Why Modern SF Writers Should Read Sir Fred Hoyle's SF

[james_davis_nicoll]

From a FLed post of mine:

I can't recall if I did my canned "why modern SF writers should go look at Sir Fred's SF" rant at Farthing but I meant to.

Although the science is often dated (or in the case of Into Deepest Space, hopelessly incorrect to begin with) and his prose often clunky, Hoyle had some strengths of the sort I think can be lifted seamlessly by modern authors. He didn't feel the need to make the universes that his characters lived in comfortable or humanocentric, which gives a wonderful sense of scale in a number of them.

In those books where humans share a universe with other intelligences, we are never at the top of the scale. Compared to the Black Cloud, our entire planet's ecosystem is almost insignificant save as a curiousity. In Into Deepest Space, we are galactic pests, on the level of kudzu or purple loosestrife, and certainly not comparable to the Yela (who in turn are eclipsed by more advanced species of a nature quite foreign to us). In Inferno, there are benevolent beings of tremendous power but communication is never attempted and might well be pointless.

I would probably avoid particular style of infodump that he used in at least one book. I like my hard science fiction but a page of mathematics may not be the best way to clue the reader in as to what is happened.

I am open to suggestions for other minor SF authors who can be useful ore for modern writers.

Comments

[scentofviolets.livejournal.com]

Emphatically disagree. A couple of those authors you list have been dead to me for years (not a hard thing to be, actually.) True, he's not to everyone's taste. But, there's this ill-definable something about certain books or certain writers, a certain kind of mood or atmosphere if you will, that I find enormously appealing. Hoyle's got it, in spades.