Definitely one of the best Science Fiction novels ever IMHO. I wanted to read for years before I got my hands on it. Usually, that’s a great way to be disappointed but in this case, I’d say that it was even better than I expected. Essential reading.
While Clarke, Asimov, Pohl and a host of others stood on the sidelines and did nothing. Riiiiiight.
I’m going to put some lesser-known works and authors in my list, since I figure others will hit the big ones that end up on every “essential” list. Some of these should be much more famous than they are.
Effinger, George Alec — When Gravity Fails. It’s set in the Middle East, which is vastly different from most SF. One of the first depictions of cybernetic technology that modifies personality, as well as providing “downloadable” skills and abilities.
Vinge, Vernor — True Names … and Other Dangers or a later story collection with both True Names and Bookworm, Run!. The first because it’s one of the first depictions of “cyberspace”, predating Neuromancer by at least 3 years, and the second because it’s one of the first stories with technologically-enhanced intelligence.
A Fire Upon the Deep is interesting and ambitious, but I think the stories in the True Names collection provide access to most of his groundbreaking ideas. A Fire Upon the Deep won an award, but I think it’s not as good overall as some of his short stories.
Across Realtime collects his Bobble books, which flesh out his technological singularity idea, something which is introduced in those True Names stories. Not essential, but I actually consider these better than A Fire Upon the Deep or possibly even A Deepness in the Sky which must have been difficult as hell to write since much of the narrative takes place from an alien point of view.
Williams, Walter Jon — Aristoi. This book takes risks on every level and is executed brilliantly. He depicts a post-scarcity society with massive resources, mutable bodies, and mastery of nanotech. There’s an elite class that are quite literally insane by our standards, who are in fact required to become functional split personalities. The very format of the text is experimental as he shows simultaneous points of view and concurrent action by splitting the narrative into columns.
A short story collection containing The Machine Stops is almost essential. This is the earliest predictive depiction of many later technologies and social developments such as instant messaging, reliance upon technology for survival, and constant connection to entertainment and information.
Bear, Greg — Blood Music, Forge of God, or Queen of Angels deserve a place, in that order of precedence. The first is both one of the first depictions of a “grey goo” nanotech apocalypse and an ambitious narrative experiment. The second deals with some big ideas about cosmology and human development, as well as showing a realistic way to destroy the earth. And the third shows some realistic social developments in response to technological advances, as well as a really well-done “alien” point of view in the AI character.
Varley, John — The Persistence of Vision or Steel Beach. The first is a short story collection. The title novella is hauntingly beautiful and painful; absolutely excellent. There are introductions to many of his other common themes and ideas in other stories in the collection, and every single one is damn good. Steel Beach is the best single novel in his Eight Worlds setting, which features ambitious explorations of gender and social roles in a society kicked off earth by invading aliens, but who enough technology to live just about anywhere.
Butler, Octavia — Her Xenogenesis series has “human” protagonists with a very alien viewpoint. The main characters are human hybrids created by an alien race that uplifts humans after we bomb ourselves back into the stone age. Deserves a place for the alternate point of view and incorporation of genetic alterations and aliens into society, if nothing else, but she also is an excellent writer.
Tepper, Sheri S. — Probably The Gate to Women’s Country would be the best single novel to choose, but with a few exceptions almost everything she has written is excellent. She writes “soft” SF, concerned with cultural and linguistic changes in response to a change in society, and often has strong feminist themes without stridency. If there’s a True Game collection, that would also be ideal. Any of those 9 books are good, and they are all interconnected, though each stands alone quite well.
LeGuin, Ursula — Damn near everything she wrote is worthy of a place in some top 50 list. The Left Hand of Darkness is both beautifully written and deals extremely well with gender politics in a society of humans who shift gender and sexes. The Dispossessed contrasts two societies in a nearly allegorical treatment of capitalism and collectivism. The Lathe of Heaven is probably her most SF-y story, since it deals with speculative technology instead of the “softer” social/anthropological stories she usually writes.
Vinge, Joan D. — (Yes, she was married to that Vinge when she established her career.) The Heaven Chronicles are an excellent hard science treatment of a semi-anarchist society of people who live in the asteroid belts. The Snow Queen deals with a society on a planet that is periodically visited by an imperial court traveling at relativistic speeds, also early depictions of nanotechnology and bioengineering. Her writing is similar to LeGuin in the depth of societies she develops and in her use of language.
