50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
April 13, 2023 8:15 AM Subscribe

Another list to argue about! What does Esquire Magazine know about sci-fi? I don't know either, but have at it!

The full list for those who don't want to click or scroll:

50. The Echo Wife - Sarah Gailey
49. Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
48. Contact - Carl Sagan
47. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller Jr.
46. Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
45. Neuromancer - William Gibson
44. The Book of Phoenix - Nnedi Okorafor
43. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
42. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
41. This is How You Lose the Time War - Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
40. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
39. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
38. The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
37. Rosewater - Tade Thompson
36. The Stand - Stephen King
35. The Children of Men - P.D. James
34. Radiance - Catherynne M. Valente
33. Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
32. The City & the City - China Miéville
31. Hyperion - Dan Simmons
30. Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
29. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers
28. The Body Scout - Lincoln Michel
27. Zone One - Colson Whitehead
26. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
25. Future Home of the Living God - Louise Erdrich
24. Ammonite - Nicola Griffith
23. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood
22. The Resisters - Gish Jen
21. Shikasta - Doris Lessing
20. An Unkindness of Ghosts - Rivers Solomon
19. Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer
18. The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
17. Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke
16. The Complete Robot - Isaac Asimov
15. How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - Charles Yu
14. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
13. The Employees - Olga Ravn
12. 1984 - George Orwell
11. The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu
10. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick
9. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
8. Exhalation - Ted Chiang
7. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
6. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin
5. Kindred - Octavia Butler
4. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin
3. The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury
2. Dune - Frank Herbert
1. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

posted by Ben Trismegistus (226 comments total) 67 users marked this as a favorite

My personal opinions:

It's a fine list, if a little safe. Reads a bit like a syllabus for a college class on sci-fi. Pretty good diversity, in gender, race, and old v. new. Nice to see five female authors in the top 10.

Hard to argue with anything on there. I've read most of them, and the few I hadn't heard of (about 9) sound interesting. I would have included Cloud Atlas, but I'm not sure it qualifies. For the classic stuff, I might have included The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, or Women on the Edge of Time. But overall, it's a sturdy list.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:20 AM on April 13, 2023 [18 favorites]

After adolescence I found THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS unreadable because it has all the weaknesses (especially the Old Fart Sage and the brilliant Chattering Girl) of Heinlein’s later bloated works without the strengths of his YA adventures but maybe that’s just me.
posted by Peach at 8:24 AM on April 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

I mean, no Gene Wolfe at all?
posted by TomFrog at 8:24 AM on April 13, 2023 [25 favorites]

This is a list of good books, in random order, with links to purchase them. Also with the name of the publisher pre-pended to the titles, as if to telegraph that no human editor has looked at this page?
posted by gwint at 8:26 AM on April 13, 2023 [35 favorites]

If Carlos Castaneda’s books aren’t for real; then they sure as hell are great science fiction.
posted by JohnR at 8:27 AM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

Should have Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries somewhere, and maybe MeFi's own jscalzi's _Old Man's War_, both of which I think are better than, and more influential than, some things on this list, but it's not a bad list.
posted by hanov3r at 8:34 AM on April 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

Clicked the link fully expecting to hate on the list, but find myself pleasantly surprised. Nice balance of classics and newer works like The City & the City. There's always an element of subjectivity in lists like this, so there's no way to please everyone, but this is better than most.
posted by bassomatic at 8:44 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I love very broad "fifty best" lists as starting points and am always happy to see them, although of course they are all wrong - how could you possibly, possibly rank the fifty best science fiction novels of all time? How could you even read enough science fiction novels, even defining science fiction as beginning with the pulps rather than at any earlier point, to be sure that you could really make a good judgement.

I think you can make a bit of a case for weak presentism - that science fiction changes and develops so much with the New Wave that in fact most of the very best SF novels will be post 1960. And this list appears to be pretty much exclusively Anglophone SF which cuts things down a little.

None the less, I immediately notice that this is not a list written by someone who has read a lot of women or BIPOC SF writers writing before about 2010, and it's bold to set yourself up as an authority in that situation.

There are no seventies/early eighties feminist SF novels on here. There's no Joanna Russ. There's no Suzie McKee Charnas. There's no Vonda McIntire. Further, there's no older SF by women, no Kate Wilhelm or Pamela Sargent or Zenna Henderson. There's no Octavia Butler! Of all the books that are still indubitably going to be SF classics when SF is viewed as an ancient literature and primarily a hobby for snob grad students, Dawn is going to be first on that list.

There's nothing from the Women's Press, as far as I can see.

There's not even that much New Wave.

And no Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination.

My point is not that this list should be replaced by my list tout courte, but there are such sweeping absences here that I think the criteria are either really weird or there's not a deep bench.
posted by Frowner at 8:47 AM on April 13, 2023 [54 favorites]

(But again, if you're going to talk about The Three Body Problem, a translated novel, then surely you have to have read a lot of other translated novels to justify picking that one alone. Just as if you're picking Ammonite (a great novel!) pretty much alone of women's writing in the eighties and nineties, why only Ammonite?
posted by Frowner at 8:48 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Finally something we can all agree on without reservations.

A big part of my experience with these lists is thinking of books that had some great writing and great ideas that I revered as a kid, and now that I've had decades to grow and learn, I think back on them and say, "Okay, that was actually pretty problematic." I would have argued strongly for Bester's The Stars My Destination once upon a time, but thinking back on it, it's both sexist and probably kinda racist, too.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 8:49 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Isn't it time to retire Asimov from any kind of canon? I'd sooner have Martha Wells's Murderbot Diaries than the Complete Robot. I'm not a fan of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and would swap it for something else personally. Maybe Gene Wolfe's the Fifth Head of Cerberus? And is Stephen King's the Stand really a sci-fi novel? I've read it but I wouldn't describe it as such.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:49 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Solaris is also translated.
posted by Spike Glee at 8:50 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

There are no seventies/early eighties feminist SF novels on here. There's no Joanna Russ. There's no Suzie McKee Charnas. There's no Vonda McIntire. Further, there's no older SF by women, no Kate Wilhelm or Pamela Sargent or Zenna Henderson. There's no Octavia Butler! Of all the books that are still indubitably going to be SF classics when SF is viewed as an ancient literature and primarily a hobby for snob grad students, Dawn is going to be first on that list.

