SF books with impact

[cahn]

There's this Esquire 75 best SF books of all time meme going around (I think thistleingrey first posted about it on DW in meme-form here) and the Esquire list annoyed me so very much (it leaves off all kinds of interesting books that I love) that instead of doing the meme I made my own list :P I used Jo Walton's Informal History of the Hugos (which is even better than I remember, btw) as a major source for finding books to put on my list. The list also has turned into more of a "SF books that had a nontrivial impact on me" rather than "best SF books" but eh.


Books where I agree with the Esquire list:
Snow Crash (Stephenson)
A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein)
A Wrinkle in Time (L'Engle)
The Stars My Destination (Bester)
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Adams)
A Canticle for Leibowitz (Miller)
A Memory Called Empire (Martine)
Ancillary Justice (Leckie)
Oryx and Crake (Atwood)
Red Mars (Robinson)
Brave New World (Huxley)
1984 (Orwell)
The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin)
The Fifth Season (Jemisin)
Martian Chronicles (Bradbury)
Dune (Herbert)

Books the Esquire list has that I imagine should belong but which I haven't read yet: (in all cases except Miéville I have read something by the author, but not any book-length SF)
The Claw of the Conciliator (Wolfe)
Neuromancer (Gibson)
Ammonite (Griffith)
Engine Summer (Crowley)
The City & The City (Miéville)

Authors the Esquire list has, but I would put in a different book (sometimes because I haven't read the one on the list):
City (Simak) - I haven't read Way Station but I don't think it would overtake City in my head
Cyberiad (Lem) - I haven't read Solaris
The Bridge (Banks) - I thought I should have one Iain Banks in here, and I've read this one
Babel-17 (Delany) - I haven't read Dhalgren but I adore Babel-17
None So Blind (Haldeman) - I haven't read The Forever War, but I probably should - but this collection of short stories is pretty great
Cat's Cradle (Vonnegut)
Foundation (Asimov) - idk - I think conceptually it just edges out the Robot stories for me, though it's a coin flip because Susan Calvin is my fave
A Scanner Darkly (Dick) - I like this one more than Electric Sheep
Stories of Your Life and other stories (Chiang) - I like this more than Exhalation
Dawn (Butler) - I mean isn't this obvious??

Authors that don't appear on the Esquire list at all:
Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner) [how is this not on the list]
Memory (Bujold) [I MEAN]
Ender's Game (Card) [kinda surprised this is not on the list, honestly - as it's in print and has got crowd appeal]
Cyteen (Cherryh) [HOW]
Doomsday Book (Willis) [WHY]
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Tiptree) [HOW IS THERE NO TIPTREE]
The Dispossessed (Le Guin) [Le Guin is the only time I've put in two from the same author which I can see the original list was trying to avoid but... yeah]
A Fire upon the Deep (Vinge) [come ooooon!]
The Rediscovery of Man (Smith) [HOW IS THERE NO CORDWAINER SMITH]
Some Desperate Glory (Tesh) :P
Ingathering (Henderson)
The Wounded Sky (Duane) [I'm making this list, it's going in]
Arslan (Engh)
Web of Angels (Ford)
Beggars in Spain (Kress) [RIGHT?]
Hexwood (Jones)
Dreamsnake (McIntyre)
Gideon the Ninth (Muir)
The Real Story (Donaldson) [also probably a personal choice]
Flowers for Algernon (Keyes)
Perhaps the Stars (Palmer)
Dangerous Visions (ed. Ellison) [no really HOW IS THIS NOT ON THE LIST]
Behold the Man (Moorcock) [I hated this book when I first read it but boy did it have an impact on me]
Cards of Grief (Yolen) - well - mostly because I couldn't resist putting Yolen on this list
The Steerswoman (Kirstein)
Permutation City (Egan)
In the Garden of Iden (Baker)
Joanna Russ should probably be on this list though I've never read an actual book by her, unless you count Souls

omg, we could fight about this list, it's clearly a list tailored to me personally and I'm sure everyone reading this will quibble about things that I've put on or left off (and please do) -- I noticed, for one thing, that apparently I read no SF published from around 2000-2010, except for Bujold -- but maybe the idiosyncrasy will make it more interesting :P

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Yay, I love that you've made your own list!

I do prefer Excession (on the original list) to The Bridge for Banks in terms of technical intricacy as well as subjective satisfaction with the plot arcs, but since the Esq list isn't into subjective satisfaction, whatever works for each listmaker is fine by me. :)

(Skipping italics now, my fingers hurt.)

I did wonder about Stories vs. Exhalation for Chiang--haven't read the latter.

Editing myself because I need a better filter this week,sorry! Also better phone autocorrect.

[cahn]

<3 Thank you for making the original meme!

Oh nooooo you shouldn't need to feel like you need to filter yourself, I did ask for critiques/differences! <3 You know, I didn't even notice the growing white/US-centricity; it does seem like something of a consequence of trying to get rid of recency bias but at the same time having a big hole from 2000-2010-ish (maybe even longer?) without consciously thinking about the problems that might introduce. And I respect the original list more for actually thinking about it! Are there books that you would recommend to fill those gaps for me? Looking back at the list, Nalo Hopkinson (for example) is one that I think I should have read but in fact missed. Oh! And there's Riot Baby (Onyebuchi), which I forgot can go on this list as a novella.

And then, of course, there's Three-Body Problem, which I had on the list, and then took off at the last minute because I had a lot of issues with it (though I did vote for it for the Hugo). Though that one has stuck with me too, so if I put Behold the Man on the list, Three-Body Problem really ought to go on it too. (Though they bother me for very different reasons, lol.)

[thistleingrey]

Thanks for extending it! All I did is c+p.

Part of why I should've kept my mouth shut is that my sense of books is a bit out of date; I don't have good recs, or not ones I'd offer confidently. (I think Shelley's flawed The Last Man outdoes Frankenstein, but no one but English majors reads it anymore and really that's fine.) I do think Hopkinson's work holds!

[cahn]

Lol, it's not like having incomplete information has ever stopped me from being highly opinionated, see this post ;) (Okay, I suppose I should work on that too...) I have not read either Shelley, which is of course another lack I have to remedy. I think I skipped Frankenstein as an adolescent, when I was reading similar kinds of books, because from pop culture I was expecting it to be more overt horror than I understand it is. I will check out Hopkinson!

[thistleingrey]

:) It's your DW space, though! Please do what you'd like with it. Anyway, honestly I think Shelley is skippable indefinitely--I read her as part of a grad seminar on the "younger" English Romantics, which was helpful for seeing her creativity in a synchronic context, but if that isn't one's jam, might be a bit of a slog.

[cahn]

<3

I think I'd like to read Frankenstein, for Romantic-and-SF cultural literacy, but then again there are a lot of books I'd like to read... :) *pokes TBR list dubiously*