L’Engle, Madeline — A Wrinkle in Time is a classic in literature, a classic in science fiction, and a great children’s story. Her explanation of a tesseract prepared me for dealing with Lorentz Contractions and General Relativity later on.
A Canticle for Liebowitz and Starship Troopers are both good, classic examples of the human/social side of SF, but in different ways.
Canticle discusses how technological change and social change interact with each other to produce the future - what humanity becomes depends on both factors. It also vividly expresses the opinion that
Humanity is trapped in an endless cycle of war, destruction, recovery, and renewed war.
Starship Troopers goes heavily into discussions of social structures, hierarchies, and attitudes toward leadership, and the qualities, qualifications, and expectations of leaders. The SF is really more for color and background - it’s very much a people story, which is a refreshing break from SF that spends dozens of pages discussing the blast radii of quasar bombs and why jumpgates don’t work within ten parsecs of a white dwarf. Shines the name!
If they don’t include this book in the collection, you can throw rocks.
It’s a great book and definitely deserves to be on the list, but the gender-shifters are humanoid aliens, not humans.
Stephen King’s 11/22/63 is a time-travel story that deals at some length with temporal paradoxes and alternate universes. I have no problem calling it sf (and a damn good read, too).
I love pretty much everything N. Shute has ever written, but if you needed to make room on the list I think it is maybe a bit of a stretch to define On The Beach as primarily science fiction. I found The Road both unbearably painful to read and quite well done, but would offer it in the same “not necessarily primarily science fiction” grouping.
Yeah; these (and Stephen King) are books I’d expect to find in a library’s (general) fiction collection, not its SF collection.
Where they might be shelved doesn’t matter.
Of the books that they have from the original list of 47, nearly half are shelved with general fiction.
More later…
I’d like to throw in an outlier here, Wool by Hugh Howey.
A very recent book (and the first part of a trilogy).
I was given it and really expected to be disappointed with it but found it very compelling.
Also, as an alternative to the already mentioned books of Iain M Banks (RIP), I think that Against A Dark Background is possibly his best novel.
I love David Brin- But I like ‘Startide Rising’ best.
I have read and enjoyed 'Hitchhiker’s Guide", but really NOT so important or seminal.
THE LIST OF 50
Adams, Douglas - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Asimov, Isaac - Foundation
Asimov, Isaac - I, Robot
Asimov, Isaac - The Caves of Steel
Atwood, Margaret - The Handmaid’s Tale
Bacigalupi, Paolo - The Windup Girl
Bester, Alfred - The Stars My Destination
Bradbury, Ray - Fahrenheit 451
Brin, David - Startide Rising
Brooks, Max - World War Z
Burgess, Anthony - A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott - Ender’s Game
Chabon, Michael - The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Clarke, Arthur C. - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Clarke, Arthur C. - Childhood’s End
Clarke, Arthur C. - Rendezvous with Rama
Dick, Philip K. - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dick, Philip K. - The Man in the High Castle
Frank, Pat - Alas, Babylon
Gibson, William - Neuromancer
Haldeman, Joe - The Forever War
Heinlein, Robert A. - Starship Troopers
Heinlein, Robert A. - Stranger In A Strange Land
Heinlein, Robert A. - The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein, Robert A. - The Past Through Tomorrow
Herbert, Frank - Dune
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Le Guin, Ursula K. - The Dispossessed
Le Guin, Ursula K. - The Left Hand of Darkness
McCarthy, Cormack - The Road
Miller Jr., Walter M. - A Canticle For Leibowitz
Niven, Larry - Ringworld
Niven & Pournelle - Lucifer’s Hammer
Niven & Pournelle - The Mote In God’s Eye
Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty-Four
Pohl, Frederik - Gateway
Russell, Mary Doria - The Sparrow
Scalzi, John - Old Man’s War
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft - Frankenstein
Shute, Nevil - On the Beach
Simak, Clifford - Way Station
Simmons, Dan - Hyperion
Stephenson, Neal - Snow Crash
Verne, Jules - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Vinge, Vernor - A Fire Upon the Deep
Vonnegut, Kurt - Slaughterhouse Five
Wells, H. G. - The War Of The Worlds
Wells, H.G. - The Time Machine
Willis, Connie - Doomsday Book
Wilson, Robert Charles - Spin
Comments:
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I ask you to consider the parameters and the comments below as stated before criticizing this final list.