There's no James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley Sheldon), which is a little bonkers. Also the wrong Ted Chiang and the wrong Phil Dick, and no Cordwainer Smith (also bonkers). So sure, a slightly shallow list, but not awful?
posted by The Bellman at 8:51 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Also, sorry, you have to do some pretty strong arguing to say that you're including, eg, Annihilation (also a great book!) but not The Female Man. What renders the more experimental work of the past fifteen years better than Russ's writing? I mean, she was really, really awfully good at the sentence level. Between her and Delany, it's hard to choose IMO although they do very different things.
posted by Frowner at 8:51 AM on April 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

I've read some of these! Guess I'd better get to the second book of the Three Body Problem now...
posted by Chuffy at 8:56 AM on April 13, 2023

I'm not sure Leckie belongs on the list, but noting some of those authors/titles they're every bit as worthy
posted by elkevelvet at 8:56 AM on April 13, 2023

Further, there's no older SF by women

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is literally #1.
posted by Chuffy at 8:57 AM on April 13, 2023 [20 favorites]

There is some Octavia Butler: Kindred is listed. But I agree there's a bit of a gap in the 60s-80s for female writers, other than Butler and LeGuin.

Tiptree was better known as a short-story writer, but there are definitely works on this list I wouldn't exactly call novels (like The Martian Chronicles).
posted by suelac at 8:57 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Tiptree was better known as a short-story writer, but there are definitely works on this list I wouldn't exactly call novels (like The Martian Chronicles).

Right, and Exhalation is a short story collection as well (albeit, as I said, the wrong one), so they don't seem to care about that.
posted by The Bellman at 9:00 AM on April 13, 2023

I think it's very legit to say "greatness has to be moral greatness as well as writerly or inventive greatness, so we're going to exclude books by really shitty people and books organized around rape apologism, racism, homophobia, and related unacceptable viewpoints".

But whoa, Anthony Burgess does not belong on that list. Doris Lessing does not belong on that list. Oryx and Crake does not belong on that list - the southeast Asia sections and the characterization of Oryx are classic liberal racism.

And then we have to have an argument about whether books like, eg, Ammonite belong on the list - its whole premise is pretty gender-essentialist, even though that's not at all where Griffith's politics are. James Tiptree has some stuff about disability that I personally would not back with my whole wallet.

I think you can get into the weeds a bit after that - Angry Planet pretty much has a "consent is only important for people we like who are consenting to things we think are good" plot that takes it permanently off my list, but is that enough reason to dump the book? I am always tempted to logic-chop on a "well, if I can't have Ammonite, you can't have Angry Planet" level and I think that's bad since we can't really get down to the "to be a great book it must reflect the best contemporary understanding of anti-oppressive politics down to the very finest level"
posted by Frowner at 9:01 AM on April 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

HHGTTG should be #42 on everyone's list
posted by skippyhacker at 9:03 AM on April 13, 2023 [67 favorites]

Meh. This is inches deep.

Some are the kind of books that are like "we all know this is supposed to go on the list" but whose time has passed or weren't that good in the first place. Many are not really SF. Angry Planet, Hyperion and 3-Body Problem are badly-written garbage; Never Let Me Go is beautifully-written garbage. Neuromancer should be in the top five. This comment section could do a much better job.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:10 AM on April 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is literally #1.

Honestly, IME namechecking Frankenstein often stands in for reading a broad selection of science fiction by women. And people seldom clarify why it's the best SF novel. Is it the finest writing? That's probably Delany, maybe Russ. Is it the most originality? Well, why not Jemisin, she's dazzling. My feeling is that people call it the best because it is frequently cited as the founding book, because it's by a woman and because people read it in high school. You don't need to have any kind of genealogy of women's SF if you just name-check one Very Important Woman, it feels like.

Is there any other genre where the founding text is considered the finest and it's all down hill from there?
posted by Frowner at 9:12 AM on April 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

The list feels like it was written by two people, one old who knew the famous stuff, and one younger with more variety for recent stuff.

Fifty books and zero Russ, yeah, oops. It does have Lessing, who for me personally is historical study rather than reading.

Future Home of the Living God, boy, that one did n.o.t. work for me, even though I like slipstream and Erdrich is great.
posted by away for regrooving at 9:12 AM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Just chiming in to say I’m so happy to see the Joanna Russ love in this thread. We Who Are About To… is one of my absolute favorite books despite the fact that I’ve barely ever recommended it to anyone (“It’s kinda like an angry lesbian postmodern sci-fi The Stranger” is a pitch that doesn’t draw in many people but the people it does draw in are my very favorite type of people)
posted by showbiz_liz at 9:16 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Is there any other genre where the founding text is considered the finest and it's all down hill from there?

Sub-genre, but people do this with cyberpunk and Neuromancer, a book I did not enjoy.

Solaris is also translated.

1Q84 too.

HHGTTG should be #42 on everyone's list

I did not notice this when I put together this post, but it is brilliant and (almost) excuses the other sins in the list.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 9:19 AM on April 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow are all more SF-y than many of these books.

I’ve always thought Hitchhiker's Guide is more like a cloying aftertaste bad SF leaves behind than a work of SF in its own right.

And though I think I yield to few in my taste for Lessing, I’ve never met anyone who’s been willing to admit reading Shikasta.
posted by jamjam at 9:20 AM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Okay, though, I should say that I have had an absolutely chaotic, out of control morning at work and have been way more negative than I realize that I should.

Rosewater, for instance, is a really great and under-read novel.

There's very little on this list that isn't a great SF novel. (Shikasta, OMG, not even a good Doris Lessing novel.)

Anyway. This list creates discussion of great SF novels, so I should remind myself that it in fact, works. It's good for the genre. It's reasonable to make a list that isn't my list, it's reasonable to make a list that doesn't have a clear genealogy.

