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

[cahn]

Re: Dhalgren: fair enough! Yeah, it's kind of unbelievable I haven't read Neuromancer (I've read some short stuff by Gibson, like "Burning Chrome") -- though I seem for whatever reason to have missed out on a lot of Cyberpunk in general (I haven't read any of Sterling or McHugh's novels either). Another of those holes, I guess.

The original list did have Wells, which I struck out due to personally not really being a fan. Heh, I read a lot of time-travel (didn't we all), but I feel like a lot of it was short stories, not novels -- I suppose Crowley's "Great Work of Time," being a novella, could perhaps be put on? Oh! And there's Card's Pastwatch, which I do actually like better than Ender's Game, though I think if one Card has to go on the list, especially if it's a list of books that had an impact on me personally, it probably has to be Ender's Game. I suppose there's time travel in some of the books on the list: The Stars My Destination, Doomsday Book, Behold the Man, Garden of Iden -- though in all those cases I suppose the time travel itself is not the point, it's more of a plot gimmick.

(Hmm, what would you call the canonical time-travel short stories? "All You Zombies" is the one that comes immediately to mind... "A Sound of Thunder" of course... "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed" ... and then of course "Story of Your Life," though that's already on the list.)

I guess I'm OK with Vinge and Bujold holding down Space Opera (even though I suppose they're not completely typical examples), though this all is making me more likely to read the Expanse. (I actually own the first book, and ase has already pinged me on this, but it often takes me about 3-4 nudges to actually read something.)

[cenozoicsynapsid]

I think The Expanse is really good, actually. It has some of KSR's fascination with politics, some of Banks's glorious but morally compromised space battles, and a strong ensemble of characters. If you read the books, then watch the tv show, you'll notice that there are probably too many characters/loose plot threads that could be tightened up. But overall, it holds together very well for a work of that size... which is the problem, honestly, the books are *huge*. And though not badly written, the prose style is not the selling point; the style is straightforward and not a draw in itself.

[cahn]

Sorry -- who do you mean by KSR? Thanks for the rec -- ugh, if only it had been published when I was an adolescent and tearing through doorstoppers! Now that's a definite barrier to my reading things, but, well, we'll see if I can summon up the activation energy :) (I did read Daniel Abraham's Long Price Quartet and enjoyed it.)

[cenozoicsynapsid]

Kim Stanley Robinson, sorry.

I can still do the fugue state devouring-of-doorstoppers for things where the plot moves fast and the style isn't too ornate. If I have to read very effortfully from paragraph to paragraph, I'm slower. I got Alan Moore's *Jerusalem* trilogy as a birthday present, and I'm making my way through that, but not as fast as I could have as a teenager... gaps of weeks between picking one up sometimes.

[cahn]

Yeah, I have lost the will to do that for doorstoppers for the most part, though I will occasionally do it when it's been recced to me enough times :) (And I guess I am reading the Keeper of the Lost Cities YA-doorstopper-ish books right now because my 9-year-old keeps mentioning to me that he would like me to read them...)