SF Book Meme

From The Science Fiction Book Club, of which I was once a card-carrying member (it's their fault I read A Scanner Darkly when I was too young to know what crap it is although even then I sensed something was amiss), via Feminist SF-The Blog!

Key to the list: Bold: unread, Italic: on to-be-read pile, Strikeout: can't remember (old age strikes again)

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester 
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

I'm surprised by how many of the unread I'm content to leave that way, but they're all by writers of whom I'm not a big fan (Rice, Benford), or by ones I've grown tired of (Asimov). As Feminist SF points out, is 43 books by men, 7 by women (Wilmar Shiras is the sleeper) and that leaves out a pile of women who've emerged from behind their male pen names in the last 20 years, not to mention Andre Norton and C.J. Cherryh. Hello? Gee, I wonder if this was a list compiled by men? Ya think? There's a somewhat more feminist edition of the list over at Feminist SF to which I refer you as an antidote. There's much more on it that I'm not familiar with and would like to read.

My own tastes in SF have shifted drastically since I first started reading it. Early on, I read a lot of hard SF by the Grand Masters (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle), then drifted into the sword and sorcery camp for a while (Howard, Lieber) and from there into fantasy (Tolkien, Brooks, Zimmer Bradley, Norton, Cherryh) and right out of the entire genre when I got sick of bad Tolkien imitations. I went back when cyberpunk appeared and remain a hardcore Gibson fan, but I branched out into urban fantasy (DeLint) and steampunk (Mieville) and those odd future histories by Iain Banks, Neal Stephenson, and Dan Simmons.

So my own personal Top 40 of "important" SF/F would be something like this (not in order of preference):

Stranger in a Strange Land & Number of the Beast, Robert Heinlein
Dragon's Egg, Robert L. Forward
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, & Always Coming Home, Ursula LeGuin
A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle
The Ringworld series, Larry Niven
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
Pattern Recognition, Idoru, & All Tomorrow's Parties, William Gibson
Snow Crash & Cryptonomicron, Neal Stephenson
The Hyperion series, Dan Simmons
The Cyteen trilogy, C.J. Cherryh
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
Moonheart & The Onion Girl, Charles DeLint
Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
The White Plague & Dune, Frank Herbert
The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
1984, George Orwell
Labyrinths, Jorge Luis Borges
Point of Dreams & Point of Hopes, Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett
Rats and Gargoyles, Mary Gentle
Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Childe Garden, Geoff Ryman
Grass, Raising the Stones, & After Long Silence, Sherri Tepper
Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks
Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy
Child of Fortune, Norman Spinrad
Death Qualified, Kate Wilhelm
Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, Ian McDonald
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell

Almost all of these books are still on my bookshelves, with a few exceptions. The ones that aren't are missing in action generally because I've worn them out rereading them and haven't replaced them yet because they're out of print or I haven't felt the urge to reread them yet. When I say important, I mean both to the field and to me, for various reasons. Sometimes I keep a book because the story is so good (just extremely imaginative, or resonating personally) that I can't forget it. Sometimes I keep it because the subject of the story or its publication is socially important in and of itself, regardless of how good a book it is. Sometimes I keep it because the writing is so amazing. Sometimes all three of these reasons concatenate, if I'm really lucky, in The Perfect Book, which none of these are. As much as I love SF, I have yet to add any of it to my top five, which presently consists of :

1. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
2. Beloved, Toni Morrison
3. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. The Waves, Virginia Woolf
5. The Bone People, Keri Hulme

There are a few that come close: The Sparrow, House of Leaves, Perdido Street Station, and I think this is because SF is generally a little light on character development or really astonishing writing, though the stories are often more compelling than mainstream fiction.

For instance, House of Leaves is very light on character, but the structure is so amazing and clever that I forgive it, the way I forgive the French Experimentalists. Perdido Street Station has wonderful characters, excellent writing and a story that is just this side of perfect. I can't even say why it's not in my top five except that the writing isn't quite fine enough to topple anyone except possibly Keri Hulme, who gets to stay there because her story is so brutally true, even though it's fiction. The Sparrow probably comes closest of all. Really, it's a toss-up between The Bone People and The Sparrow at this point.

Sometimes I wish SF writers would just try a little harder. Or that mainstream writers wouldn't sneer at SF. I like the writers who aren't afraid to straddle that division, like Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Helprin, Alice Hoffman, Robertson Davies, Iain Banks. They seem to push language and structure more than the slice-of-life writers, which I find interesting and more substantive. Or literary, if you must. Of all the SF writers I read regularly, I think LeGuin comes closest to being "literary" in that snobby elitist sense, which is no mean feat considering she writes a lot about magic and dragons. Her adult fiction is really stunning though. Gibson's come close too, especially with Pattern Recognition. I suppose it's the skewed viewpoints that bothers most people, where things are just a little different from real life.

But that's the point of fiction, isn't it?

Comments

[Em]

I like your list a lot better than the first one. Even though I haven't read/wouldn't read many of yours, they at least seem relevant and the list is cohesive. I would add, though, as long as you've got Orwell in there, then Aldous Huxley's Brave New World too.

[Lee Kottner]

D'oh! You're right. I have to add Huxley, though I like Orwell so much better. I don't know how cohesive my list is, but I think it has a bit more substance than the book club's.