Please allow me to register a dissention for A Canticle for Liebowitz. I had heard so much about it, so I finally read it. Only my steely determination got me through it. What a pile o’ crap. I wouldn’t be starting non-SF readers on Dune, either. While a great book, it’s a helluva tough read, too.
Where’s the love for Ralph 124C41+? What a shameful omission…
But, more seriously, I’d probably go with The Stars My Destination. It still feels amazingly modern, fifty years later, and it’s a great showcase for all of the things SF can do well – new societies, intruiging ideas, good characterization, literary pyrotechnics – and wraps that all up in a compelling plot that perfectly fills what now looks like a quite short book.
Dune is an excellent novel, but I wouldn’t recommend it for precisely the reasons some others have been reccommending it – it doesn’t need to be SF, and the SF furniture is mostly maguffins or silly. (For a book that supposedly launched a thousand ecologists, it’s remarkably dumb on its “one climate per planet” thinking, which is straight out of Planet Stories.)
The Mote in God’s Eye is also a good book, but I wonder if it would appeal to non-SF readers – maybe it could be a gateway drug for readers of Patrick O’Brian, though. (It’s also the second-best Heinlein novel not written by Heinlein, after Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage.)
I don’t think there is any such animal as “the quintessential science fiction novel.” Unlike most genres, science fiction is tremendously open-ended – it can be about almost anything, can deal with it in almost any way and as a result there’s no single SF novel that can possibly cover enough ground to typify the genre.
If you’ll look at the nominees so far, you’ll see a tremendous range of styles and themes. And that’s not touching on the weird stuff that came out up to the 60s when a lot of SF writers were just blowing smoke any way that looked good, so you had stories like ‘The Girl In The Golden Atom’ which were practically scientifically illterate, but were presented as SF.
For a good introduction to a new reader of Science Fiction, I like to recommend Dhalgren.
Ahh I slay me.
There are some great recommendations above, but one classic of the genre that I didn’t see mention is Earth Abides. I guess you could say that it’s a little too specific in its subject matter to be a perfect representative of the whole of SF (not that any book could be all that), but it’s easily accessible, a great read, and it stays with you.
For a representative Heinlein, I like to recommend The Door into Summer. Great story, not too political, interesting time travel concepts. And one of Heinlein’s greatest characters ever (I’m referring to Pete, of course!).
cool. I might have to check out Dhalgren – I’m just a little bored with the books I"ve been reading so I might check out the sci-fi thing.
Wilson was making a funny. Mind you, it’s a good book, well worth the effort it will take to read it, but for an intro to science fiction, I’d read any of the other books mentioned here before that one.
chefjef, let me offer an alternative to Dhalgren…sticking needles into your eyes. It would hurt less. Dhalgren is totally unreadable. YMMV.
More unusual:
Brian Aldiss: Non-stop
Larry Niven: A Gift from Earth
Kim Stanley Robinson: Icehenge
Commonly known:
Isaac Asimov: The Gods Themselves
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Orson Scott CardL Ender’s Game
Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama
Robert Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Frank Herbert: Dune
Niven/Pournelle: Mote in God’s Eye
Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars
And we didn’t make room for Fantasy, but here I want put in a BIG plug for:
C. S. Lewis: Till We Have Faces
Why? I struggled through half of that book, but I didn’t see the sf elements, and I don’t care enough about Hinduism for the mystical stuff to interest me. That book is dense, man.
I didn’t like A Canticle for Liebowitz much (I made it a third of the way through), but even if you do like it you must admit that it’s not exactly an accessible book, right?
An addendum to the OP: most of you are doing this, but please include your reasons for suggesting a book and a short description if it isn’t well-known. Thanks!
For something a bit more modern, what about Mary Doria Russel’s The Sparrow? It is about a cross-species misunderstanding that leads to personal tragedy for a Catholic priest. It is also a great example of something sf does better than any other genre: it puts a human problem, institution, or characteristic in an exotic situation to allow us to view it with more objectivity and insight.
