Hi folks - my first post to this high quality discussion board...

The "What Else Do We Reading" thread was great, and it made me wonder: who else do you think constructs alternative or future worlds most convincingly?

When first reading Neuromancer back in 1990, the completeness of the Sprawl world was, initially, what fascinated me most about Gibson's writing. Moreover, so many SF/Fantasy or even "serious" writers (e.g., Vonnegut) feel compelled to describe how everything in their world works and how it got to be that way. By and large, Gibson lets the reader figure out the technology, geopolitical history, etc., from the point of view of his characters.

I guess that's just one way of doing it; certainly a lot of other great writers created fascinating worlds that *did* require a lot of exposition. But I'm getting off-topic in my own post.

So, here's a couple candidates for Best Alternative World to get the ball rolling: I would say that Pullman's "His Dark Materials" are great for their synthesis of alternative history and their semi-serious mixing of physics and theological apology. Dune, of course, is a great far-future world. King's Dark Tower series is a pretty compelling alternative/future world as well. I guess I'd give a nod to Stanely Kim Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

So, these are all easy and mainstream candidates but with few of the under the radar authors mentioned in the other threads. Who else would you folks recommend?

As far as what I'd call "Good" future worlds, I find Sterling to be one of the best. That's about it, though. Most hard sci-fi ignores society and most social sci-fi is so involved in a single train of thought that it ignores the vast effects of technologies on humanity. Gibson and Sterling are, IMO, the best as far as melding society and technology and understanding that the two are inherently intertwined.

I'd really recommend Sterling's Schismatrix, though his strength is really in his short stories.

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Most hard sci-fi ignores society and most social sci-fi is so involved in a single train of thought that it ignores the vast effects of technologies on humanity.

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Very well put.

Sterling is certainly quite adept at creating convincing worlds. But - and I'm probably going to going to SF hell for this - I'm not a big Sterling fan. I guess I put him in the same catagory as P.K. Dick: Amazing ideas, spotty execution.

Yeah, I'm going to SF hell for sure.

...has such a depth, a wealth of texture and background for the story that it feels more like an anthropological text that a sci-fi story... in a good way, that's it. Other works from him such as "The Last Castle" really got me immersed in alternate universes that felt perfectly pausible... just a little to the side of this reality.

Great "alternate" world, very real, complete with
cholera outbreaks and all the ugly bits other writers ignore.
The Manhattan scenes are better than "Gangs of New York".

The best scene in The Difference Engine (in my opinion) was the discussion with the members of the Manhattan commune. The commune people say that everything is shared equally among all the people in the commune. The protagonist points to a black man and asks "Him, too?" and the commune member replies, "yes, he belongs to everybody as well"

For some reason, the juxtaposition of communism and slavery really hit home to me. That was something that I never really realized....that if steps hadn't been taken to make slavery into a socially unacceptable practice, even the ultra-left would still be treating them as property.

Lesson 1: The liberals are a bunch of hypocrites.

Lesson 2: They're no worse than the conservatives.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. Set across multiple generations of info geeks. Conflict, heroes and villains. Neat words. Somehow, still fits with WG works, PR in particular.

Spike's website on Ballard

You really have to read some of this man's work. Place it within the context of the time and era in which it was written and then be amazed.

start with short stories, War Fever is as good a place to start, and very timely

Besides Gibson, I'd have to add Tolkien, Ballard's 60's stuff (Drowned World etc), Zelazny's Amber series, Simmon's Hyperion series. All were total exotic immersion for me.

For really exotic, there's Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. If you haven't read it, I recommend it. It was really cool.

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By and large, Gibson lets the reader figure out the technology, geopolitical history, etc., from the point of view of his characters.

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That's an interesting comment because leaving us to connect a lot of the dots ourselves creates a much richer, internally resonant, albeit fractal, experience, as opposed to say, Proust, who gives so much minute cross referencing detail that one sometimes feels smothered by it.

I'm glad you agree...too often we let our SF writers coast simply *because* they write SF. Great ideas are just that: ideas. That is, until someone breathes life into them.

I kind of like Ron Goulart's take on things. Kind of puts the boots, in a very friendly way, to techno-fetishism while thoroughly revelling in it.