Write 500 times, I do not need to be a killjoy just because work is a vortex of madness.
posted by Frowner at 9:21 AM on April 13, 2023 [16 favorites]

Get that Heinlein the hell out of here. Don't want to see it, don't want to suffer through reading it again. Bad books! Bad! I guess they were important or something? But they're the worst of sci-fi.
posted by dis_integration at 9:24 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

For a list that's weirdly leading with the publisher, they picked the shitty Solaris translation. The linked one went Polish to French then French to English, and is... unfortunate. Get the newer one that went straight to English from the original Polish.
posted by phunniemee at 9:26 AM on April 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Half of these are what Bruce Sterling calls “slipstream” novels — books written by literary authors slumming in science fiction, as opposed to career sci fi writers. These books would be shelved in the lit. section at a book store rather than the sci fi section. That’s fine and everything.

My hometown library has A Clockwork Orange shelved in the humour section. I guess if you’ve read the complete Dave Barry oeuvre, this one is right up your alley.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 9:30 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

So it's pistols at dawn, then!

Water pistols filled with our choices of nutrasweetened diet soda would certainly befit the book!
posted by jamjam at 9:30 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sci Fi is just too big to boil down into 50 books. You need to specify an era, or a subtype, to really get a reading list.

You could have both Asimov and Wells on a list focused on robots, for example, which would let you talk about their contribution to that subgenre rather than some handwavy "best" designation.
posted by emjaybee at 9:32 AM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

With any media outlet's list, you have to consider the audience. Esquire used to be (and maybe still is?) a publication for post-college dudes trying to broaden their horizons and look (if not be) smarter. So if this list gets a few of them to pick up Jemison, as a MeFi-posted list did for me a few years ago, I'd call it a net win despite the omissions.

And for me, these comments have added a few more books to my list, so thanks to Frowner, showbiz_liz and others for sharing their knowledge!
posted by martin q blank at 9:36 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Is there any other genre where the founding text is considered the finest and it's all down hill from there?

Religious publications come to mind...
posted by Chuffy at 9:39 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

jamjam: And though I think I yield to few in my taste for Lessing, I’ve never met anyone who’s been willing to admit reading Shikasta.

[slowly raises hand] I... I... really liked it. But I can absolutely see why many folks don't.
posted by indexy at 9:39 AM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Stand on Zanzibar is a surprising omission.
posted by jamjam at 9:40 AM on April 13, 2023 [15 favorites]

Oh my goodness, indexy, don’t apologize — you don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this moment!

You are not at all obligated to tell me of course, but I’d love to know why.
posted by jamjam at 9:44 AM on April 13, 2023

I don't know the target audience for or what it's trying to say, and I'm not sure one could figure it out by looking at the list. It seems really lazy. It could do worse on gender balance, though, so it's not entirely pointless.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:48 AM on April 13, 2023

Also, it doesn't have Tamsyn Muir on it so it's just fucking wrong, I guess the only thing worth discussing is how wrong is it, in how many different ways.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:50 AM on April 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

As some have said, the article (or at least the MetaFilter post) have done their job--this maybe not amazing list has had you folks point out who I really should read next.

My only two cents: even if you were somebody who likes the politics of the book, Oryx and Crake is awful
posted by TheProfessor at 9:50 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

There are some interesting choices made on this list (from early 2022) to be sure, but the text accompanying each book is just a summary, rather than an argument for the books inclusion and position on the list. So, I have to agree with gwint that this feels like a just low effort page meant to present readers with affiliate links to Amazon rather than a serious place to start a discussion.
posted by 3j0hn at 10:03 AM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Also, is the place to admit that I got nearly halfway through Dhalgren and put it down because I had no f***ing idea what was going on?
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 10:07 AM on April 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

jamjam,
It's hard to express exactly why I like something (Why do you like bananas? Dunno, they just taste good!) but I'll try. The whole thing just resonated with me on some level. I read it after reading Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, which I also liked and was glad for another book that had a similar style and themes, but Shikasta seemed like a more expansive, and better written, take on those ideas. I enjoyed most of the worldbuilding and its new (to me) take on the question of good vs. evil in general and what outside powers might be doing to nurture our world or be parasitic upon it. I also appreciated that even though these powers existed, individual humans also had agency and the ability to shape events with their own choices and actions. I wasn't aware of the Sufi influence when I first read it, but it was nice to see someone write about why our world seems so broken from such an interesting perspective. I also respected how she portrayed Johor as an agent of Canopus, and how he interacted with others in the story.

I also tend to like books that have a long history in them, and characters that flow through this history either by being long-lived / immortal or through reincarnation. I liked North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Atkinson's Time After Time, and Rice's vampire books for similar reasons. I haven't read it in a while, so certain problematic things might have slipped beneath my radar at the time. I'm not sure how the portrayal of Chinese people in the later part of the book would read today. I'll ponder this some more, but please let me know if you have any other questions.
posted by indexy at 10:10 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Water pistols filled with our choices of nutrasweetened diet soda would certainly befit the book!

Share and enjoy!
posted by tclark at 10:13 AM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

I have to agree with most of it:

1) It is a list with 50 items
2) They do all appear to be books from all time
3) Most or all are arguably Sci Fi

Frankly, this is a list of some super safe and bad choices by people who think poorly of sci-fi outside of the literary bent. Some are great, some are blah, many are there because they're supposed to be there.

Perhaps it's someone's "my favorite 50 sci-fi books"?
posted by jclarkin at 10:13 AM on April 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Also, is the place to admit that I got nearly halfway through Dhalgren and put it down because I had no f***ing idea what was going on?

I got all the way through. Twice. And I'm in the same place. But it's quite a ride.
posted by tclark at 10:15 AM on April 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

No Wolfe at all seems to be a major omission to me.

I do like the inclusion of A Wrinkle in Time. I think the "childrens'" books often get left off these lists and it's nice to see the real importance of juveniles included in that way. I'd like to have seen more.

There's the usual quibbles about how certain writers should be on this list: I don't think Exhalation is Chiangs's best, for example, but I agree he is certainly deserving to be on the list. "Story of Your Life" or "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" would be my preferences. But whatever.

