But despite Heinlein’s limited view of women, what Charlie Tan says is basically correct: he all but singlehandedly created modern SF. And for the quintessential SF story, I’d have to split my vote between Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War.
To nominate a dark horse:
“Sargasso of Space” by Andre Norton. A juvenile, very accessible, but it’s got great SF elements: space travelling traders, advanced alien technology, mysterious extinct alien races who are so alien that staring at their art too long can drive you insane. It’s got “out there” capitalism with corporations and independent contractors competing to bid on exploration rights to newly discovered worlds, addicts of strange new drugs … really, an EXCELLENT book to introduce a new reader to SF, especially a young one. Does not represent all of SF, but then, nothing can.
How the hell do you want her to act?
If she acts like a woman, she is too girly. If she acts normally, she is to manly. Perhaps you want her to be martian?
Look, if I grab a gun and go out and shoot a pack of dogs harassing my sheep, am I acting manly, should I cower in the house and let the pack kill off valuable animals? Should I call some manly man and whimper and squeel at him to come save my sheep? Or should I just get the damned job done. [I will confess that I did call animal control to haul the bodies off. With husband out to sea, you simply deal with shit.]
So, if a woman jumps into her spaceship and tears off after some BEM that took her kid, is she being a man with tits or just a woman getting the job sorted out?
A serious Delany suggestion: Nova. Nova is strong on traditional story telling (in essence it is both a treasure hunt and a grail quest). It presents a galaxies wide human society that is beautiful and strange, civilised and wild. The people of this society have lives full of possibility, they plug themselves directly into their machines for work so they can work at anything anywhere… In theory, among these bounteous worlds there are still divisions of class, of wealth of health.
Delany places his exotic, human characters into this story, a synecdoche of this society. Mouse, a gypsy who acquired his plugs and his place in society late has an unfixable congenital neurological condition of the voice. Prince Red, heir to riches has a similarly crippled arm, unlike the Mouse he can never be plugged in. The bigger problem of Prince Red however is that, like former spacer Dan, he is a madman. In other ways merchant adventurer Lorq Von Ray is maddest of all. He seeks the most valuable substance in the human universe, in the heart of a nova, at the instant the star blows. If he succeeds he will overturn everything that holds the worlds together.
Nova, a product of the New Wave embedded in the traditions of classic Science Fiction, reaching back to legend, expresses in wonder and beauty and terror all that SF has to offer, everything I, at least, look for in a novel, in 1968 and now.
Two votes against:
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The Foundation trilogy. Really? The characters are somewhere between wooden and cardboard, and the underlying premise has since had its butt kicked by chaos theory.
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Dune, in addition to being long and boring, is one of the most morally repugnant novels I’ve read. Let’s unleash the jihad on the galaxy, because the slaying of hundreds of millions will be good for galactic civilization or some such.
Early in the second half of the book, an alternative is briefly presented, discarded as even more morally repellent to Paul Atreides for reasons never made clear to the reader, and then dropped. There’s no indication of whether this alternative would result in the death of anyone.
Since other people are listing several novels each in their posts, I’m going to go ahead and list my twenty favorite science fiction works that are longer than 25,000 words:
- Olaf Stapledon First and Last Men and Starmaker
- Philip Jose Farmer The Riverworld Series
- Frank Herbert Dune (and maybe its sequels)
- Walter Miller A Canticle for Leibowitz
- Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination
- Ursula K. LeGuin The Left Hand of Darkness
- H. G. Wells The Time Machine
- Philip K. Dick The Man in the High Castle
- Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth The Space Merchants
- Theodore Sturgeon More than Human
- Roger Zelazny Lord of Light
- Arthur C. Clarke Against the Fall of Night
- Stanislaw Lem Solaris
- Ken Grimwood Replay
- Joe Haldeman The Forever War
- Clifford Simak City
- Michael Frayn The Tin Men
- Larry Niven Ringworld
- Robert Heinlein Stranger in a Strange Land
- Isaac Asimov The End of Eternity
That’s how I feel about Heinlein. I get the impression from a lot of his stories that he thought women could do anything they wanted; be cops, astronauts, executives, etc., even though they’re only women. It’s first-generation feminism.
And the lecturing on the wonders of libertarianism bring me down too. I’ve read a lot of Heinlein, and I want to like his work, but he doesn’t make it easy.
As for the Quintessential Science Fiction Novel, I’d suggest David Brin’s The Uplift War or maybe Brightness Reef.
I missed this thread the first time round, but
Jules Verne - From the Earth to the Moon
Hard science (for the time), good detail and realism pushed beyond the known. Great stuff.
Si