[j. d. worthington]

You're certainly right -- I should include Blish, especially A Case of Conscience (a personal favorite). That's an example of a very short book that one can mentally masticate for a very long time; very meaty.

However, I stand by the choices I made. I don't think you need to be a pre-teen to enjoy some of these; I've seen plenty of intelligent adults pick them up and derive a great deal of pleasure from them. And I agree that Slan has serious defects; but I think it still retains its importance, as does David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, or Karl Capek's War with the Newts. I do not assert their status as great literature, but important to the development of science fiction and, to quite a few people, still very enjoyable, that I do, and most emphatically; not only from my own tastes, but from working at bookstores and dealing with no few readers over the years. Whereas "Uncle Hugo" (I won't give HPL's designation here, in deference to others) and his Ralph 124C 41+ is simply unreadable unless you grit your teeth, much like Poe's The Journal of Julius Rodman, or the Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries. Each holds its place historically, but I know of no one who reads these for pleasure -- absolutely no one. I do know people who read and enjoy The Castle of Otranto and Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales. Therein lies the difference.

Interesting challenge you pose there. However (especially over such a long period) this simply wouldn't allow for the scope of science fiction, even picking a single example of the best of different types. I was trying to give a representative selection to choose from, sort of a smorgasbord of varying types and tastes, so that a newcomer could pick and choose and still get a fairly wide selection to see what they'd like, of those things which are considered -- and which I in general agree to be -- both important and enjoyable. For my part, I prefer a wide spectrum of choices rather than a narrower, more confining view of something as widely divergent as what sf has tended to be. This is a part of literature that has always leaned toward quirky and individualistic writers, and to narrow the choices too much would not allow for that and runs the risk of being somewhat bland, even if the abstract literary quality is higher. That said, I think it's worthy as a thread of its own (if such doesn't already exist) to see what different people would choose as the 10 most important or 10 best (though I hesitate to go there, too loosely defined a term) sf books (should we keep it to novels, or are collections and anthologies allowed?). So perhaps someone should start such a thread. At the very least, it would give a newcomer to the field, again, a rather eclectic selection to choose from...