I think the past two decades are significantly over-represented, but that's a generational effect. It's also really hard to say if something published less than ten years ago is indeed a durable and resonant work that will be remembered later. However the recent bias in this list is its major weakness. I strongly suspect that many of the choices on this list won't be on the next one.
posted by bonehead at 10:18 AM on April 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

No JG Ballard? - hahaha nope. Ditto M. John Harrison.
posted by aeshnid at 10:19 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

This list was cool for adding to my "To Read" pile.
posted by latkes at 10:24 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm not nearly as plugged into SF as I used to be, so I check these lists for writing I've missed. For example, Audible has Rosewater on sale, lucky me. Don't recall hearing of it before today.

That said, I'd like to add a few complaints. 😃

Annihilation is the first part of a much greater whole. Authority makes it better and Acceptance makes Authority better. I'm afraid that I'm developing a tic on this topic.

Fifty books and zero Russ, yeah, oops. Indeed, as noted by others.

I agree with hippybear about Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
posted by kingless at 10:25 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

For the Esquire list I didn't score so well, but for that ChatGPT list I am absolutely acing it... which... damn, am I just following an AI? Do I have tastes of my own or do I just read what people tell me is good... I'll go consult my Mercer box. Oh no! This is my Bene Gesserit pain box!
posted by Molesome at 10:37 AM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'll say this list, however one judges it, has given us a good parallel list here in the comments! Thanks, mefites.
posted by kensington314 at 10:39 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

*starts scrolling through*

*gets peeved when that one book isn't showing up*

*continues scrolling, gets actually angry*

*calms down once I find that The Fifth Season is ranked number 4.*

Seriously, this is one of my favorite books of all time, along with the series, very readable and just a stunning tour de force. It's the first book in a trilogy and hot damn does it do a fantastic job of being a saga that spans an immense amount of time, while never losing sight of its characters.

Anytime I hear about GRR Martin not finishing A Song Of Ice and Fire after six or seven books, I get all snobby, start smirking, and mutter under my breadth "Has he considered consulting with N. K. Jemisin?"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:49 AM on April 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

For a list that allows The Stand as a science fiction novel--and for a list that twice uses the term "Lovecraftian" to describe its books--the omission of Lovecraft himself is a little weird.
posted by mittens at 10:54 AM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm glad to see Becky Chambers on the list, but - as much as I loved Small Angry Planet - to me, that's more "the book where we all fell in love with Becky Chambers," not necessarily her best book. I mean, writers do often get better as they go along. I've had a greater interest in re-reading A Closed and Common Orbit, and I loved A Psalm for the Wild-Built maybe more than either of those.

First is good, but first is not always best.

Perhaps a better exercise would be "50 of the best sci-fi authors, and at least one of the books each of them wrote."
posted by kristi at 10:55 AM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yeah, The Stand is the wrong King book. For SF, I'd put in Carrie, The Dead Zone (still my favorite King book), or even Firestarter.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:03 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’m probably out of date, but I still tend to assume that anyone who calls it ‘Sci-fi’ knows nothing and hasn’t read any, and reading the list has not significantly disturbed that prejudice.
posted by Phanx at 11:05 AM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is 1984 really science fiction? I mean, it's dystopian and set in the future, kind of. But ... is that enough?
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 11:05 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I agree that they would have a smoother ride if they'd limited the list to "Some recommend Sci Fi novels of the past 50-ish years" and cut out some dated chestnuts that haven't aged perfectly. I think we're reaching the point in time now that many Golden/Silver Age works are turning into historical curiosities rather than required reading. With a few overlooked gems, of course.

If you a reading this and you haven't read 'Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand', give it a look, it's one of my fave faves and Delaney's masterpiece. (I actually like 'Dhalgren' as experimental literature, but it's not for everyone, of course.)

Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series was a big deal at the time. I actually didn't care for 'Shikasta', but I really liked 'Marriages Between Zones..' and 'The Sentimental Agents'.

Of course, a few missing pieces of the puzzle to be added.
posted by ovvl at 11:07 AM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

You people need to brace yourselves, there's also a best fantasy list from Esquire. Both of these lists were posted a while back on the Song of Ice and Fire forum and oh wow, there were OPINIONS! It deserves a separate thread though because not only was there some crossovers from this list BUT THEY FUCKING LEFT OFF TERRY PRACHETT!
posted by Ber at 11:08 AM on April 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

[...] the omission of Lovecraft himself is a little weird.

Yeah, but is it, though? Here's Lovecraft, at the peak of his powers, finally introducing the dreaded shoggoth:

It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

If "crushing the frantic penguins" doesn't give you a severe case of the giggles, then you're made of sterner stuff than I.

Also, Lovecraft was a racist jerk
posted by phooky at 11:11 AM on April 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

The Employees is a weird inclusion. I liked it, I think it's worth reading, and it's definitely not a safe pick. But it didn't have the ciritical success or popularity to make it into the teens on a list like this. And it's too new to have been influencial in the genre. I'd almost always recommend Stories of Your Life and Others instead.
posted by Hume at 11:15 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Bah. BAH!!!!
posted by chasles at 11:19 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand is often my favorite Delany novel. Like Triton it has a lot of violence and bad stuff semi-obscured as background conditions that emerges in a weirdly calm and terrifying way into the foreground, but the bad stuff isn't because technology is bad and will irretrievably fuck us up. Technology is good. It's used in both books to provide semi-just post-scarcity societies where some wonderful things happen and most people can, with effort and a little luck, exercise opportunities to have some wonderful experiences. I really like the polyvocal aliens. There was a point where I was reading SIMPLGS and it suddenly occurred to me what one meant when one said "polyvocal".

Honestly, I would seldom recommend that people start reading Delany with Dhalgren and probably not with Stars In My Pocket either unless they have strong hearts that never falter - those are both challenging books and you've got to have read enough fiction (and or science fiction) that you can either sort out what's going on or just float along in a wordy haze.

I really like "Time Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", Triton and "The Tale of Old Venn" as Delany starting points.

