Help me build a classic science fiction reading list!

Cafe Society
81

The king of science fiction authors whose works have been adapted into other media is Philip K. Dick, and I think it’s a shame he isn’t better known to the public. Dick’s stories tend to be extremely paranoid and often deal with questions about the nature of reality and consciousness. Here is a list (not complete) of movie/TV adaptations. Some of these definitely qualify as classics:

The Man in the High Castle
Total Recall
The Adjustment Bureau
Screamers
Next
A Scanner Darkly
Paycheck
Minority Report
Impostor
Blade Runner

The adaptations don’t always convey the tension and paranoia and dark humor in Dick’s stories.

For instance: neither Total Recall adapation is anything like the short story (We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), except for the basic concept. A miserable wage slave with a boring life craves excitement, so he goes to the Rekal company and has exciting memories of a spy mission to Mars installed in his brain. In the process of doing that, they discover that he really is a spy and his true memories have now become unlocked. The two movies take this as literal truth and merry hijinks and triple-breasted women occur.

Instead of using this as a springboard for a straightforward action story, Dick has fun with the concept. What would happen if other people had been messing around in your brain, planting or erasing memories for their own purposes?

Just a note about the Blade Runner movie:

Some things don’t make sense in the movie because they’re lifted from Dick’s story (DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?) but they’re not used in context. In the story, humans have intense guilt about animals (most of which are near extinction) and feel obligated to keep one as a pet. Tyrell’s owl and Zora’s snake are remnants of this. Note that the test to identify a replicant involves questions that often reference animals — a calfskin wallet, a nude on a bearskin rug, a butterfly collection, a tortise in the desert. In the story this makes sense. In the movie, we don’t know why these questions would provoke an emotional response.

A clever detail in the story is that real animals are expensive and are subject to getting sick, etc., but since pets are a status symbol, many people have replicant pets that they pretend are real to their friends.

Also in the story, most educated/sane/healhy/ambitious/competent people have left earth, so those who stayed behind (the people we see in the story) are mostly misfits in some way. In the movie, all we have of this are the floating advertisements for jobs off-world.

Because so many people have left earth, there are a lot of empty buildings and a lot of the infrastructure is crumbling, like the run-down, empty building where J. F. Sebastian lives.

I love the atmosphere of the movie, especially the street scenes.

82

Well, just taking the top of the pile as an example:

It says right there that it’s a novel, and I’d say that calling the author a “science fiction grandmaster” counts as marketing it as science fiction.

That’s the only one of the juveniles that I won’t recommend. Heinlein’s understanding of special relativity was abysmal. In most of his works, it was a minor enough point that it was possible to just gloss over that, but when it’s as front-and-center as it was in Time for the Stars, that’s not really possible.

83

Sorry, but you’re not catching the insider’s nuance.

We’re talking about a first edition hardback from a mainstream publisher only. Reprints of a known book don’t count. Paperbacks don’t count. Specialty genre publishers don’t count. The front cover of that first edition must have the words “A Novel.” That’s it. Nothing else except the author’s name and the book’s title. The idea is to convey that the work speaks for itself. It doesn’t need hype, or blurbs, or description. It is of a quality equal to other works released by the publisher by definition because it shares with them the same designation. USDA Prime fiction.

This code is taken very, very seriously by the literary community. Everybody understands it. If it doesn’t convey its meaning to you then you are an outsider and you don’t count. It’s like using the right fork.

Today’s publishing world has adapted somewhat to the changed culture. You’ll still see this code but the elegant simplicity that publishers tried to convey is somewhat old fashioned. Book covers tend to have lots of extraneous words to catch potential buyer’s eyes. Different publishers have different cultures, too. Even prestige houses are very tiny parts of giant conglomerates and have to account for their bottom line. All that means is that sparseness now has its own code. It’s sort of an honor to have nothing on your cover. It’s so good that nothing else needs to be said. Weird, perhaps, but every industry culture has its insider codes.

84

Ah … the memories this thread brings back … thank you threadspotter for bringing this to our attention …

Votes for Jules Verne and H.G. Wells for tales just as important today as when published … I think the book 2001 rates enough merit to be included, how we interface with AI is still a “hot topic” … the dragonkind of Pern are a ton of fun, though I’m not sure Anne McCaffrey had much to say about the basic human condition …

First book to cross my mind when I saw the thread title … timeless in the sense that the plot is already ancient, and humans far in advance still grapple with the ancient question of proper governance … a classic in the sense it will still be important 100 years from now …

85

Interesting. I’ve seen that type of “stating the bloody obvious” on books often enough, but I, too, never realized that it was a dog whistle for snobs.

86

If the code only has meaning for publishing insiders, then it doesn’t have meaning. The only people for whom the meaning could be relevant are the people making the decision to buy the book or not. If a book has a code on the cover that means “this isn’t science fiction”, but the people buying the book don’t know that, then the code doesn’t matter.

87

Also, the system is faced with the possibility of dishonest signaling. Publisher says: “Wow, we sure went with a turkey on this one. How do we sell it?.. I know, just put ‘A Novel’ on the cover–the rubes will think that we think it is really good!”

88

That’s classic outsider logic. “They’re not talking to me, so how can it work?” They don’t need to talk to you. There are sufficient people who know what fork to use to comprise their audience. How many literary first edition novels have you ever bought from unknown authors in the first place? The likes of you (and me) are going to wait for the paperback. Paperbacks are marketed entirely differently than hardbacks and have their own sorts of codes. You *can *tell a paperback by its cover, especially f&sf. You don’t even realize that it’s code, because it’s code that you understand.

