It just struck me how few first person narratives there are amongst the sci-fi books on my shelves. There's the psion series by joan d vinge and the hooded swan series by brian stableford, but almost all the others are told in the third person.

First person also seems to be a style that writers dabble in when they're young, then give up when they realise the limitations. I have a copy of wave without a shore, possibly C.J Cherryh's strangest work, but I'm still rather fond of it.

Any examples of sci-fi where the first person narrative really works?

The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake, both excellent novels by Margaret Atwood.

The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison was lots of fun.

Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan was a pretty good cyberpunk detective novel. The first person narration played an important role in communicating the experience of having your mind transferred to different bodies.

Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer is told in three parts, each from a different point of view: Nicholas - first person, Nicola - the second person, and Shadrach - the third person. This works very well in defining the psychology of the characters (i.e. here the first person = self absorbed).

Message edited by its author, May 1, 2009, 8:56am.

There are more than you would first think.

Jumper by Steven Gould works at getting you into the kid's head and really romps along.

The Left Hand of Darkness by LeGuin is excellent at putting you in the position as an observer of a new culture.

Grey by Jon Armstrong is hilarious, putting you in the viewpoint of a vapid, fashion obsessed playboy who doesn't seem to get the significance of anything that's going on around him other than how it accents his outfit.

The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe probably uses first person to the best effect I've ever seen. If you want to know what's going on you are forced to read around Severian's view. Lots of work for the reader, maybe not to everyone's taste. Wolfe is a master of using the first person as a negative space, leaving the real story to be implied in what the character doesn't see, or doesn't realize he is seeing. The Fifth Head of Cerberus is an excellent example, and Peace (though it's not sf) is his best example of this, period.

Other great uses of first person off the top of my head, I know there are more.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Roadside Picnic by Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky
The Artificial Kid by Bruce Sterling
A Specter is Haunting Texas by Fritz Leiber
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany

Perhaps not "great", but definitely in the first person, and I enjoyed them, back in the day;

Farmer in the Sky and The Door into Summer by Heinlein.

Perhaps a "dabble in" when he was young(er) as puddleshark suggested.

Oh and another that I just thought of, Becoming Alien, Being Alien, and Human to Human. Good series.

Tik-Tok by John Sladek is the autobiography of a robot. I remember little of it, but I don't think I enjoyed it.

Old Man's War, The Last Colony and Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi. (The Ghost Brigades was in third-person.) Parts of Ilium by Dan Simmons were told in first-person. Also Julian May's Rampart Worlds series - Perseus Spur et al.

Stanislaw Lem's short stories about Ijon Tichy (The Star Diaries, Memoirs of a Space Traveller, The Futurological Congress) are also told in first-person, although Tichy is mainly operating as a dispassionate observer.

Oh yes! H.G. Wells' stories. =)

Message edited by its author, May 1, 2009, 7:01pm.

#4 There ARE more than I thought. Particularly since I own several of the books mentioned above. (That's the peril of double-stacked bookshelves - you forget what's lurking behind the more recent titles stacked at the front).

Heinlein did most of his stuff first person in the later part of his career:

Friday
The Cat who Walks Through Walls
To Sail Beyond the Sunset

There's also the (execrable) Number of the Beast, which is told in 1st person by each of four main characters in alternating chapters.

Message edited by its author, May 2, 2009, 8:02am.

There's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, also by Heinlein. A Clockwork Orange makes excellent use of first person narrative, but some might not call that science fiction.

Some of Octavia E. Butler's works are in 1st person.
A few that come to mind are:
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
Kindred
Fledgling

Any of you read a sustained work narrated in second person? The only one I can think of is the WWII classic Beach Red.

Grendel is written in first person present which makes it very interesting, especially when Grendel's superior physical skills are not able to defeat the humans who are capable of not only thinking in the present, but can plan and carry out those plans in the future. No wonder Grendel thinks the bard is his most important enemy, the bard paints the future from the past. Grendel is firmly stuck in the present. I thought this book was a tour de force in tackling a very difficult style. However, it is quite short, so keeping this conceit up over an extended length must be nearly impossible to write and difficult to read. It is so different from the way our brains work.

Sarah Monette's excellent Doctrine of Labrynths series is told in rotating first person, which makes it more interesting than most Fantasy novels I have read, from my point of view. Definitely not SF, though.

I'll add Islands in the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke

#13 Molly Zero is 2nd person.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is first person. Eastern Standard Tribe and Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom are as well I think.
The Heritage by Will Ashon is first person.

To be honest it isn't something I find particularly memorable.

I love Eastern Standard Tribe and Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom! Must have missed Little Brother when it came out - how is it?

Well fairly simplistic but then it is a YA novel but it didn't half crack along when it got going. Also I was pretty familiar with all the techno-geekery so that obviously didn't impact me the same way as someone who wasn't familiar with that.

Little Brother is still available in the shops (and is on the Hugo shortlist this year) and also available for free in ebook form on Cory's website.

Most of Barry Malzberg's books are in 1st person, sometimes in present tense, and a couple others are 3rd person only because the teller suffers from a dissociative disorder. He did some short stories in 2nd person but not novels that I could see.

Strong agreement with ogodei in #4 on the excellence of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun as a first-person narrative. The narrator is unreliable, so we have to work a bit to figure out what's really going on. My theory is that Wolfe is teaching us how to read carefully.

One of my favorite short stories, also by Wolfe, is told in the second person: "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories," the leadoff in his collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories.

#13

To betray my ignorance, what is the second person perspective?

You read a book and you're the protagonist so the narrative uses "you" and "yours", etc.

#22

First person is "I went to the zoo".
Second person is "You went to the zoo".
Third person is "rojse went to the zoo". or (he / she / it / they) went to the zoo.

13: Bright Lights, Big City is written in the second person.

There are a fair amount of Roger Zelazny works in first person, My Name is Legion, Doorway in the Sand, the whole Amber series. Probably more.

Message edited by its author, May 4, 2009, 4:42pm.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross
In the Garden of Iden by Kage Baker

Also, Connie Willis almost always writes in first person.

Crashcourse, Clipjoint, and Psykosis by Wilhelmina Baird are all told in first person.

Archform: Beauty by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. is told in first-person by five different people. That takes a little getting used to.

#13

I was thinking about your second person narrative problem, Geneg, and then I remembered the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series of books. It's always "you" as the star in those books, whether it be fighting aliens or as an olympic athelete.

It's probably not the answer you were after, but I remember some of those were quite fun when I was a teen.

I used to love "Choose You Own Adventure" books! I kind of wish they wrote them for adults. There are a few, but they're generally of the 'erotic' variety.

#30>I've never heard of such a thing!

First person is common enough to be entirely unremarkable, so I certainly couldn't come up with a list -- it doesn't really register.

Second person, OTOH, is still quite rare. The only recent examples I can think of are Halting State by Charles Stross (second-person with multiple POV, which is quite an accomplishment) and The Gospel of the Knife by Will Shetterly. There's also a short story in one of Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Starlight anthologies -- #2, I think -- but I don't remember the title.

I'm currently reading Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. It's largely second-person, in a way that manages to be unobtrusive.

Not SF, but fun brain candy.

Message edited by its author, May 6, 2009, 5:34pm.