We’ve got a no book review policy at Meme Therapy (conflict of interest, plentiful excellent review sites already out there) but that doesn’t preclude us from shining the ocassional spotlight on some writer’s work that could use more attention. So this week we’re covering underrated writers. These are the people whose work you love but whom none of your friends seem to have read.

My own personal pic is Peter Watts, a Canadian marine biologist who writes, hard sf with characters and settings that live on in your imagination long after you put the book down. I reccomend Starfish as a starting point, a beautifuly haunting work and its a crying shame more brits haven’t read it.

I put this question to science fiction authors Elizabeth Bear, Karl Schroeder and David Moles. I also pestered reviewer Shaun C. Green and blogger James Bloomer. Enjoy.

Oh, man. Tough question. Of all time? Critically underrated, or deserves to be read much more than presently? If the first, I don’t know: if the second, Theodore Sturgeon or Octavia Butler.

Elizabeth Bear

Tough call. I think more SF writers of my generation should read Greg Bear, particulary his short fiction, which is often extremely poeticand strange; but he’s not exactly underrated by the wider world. Alexander Jablokov, maybe. A Deeper Sea, Carve the Sky, River of Dust — it’s a tragedy that those books aren’t considered modernclassics. But I guess they’re not Slashdot enough.

David Moles

Hmmm, all the authors I have personally “discovered” over the last few years seem to be winning awards! Often I think that underrated really equates to not well known. For example the selection of UK authors that Lou Anders is publishing at Pyr. It would be hard to call them underrated, but they may have a low profile in the US. I am looking forward to The Prestige movie breaking Christopher Priest into the mainstream and hopefully sending his book sales stratospheric.

James Bloomer

I can probably think of a few, and then struggle to choose between them. M. John Harrison has been widely critically acclaimed for just about everything he’s written, and he really is astonishingly good, but he’s never achieved commercial success. I’ve no idea if he cares about that but I imagine he’d be very happy that more people were reading his work and less were reading books that he considered crap. Well, I’m looking forward to ‘Nova Swing’, the sequel to ‘Light’.

K. W. Jeter is a writer that very few people I’ve met seem to have heard of. They may recognise his name in connection with the ‘Blade Runner’ sequels, but his own novel ‘Noir‘ is easily the darkest take on cyberpunk I’ve ever read. He’s also extremely referential which is quite an odd experience; you’re reading about someone’s personality being trapped inside high-quality stereo cabling and all of a sudden someone’s quoting Tristran und Isolde or something. But while he is underrated by dint of being little-known, he’s not one of my favourite authors.

Then there’s John Clute. The only fiction of his that I’ve read is ‘Appleseed’, which I thought was great. It’s a very bizarre and alien piece of work and I can see it being difficult for many people to identify with, but as a piece of literature it’s excellent. Since it’s not an easy book, and Clute is best known by people who like extremely clever, wordy criticism of genre fiction, I think it’s likely very underrated.I could also list a few lesser-known or new writers who deal in science fiction, but I’m not sure if people who’ve thus far only published short stories or novellas at most really qualify for the question.

Shaun C. Green

That’s subjective, but there’s writers who should be more widely known. Andreas Eschbach, for instance. Look for writers who can turn the entire genre on its head–like Peter Watts, whose upcoming novel Blindsight totally demolishes the traditional first-contact novel. Nobody’s going to be able to write a first-contact novel in the future without taking Blindsight into account, just like nobody can do a Western anymore without taking “Unforgiven” into account.

It’s the fact that stuff like Blindsight is being written that makes this the true golden age of science fiction.

Karl Schroeder

That’s two mentions for Peter Watts, what does that tell you? It was his editorial that kicked off that kafuffle over Margaret Atwood a short while back. You can read more about that here (link). That’s the cover art for his upcoming book Blindsight on the right.

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