My 4 Favorite Sci-Fi Authors

Here are some of the great writers we'll explore here at this Substack this year.

A long time ago, in a lifetime not so far away, I used to write science fiction stories all the time.

From third grade through sixth grade (1992-1996), I'd often come up with tales of time travelers, cyborgs, and intergalactic adventurers. My grandest effort was a multi-book series I christened “THAW” to stand for "The Human-Alien War." It was heavily influenced by the X-Men, as was a lot of my fiction during these years. The idea of people who were different through no fault of their own, who were just born with fantastic powers, seemed to resonate with me.

I typed up stories on the family computer. I used a little typewriter my parents had given me. And I wrote by hand in spiral-bound notebooks that I still have over in the hall closet alongside journals, school papers, and my collection of colorful socks.

But that all changed in seventh grade. That was when I "accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior and committed myself to the Kingdom of Mercy." In the following two essays, I noted this stage in my writing development and how it shaped the decades to follow:

The 40 Counterculture Writers Who Most Shaped Psychedelic Zionism, Part I

The 40 Counterculture Writers Who Most Shaped Psychedelic Zionism, Part II

On those lists of authors, you'll only find a couple who wrote science fiction.

That's because, from junior high on, I felt this moral conviction that I needed to use my writing skills for bigger purposes than merely writing fun stories to offer exciting escapes and delightful diversions.

So I started writing essays about religion, politics, and other Big Ideas. It was not a complete break from fiction by any means—I would still attempt short stories, screenplays, and novels in the years to come—but these were always of secondary importance. And among my own reading, nonfiction came to dominant the book lists. I felt like there was always something real that was more important than having fun in fantasy worlds.

And now it's three decades later. I turned 41 a few weeks back. And last year I finished the drafts of my first nonfiction book (Psychedelic Zionism Rising) and an experimental novella called Thou Art Enoch, in which I made the huge mistake of attempting to tell the story of the ancient text known as The Book of Enoch. That latter project took years. It became a perpetual rabbit hole of research and one dead end after another as I tried to figure out how to tell the story sensibly. Why couldn't I have just picked something simple, like some badass hero fighting space aliens?

Well, now I can. This year we're publishing our first science fiction book, Alec Ott's Perdicion: The Other Blue Planet (now available for pre-order), and I've started writing this stuff again myself.

So to get my head back into the space, I've selected four books from some of my favorite authors to get moving again.

1. Robert Anton Wilson

I've already extolled my appreciation for RAW many times elsewhere. He's foundational for me. However, I tend to only really like him for his nonfiction work. I generally haven't really cared for his novels and even less his hyper-experimental screenplays, which were published as books, too. It's only been over the last couple years that I've pushed myself to read his Historical Illuminatus Chronicles trilogy and his Masks of the Illuminati mystery. And they're good! They're just not that great as novels. Plot, story, and character are all secondary, and they really only function as vehicles for Wilson's philosophy and ideas. So, lacking dramatic tension in a plot and not giving the reader ways to deeply empathize with a character, these books just don't pull the reader along all that intensely. They're well-written, they're innovative and cool, just not all that emotionally gripping.

And very much foremost among them is the title above, the book Wilson is most known for, which he co-wrote with fellow Playboy magazine editor Robert Shea, The Illuminatus Trilogy. This 805-page novel is notoriously challenging to read, so much so that Wilson even encouraged people to read some of his other books first. So that's what I did. I'm now finishing up Nature's God, the third book in the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and then will push myself to focus on Illuminatus itself. And I'll blog a bit about it here as I do.

Perhaps this book built on chaos-worship and anarchist philosophy infused with classic sci-fi and 1960s counterculture was just waiting for me to be ready for it. Maybe, too, the Age of the Orange Idol was the time when I really needed to read it.

The next two authors on the list have both cited RAW as an important influence on them, so they're also in this tradition, but much more accessible ... sort of:

2. Alan Moore

Alan Moore is best known by the broader public as the writer of Watchmen and V for Vendetta, both acclaimed classics of 1980s comics which were made into fantastic films in the 2000s. However, you won't find Moore's name on those movies: He insisted he not receive credit for them.

Over the decades, Moore developed the reputation as not only the greatest, most sophisticated of comic book writers, but also one of the most "difficult," understanding himself not as a choreographer of supermen in tights to entertain children, but as an artist pushing the comic medium far beyond what anyone else considered.

