology) that would have been thought absurdly impossible nonsense
as recently as a century or two ago would constrain the arrogance of
"mundaneness", but it seems not.

Second, and really more important, the thesis ignores the basic points of
speculative fiction: first--like any fiction--to entertain; but second,
to use the special ability of speculative fiction to shape its worlds and
their conditions so as to be able to better and more narrowly focus on
examining some aspect of the human condition (what Douglas Adams so
charmingly called "Life, the Universe, and Everything"). To say that
that essential ability should be constrained by college-freshman physics
texts is absurd.

All that said, if there are those out there for whom "mundaneness" as the
"Manifesto" seems to define it, is of interest here are some further
additions to the list:


Ackroyd, Peter
First Light

Auster, Paul
In the Country of Last Things

Banks, Iain M.
The Bridge

Bester, Alfred
The Demolished Man

Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451

Brunner, John
Stand on Zanzibar
The Jagged Orbit
The Sheep Look Up
The Shockwave Rider

Chapman, Stepan
The Troika

Crowley, John
Beasts

DeMarinis, Rick
Scimitar

Disch, Thomas M.
Camp Concentration

Dowling, Terry
The "Rynosseros" Cycle [three omnibus volumes]

Grant, Richard
Views from the Oldest House
Through the Heart

Harrison, M. John
The Committed Men
Signs of Life

Jeter, K. W.
Farewell Horizontal

Lieberman, Herbert
Sandman, Sleep

Lightman, Alan
Einstein’s Dreams

McDonald, Ian
Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone

McIntyre, Vonda N.
Dreamsnake {OK, the snake's alien, but that is really immaterial]

Miéville, China **
The City and the City

Millhauser, Steven
Martin Dressler

Mills, Magnus
The Scheme For Full Employment

Read, Herbert
The Green Child

Roberts, Keith
Pavanne
The Chalk Giants

Ruff, Matt
Bad Monkeys

Silverberg, Robert
Star of Gypsies

Stableford, Brian
Biotech Revolution:
Le Fleurs du Mal / The Undead
The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future
Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution
Emortality:
[in the author’s intended reading order, not publication order]
The Cassandra Complex
Inherit the Earth
Dark Ararat
Architects of Emortality
The Fountains of Youth
The Omega Expedition
Tales of the Biotech Revolution:
Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution
Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech
Revolution
The Golden Fleece and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution
The Mind-Riders

Whitehead, Colson
The Intuitionist

Williams, Tad *
The Otherland Tetralogy:
City of Golden Shadow
River of Blue Fire
Mountain of Black Glass
Sea of Silver Light

Wolfe, Gene
The Borrowed Man Duology:
A Borrowed Man
Interlibrary Loan

Wright, Austin Tappan
Islandia



--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, webmaster
Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
greatsfandf.com/

[Robert Carnegie]

Who is "DeadRock"? If DeadRock = Dan Livingston then
I claim precedence in complaining about his use of words
regardless of their understood meaning, starting with "best".

I don't generally look now, but I see that this time,
he explicitly asserts that another meaning of "mundane"
is "boring". It isn't.

However, it may be taken to refer to the mundane
"manifesto", as described, of science fiction that only
includes scientific physical possibilities as presently
understood. But, as I say, I don't trust Dan Livingston
to mean what he says, and this is all the time that
I intend to waste on him today.

[James Nicoll]

In article <s2a5io$s1g$1...@dont-email.me>,

Eric Walker <webm...@greatsfandf.com> wrote:
>On Tue, 09 Mar 2021 05:27:02 +0000, David Duffy wrote:
>
>> Hamish Laws <hamis...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>[...]
>
>> ???The Mundane Manifesto,??? signed by Geoff Ryman and others from the
>> 2004 Clarion West workshop
>>
>> No interstellar travel ??? travel is limited to within the solar system
>> and is difficult, time consuming, and expensive
>>
>> No aliens unless the connection is distant, difficult, tenuous,
>> and expensive ??? and they have no interstellar travel either
>>
>> No Martians, Venusians, etc.
>>
>> No alternative universes or parallel worlds
>>
>> No magic or supernatural elements
>>
>> No time travel or teleportation [though they do mention _Timescape_ as a
>> paradigm]
>
>Well, hello again everyone: back after a dozen or so years without enough
>spare time to pursue my speculative-fiction pleasures.
>
>The so-called "Mundane Manifesto" is terribly foolish in (at least) two
>ways.

