Sci Fi and Fantasy novels

[danaeris]

Stolen from multiple sources.

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you've read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

(I only bolded the ones I've read; the rest I couldn't be bothered with. I mean, I like books. I'm not very selective. I know bad reading when I read it, but that doesn't mean I won't enjoy it. You know what I mean?)

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin (does watching the TV special count?)
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Reading this list, it stood out to me that some of the books I've read on the list are books I was not even aware were considered significant. They are just books that I picked out of my father's library and I thought looked interesting. So I read them.

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

Haven't read: 14, 20, 30, 31, 36, 37, 40, 49

Currently own: 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 12, 16, 19, 22, 25, 27, 28, 38, 39, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47

I'm not sure how Terry Books makes the list...

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

Wow, go you on the reading lots of good books!

I'm guessing that they used some kind of scoring system that combined factors including not just quality of writing, or all time sales, but also influence on the genre, etc.

Brooks may have scored really well in one category and stunk in the rest, but snuck in regardless.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

*grin* I think foms has it sussed on that one... And possibly for the Rice book as well. Though the Rice also has a quality of "nifty" conceptually that probably sold a lot of her subsequent work. Readers eternally hoping that just maybe, this time, she actually wrote something that lived up to its potential.

[furious-g.livejournal.com]

Ooo nice list. I posted mine on my LJ so the good people here wouldn't have to read through it. Was surprised that I have read as many as I have. I kind of stopped reading a few years back.

[danaeris.livejournal.com]

nift. Just got around to friending you, btw. Sorry about the massive volume of posts you will now be seeing.

[furious-g.livejournal.com]

No problem, friends are good! =)

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I think it would be far easier to bold the 3 or 4 I haven't read, and italicise the 2 or 3 I didn't finish.

I guess, by there standards, I'm pretty well read in the field.

Of course, ask any 10 sf fans about the 50 most important works in the field, and you'll get 20 different lists -- if not more.

[foms.livejournal.com]

10 italicised
25 emboldened
4 notes

NOTE 15 A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
- I am at a bit of a loss as to why this is considered more important than some of her other works, which I have read.

NOTE 23 The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
- I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t hate this book. It may be important for sales reasons and for influence (which may be considered either good or bad). I have never heard anyone suggest anything other than that I avoid reading it.

NOTE 36 The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
- Given that this is a relatively recent collection (1993)(NESFA Press is providing an invaluable service to science fiction) and that when I read Cordwainer Smith, his stories were hard to come by, I can sort of say that I read part of it and stopped. The reality is that a lot of these stories were practically unavailable before 1993.

NOTE 48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
- Another book that is considered important based on sales and copy-catting. I never bothered.

NOTE 49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
- I’m really not sure whether I’ve read this of something similar or both. The summaries that I found didn’t illuminate.

Of the books on the list at which I haven’t really looked, only one strikes me as a major omission and that is Fahrenheit 451. I am ashamed.

The Covenant books

[admiralthrawn.livejournal.com]

I recommend them to a lot of people; whether you enjoy them or not depends on what you read books for.

If you read books for interesting, loveable protagonists that you can identify with or aspire to be.... Avoid it like the plague, since Covenant is a bastard. Not a tragic flawed hero or anything, he's just a bastard. And as one of his central behaviors is that he got dropped into a fantasy world and refuses to believe that it exists, it's very hard for most fantasy-readers to identify with him at all.

But if you are the type who reads fantasy for interesting worldbuilding (the history of the land is fairly unique), or for deep philosophical thinking (the discussions of belief are pretty interesting), then it is a good book.

I'd also definitely list is as Important, in a literary sense, because it helped break fantasy out of the rut of Good versus Evil black/white morality, while being set in a very black/white setting, which is an interesting trick. And it did it not through the common setup of a sympathetic antagonist (since the four primary badguys are unmitigated evil, motivated only by hatred of everything, probably including each other and possibly including self-hatred), but through the far more unusual setup of unsympathetic good-guys. The flaming good-guys brought much of the evil upon themselves, and a decent fraction of them are broken to the point of being unlikable, even beyond the protagonist. The revelation in the third book of _why_ the good guys are losing is particularly well done, and how they handle it was what made the books worthwhile for me.