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Most importantly, remember that this is a list of individual books, not authors, so comments like “no love for Joe Blow?” didn’t affect this list of 50. It’s no insult that they’re not on this particular list. The overall importance of the author’s oevure was only the most minor of considerations. Your input will have an enormous impact on Group 2, however.
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All comments and criticism were considered and taken into consideration. I spent an enormous amount of time and effort in research and contemplation before putting together the initial list, and quite a bit more since I posted this thread. You may not agree with everything on it, but it was absolutely not pulled out of thin air or my own imagination.
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In doing the final tie-breaker, I introduced a new factor that is a bit contrary to the spirit of the list - year published. I looked at how many books of the 47 were from each decade from 1950 - 2010, and found that the 70s, 80s, and 90s were really underrepresented. Thus, The Sparrow, Startide Rising, and The Dispossessed filled the final slots. I’m pretty satisfied with that. The '00s are probably a little over-represented, but I don’t mind that as it adds a bit of freshness to the list and also acknowledges that there is some great stuff happening in the field right now.
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I admit that I’m iffy on whether The Yiddish Policemen’s Union should be on a SF list, and I’ve thought long and hard about whether to cut it. In the end, the fact that it won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus for best SF novel (not fantasy) and was the first runner-up for the Campbell can not be ignored. As a bonus, it’s written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author well-known amongst general fiction readers. It deserves its spot.
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I’m sort of dreading doing Group 2, but I shall soldier on. Do you all want to see it?
Thanks again for all the comments and discussion!
P.S. Special thanks to Kerry, who exists In Real Life. She may not be a hardcore sci fi geek, but I trust her more than y’all put together. 
Damn. Where’s Robert Silverberg?
My nominees: Hawksbill Station, Dying Inside, Shadrach in the Furnace
I blame myself! :smack:
It’s the oddest sort of discrimination to exclude literature from science fiction. Atwood, Pynchon, and Orwell are obviously not thought of as science fiction authors in the way that Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov are. The former three made forays into science fiction (probably without even thinking about it, at least in Orwell’s case); the latter three made their names in the genre. It should be noted that the latter three have all written in other fields-- in Asimov’s case, extensively and often.
The claim that science should be the heart of the science fiction story excludes many classics of the genre. The science of Starship Troopers is laughable, and was at the time when it was written. Heinlein must have known that his giant exoskeletons aliens were impossible, and the explanation for the MI’s armor is pretty much “negative feedback”. Further, the focus of the story is not science, it’s social. Heinlein spends many pages explaining his setting and none, to my recollection, on how they manage to gallivant around the galaxy like a battleship sailing across the Pacific. It’s clear to me, anyway, that Heinlein by this point was no more letting physics get in the way of his story than Vonnegut did.
Even odder, the science fiction purist may grudgingly accept fantasies like Star Trek and Star Wars as part of the genre, apparently due to popular misconceptions. Why on Earth would anybody, having made that unfortunate concession, then want to exclude a classic like 1984?
Added: The final list is fine, I’ve seen many worse and few better.
It’s definitely highly regarded, especially in the apoc subgenres. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on the shortlist. I look forward to keeping an eye out for his predictions.
Have you read the collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future? I don’t think it’s particularly well-known, but it’s pretty good. I’ve read through it a few times because I own it.
All 3 are being considered for group 2. Hothouse is on my apoc reading shortlist. I think I ordered it from Amazon earlier in the week, but I got a number of books, so I’m not sure.
Incidentally, I ordered a stack of apocalyptic stuff from a place called Quality Bargain Mall of all things. I’m only mentioning it because it was a surprisingly good source for cheap used books, including out-of-print and hard to find titles. They have a really wide selection of SF in stock and I found it easier to order a bunch through there than getting every one piecemeal through Amazon Marketplace. Shipping is $4.99 for the first book and $2.49 for each additional book, which is at least better than Amazon’s minimum of $3.99 per book. A lot of the books were 99 cents, including a near-perfect hardcover of Eternity Road! Overall the condition of the books was satisfactory, but I’m not too picky about that.
Have you read The Cyberiad? Lem sure has an interesting way of looking at things. Really weird and fun.