[snip ways and list]

As it actually played out, the Manifesto had a third flaw, which is that
its most vocal proponents were so fearfully ignorant they were incapable
of sorting SF into mundane and not mundane. For example, a go to example
of Mundane SF offered by the Mundane SF Blog was Neuromancer, but
Neuromancer has alien transmissions from Alpha Centauri.


--
My reviews can be found at http://jamesdavisnicoll.com/
My tor pieces at https://www.tor.com/author/james-davis-nicoll/
My Dreamwidth at https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/
My patreon is at https://www.patreon.com/jamesdnicoll

[Don]

Eric Walker <webm...@greatsfandf.com> wrote:

<snip>

> Well, hello again everyone: back after a dozen or so years without enough
> spare time to pursue my speculative-fiction pleasures.
>
> The so-called "Mundane Manifesto" is terribly foolish in (at least) two
> ways.
>
> First, it implicitly presumes that humankind already knows, with perfect
> correctness, all there is to know, or at very most will by the day after
> tomorrow if no weekend intervenes. One might think that even the
> briefest look at the countless aspects of today's everyday technology
> (and sociology) that would have been thought absurdly impossible nonsense
> as recently as a century or two ago would constrain the arrogance of
> "mundaneness", but it seems not.
>
> Second, and really more important, the thesis ignores the basic points of
> speculative fiction: first--like any fiction--to entertain; but second,
> to use the special ability of speculative fiction to shape its worlds and
> their conditions so as to be able to better and more narrowly focus on
> examining some aspect of the human condition (what Douglas Adams so
> charmingly called "Life, the Universe, and Everything"). To say that
> that essential ability should be constrained by college-freshman physics
> texts is absurd.
>
> All that said, if there are those out there for whom "mundaneness" as the
> "Manifesto" seems to define it, is of interest here are some further
> additions to the list:

Greetings, it's good to have you back.
Allow me to air a couple of my grievances with the list. The
purported Manifesto [1] states "The greater part of the works of Philip
K. Dick" qualify as mundane, yet the list neglects to include one single
solitary PKD.
Robin Cook's also missing. He writes hard science fiction; medical
thrillers. The fictional content found in his stories mostly pertains to
the nature of the criminal infrastructure, the criminal apparatus,
created by villains to systemically exploit health care vulnerabilities.
Cook's thrillers can serve as a preemptive clarion call to highlight
plausible criminal scenarios.
Although profit often motivates his villains, it's not always the
case. Sometimes it's about anti-social people who love to use others as
their own personal guinea pigs.

FWIW, Perry Rhodan's my primary "go to" anti-Mundane reading material.
"Anything goes" in PR.

Note.

[1] https://sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto/

Danke,

--
Don.......My cat's )\._.,--....,'``. https://crcomp.net/reviews.php
telltale tall tail /, _.. \ _\ (`._ ,.
tells tall tales.. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

[Titus G]