Dhalgren is a great book (and if you like it, you should read John Rechy's City of Night).

I think one thing I really like about Delany generally is the feeling of a vast, connected, real but unknown to me world out there, a world that is very clearly described when Delany focuses on a relevant part but which remains as confusing in total as a new city or a foreign country when you're there for the first time.
posted by Frowner at 11:23 AM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

I like this list. Just saying.
posted by flamewise at 11:26 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I mean, no Gene Wolfe at all?

Fifty books and zero Russ, yeah, oops.

Ditto and double ditto.

And, as has been mentioned, no Cordwainer Smith -- nor C.L. Moore nor mind boggling to me no Avram Davidson nor no Jack Vance? I am sure Xoc agrees on Vance, at least. And as I have said before here, Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep deserves more than Bladerunner -- no Wilbur Mercer, Mercerism, Mercer empathy boxes and, worst of all, no Penfield Mood Organ made for a flashy movie I loved but it tore the heart from the novel all the same. But then I am of the opinion that no great science fiction novel has survived a movie version. Today I learned there was a movie made of C.L. Moore's wonderful Vintage Season that sounds so awful I can't bear to link it here. I mean Vintage Season should have been a slam dunk of a movie. I feel certain she would feel the same were she still around.

All these point missing clickbait X amount of greatest whatevers are so piss poor as post material. In my humble opnion.

Upon review, I agree with putting Frowner's Delany's Triton before Dhalgren.
posted by y2karl at 11:30 AM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I've read "Shikasta". I'm not certain I would place it on this list, but I'm also baffled as to why people would read it, but not admit to having read it.
posted by Ipsifendus at 11:30 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Certainly a good half will not be on the "all time" list they do in 50 years, but most lists have a recentness bias. I think Butler will be on the future list and certainly Heinlen will be argued over, perhaps in a different way. Asimov is problematic but some of his robot ideas will still be contemplated, if in a historical context. As will LeGuin, but less likely Chambers. Neuromancer will reflect an era but Hyperion will live with "Slan" and Skylark of Space. Sputter sputter not a single Lensman book included?

I will return to this list next time I'm looking for a good historical read.
posted by sammyo at 11:34 AM on April 13, 2023

While people mentioned a number of books/authors not on the list I'm glad to see Dhalgren there, though I might argue it should be higher. My ambivalence is driven mostly by my inability to fully understand it but perhaps I'm just missing the point.
posted by tommasz at 11:37 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

You people need to brace yourselves, there's also a best fantasy list from Esquire. Both of these lists were posted a while back on the Song of Ice and Fire forum and oh wow, there were OPINIONS! It deserves a separate thread though because not only was there some crossovers from this list BUT THEY FUCKING LEFT OFF TERRY PRACHETT!

I get what you're saying, but, honestly, if they left off Pratchett, it deserves no thread, anywhere, and whoever wrote or edited it deserves only this.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:41 AM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Seeing this list, it makes me very aware of how little SF I have read.

And most of my introduction to SF was Heinlein. Probably Starship Troopers, (there was a boardgame), then the YA stuff, and then Stranger in a Strange Land. Surprised the Moon IAHM beat that out, though I enjoyed reading it. Wye Nott?

Then as you get older you realize he was a fascist ahole...

And Murderbot is great. HOW DARE YOU!

Also, The Cloud Roads, (sci-fi or fantasy?) and the Raksura books from Martha Wells are pretty great.
posted by Windopaene at 11:41 AM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

It’s pretty tame but mostly right. A few changes I’d make:
1) The lack of Iain Banks is criminal. Fans of Literature will push for Use of Weapons, popularity would demand Player of Games, but Look To Windward is the strongest of the ten Culture novels.
2) For pre-90s classic sexist male sci-fi Ringworld deserves placement on this list more than anything by Asimov or Heinlein. Niven’s an asshole but he’s brought way too many fresh Big Ideas(tm) to exclude entirely and Ringworld’s by far the most essential (even if The Smoke Ring is more interesting).
3) Replace The Three Body Problem with The Dark Forest. The latter contains a major contribution to the set of classic sci-fi thought experiments, the former is just a good intro to passably-translated Cixin Liu.
4) Similarly, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet is not the best book in Wayfarers. That whole series deserves inclusion on any best sci-fi list as an ensemble act, but while the strongest is a matter of personal taste the intro is definitely not it.
5) Childhood’s End isn’t Clarke’s best book by a mile. We can debate which, but this ain’t it.
6) Murderbot, please. Probably Network Effect.

I’ve always thought Hitchhiker's Guide is more like a cloying aftertaste bad SF leaves behind than a work of SF in its own right.

Not to be too mean but this is not merely the worst take I have ever read on sci-fi, or even English writing, it may actually be the worst take I have ever read on the written word in any context. I wish I could believe I was being trolled.
posted by Ryvar at 11:44 AM on April 13, 2023 [23 favorites]

1) The lack of Iain Banks is criminal

I was going to just say *warms up effectors*. I expect his omission is just another reflection of the trouble he had breaking into US markets.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:48 AM on April 13, 2023 [21 favorites]

Seriously. The man solved Star Trek’s fundamental problems over the course of ten novels nearly all of which are at the very least better-executed than half this list. Are you not entertained?
posted by Ryvar at 11:52 AM on April 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

The contemporary subset is timid and replete with books no one will remember to say the least of read before long.

The classic subset … which I guess is mid oughts and earlier now … is sloppy and arbitrary.

I stand in great admiration for someone who could read Dahlgren today. I recall that required an immense effort, and that was when I was when I had a 19-year-old’s stamina and no internet or television to distract me.
posted by MattD at 11:55 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

These lists really ought to be marked "for people who really like science fiction qua science fiction" and "for people who don't really like science fiction in general but could be persuaded to read an SF novel if it sounded good".