It occurred to me that once I get Group 2 in place, it would be fun to make some companion lists that have included items that fall into various categories, like female authors, non-white authors, or books originally written in another language. Translations can never quite capture everything. Maybe some person who reads Polish would like to know about Cyberiada.
I’ve read a ton of Tepper, most of them multiple times, and I agree she should be more known than she is. She offers a great combination of interesting ideas and compelling plots. I’d say her stuff generally has a foot in each of sci fi and fantasy, but I’m willing to put up with the magical/fantasy elements because she’s worth it. The more time goes by, the more I’m disturbed by her anti-sexual attitude, however. I agree that Gate to Women’s Country is the one to pick. (Sometimes I get the urge to remark “There’s no fucking in Hades!” but I resist.) Grass is popular, but is definitely much more on the fantasy side of things. I was so blown away by the twist in The Family Tree that as soon as I finished it, I immediately read the whole thing again. My personal favorite is The Visitor. I’m still not sure how she managed to cram ALL those elements into one book and still not have it feel rushed or cramped.
I see Wool being mentioned more and more, but I thought it was awful. So many things just didn’t add up, and it was boring besides. But a lot of people seem to have really enjoyed it. I’ll give it props for a catchy title.
Speaking of catchy titles, I have to give a shout-out to How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu. I didn’t enjoy it too much but damn, that’s a good title.
You can’t possibly be serious.
Well, thanks. It’s nice to get some positive feedback for a change. 
Here are some lists that I really liked, though they are very different than my own:
The Forbidden Planet list.
https://forbiddenplanet.com/picks/50-sf-books-you-must-read/
My list is 50 books that should be in the library. This is a list of books you should actually read. My list makes for a good reading list on its own, but in many ways, this one is better. It omits a lot of items that are also considered literary classics and goes light on Heinlein/Asimov/Clarke, leaving room for more breadth. It puts things in a pretty unusual order too. It’s really top-notch.
The abebooks list of 50
This list has a one book per author limit and they went for variety in themes, etc. There is some neat stuff here that you don’t usually see. Check out the awesome old book covers. I loved this comment: “I wanted to show the unbelievable breadth of this galactic-sized genre and, of course, I failed because this is just the tip of the spaceberg – there are probably 500 essential science fiction books, not 50.” Yup, I know the feeling.
The Basic Science Fiction Library from the Gunn Center at U of Kansas
http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/sflib.htm
IMHO, it includes far too much to be called a basic library but it’s a great resource.
Also, in the “not too different than my own” category:
The NPR Top 100
This was done by popular vote and includes fantasy novels. Any popular-vote list will be heavily skewed against lesser-known and newer works. Then again, if it’s popular, it’s probably for a reason.
Asimov gives full credit to Campbell. Have you read his first stories? Clarke came later - Rescue Party was past the Golden Age already.
Astoundings from the first half of 1939 had a lot of the old style stories. The difference is obvious. Heinlein, who had the wisdom to shove his first novel deep into his desk drawer, came out with great stories from the beginning.
Right, it doesn’t. “Space” stores only became dominant in SF in the 1930’s. There were some space stories published in the 1800’s (e.g. From the Earth to the Moon, War of the Worlds), but stories about creating, altering, and enhancing human life were important in a major way. E.g. Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
This thread has provided me with much pleasant diversion as I go throughout my day, considering this, rejecting that. It has been many years since I read it, but anyone have any thoughts about David Gerrold’s When Harly Was One?
Close. I would put some work into the introduction. Personally, I’m looking for an entry point: when I visit a Sci-Fi bookstore or one of your internet lists, my eyes glaze over. So write about your intent when you compiled the list, and include some hand holding. Oh. You might include references to other works in your 1-3 sentence review, to convey an idea of possible reading paths.
(Currently I have a collection of short stories by Vignor Vinge on my kindle, along with this this 2013 work which was on sale.* I should probably read Dune some day. But I really want to read Foundation. So that one comes next. )
- It alludes to regressions and big data. Cool! My back of the mind worry is that the author might have nothing to say about that: I tend to prefer theme over characterization. And sometimes the underlying ideas can be pedestrian, in which case I feel I’ve sorta wasted my time and effort. That’s a critique of fiction in general and not sci fi.
ETA: What are the genres of sci fi and fantasy anyway? I’m guessing somebody here knows of a good annotated internet list. (I’d google for it, except that I couldn’t assess quality.)