8 Dated Science Fiction Novels That Are Still Essential Reading

The Foundation series, by Isaac Asimov
Mind-blowingly complex, brimming with ideas, and one of the true classics of any era of science fiction, Asimov’s Foundation series often feels incredibly old-fashioned. Although the scale of information dealt with is immense (the plot concerns the preservation of the sum total of human knowledge through a technological Dark Age), it’s somehow all stored on microfilm, and computers are basically depicted as larger versions of the 1950s-era machines Asimov was familiar with. While some of this is distracting to the modern reader, the sheer scale and imagination involved in creating a galactic civilization in decline and tracing its fate over the course of millennia remains an incredible feat of storytelling. Ignore the occasional mentions of printed newspapers and focus instead on the world-class world-building.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Poor William Gibson; once considered one of the most prescient writers in science fiction, today he’s often remembered for being the guy who thought three megabytes of “hot ram” was going to be a significant amount of computer memory in a future dystopia. In fact, Neuromancer is a dizzying collection of incredibly accurate predictions (he basically described the modern Internet in 1984) to the sadly outdated (the famous first line of the book refers to a technological trait of televisions that people born in the last twenty years are probably unfamiliar with). Still, there’s so much he got right, and such great storytelling, that it’s well worth your time to push past the rusty bits.

Synners, by Pat Cadigan
Alongside Gibson, Cadigan proves the near-future cyberpunk is always going to hit a few potholes a couple decades down the road. She, too, gets a lot of the details right as she builds a dystopia in which people escape a diseased, depressing world via brain implants that allow them to experience the dreams and desires of others. Cars have the equivalent of GPS locators. There’s a sort of proto-social network called the “dataline” that reads an awful lot like Facebook (to the point that data is being tailored and monetized). There’s even a sly reference to legalized same-sex marriage. And yet: there are only landline telephones, the emphasis on virtual reality recalls overhyped “entertainment of the future” thinkpieces from the early ’90s, and, most amusingly, when characters do interact with the dataline, they do so via printing it out on paper, a detail that made me chuckle in the middle of an otherwise gripping novel that has lost none of its narrative drive or subversive edge.

Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
Put simply, no one ever read Heinlein’s classic novel for its technological predictions. Which is good, because Heinlein wasn’t good at it. In a story that starts off about a human baby born on Mars and raised by Martians who must then return to Earth, Heinlein’s futuristic society uses typewriters and magnetic tapes for data storage. These and a dozen other minor eccentricities mark this as a manuscript written a long, long time ago (originally conceived in the late 1940s, it was published in 1962). But who cares, because this is a book of ideas—about culture, politics, religion, and humanity itself. With a profound influence on culture that continues to this day, no one may completely grok everything this book has to say, but it’s well worth ignoring the typewriters in order to try.

The Oxford Time Travel series, by Connie Willis (specifically Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog)
Every time Willis visits her Oxford time travel universe, in which university professors from the 2050s travel to the past to research significant historical periods, she wins an armful of awards, and it’s no mystery why: exhaustively researched, propelled by cliffhanger plotting, and populated by characters so lovable you want to pull them off the page and hug them, they’re some of the genre’s best comfort reads, even when they’re dealing with, er, death-by-disease on a truly grand scale. And this is true even though gigantic portions of the future-set plots tend to have to do with miscommunication, missed connections, and the inability to locate the right person with the right bit of information to move the plot along, circumstances that, in nearly every instance, could be cleared right up with the simple addition of a cell phone (or even voicemail). It gets to the point where you really start to wonder why they apparently don’t exist. Willis added an explanation of sorts to a later entry, Blackout, but the real answer seems to be that when she wrote Doomsday Book in the very early 1990s, cell phones were way less ubiquitous than they are today, and who could have imagined.

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson is a smart, subtle writer who is normally way ahead of the curve when it comes to fictional science. In fact, he was well ahead of the curve in 1992 when Snow Crash was published, as the Metaverse he depicts is basically Second Life with a slight graphics upgrade. And yet, the Metaverse has aged pretty poorly, and can be lumped in with other debacles of “virtual reality” that were imagined to be the way us Future Humans would primarily interact online (the nadir of which remains, forever, the VR scene from the film Disclosure). But as usual with a Stephenson book, there are ten ideas that work for every one that has rusted with age, and the sheer brilliance of his world-building alone makes it well-worth seeking out.

Player Piano, by Kurt Vonnegut
No one has ever held Vonnegut up to a high standard of realism or science fictional imagination, but that doesn’t make the obsolete technology any less distracting, especially when it’s at the center of the story. 1952’s Player Piano is the story of a future where society has been degraded by the total mechanization of life, and it’s riddled with outdated ideas, most notably a “super computer” so large it requires an immense underground cavern to house it. In the early 1950s, this was a forgivable extrapolation of computer technology, but it doesn’t matter: written with style and panache typical of Vonnegut, the novel still has something to say about society and human nature even 60 years later, and it’s well worth pushing past the stale technological predictions.

The Silver Metal Lover, by Tanith Lee
There’s a lot that’s still futuristic about this wonderful coming-of-age novel from the legendary Tanith Lee, who passed away earlier this year. Most obviously, it is a story about a spoiled teenage rich girl named Jane who falls in love with a sentient robot. Moreover, its environmentally ravaged Earth (though caused by an atmospheric impact with a giant comet) and radical inequality (the wealthy literally live in floating mansions) still feel disturbingly prescient. But something about the world is also very of-its-time (specifically, the late ’70s/early ’80s): Jane is constantly calling her mother on landlines; a huge plot development hinges upon a planted tracking device far less efficient than the GPS locator in your phone, but which the characters treat as some sort of brilliant innovation; and the ending tilts toward sentimental spirituality when most authors writing today would go in a far more concretely SFnal direction. And yet, it doesn’t matter a bit, as this tale of star-cross’d lovers is just as likely to reduce you to a pool of tears as another doomed romance that could have been saved by one simple text message (“romeo – im not rly ded. <3 ;)” – j).
What dated SF do you still love?