89

“Way Station” and “City” by Cliff Simak
“More than Human” by Sturgeon
“Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter Miller
“The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol 1” The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 - Wikipedia

90

Exapno, suppose that I have a club, and I want the club to be open only to speakers of Croatian. I make up a sign, which says “Keep Out” in Croatian, and hang it on the door. Is this sign likely to work? Why or why not?

91

I hear that the really, really high end “literary” novels don’t even display the title or author. They are simply wrapped in old brown paper grocery bags and sealed with duct tape. And bookstores? They are sold exclusively out of the boiler rooms of veteran’s hospitals. This is to signal the high confidence the publishers have in the book’s quality.

92

“I don’t know about it, so it doesn’t exist” is a terrible argument. You’ve just learned something. Shouldn’t that be a good thing?

Everything in marketing is code. Everything. Everywhere. Luxury products have codes of a certain sort. Elite products have codes of a certain sort. Mass marketed items have codes of a certain sort. Hotels have a dozen price points and audiences, and those are recognizable by certain codes. You can tell the price point of a restaurant without ever stepping foot in it or opening a menu. Cars have always subtly marketed themselves at fractions of an audience: General Motors built itself into a giant this way. And here’s an eyeopener: Literary hardbacks want to distinguish themselves from genre paperbacks. Nothing sells to everybody. Nothing markets itself to everybody. That’s an utter waste of time and money.

Are you seriously telling me that because you don’t know the subtleties and nuances of a product you’ve probably never purchased once in your life and belongs to a profession you are not a part of, that it doesn’t exist or is wrong to do so or offends you in some way? Well, guess what. There are millions of these little codes for every product and every industry and every profession and you’re probably missing most of them as well. That’s what distinguishes sociologists from physicists; the two disciplines train people to notice different things about the world. All those otherwise invisible things exist whether the other group notices them or not.

93

This is my first post on these boards; this thread caught my compound eye (prepare for The Invasion of the Ex-Lurkers :smiley: ). I love science fiction. Glad to see I’m in good company on these pages.

Many science fiction works can be considered “famous, influential, and noteworthy” but, for the purposes of this reply, I’ll limit myself to twenty favourite novels I would call “genre-defining.” Of course, anyone else’s results may vary.

I very much like the definitions of science fiction put forth by KU’s Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction; namely, that it is, among other other things, a “literature of the human species encountering change,” “a literature of ideas and philosophy,” and a “literature of the Other.” My (highly personal) selections are provided, in no particular order, with these definitions in mind, and with reference to Ward Shelley’s funky “History of Science Fiction” infographic map/poster.

– Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea -Jules Verne (1870)
– Brave New World -Aldous Huxley (1932)
– The Time Machine -H.G. Wells (1895)
– Star Maker -Olaf Stapledon (1937)
– Foundation -Isaac Asimov (1951)
– Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus -Mary Shelley (1818)
– Dune -Frank Herbert (1965)
– The Diamond Age -Neal Stephenson (1995)
– The Shockwave Rider -John Brunner (1974)
– The Female Man -Joanna Russ (1975)
– Annihilation -Jeff VanderMeer (2014)
– Dhalgren -Samuel R. Delany (1975)
– Steel Beach -John Varley (1993)
– Childhood’s End -Arthur C. Clarke (1953)
– The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch -Philip K. Dick (1965)
– Stranger In A Strange Land -Robert A. Heinlein (1962/1991)
– Lilith’s Brood -Octavia E. Butler (2000)
– Neuromancer -William Gibson (1984)
– Contact -Carl Sagan (1985)
– Tau Zero -Poul Anderson (1970)

Highly recommended science fiction short story anthologies:

– The Big Book of Science Fiction -Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (2016)
– The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF -David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, eds. (1994)
– The Time Traveler’s Almanac -Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. (2013)
– The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964 -Robert Silverberg, ed. (1970)
– The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two (2A and 2B) -Robert Silverberg, ed. (1973)

94

A few additions.

The Stars My Destination Alfred Bester
The Demolished Man Alfred Bester
Nightmares and Geezenstacks Fredric Brown
All The Colors of Darkness Lloyd Biggle Jr
The Planet Buyer Cordwainer Smith
A Plague of Demons Keith Laumer
The Retief series Keith Laumer
The Dying Earth Jack Vance
A Martian Odyssey Stanley Weinbaum
The Hyperion Chronicles Dan Simmons
The Sirens of Titan Kurt Vonnegut
The Paratwa Saga Christopher Hinz

95

Blurt, I beg of you: Please do not make Stranger in a Strange Land the sole Heinlein on your list. List another Heinlein instead, or list it together with another one, but don’t make it the only one. There are already too many people who read it as their first exposure to Heinlein, and get the wrong impression of his work as a whole.

96

That’s right–you should list Friday instead!

97

Cantos, not chronicles. (The title of a series of four novels, not a single work.)

98

Well, Friday would be a better choice than Stranger, but I’d go with either The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, or one of the juvies.

99

Yes, but do any of those have Wheelan penis zippers?

100

Here are a few I didn’t notice on the list:

Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper; it delves into the question “What is sentience?”

The Survivors / Space Prison (same book, two titles); a space opera of human adaptability and ingenuity

Also a couple not considered classic, but maybe should be:
Inherit the Stars by James Hogan - A work of true Science fiction - the research and deduction surrounding the discovery are the main plot of the story

Darker Than You Think by Jack Williamson - Archaeology and genetics meet werewolves.