I’ll second Anathem, Perdido Street Station and Malazan Book of the Fallen.
And add American Gods for consideration as well.
The Twilight series should be mandatory in all 3rd grade classes now. Lots of good low-level editing practice.
Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men: to my mind, together with A Hat Full Of Sky and Wintersmith, his finest achievements yet. They ought to be read and remembered like Alice.
I would nominate Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan and The Windup Girl by Paulo Bacigalupi. Bacigalupi’s likely to write something better in the future through; I’m not sure Morgan is.
Agreed, although it’s less egregious if you think of it as YA fiction. Most of the fans of his who I know are ~12 y/o boys.
I feel like something from William Gibson should be included but the latest books may not be classified as SF or Fantasy. The earliest fit the classification but are too old.
Also like Anathem and Perdido Street Station
I like The Gone Away World by Nick Harkaway also
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. So far at least, it’s some of the most compelling fantasy I’ve read in years. Just waiting on the publication of book 3…but at least it’s written, supposedly.
Name of the Wind, definitely.
Joe Abercrombie’s series, probably.
Mistborn, perhaps. Maybe his Stormlight Archive instead, but Mistborn felt much more accessible to me.
It’s only partially sci-fi, but I definitely think Cloud Atlas is going to be required reading for high school (or at least college) English students at some point in the future.
I’d say *The City and The City *is magic realism and definitely belongs on this list (as MR is a subset of Fantasy IMO). But more importantly, Embassytown definitely should be on such a list.
I see American Gods was nominated, I’d think Anansi Boys is also worthy.
Also, while I think generally Iain Bank’s last few Culture books weren’t as great as, say, Player of Games or Excession, Surface Detail certainly was very good, better than most anything else I read in 2010. And the non-Culture The Algebraist was better still.
A little shout-out to my compatriot Lauren Beukes, especially her latest work, The Shining Girls
I second Wee Free Men. The book is absolutely brilliant. I also love Rothfuss and Name of the Wind, but I was very disillusioned by the second book - Wise Man’s Fear. Over time, I’ve become more forgiving. I think WMF is a lot better if you don’t think of it as a book by itself and just think of it as NotW having become a longer book. It’s still a let down, but not as much of one.
If you had asked a similar question back in 1983, I might have answered “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”.
My, how silly I was!
Lauren Beukes is a great new talent.
I’ll have to check out the new one. Definitely enjoyed Zoo City
For fantasy:
Charles Stross’s Laundry series. I like The Jennifer Morgue best, but all of them are good.
Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. Hard to pick which one though.
For Sci-fi:
I’ve heard great things about Ready Player One and The Quantum Thief, but haven’t picked them up yet.
I disagree. Martin gets to the heart of politics: habit and self interest. Erickson’s work isn’t as black and white as Tolkien but still inhabits a middle ground that is naive enough to believe that by great deeds a hero can inspire even his enemies. And making George RR Martin seem concise isn’t a positive in my book. I really like the world of the Malazan Empire* but Erickson makes you wade through a ton of crap to see it. I actually prefer the books by Ian Esslemont. Each one can stand (or fall) on it’s own.
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- I do like some fantasy in my fantasy. The problem I have with Joe Abercrombie is that the good guys always lose or become so twisted by fate that the “win” is meaningless. No good deed goes unpunished doesn’t make for a good fantasy. Real life is grim enough.
And you’re basically the only one. When something like that happens, do you ever step back and think, “it’s probably me”?
Of course I do, but I don’t change my opinion JUST because others disagree with me, I have to figure out what is going on for myself. Sometimes it means I’m missing something. Sometimes it means my tastes are different from others,’ and sometimes it means I’ve figured something out that others haven’t. And apparently I’m NOT the only one that feels that way about “Old Man’s War” – read back a few posts.
You at least have reasons for why you dislike it, that post pulled out the “I’m too sophisticated for this childish tripe” card.
I’d say that cyberpunk is being replaced by science fiction about the Singularity. Used to be, Vinge was the only one writing about it, now he’s been joined by others in writing about the effects of computer augmented consciousness, uploaded minds, artificial intelligence and so forth and how that changes individuals and society, with vary degrees of success.
No insult was intended. But I said what I said, because it IS easy to constrict a halfway decent list of the fifty best SF novels when you have almost a century of material to look back on. Some of the picks, like Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein, are literally no-brainers. Many others are not much more difficult. You found it incredibly difficult because you wanted to get EXACTLY the right fifty books, the ones that would be the best of SF perfectly expressed. Hell, if you had been satisfied with being 95 percent right you could probably have done a fine job of it in an hour or two.
Naming the books that are likely to be essentials that are written in the last 15 years is more difficult because you have less context. You are much less likely to be right. And that’s also the fun of it … taking on some long odds and seeing if you can win.
I think we might be blinded by the notion that literature must be books, when we’re standing at the dawn of new media. Many of the “essential works” of the 2000s might turn out to be webcomics. I can very easily see, say, Girl Genius or Shlock Mercenary being looked back on, someday, as “Golden Age classics”.