As much as it's tricky to draw lines, I think you can imagine a sort of cloudy difference between books that have SFnal tropes but are really accessible to people who don't read SF and books that just...aren't going to grab you if you don't find SF interesting in general. The Stone Sky series is very accessible to people who don't read a lot of SF - that's part of what makes it so interesting, because it has some really dazzling SFnal moments and you don't really need to care about SF much to enjoy it. Oryx and Crake famously isn't very interesting science fiction* but interests people who like Atwood or for whom environmental collapse dystopia is a novel concept.

I'd say that Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Elizabeth Vonarburg - a bunch of people who are Not On This List but are indubitably important, in fact - are very much not for people who don't like SF that much. You aren't going to get very far with The Book of The New Sun if you are offput or embarrassed by weird words, people acting in ways that people don't act in our world, etc. Severian is a weird, dramatic, self-absorbed teenager, yes, but he does not come from a world where a weird, dramatic, self-absorbed teenager is similar to the weird dramatic self-absorbed teenagers we know.

A lot of science fiction that appeals to people who don't like science fiction much is grounded by the concerns of college-educated middle class people and has protagonists whose concerns are those of the college-educated middle class. Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven, Never Let Me Go, A Clockwork Orange, The Children of Men - all books about the issues of the day that concern the educated middle classes reflected through an SFnal lens.

*I've gotten very fond of The Year of the Flood. If you are interested very broadly in cyberpunk dystopias it's worth a read - it's like the cyberpunk dystopia story of the people who are not in fact jacked in to the matrix and I think it reads really well alongside, eg, Snowcrash. To me while it maybe is more scattered than Oryx and Crake it is also missing O&C's big flaws.
posted by Frowner at 11:56 AM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

so, let's talk about ada palmer, whose work is not on this list.

she's written one series, a quadrilogy named terra ignota. the first book is too like the lightning, you want to read it even if you don't realize it yet. go pick it up pls you'll love it and hate it and love it. terra ignota has to date gotten some small amount of recognition -- it was nominated for a best series hugo, but didn't win, and there's been an amount of mainstream press coverage in places like the los angeles review of books -- but as of right now her work is semi-obscurish.¹

but anyway i am pretty confident that if anything resembling our culture still exists twenty years from now, twenty years from now she'll be remembered as the greatest scifi novelist of the early 21st century. you'll probably start noticing an uptick in buzz about her about three or four years from now when the people she's inspired/influenced start to get their books published. like, ada palmer has that-one-cliché-about-the-velvet-underground energy in spades.

anyway, you should go read her right now. i recommend starting with this essay about rome on her blog² — if you like the style of that and the approach to the world presented in that, you'll probably be very excited to discover that there's a four-book scifi series³ with that approach and in that style.

1: okay, her fiction work is semi-obscurish, but as i understand it the stuff she's written for her day job as a professor of early modern and enlightenment history at the university of chicago — she kind of specializes in the history of atheism — anyway, her academic work, especially her stuff on early modern reception of lucretius, is already influential even though she's a relatively young professor.
2: her long series on machiavelli is also quite nice. also if you're visiting florence any time soon her gelato guide is very useful indeed.
3: well, scifi series slash work of theodicy i guess.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:00 PM on April 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

Regarding the absence of Lovecraft, I assumed they purposely left out people who have been universally derided as problematic. Hence the absence of Orson Scott Card. (I'm still mad at him - The Worthing Saga is one of my favorite books and I can't read it anymore.)
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 12:02 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

By the way, say what you will about Heinlein but both The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag and All You Zombies will be in memory yet green for me.

Asimov, however, deserves extra time in purgatory for just his sideburns, let alone his infamous record for groping women at science fiction conventions.
posted by y2karl at 12:07 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I had to scroll forever, but finally Bradbury...
posted by jim in austin at 12:08 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series is a work that takes actual effort to read, because there's so much to understand, so much world building, so much going on, so many layers. Possibly the richest, deepest fiction I've ever read. Dune has nothing on this stuff, which basically walks you through the critical rainforest-sized debate of "can pacifism ever prevail over war" and all the auxiliary questions that raises, at the grass blade level. The answer is essentially irrelevant, the journey is the point.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:11 PM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I had to scroll forever, but finally Bradbury

I'm aware of his work.
posted by credulous at 12:18 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

> which basically walks you through the critical rainforest-sized debate of "can pacifism ever prevail over war" and all the auxiliary questions that raises, at the grass blade level.

but also that's just one of about twenty interlocking debates explored at the same level of detail with the same amount of care.

and also there's gigantic orgies, just, like, the most elaborate, ornate, orgies you can imagine.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:25 PM on April 13, 2023

Look To Windward is the strongest of the ten Culture novels.

Surface Detail is a hair better IMHO. But the absence of Banks is just one of the many glaring flaws of this list.

And Ada Palmer is the sort of thing we could argue about at length. Personally, I found it to be unreadable trash, from the awful, twee writing style to the "there are only nine people in the Solar System who count, and they all went to high school together" triteness. I even forced myself to finish it, on the premise that others liked it, so maybe it would come together. It did not. YMMV.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:25 PM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

yes yes start an argument, do it, there's nothing more likely to get people to read something than an argument about it let's do it let's argue about ada palmer let's go let's go
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 12:27 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's on! But let's do it in dance-off form.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 12:29 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Today I learned there was a movie made of C.L. Moore's wonderful Vintage Season that sounds so awful I can't bear to link it here.

Ha! Hardly the worst movie based on sci-fi novel (there are so many contenders for the bottom!), but David Twohy's Timescape is not without its charms. Better than Last of Mimzy at least.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:32 PM on April 13, 2023

I think I lean more towards outgrown_hobnail's opinion of Too like the lightning but on the other hand I did read it all and was engaged enough that the cliffhanger (non)ending kind of enraged me. It's also the sort of book where I'd love to read more about it written by people who loved it because I do want to understand what's compelling about it.
posted by colourlesssleep at 12:35 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

“A list of 50 books, most of which are SF, most of which are quite good to excellent, some of which are the wrong book by the right author, with weirdly glaring exceptions from pretty much every period of SF history, every SF subgenre, every SF movement, and every SF tradition, except maybe I guess classic literary SF dystopianism, but even then there are no, like, deep cuts.”
posted by kyrademon at 12:35 PM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

First is good, but first is not always best.

