50 "Must-Read" Science Fiction Books

[thesoothsayer]

•352. "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams
•355. "I, Robot," Isaac Asimov
•369. "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," Philip K. Dick
•372. "Stranger in a Strange Land," Robert A. Heinlein
•373. "Dune," Frank Herbert
•374. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley
•386. "Nineteen Eighty-Four," George Orwell
•397. "A Journey to the Centre of the Earth," Jules Verne
•399. "The Island of Dr Moreau," H.G. Wells

Only read 9/50, and some of the rest I've never even heard of.

[iansales]

I reread Stranger in a Strange Land only last month, and I've just written about it on my blog here.

[Taltos]

Originally Posted by clovis-man

This is not a topic I would normally delve into. However, I just picked up a copy of the 2006 book edited by Emma Beare, entitled 501 Must-Read Books.

Well, all "the best" and "must see\read" lists are always subjective and depend on the person making the list - so if your list doesn't exactly match that it's only a matter of oppinion.

Originally Posted by clovis-man

Here's the list (the SF section covers numbers 352 through 401):

•352. "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams
•355. "I, Robot," Isaac Asimov
•358. "The Demolished Man," Alfred Bester
•361. "Planet of the Apes," Pierre Boulle
•362. "The Martian Chronicles," Ray Bradbury
•364. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess
•367. "2001: A Space Odyssey," Arthur C. Clarke
•370. "To Your Scattered Bodies Go," Philip Jose Farmer
•371. "Neuromancer," William Gibson
•372. "Stranger in a Strange Land," Robert A. Heinlein
•373. "Dune," Frank Herbert
•377. "Solaris," Stanislaw Lem
•381. "I Am Legend," Richard Matheson
•383. "A Canticle for Leibowitz," Walter Miller
•384. "Ringworld," Larry Niven
•390. "The Laxian Key," Robert Sheckley
•391. "City," Clifford D. Simak
•396. "Slan," A.E. Van Vogt
•398. "Slaughterhouse-Five," Kurt Vonnegut
•401. "The Day of the Triffids," John Wyndham

These I've read, at least 2 books are currently in reading and some more are in the TBR for this year - so not doing very bad

[Fried Egg]

Originally Posted by iansales

I reread Stranger in a Strange Land only last month, and I've just written about it on my blog here.

Indeed, I wouldn't put this book on any list of "must-read SF", that's for sure.

[iansales]

It apparently has its fans...

[Rodders]

I loved Stranger in a strange land when i read it. I don't understand why people are so negative about this.

[Fried Egg]

Originally Posted by Rodders

I loved Stranger in a strange land when i read it. I don't understand why people are so negative about this.

I don't mean to be negative about it. I thought it was ok, just nothing special. What was it about it that you loved?

[iansales]

Rodders, I'd be interested as well to know why you loved it. How long ago was it you last read it?

[AE35Unit]

Originally Posted by Rodders

I loved Stranger in a strange land when i read it. I don't understand why people are so negative about this.

Me too Rodders-I sailed thru it way back when.

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by Connavar

I was wondering about The Inverted World by Christopher Priest that was mentioned in that list in the first page.

Is it seen as one of his better books ? Its one of my choices for library books of his and i would like to start there then getting a library book of his latest novel.

Conn, I've been away from my sources for a few days. Looking at the 501 Must-Read Books book now, I see that the entry re The Inverted World doesn't indicate any ranking of this among his other works, but does include a list of four which seem to be considered as also notable:

The Affirmation
Existenz
The Space Machine
The Separation

I'm just now becoming aware that the movie, The Prestige, was based on a novel written by him of the same name.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy]

I think it was Alexei Panshin (it may have been someone else) who noted that , without Smith's powers being real, the cult or religion formed in Stranger In A Strange Land makes no sense. Even with it, the book is full of elements that I found problematic at best. There's Heinlein's obsession with free love - essentially freedom to have sex with anyone, anytime which I'm not convinced is such a great deal as it's made out to be (Heinlein, like Freud, falls into the error of proceeding from a recognition of the importance of sexual urges in human nature to over-estimating their importance) and the frankly offensive remarks about rape. Heinleinists defend these sorts of things by saying that one must not mix up the writer and the story and ascribe everything a character says to the writer. However, like Chesterton, the post-Starship Troopers Heinlein was a polemicist in everything he wrote. If fans wish to praise Heinlein for the 'scathing attacks on Western culture' or the philosophical content in his works they have to be willing to accept the less laudable aspects of his books as also stemming from his own philosophical vision.

I don't believe Heinlein was a mere hack writer as one of the commentators on Ian Sales' blog says - but that's because I accept that a certain finesse of prose style was never a part of the charm or purpose of SF until much later than Heinlein's best work. It was raw imagination with a smattering of scientific plausibility (which I believe is a purely aesthetic element, although hard SF adherents will argue the point) that counted, and Heinlein with his sprawling Future History had raw imagination in abundance at his best .

As for Christopher Priest, I do feel he has quietly amassed one of the most original and challenging bodies of work in British SF - always bearing in mind that my own SF tastes are rather skewed by the fact that I don't accept that credible extrapolation and some sort of pragmatic respectability as 'thought experiment' in various sciences and their applications is really the defining factor for the genre.

[Fried Egg]

It struck me when reading "Stranger" that much of the shock value or radical nature of some of the ideas therein must have been greatly diminished to anyone reading after the late sixties.

[J-WO]

Definitely, FE. Some of it is very quaint by today's standards.

My favourite, though, is having Heinlein go on a long monologue about the beauty, nay the necessity, of free love, and then completely clamming up as soon as homosexuality is mentioned. Funny stuff.

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by knivesout

As for Christopher Priest, I do feel he has quietly amassed one of the most original and challenging bodies of work in British SF - always bearing in mind that my own SF tastes are rather skewed by the fact that I don't accept that credible extrapolation and some sort of pragmatic respectability as 'thought experiment' in various sciences and their applications is really the defining factor for the genre.

HMMM...I don't think I fully understand what you are driving at here J.P. w.r.t. to your skewed SF tastes and whether your comments are being directed specifically towards Priest; could you please further explain for the benefit of this curious soul?...

I'm currently reading a rather fine collection by Priest entitled Dream Archipelago and hope to complete the remaining Priest canon this year, hence my particular interest.

[iansales]

knivesout, I don't think Heinlein's prose was all that much better than his contemporaries. It was mostly serviceable - although, many sf writers of that time earlier couldn't even manage that. Where Heinlein excelled was in his deployment of sf tropes. He had a way of streamlining them into his story that made them seem a natural part of the setting. In many of his novels and stories, it's only the attitudes and sensibilities of his characters that seem dated - often the furniture actually feels like a different world. His classic example is, of course, "the door dilated".