Significant SF

Everybody and their brother is doing the "which Significant SF books have you read?" thing today, so I might as well play along. The list is below, and just because I'm lazy, I've opted to strike out the ones I haven't read, rather than bolding the ones I have. It's less typing that way.

There are two things about this that are sort of striking: First, that while I may be the only ScienceBlogs person who regularly attends SF conventions, and yet, I've read fewer of these books than most of the other people who have responded. Second, that there really aren't any books on the unread list that I feel all that bad about not reading. I have a copy of Dhalgren, and I read enough of it to know that I don't care to finish it, and I may get to Cities in Flight one of these days, but really, I'm just not going to lose any sleep over not having read Starship Troopers, when there's so much new stuff that I'm sure I'll like better.

Life is just too short, you know?

Anyway, the list:

  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
  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
Tags

More like this

I guess they're being a bit loose with the "S" in SF if LotR/Silmarillion/Mists of Avalon and the like are on the list.

By Tom Renbarger (not verified) on 11 Mar 2007 #permalink

Right, after tracking down the original list, I see that it's SF/Fantasy. No worries, then.

By Tom Renbarger (not verified) on 11 Mar 2007 #permalink

You should consider reading Cordwainer Smith. His fiction is very unique. "Rediscovery of Man" is a collection of short stories, too; if you don't like the first few, no problem in not finishing.

By Ambitwistor (not verified) on 12 Mar 2007 #permalink

You probably would either like or be infuriated by Timescape. One of the things I liked about was that, on top of a decent plot and sense-of-wonder, it had what seemed to me like a reasonable depiction of the life of an experimental physicist. Like your laboratory blogs, it made me excited and curious about experimental details.

I concur that Benford's "Timescpae" is probably the unread one on your list that you would most enjoy, though the "spindizzy" equation in Blish's "Cities in Flight" will give you a kick.

It seems wrong to me to baldly list "most significant" without taking dates into account. That's why I list, for each decade and each century categories and sublists:

Executive Summary of the Decade
Major Books of the Decade
Major Films of this Decade
Other Key Dates and Stories of this Decade
Major Writers Born this Decade
Major Writers Died this Decade
Hotlinks to other Timeline pages of SF Chronology
Where to Go for More: 51 Useful Reference Books

An example being for 1930-1940
http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/timeline1940.html

If one is considering "influence" then it is useful to look and influence from Science Fiction to "mundane" literature and vice versa, and between Science Fiction and inventions and scientific discoveries of the same time, and between science fiction and geopolitical context. For that matter, between novels, films, television, and magazines.

Science Fiction is just too multidimensional to be squeezed into a linear list, in my humble opinion as someone who used to go to more than one science fiction convention per month on average, and who publishes science fiction criticism in academic venues.

"most significant" is always a touchy subject, but that list leaves out two of the books that have been "most significant" in my SF reading--Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, and The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Speaking of dystopian SF, I'd think 1984 should be somewhere in there...