That’s kind of how I felt about the inclusion Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix. It’s a great book, but I really think Noor is a masterpiece.

(yes, i know the book of phoenix isn’t het first book. the point stands, though)
posted by Thorzdad at 12:35 PM on April 13, 2023

I think the best Banks novel in Excession, so there. But basically any Banks that has Special Circumstances just getting up to shit is worthy.
posted by Ber at 12:42 PM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

My favorite part of lists like this is the ensuing discussion that spills out way more reccommendations. :)

I don't think you could even make a list of "here's 100 authors we think you should read and some of their best works" and still not generate an argument". I also don't know how you correctly thread the needle of recency bias and amberized legacy.

It's funny to see people's reactions to the various works. I read through all of Southern Reach and I don't know why. I liked the world and hated the story. (Later found out that my wife used to work with Jeff VanderMeer and thought he was a yutz and her partner at the time haaaaaaattttted. )
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:46 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's always interesting reading MeFi listicle comments, where the audience for such things ranges from "casual reader" to "I just participated in a 2-day comment marathon arguing Dr. Who canon and this list is terrible."
posted by Chuffy at 12:47 PM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

ok is this the fighting about Ada Palmer room lets go

As for her fiction, I really enjoy her non-fiction! I would probably love Terra Ignota in essay form. As fiction it just felt too lumpy and artificial to me, characters confected like Galileo presenting his system through the stances of Salviati and Sagredo.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:51 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I stand in great admiration for someone who could read Dahlgren today.

If I recall correctly, there once was a saying about how no one ever reached page 169 or so of Dhalgren. Which page turned out to be completely blank. And, furthermore, was not Dhalgren re-edited and re-edited through several publications? It is nice to note however that Delany is so far still with us, however.
posted by y2karl at 12:52 PM on April 13, 2023

This Thursdays complaint about this Thursday's listicle.

1. Hitchhikers is much too low, Dune is too low. Frankenstein is simply not the best SF book of all time, did you hit your head before you wrote this? Take two edibles instead of one?
2. Some of the glaring omissions make me think that you're not actually a science fiction fan, which is ok, but don't write a list of what you consider the best 50 SF books of all time when it sounds like you've read maybe 100-150 SF books.
3. There are multiple books in that list that I wouldn't consider science fiction. I like the outside of the box thinking on these lists, but not to the point of including stuff that should be on another list.
4. This feels like they're including some really questionable books simply because they are authored by women which makes me sad because I am all for women authors yet I feel this list overlooks some incredible woman authors with the apparent goal of trying to push books. Meh.
5. I can't believe that so many of you misspelled Excession.

Clickbait article is clickbait-y, film at 11.
posted by Sphinx at 12:57 PM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

If you want women authors, having Kage Baker on the list would have been good by me. Dump "The Stand" or "Annihilation" to make room.
posted by wenestvedt at 1:07 PM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I could argue that every one of those selections deserves to be on that list in those specific positions, or I could also argue against a lot of them being included on the list at all, but overall I think it's a nice list, with lots of variety. The most interesting thing to me about these types of lists is how people get so invested in arbitrary rankings of things that cannot be objectively ranked. At the end of the day, it's just more book ideas for my SF book club, where I will listen to people debate endlessly on whether a particular book was well written, original, or even counts as SF, while I drink my pint and eat some fries.
posted by exolstice at 1:09 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Its a solid list, but I'm a little surprised Revelation Space (or anything else by Reynolds) isn't listed given its influence on the last 20 years of space operas.
posted by Dalekdad at 1:09 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sphinx: agreed on all points except Excession. The part of me that read through the entire Star Trek Technical Manual three times in a row as a teenager loves Excession more than any of the other Culture novels, but on an alltime best of SF list it’s pushing too many pens into its pocket protector. Similarly, Use of Weapons is one of the very, very few SF novels that wouldn’t be forcibly escorted out of the Serious Literature Yacht Club… but in terms of a good sci-fi novel that brings an interesting story, interesting characters, and does satisfying things with them amidst a backdrop of best-in-class worldbuilding? You’re not gonna beat Look to Windward. Plus it solves more of the Classic Objections To Star Trek/Utopian Socialist Socioeconomics than any other book ever written, including the six prior Culture novels.
posted by Ryvar at 1:11 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Get that Heinlein the hell out of here.

A less divisive Heinlein choice could be The Green Hills of Earth, especially the last story (title of book), which is about an old space miner. Like most sci-fi from that time, essentially a compilation of several short stories.

Note, please add Ringworld at #51.
posted by Beholder at 1:21 PM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

K B Wagers writes some meaty space opera, with a double trilogy starting with Behind the Throne with a kick-ass Desi-inspired interplanetary kingdom in a larger universe that isn't very kind and a complicated, damaged hero who is dealing with, and has to deal with, some shit.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:29 PM on April 13, 2023

Also read some Ann Leckie. Actually read all of it. God damn.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:30 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh, no: keep Harsh Mistress. It only appears to advocate for right-wing libertarianism; in fact, it's a vicious critique of right-wing libertarianism, but for all that he was a creepy perv, old Bob was a real good writer, and it takes real unpacking to sort out the critique.

As for Leckie, well, the first book is actually quite good and the sequels are just terrible. The only thing that saved them from DNF was the Presger Translator.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 1:32 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is perfectly ... fine. A very enjoyable read but also pretty shallow.

A lot of books on this list aren't even the respective authors best work. Onyx and Crake is not Atwood's best (or even that great IMHO). Likewise, the books for Asimov and Clarke are representative but not the greatest of their outputs.

And if you are going for cred by including Wells and Shelly, ignoring Verne seems silly.
posted by AndrewStephens at 1:37 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I recently read The Echo Wife and I do not think I would include it in my personal top 50. When I told my (regular) wife about it I said I basically felt attacked by a very angry author throughout, but I don't know what my perspective as a husband did to my perception of the book.

Anyone read that book and love it willing to memail me about it or something? I don't know anyone else IRL who has read it.
posted by jermsplan at 1:44 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was trying to think of what I think the top ten or even the top 50 science fiction novels would be and I just can't - there's too much I haven't read.

