Top Ten SF Must-Reads...

In My Humble Opinion
41

Many, many thanks to everyone who posted! There were almost 30 replies less than 24 hours after I created the thread! I’ll be downloading this and Fenris’ thread for future reference and will certainly begin with the most-mentioned books. Right now, I’m still slogging my way through “Catch-22” (a little TOO much circular-reasoning-to-the- point-of-absurdity for me, but I hate leaving a book unfinished), but I’ve created an e-mail reminder to read the first two “Lord fo the Rings” books before the December movie release.

Again, many thanks for the helpful posts.

Patty

42

One more small (HA!) list for you Marvel: Not the 10 most important, or the ten best or the ten most famous. This is just a list of ten odd, fun favorites of mine that most non-SF/F fans won’t have heard of, but are pleasantly quirky.

  1. The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathon Hoag: Robert A. Heinlein. Includes the creepy-as-hell title story, “The Man Who Travelled in Elephants” (Heinlein’s favorite), the bizarre time travel story “All You Zombies” and the paranoid “They”. If you think Heinlein=Starship Troopers this’ll prove you wrong.

  2. Wasp: Eric Frank Russell. Ian (James Bond) Fleming and Russell were in some sort of “dirty tricks” department during WWII. In this book, our hero is dumped on a planet we’re at war with (with thinly disguised Japanese aliens) with orders to subvert and undermine their society. Russell lets the hero do all the dirty tricks that Russell didn’t get to use in real life. Much fun (although the alien’s portrayal is a bit racist nowdays) and a classic “Stupid aliens, smart people” novel.

  3. Brain Twisters, The Impossibles, Supermind: Mark Phillips (aka Randall Garrett and…um…someone else). A quirky, funny, three book series (the books are short!) about an F.B.I Agent who has to deal with psychic criminals (teleporting car-thieves, etc). His only allies are his assistant and a little old lady with vast psychic powers…who believes she’s Queen Elizabeth.

  4. The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump Harry Turtledove. An EPA (Environmental Perfection Agency) man in a world that’s very similar to ours except that magic works, must determine the source of a number of birth defects around a dumping ground for used spell components.

  5. The Technicolor Time Machine-Harry Harrison. Deep Silliness. A low-budget “Z” movie team decides to shoot a sword-and-sandal Viking epic on location. With the help of a time machine, it’s really on location!

  6. Dancers at the End of Time: Michael Moorcock. Collects three very short novels under one cover. At the decadent End of Time, Jherek and his companions have the power to create and destroy worlds and their existance is one long, happy party. Jherek knows nothing of the word “morality” until he meets and hopelessly falls in love with kidapped-through-time Victorian woman Amelia Underwood who knows everything about morality.

  7. The Girl, The Gold Watch and Everything-John D. (Travis McGee) McDonald. Our hero inherits a gold watch that can freeze time.

  8. Retief and the Warlords: Keith Laumer. “To be laughing while reading this book, foolish humans!” Retief, ultra-competent diplomat must defeat his cloddish alien rivals. The single funniest torture scene in the history of the written word.

  9. Inferno-Larry Niven. A science-fiction writer gets sent to Dante’s Inferno. Things have changed (polluters and environmental extremists end up with the wasters and hoarders, for example). Fun stuff.

  10. Esbe: A Winter’s Tale: Linda Haldeman. A very, very, very small, quiet gentle novel about love, winter, music and demon summoning on a college campus.

Most of these are out-of-print but can be found easily and cheaply on Bookfinder

And one other, if you stumble across it, is a masterpiece that’s sadly out of print and kind of expensive (about $150.00 in hardcover and about $30 in paperback, if you can find it!):
Robots Have No Tales: “Lewis Padgett” (AKA Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore). The funniest SF stories of the '50s. Gallagher can only invent when he’s drunk but never remembers the purpose of his inventions when sober. The third Gallagher story “The Proud Robot” (imagine Baum’s Glass Cat as played by Tony Randall as the robot) is in my top ten all time favorite stories.

Fenris

43

I’m not sure these will help you hold your own in any SF conversation, but they represent my personal top ten. And before any bozo throws rocks, let me add that these make MY list because I enjoyed reading them, not necessarily because they belong in some literary shrine. Some of them may be a bit difficult to find, but if you get the chance, they’re well worth reading:

  1. Forty Thousand in Gehenna by C. J. Cherryh
  2. Friday by Robert Heinlein
  3. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  4. Hammer’s Slammers by David Drake
  5. The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey
  6. Bolo by Keith Laumer
  7. Recall Not Earth by C. C. MacApp
  8. Footfall by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
  9. The Seedling Stars by James Blish
  10. The Double Spiral War (trilogy) by Warren Norwood
    (Midway Between, Polar Fleet, & Final Command)
44

This won’t make me any friends here, but I can’t stand Asimov. I find his writing pompous and overblown. Using “said X” instead of “X said” might be ok every now and then, but not all the time. And the word “sardonically” once every paragraph? Eugh. Asimov had some clever ideas, trouble was, he was too aware of the fact. Arthur C. Clarke is nearly as bad - a better writer, but just a little too arrogant. A clever man who has predicted many advances; but he never let us forget it.

45

What about Brave New World by Aldous Huxley? That’s got to be one of the best sci-fi books ever.

Whilst Dick and Clarke and Asimov are marvellous, i’d like to add my vote for Iain M Banks and JG Ballard as some of the most enjoyable books anywhere in any genre, IMHO, of course.

J.

46

That being a fan of Phillip K Dick.

I just finished reading UBIK which is really fun and not as mind bending as some of his other books I have read like Valis, or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I was very much suprised how different Androids was from the famous SF film Bladerunner.

Plus you’ve got to read W. Gibson becasue after all he does allude to a Cecil Adams column in one of his books.

47

Asimov was pompous and overblown? :eek:
I wonder what your opinion is of Ellison, then.

48

This thread has caused me to make a list of all the books I either don’t recognize or haven’t read, for my next list to the local used book store. I may never get to War and Peace at this rate…

I’m also late to the party, but here’s my list. It’s certainly debatable, but I found these to be entertaining.

Heinlein: Friday, Glory Road, and Job: A Comedy of Justice.

T. J. Bass: The Godwhale, and to a lesser extent Half Past Human

Melissa Scott: Mighty Good Road. I don’t know if this is a series, but I hope it is! Amazon shows she has a lot of stuff out, so I’ll dig some more.

Niven/Pournelle/Steven Barnes: The Legacy of Heorot, and the sequel, of which the name escapes me.

Spider & Jeanne Robinson’s Callahan’s Bar series (and they’re not a trilogy - there’s just three of them!), and the Starseed and Stardance books.

OK, so that’s 13. Sue me…

And here’s another vote for Miller & Walter’s annotated version of Verne’s 20,000 Leagues. I read another version when I was a teen. This explains a lot of references that I never got. Also, Doc Smith’s Lensman series was a favorite as a kid. My grandfather turned me on to those, and I still have some of his copies. Same with the Skylark series. And Tolkien. Yikes, that’s 14 more. I better quit now.

And for just fun reading, I’ll throw in any of Kenneth Robeson’s Doc Savage books. I know, Robeson was the pen name for about 3 different people. Still, they were a fun read, and Clive Cussler owes him/them big time!

Oh, nobody has mention David Feintuch’s Midshipman series.

Good!