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

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

That's one reduction I agree with; the first book is the best in that series.

I question whether Rowling should be on the list at all, when The Last Unicorn is not.

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

I question whether Rowling should be on the list at all, when The Last Unicorn is not.

I would say the same thing about the absence of Engine Summer (or Little, Big; YMMV) and . . . well, every other book on the list.

In terms of unity of narrative arc, Harry Potter needs to be included in its entirety more than Earthsea and (as I understand it) way more than Discworld. I would also opine that the third volume is easily the best (intersection of increasing skill and decreasing editorial control).

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

The list has strong UK bias for two non-UK-biased genres. That is, a lot of the most influential f/sf works are from the US and those are mostly missing. It's a very university-English-professor list and doesn't appear to relate, structurally, to the genres' internal developmental. (It also blends horror in.) No Jurgen? No Golden Age space opera? No Marion Zimmer Bradley? No Leiber?

Skipping about, I note that the Michael Moorcock choice is Mother London, a good book but easily his least influential in f/sf; however, the most likely for a non-f/sf-reader to have read. Possibly the Guardian cannot send readers to Elric with a straight face.

[sovay]

The list has strong UK bias for two non-UK-biased genres. That is, a lot of the most influential f/sf works are from the US and those are mostly missing.

Has anyone ever compiled a reasonably comprehensive list of British science fiction and fantasy novels everyone must read?

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

Well, you kinda got it right there from the Guardian. I'd still put Elric on it though. And a Jerry Cornelius book, because he went on to become as much of a mythotype, a trope, as Elric.

[sovay]

Well, you kinda got it right there from the Guardian.

With Heinlein and Haldeman and Bradbury mixed in: I was really asking if you narrowed it to writers in/from the UK, what kind of list would you get?

And a Jerry Cornelius book, because he went on to become as much of a mythotype, a trope, as Elric.

I haven't actually read any: Elric, yes; Cornelius, no. I imagine Dancers at the End of Time doesn't count.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'd still put Elric on it though. And a Jerry Cornelius book, because he went on to become as much of a mythotype, a trope, as Elric.

Word. I'd call both Elric and Jerry Cornelius the necessary examples for Moorcock; it seems almost like listing Farmer Giles of Ham for Tolkien and leaving off Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. (Admittedly, I've never read Mother London.)

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Yes, though I think speaking of 'The Guardian' as a monolithic entity in this instance is incorrect; if I had time, I would break out the main list by contributor. It's my strong impression that not only were the large majority of the genre-published titles nominated by the three genre-published writers, but the large majority of works published after about 1980 were nominated by them as well; it could easily be that they were assigned to cover "contemporary sf". (That said, Jon Courtenay Grimwood picks The Years of Rice and Salt as the essential KSR, which is clearly crackers.)

[sovay]

I question whether Rowling should be on the list at all, when The Last Unicorn is not.

As they say: word.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Hmm... to me, the third one was the best. But I suppose the first is the one that needs to be read, if one's only going to read one.

I question whether Rowling should be on the list at all, when The Last Unicorn is not.

This is true. And I'd like to see Hughart's The Bridge of Birds on the list. But I suppose for sheer impact in the wider world Rowling belongs there.