On 11/03/21 12:04 am, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> On Tuesday, 9 March 2021 at 03:53:26 UTC, Titus G wrote:
>> On 9/03/21 3:06 pm, art...@yahoo.com wrote:
>>> On Sunday, March 7, 2021 at 2:02:44 PM UTC-7, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>>> "22 Best Mundane Science Fiction Books" by Dan Livingston
>>>> https://best-sci-fi-books.com/22-best-mundane-science-fiction-books/
>>>>
>>>> I have read "Flowers for Algernon", "Little Brother", "Darwin’s Radio",
>>>> "Red Mars", "The Hacker and the Ants", "Jurassic Park", "The Martian",
>>>> and "1984".
>>>>
>>>> I have seen "A Clockwork Orange", "Flowers for Algernon", "Jurassic
>>>> Park", and "The Martian".
>>>
>>> I have read 10 of those. Does that make me mundane?
>>>
>> I have read nine but haven't a clue what that twit DeadRock means by
>> "mundane",
>> Was Clockwork Orange Science Fiction? I don't remember so.
>
> Who is "DeadRock"? If DeadRock = Dan Livingston then
> I claim precedence in complaining about his use of words
> regardless of their understood meaning, starting with "best".

Yes.

> I don't generally look now, but I see that this time,
> he explicitly asserts that another meaning of "mundane"
> is "boring". It isn't.

Yes. It is appropriate that Deadrock's lists are promoted here by Dimwire.

> However, it may be taken to refer to the mundane
> "manifesto", as described, of science fiction that only
> includes scientific physical possibilities as presently
> understood. But, as I say, I don't trust Dan Livingston
> to mean what he says, and this is all the time that
> I intend to waste on him today.

A lot of the traffic here is people correcting or abusing other people.
Deadrock, like Climate Change and Covid-19 denier, Dimwire, demands
correction and/or abuse.

[Titus G]

On 10/03/21 11:04 pm, Eric Walker wrote:
snip

An interesting post in an interesting thread which I have kept for
future perusal.

Perhaps I am becoming a pedantic old fart with recent posts on genre
classification and the current observation that "The Bridge" was by the
M-less Iain Banks and therefore not Science Fiction

[Robert Carnegie]

On Wednesday, 10 March 2021 at 23:54:16 UTC, Titus G wrote:
> On 11/03/21 12:04 am, Robert Carnegie wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 9 March 2021 at 03:53:26 UTC, Titus G wrote:
> >> On 9/03/21 3:06 pm, art...@yahoo.com wrote:
> >>> On Sunday, March 7, 2021 at 2:02:44 PM UTC-7, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> >>>> "22 Best Mundane Science Fiction Books" by Dan Livingston
> >>>> https://best-sci-fi-books.com/22-best-mundane-science-fiction-books/
> >>>>
> >>>> I have read "Flowers for Algernon", "Little Brother", "Darwin’s Radio",
> >>>> "Red Mars", "The Hacker and the Ants", "Jurassic Park", "The Martian",
> >>>> and "1984".
> >>>>
> >>>> I have seen "A Clockwork Orange", "Flowers for Algernon", "Jurassic
> >>>> Park", and "The Martian".
> >>>
> >>> I have read 10 of those. Does that make me mundane?
> >>>
> >> I have read nine but haven't a clue what that twit DeadRock means by
> >> "mundane",
> >> Was Clockwork Orange Science Fiction? I don't remember so.
> >
> > Who is "DeadRock"? If DeadRock = Dan Livingston then
> > I claim precedence in complaining about his use of words
> > regardless of their understood meaning, starting with "best".
>
> Yes.
>
> > I don't generally look now, but I see that this time,
> > he explicitly asserts that another meaning of "mundane"
> > is "boring". It isn't.
>
> Yes. It is appropriate that Deadrock's lists are promoted here by Dimwire.

Lynn McGuire - but only now have I realised that
"dead rock" may be your inversion of "living stone".
I live in Scotland and "David Livingstone" is one of
our famous people (from the 19th century) so it's
just a name - in fact this place name
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livingston,_West_Lothian>
although it also rhymes with the bible, 1 Peter 2: 4-6
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Epistle_of_Peter>
and we traditionally like that sort of thing.

I think that to keep track of you calling people by
different names, I'm going to need footnotes or
a conversion chart on your web page.

[Lynn McGuire]

Sorry, somebody else is doing the deadrock thing. I call Dan Livingston
by his given name, Dan Livingston.

And Titus G. calls me dimwire which is I why I block his postings. Life
is too short to deal with people like Titus.

Lynn