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

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Both are easily remedied given time, a library, and hot tea. And a bed.

I'm sorry you're so vulnerable to Con crud... it must make going to conventions just that much more costly....

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I think you would absolutely love Orlando.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

There are some very weird gaps in that list. I believe it was compiled by an editor, or team of editors, comfortably over 55, who has not read much f/sf lately, but was willing to accept some of the staff's recommendations (e.g. Sarah Waters).

(Putting the entire "Discworld Series" in as a single item is a cop-out. If you ask people, they can come up with two or three must-reads.)

(And, come on, News from Nowhere? Fight Club?? Etc.)

I'd also tell anyone who hasn't readThe Hitch-Hiker's Guide to skip it and just listen to the first round of the radio show, which was and remains brilliantly done.

ETA: I figured out what tipped my subconscious off: it's The Glass Bead Game. Heh.

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.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Sorry to hear about the fever. I hope you're feeling better soon.

Not sure what I think of the list, but I'd expect The Grauniad and I wouldn't have quite the same notions of what to list. Glad they got Book of the New Sun and Snowcrash and The Third Policeman on there. Slightly puzzled that they list Narnia in place of the Space Trilogy, if a choice had to be made, but I suppose that's just me. Can't decide if I'm pleased that they're including stuff from mainstreamish authors like Atwood of "spaceships and talking squid" fame and Rushdie and Toni Morrison, or if I'm a bit put out that they're taking up space that might be given to "our people." Not sure why Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is included, but I suppose I can't look at that book rationally since it pressed all my borderline-mediaevalist buttons.

I'm a little puzzled that Discworld and Earthsea are reduced to series, whereas Harry Potter isn't.

In Contrast

[ericmvan.livejournal.com]

Here are the 18 sf novels that placed in the top 50 in the last Locus reader's poll and were also included in separate lists of the c. 100 greatest sf novels of all time by John Clute, David G. Hartwell, and David Pringle. Bold titles were omitted from the Guardian list:

Bester, Alfred: The Demolished Man
Bester, Alfred: The Stars My Destination
Bradbury, Ray: Fahrenheit 451
Brunner, John: Stand on Zanzibar
Clarke, Arthur C.: Childhood's End
Dick, Philip K.: The Man in the High Castle
Gibson, William: Neuromancer
Herbert, Frank: Dune
Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Dispossessed
Le Guin, Ursula K.: The Left Hand of Darkness
Miller, Walter M., Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein
Stapledon, Olaf: Last and First Men
Stapledon, Olaf: Star Maker
Sturgeon, Theodore: More Than Human
Wells, H. G.: The Time Machine
Wells, H. G.: The War of the Worlds
Wolfe, Gene: The Book of the New Sun

And here are the 32 novels named by three of the above four authorities. They missed 19 of them:

Asimov, Isaac: The Foundation Trilogy
Benford, Gregory: Timescape
Blish, James: A Case of Conscience
Bradbury, Ray: The Martian Chronicles
Brin, David: Startide Rising
Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange
Card, Orson Scott: Ender's Game
Cherryh, C. J.: Cyteen
Clarke, Arthur C.: The City and the Stars
Clement, Hal: Mission of Gravity
Dick, Philip K.: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dick, Philip K.: Ubik
Disch, Thomas M.: 334
Farmer, Philip José: To Your Scattered Bodies Go
Haldeman, Joe: The Forever War
Heinlein, Robert A.: Starship Troopers
Heinlein, Robert A.: Stranger in a Strange Land
Huxley, Aldous: Brave New Word
Keyes, Daniel: Flowers for Algernon
Moorcock, Michael: The Cornelius Chronicles
Niven, Larry: Ringworld
Orwell, George: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Pohl, Frederik: Gateway
Pohl, Frederik & Kornbluth, C. M.: The Space Merchants
Russ, Joanna: The Female Man
Simak, Clifford D.: City
Simak, Clifford D.: Way Station
Simmons, Dan: Hyperion
Smith, Cordwainer: Norstrilia
Stewart, George R.: Earth Abides
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.: The Sirens of Titan
Wyndham, John: The Day of the Triffids
Zelazny, Roger: Lord of Light