While I deeply appreciated and enjoyed Moore's work when I was younger, much of it just seemed too difficult and high-brow for me. Often, I just didn't get it. However, now—at 41 rather than 20—much more of it hits differently. I can understand what he was doing much better and can appreciate it with a more mature mind.

And I now possess a permanent, deep affection for Moore due to his book last year, co-written with his friend, the late Steve Moore (no relation), The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. I wrote about this book here and how, using the guidance it provides, I performed a ceremonial magick ritual in November which acted as a kind of self-exorcism, putting my PTSD symptoms into remission:

The Absurd Way I Accidentally Cured My PTSD

I've now made it a mission to collect and read Moore's entire output, with an emphasis on his work over the last 20 years, when I was largely too distracted with all this political ideology nonsense to pay proper attention. This particularly includes his shift away from comics to novels. He's written a gigantic novel called Jerusalem, and the first installment in a trilogy, The Great When: A Long London Novel. I've struggled about where to focus first with Moore's body of work, but for now, I’ve settled on his Tom Strong series, as this seems an easygoing, more accessible way to get moving.

Tom Strong is inspired by pulp sci-fi and adventure novels from the early 1900s - Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, Doc Savage, that sort of thing. Strong is a "science hero" who creates inventions with his family. He's strong and tough, but otherwise, he doesn't have any super powers beyond what he can create.

Here at Heroes of the Desert it’s this period of science fiction that especially interests me. I want to publish books and write them in this style of straight, traditional adventures. That's what I was writing as a sixth grader, and that's what I'd like to get back to now. They're fun, simple, and more commercially viable than some experimental novella rewriting an occult text from 300 BC.

This Tom Strong Compendium includes the entire series: 36 issues and over 900 pages. I'll also blog through this a bit, noting ideas, characters, and concepts that might be of interest in my writing, to our authors, and hopefully for you readers out there too.

After that, then his comics Promethea, Top 10, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—also written during this ‘00s period—will also come in for some attention. I'm not sure yet when I'll make the time to focus on Jerusalem and this Long London book. We'll see where the spirits guide me.

3. Douglas Rushkoff

I regularly extol the important writing of

Douglas Rushkoff

, most recently in this piece here talking about the reissue of his Program or Be Programmed book:

Why the Internet Made Us All Dumber and Meaner

I've also appreciated his own comic and graphic novel titles over the years. Check out Testament, ADD: Adolescent Demo Division, and his most recent one, Aleister and Adolf. However, his novels have just sat on the shelf as I've waited for the time to focus on them. And I guess that's now. I'll start with Exit Strategy, a near-future novel about corporate excess (themes covered in Rushkoff's later nonfiction works—Life Inc, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Survival of the Richest). This one includes a literary device that Wilson employed, too, particularly in the second Historical Illuminatus novel The Widow's Son. That's the use of footnotes in a novel, generally of a satirical bent. Given my nonfiction focus for years, I'm interested in applying this device in fiction.

Rushkoff published Exit Strategy in 2002. I wonder how it will read more than 20 years later, just as how Illuminatus will read 50 years later.

4. Alec J. Ott

Click here to order Perdicion: The Other Blue Planet, the first in a trilogy of sci-fi novels and the debut release from Heroes of the Desert Books, the adventure imprint of

God of the Desert Books

.

Please, please, please order a copy of Alec's novel. It's a fun, traditional science fiction adventure with some artificial intelligence themes that are prescient for the moment we're in now. As I'm taking in the sci-fi named above, I'll also have my head in Alec's books, too.

Alec has written the next two books in the series and is revising them now. As I dig into them as an editor, I'll plan to bring what I'm taking away from the three authors listed above: the social commentary and relevance of Wilson and Rushkoff, and the deployment of classic sci-fi conventions from Moore.

Finally, just one last book from authors I haven't read yet who I'll throw onto this list too of reading plans, AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future:

I've been on an AI reading binge the last few months and this is one of the titles that I came across from the library. It's a hybrid fiction-nonfiction book. It includes 10 short stories inspired by how AI might work 15 years from now, exploring how it could transform our lives. And then it features nonfiction analysis. It's a novelist and an AI-expert working in tandem. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for me, a writer who spent so many decades wandering in the nonfiction realm, rudely neglecting the science fiction writing that first taught him how to walk? Again, I'll blog a bit through this as I come across insights of use.

Now, what do you think? Who are some of your favorite sci-fi authors and what do you draw from them in your own writing? Which books should I throw into this mix too?

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