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

[hamsterwoman]

I know it might be weird to have Perhaps the Stars instead of Too Like the Lightning, but Perhaps the Stars was the one where I was like, "...wow!"

Perhaps the Stars makes perfect sense to me as the pick for Terra Ignota! To start with, I do feel TLTL suffers from being only half a book -- I'd be far more on board with the combo of TLTL + 7 Surrenders (as it was intended to be the first volume) -- but also, yeah, Perhaps the Stars was the book that blew me away most of the four, and the fact that it stuck the landing with that complex a setup is the thing that makes the whole series most extraordinary for me. So, I'm in complete agreement there!

I think because they look like Epic Doorstoppers, which I've mostly given up on :)

Heh, yeah, the reason I've read and loved Elder Race and have yet to finish anything else by Tchaikovsky is that the rest of them that are interesting to me do look like Epic Doorstoppers, and I mostly can't deal with those anymore, except where I've already invested the time in the series.

Of course the one I always think of is Semley's Necklace, but that's a short story.

Oh right, for some reason I keep completely forgetting about Semley's Necklace. That too! Though I guess they already had Ursula LeGuin on the list and it's not like one can argue Left Hand of Darkness is unworthy.

[cahn]

Haha, yeah, and I even put a second Le Guin on my personal list so I suppose it can't ALL be Le Guin (although if it were, I'd also maybe put the story "Nine Lives" on there... :) And maybe Lathe of Heaven as an alternate-universe story?)