The thing is, science fiction is such a multi-faceted genre I’d be hard pressed to think of a single book or author that is the quintessence of every aspect. That being said here are a few candidates.
For traditional hard sf–Arthur C. Clarke, Rendevous with Rama, or any of his early stuff.
For world spanning space opera–Foundation, with Dune a close second.
(I’d also nominate Hyperion, but that may be to recent to qualify as quintessential.)
For military sf–Starship Troopers
To show off science fiction’s literary potential–The Book of the New Sun (I know it’s a series, but I think of it as a single book.
For experimental sf that annoys purists–anything by Philip K. Dick.
For old school scientifiction–The Martian tales
For Cyberpunk–Snow Crash
What about going further back to H.G.Wells’ works? War of the Worlds must be one of the earliest alien invasion stories, and introduced the ideas of death rays and mechs.
To continue the Heinlein hijack:
I could argue that he singlehandedly created modern SF. The defense will present these exhibits:
- He took ordinary humans and put them in extrordinary circumstances, unlike many things before with superheroes, or at least ordinary heroes (starship captains and the like).
- The juveniles transformed the “Go west young man” to the young lad, reaching for the stars.
- He took SF out of the pulps and into hard covers, showing up on the NY times best seller list.
- He brought social issues into SF.
- He was clearly a great inspiration for the whole counter culture of the 60’s, wheather those who ambraced that culture knew it or not.
- He always tried to make the science plausible.
All of this doesn’t make him a saint and there are a lot of flaws, but I think that in discussing the quintessential SF novel, and dismissing him as “sexist”, is wrong. His biggest flaws is that later in his career, he spent quite a lot of time trolling. Most of his books after SiaSL are meant to provoke. I think he liked the attention - and sales - he got from SiaSL. Two of his finest works are post SiaSL: The moon is a harsh mistress, which gets my nomination, and The tale of the adopted daughter. I bet Joss Wheadon read that one before devising Firefly.
Ah, they’re 1890’s style death rays.
I couldn’t help myself.
I absolutely agree with Alfred Bester’s “The Stars, My Destination”. It’s a fantastic read.
One of my favorite books is “White Light” by Rudy Rucker. It’s sorta Alice in Wonderland crossed with Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s claimed by many, or by some at least, to be the first of the cyberpunk books.
David Lindsay’s “A Voyage to Arcturus” is a book that was written in the 20’s thats turns a journey into outerspace into a journey inward towards our inner being.
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons “Watchmen”, although a graphic novel that pushes the boundaries of the superhero genre, I believe it can be encompassed in the science fiction realm.
None of these books are typical science fiction novels but, at least for me, show how far the genre can pushed into different directions.
Here is the quintessential science fiction story but it is not a novel.
Omnilingual (Feb 1957) by H. Beam Piper
http://www.feedbooks.com/book/308/omnilingual
It is in the public domain and available as an audiobook.
So much stuff called science fiction today has nothing to say about science.
psik
It must be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
<Check the dates>
Wow - someone else who has heard of that book!
I thought the first third was the best part of the book. Second part, not so good. Third part, terrible.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
Citizen of the Galaxy.
The Mote in God’s Eye.
For some of the characters, maybe, like Mimi, the senior wife in the Davis family in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. But Wyoming Knott, in the same novel? Or any of the women in Stranger In a Strange Land? The frontier would have chewed up those women and spit them out.
Heinlein never did get women right. His women, regardless of ability, wanted to crank out babies almost as soon as they were ‘husband-high’, as he puts in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Until he realized the amount of grief he was catching for his sexist characterizations, and then he constructed some equally unrealistic superwomen.
IMHO, one of the best windows into RAH’s thinking about women is how he sees and portrays his own wife in Tramp Royale, his account of their trip around the world together. In some ways, he views her as an equal, but in other ways, he’s all but patting her on the head in condescension.