And finally, here are the 42 novels named by two of the four authorities, of which they inlcude a whopping eight:

Aldiss, Brian W.: Hothouse
Asimov, Isaac: The Gods Themselves
Ballard, J. G.: The Crystal World
Bishop, Michael: No Enemy But Time
Brackett, Leigh: The Long Tomorrow
Budrys, Algis: Rogue Moon
Burroughs, Edgar Rice: A Princess of Mars
Capek, Karel: R.U.R.
Cherryh, C. J.: Downbelow Station
Clarke, Arthur C.: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Clarke, Arthur C.: Rendezvous with Rama
Crowley, John: Engine Summer
Delany, Samuel R.: Dhalgren
Delany, Samuel R.: Nova
Dick, Philip K.: Martian Time-Slip
Dick, Philip K.: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Disch, Thomas M.: Camp Concentration
Heinlein, Robert A.: Double Star
Heinlein, Robert A.: Have Space Suit -- Will Travel
Heinlein, Robert A.: The Door Into Summer
Heinlein, Robert A.: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Heinlein, Robert A.: Time Enough for Love
Hoban, Russell: Riddley Walker
Lassswitz, Kurt: Two Planets
Lem, Stanisalw: Solaris
Lewis, C. S.: Out of the Silent Planet
Niven, Larry & Pournelle, Jerry: The Mote in God's Eye
Pangborn, Edgar: A Mirror for Observers
Panshin, Alexi: Rite of Passage
Pohl, Frederik: Man Plus
Roberts, Keith: Pavane
Schmitz, James H.: The Witches of Karres
Silverberg, Robert: Dying Inside
Twain, Mark: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Van Vogt, A. E.: Slan
Van Vogt, A. E.: The World of Null-A
Verne, Jules: From the Earth to the Moon
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.: Slaughterhouse-Five
Watson, Ian: The Embedding
Wolfe, Gene: The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Wyndham, John: The Day of the Triffids
Zamiatain, Yevgeny: We

While they have an obvious (thought not consistent) bias against hard sf whose qualities are not the traditional "literary," they also have huge holes in the literary end. It's just a massively uninformed list.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Seeing your list has reminded me that I have read considerably more than three long works by Asimov. *fixes*

Hope you feel well soon!

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

No Crowley and no Last Unicorn? That's just--wrong. And yes, Angela Carter's short fiction should be on there. Though I'm happy to see Warner.

Nine

[selidor]

Ok, it is a fantasy and sf list.
Any ideas why Lord Dunsany doesn't feature anywhere, given the apparent UK bias of the list?

[anef.livejournal.com]

And what about Tanith Lee, for heaven's sake?

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

Hilary Mantel? Oh, my. I must move her up the list, I've been meaning to read her for dogs' years.

(And you must read The Castle of Otranto, which is all sorts of good clean fun.)

I will not do this because I am embarrassed of the much larger weird gaps in my reading. (I have just tracked down a copy of Zamyatin on Worldcat-- meant to read it in '08-- and it's going to be part of the first whack of stuff I put on hold in '09; I've read just about everything Simmons has ever written but the Hyperion books; ditto Moorcock and Mother London, which has been sitting on my shelf staring accusingly at me for twenty years; etc.)

I find it interesting that very few of these memes have a "strikethrough if you absolutely loathed it" option, as if no one could ever possibly hate anything on MY list!!!one!.

I am finally giving in and doing The Satanic Verses-- which has also been sitting accusingly on my shelf staring at me for twenty years-- in audio. It's one of four Rushdies I've tried (The Jaguar Hunter, Midnight's Children, and Shame being the others) that I simply can't get through. I don't know whether it's Rushdie's style or the translators' that gets me, but it does. Every time. It's all kind of loose and gangly and thwacks me in the side of the head while I'm trying to serve the soup all too many times.