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Doris LessingAs of November 17 we have lost another of the great writers of the 20th (and the 21st, as it stands) Century, and, to my knowledge, the only SF writer (although her scope was much, much wider than that) who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Her writing included Speculative Fiction (or, as she called it, Space Fiction) in a number of approaches and settings, including the clearly SF Shikasta series, the final installment in the Children of Violence sequence (The Four-Gated City), or the magnificently titled Briefing for a Descent into Hell.

There are obituaries in many places, of course, but you might start with the BBC, the Guardian, or the New Yorker.

Some pieces published clearly show that, even in death, she was a divisive and uncompromising presence. We need more of those, not fewer...

 

Reviews of some of her books (I'm not even through with her Shikasta series yet) can be found here.

 

Peter Watts – Maelstrom

 

Thomas Pynchon – Gravity’s Rainbow

 

Sydney Padua - The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage

 

Charles Stross - The Atrocity Archives

 

Ken MacLeod - Cosmonaut Keep

 

Aliette de Bodard – In the Vanishers’ Palace

 

Doris Lessing - Shikasta

 

Somtow Sucharitkul - The Throne of Madness

 

Thomas Pynchon - Slow Learner

 

Liz Williams - Empire of Bones

 

Iain Sinclair - Radon Daughters


Andy Weir - The Martian

 

Tricia Sullivan – Occupy Me

 

S.P. Somtow – I Wake from a Dream of a Drowned Star City

 

Lavie Tidhar - Central Station

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