Mrs. Watson, all your children have been certified insane

[sovay]

Got from thistleingrey: the Guardian's science fiction and fantasy novels everyone must read. Bold if you've read the book, italicize the author's name if you've read three or more long texts by them. I have some very weird gaps in my reading. I also have a fever. One of these is much more easily remedied than the other.


Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W. Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
JG Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
JG Ballard: Crash (1973)
JG Ballard: Millennium People (2003)
Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)
William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Poppy Z. Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)
Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)
GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
Michael G. Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
Samuel R. Delany: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Thomas M. Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
M. John Harrison: Light (2002)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
PD James: The Children of Men (1992)
Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968—1990)
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950—56)
MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)
David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
Walter M. Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)
Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983—)
Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995—2000)
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532—34)
Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)
Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)
Antoine de Sainte-Expéry: The Little Prince (1943)
José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954—55)
Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980—83)
Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)
John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

Comments

Completely Made of Fail

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

No John Crowley: no Little, Big, Engine Summer, or Aegypt.

Three books by J.G. Ballard (who, as great as he is, has less range than Derek Jeter) but only one by Gene Wolfe, including no Peace or The Fifth Head of Cerberus (and, frankly, a list this big should include The Book of the Long / Short Sun, too).

Two worthy entries by Le Guin, but no The Dispossesed, her best. Two worthy by Philip K. Dick, but no Ubik, his most Phildickian.

When an authority recommends 143 titles and overlooks at least half a dozen of the top twenty, it's not worth paying attention to.

IMHO.

[sovay]

I love that I can tell from your writing exactly how you would sound aloud. Or possibly you model your conversation the other way round, but even so. Those are very characteristic italics.

No John Crowley: no Little, Big, Engine Summer, or Aegypt.

No Peter S. Beagle, either, which slightly blew my mind. Not everyone has to love A Fine and Private Place, but I was under the imrpression The Last Unicorn was assured of its place in the canon.

Two worthy entries by Le Guin, but no The Dispossesed, her best. Two worthy by Philip K. Dick, but no Ubik, his most Phildickian.

I don't disagree with the Le Guin—I recommend The Left Hand of Darkness or A Wizard of Earthsea before The Dispossessed, partly because I think there's less chance of bouncing off Therem or Ged than Shevek, partly because (self-centeredly) I am more interested in gender work and language than in political systems. I would not, however, have chosen either of the novels listed here to represent Angela Carter: I think her best work is her short fiction.

When an authority recommends 143 titles and overlooks at least half a dozen of the top twenty, it's not worth paying attention to.

Of course it is, otherwise what would we argue about?

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I feel it's quite possible that the person who compiled this list has not read The Last Unicorn.

No Diana Wynne Jones, either, FWIW; and YA is given but a curt nod. I think that YA SF like Lucky Starr and of course the Heinlein classics were and still are (for writers who read them as children) influential, but perhaps in a "sleeping in your subconscious" way, not in an "establishing tropes that embed themselves in the genre" way.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

I was under the imrpression The Last Unicorn was assured of its place in the canon.

I imagine the fact that The Last Unicorn isn't currently in print in the UK, and going by Amazon at least looks to have been that way for quite some time, doesn't help it.