For clarity

[feuervogel]

Because the internet lacks a sarcasm tag, and we haven't invented a punctuation mark to denote it, all the authors I listed yesterday as "not actually science fiction" was sarcasm.

I'm currently reading one of Drake's RCN novels, which are based on the same source material (a Napoleonic-era British sailor's diary) as O'Brian's Aubrey & Maturin books (Master and Commander, ff). O'Brian set his in the Age of Sail; Drake set his in a distant future where people have colonized space.

Drake's Hammer's Slammers novels are not-very-loosely based on his time serving in Vietnam, and set in a future where people have colonized space (and hire mercenaries to fight their battles for them). (If you like gritty military SF and you haven't read these, the first collection is excellent.)

Bujold's Vor of Barrayar are based on the imperial Prussians (with some influence of Czarist Russia), with purposeful similarities to Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey stories and the occasional reference to Georgette Heyer (especially A Civil Campaign).

Cherryh's Foreigner books aren't specifically based on real Earth history, as far as I know, but the parallel between clueless humans (presumably white people) stumbling into more complicated alien politics than they thought and colonialist Europeans drawing borders in Africa and central Asia that ignored the existing people's affiliations is there, even if you don't squint too hard.

Her Alliance-Union books are, like much space opera, the Age of Sail in space, with long journeys between various human establishments (be they colonies on stations or on planets), trade, pirates, a too-powerful Earth Company (a la the East India Company), politics, rabble, and the like.

LeGuin's books are generally anthropological in nature, especially the Hainish ones. The concept there is that the Hain seeded the universe with people, and they left them to develop/evolve under different conditions. Eventually, some group of them discovers space flight (or the Hain teach them? I'm not sure), and they go from planet to planet to observe the natives and eventually ask them to join their league of worlds (the Ekumen). They're quite brilliant.

And these are all science fiction, regardless of what some purist genre-snob thinks.

Comments

[matt_doyle]

For the record, I got the sarcasm. :-)

[feuervogel]

Yay :)

Though I realized when I was writing this entry this morning that I'd meant to include a "LeGuin may as well write anthropological stories about, like, Native Americans or something," since her father was a big anthropologist working in the Americas, after all.

[a-nightengale.livejournal.com]

As did I. :)

[feuervogel]

I hoped you, at least, would. You guys publish half those writers ;)

[warpig1979.livejournal.com]

Nerd-dendum: Drake's stories are also as often as not riffs on history and/or classical literature - he's done stuff inspired by the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Tet Offensive, the Norse Eddas, the Nika Insurrection, the life of Walter Raleigh, the Roman invasion of Parthia, and Ethan Allen's attack on Fort Ticonderoga.

Actually I think he's done the life of General Belisarius like three different times.