If you asked me what the top ten overtly, intentionally feminist science fiction novels of the 20th century were, I would feel that I could make a pretty plausible though not definitive list. (That is, I wouldn't sneak in books that were "feminist" in the sense of having strong female characters, making some critique of male authority, etc - I'd make a list of books where the writer was specifically trying to engage with feminism qua feminism)

But seriously, I stumbled across Science Fiction Ruminations the other day and it's full of books I've never read, many of which I've never even heard of and many of which seem like they are pretty good. Probably not a ton of earth-shattering best-ofs in English that I've never heard of at all, especially prior to 2000, but there's enough good books discussed that I'm pretty sure there are a few best-ofs hiding in the back.

Because of Science Fiction Ruminations, I am reading Walter Tevis's Mockingbird and it's very uneven but has a strong Cordwainer Smith/Alpha Ralpha Boulevard eerie vibe. Has silly and incomplete politics, but they are at least silly and incomplete in a relatively unusual way.

The trouble with SF is that there's so much churn, and it feels like there's more churn now because in addition to the conservative and trope-y stuff that gets published at a fast clip, now there's left-leaning and trope-y stuff published at a rapid clip.

Older science fiction is full of surprises once you steer away from the extremely, extremely well known.
posted by Frowner at 1:44 PM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Looking back, I'm kind of amazed there is no Cherryh on this list. She has been published regularly and popularly for about fifty years now. And no Bujold? No Connie Willis? No Leigh Brackett, no Andre Norton.
posted by suelac at 1:47 PM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

And if you want to say, “this is not a list for genre SF readers”, then no Mitchell, no Ma, no McCarthy, no Itaranta, no Wallace, no Ogawa, no Atkinson, no Calvino...
posted by kyrademon at 1:53 PM on April 13, 2023

You know, kyrademon kinda nails it above:

> No Verne, no Moore, no Kuttner, no Russ, no Zelazny, no Vance, no Cherryh, no Strugatsky, no Leckie, no Willis, no Banks, no Keyes, no Bujold, no Russell, no Zemyatin, no Abbott, no Martine, no Vonarburg, no Stewart, no Sturgeon, no Brackett, no Ballard, no Brunner, no Wilhelm...

Personally I was looking for some Shockwave Rider, or maybe Sheep Look Up. These are 50 year old SF that look fresh as ever. Also was looking for Culture.

I still can't help but like this list.
posted by flamewise at 1:54 PM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Quick poll: is The Martian Chronicles any good? I've read most of the stuff here but that one I never tackled. Bradbury was good, but his stuff seems rather dated now (unlike plenty of his contemporaries' work).
posted by zardoz at 1:58 PM on April 13, 2023

It had its moments. Back then.
posted by y2karl at 2:01 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Can we argue about Hyperion next? I inhaled that one, too.

It's in the running for my favorite sci-fi novel ever. Is far too impressed with itself and its literary references? Yes. Did I, a former English teacher, eat it up? Also yes. Do I think it's an excellent, kaleidoscopic rumination on what society might look like if we eliminated barriers of time and space? Still do.

Then I read The Fall of Hyperion, which ironically broke those laws of time and space to go back and make the original seem worse. The two Endymion sequels continue to tempt me, even though I should know better.
posted by HeroZero at 2:06 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

HeroZero, I had the opposite reaction. I read Hyperion and thought it was OK with a weak ending. Then I read Fall of Hyperion and suddenly everything just clicked and the whole story became amazing, so much so that I would only recommend the books as a set - either read both or don't bother.
posted by AndrewStephens at 2:10 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Since I don't think anyone else has registered this beef yet: I am unhappy about the omission of Zamyatin's We.
posted by Westringia F. at 2:15 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Glad to see The City & The City there. Such a weird interesting book. Would hate to throw out Never Let Me Go as a slipstream; I think that's my favorite novel of any genre.
posted by pjenks at 2:19 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion are extremely different books, and I think I am wired to like the open-ended messiness of the first book more. I could certainly see a different reader having a different reaction.

For most of Fall, I was a bit put off by how hard the narrative was driving to tie everything up, particularly in the scenes of military commanders discussing grave matters at a big conference table. But that final moment, when they [spoiler]

pull the plug on all of the instant interplanetary portals.

...I thought that almost made the slog of part 2 worth it.
posted by HeroZero at 2:19 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's been a while since I read the Hyperion Cantos but I totally devoured them. I want to dismiss the last two but there were a couple "fuck yeah" moments that I still remember. As far as Simmons himself, I want to propel him almost as far away as I have yeeted Card.

> No Verne, no Moore, no Kuttner, no Russ, no Zelazny, no Vance, no Cherryh, no Strugatsky, no Leckie, no Willis, no Banks, no Keyes, no Bujold, no Russell, no Zemyatin, no Abbott, no Martine, no Vonarburg, no Stewart, no Sturgeon, no Brackett, no Ballard, no Brunner, no Wilhelm...

50 is pretty limiting, especially when the list already has a number of the afore-mentioned slipstream ilk crowding out worthy inclusions. Lists like this should go to 100 and include series. Speaking of literary authors, where the hell is Chabon? There's someone who celebrates and champions genre fiction, rather dabbles in it.
posted by Ber at 2:20 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker
posted by chavenet at 2:22 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I read every word of Dhalgren for a science fiction class that ended up getting cancelled due to bitterly cold temperatures. That's one of the biggest regrets I have about my MFA program - I liked the book well enough, but I would've loved arguing about it more, by an order of magnitude.

Triton was great, though - it is, among other things, Delany using an unreliable narrator to make fun of incels avant la lettre, and I'm very much here for it.
posted by Jeanne at 2:28 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

is The Martian Chronicles any good?

Yes. I actually didn't really like it the first time. Then I went back and got more out of it. I think my expectations were different. Things I felt were simplistic before turned out to be subtle. I'm not a big Bradbury fan, but he has his moments.
posted by ovvl at 2:29 PM on April 13, 2023

station eleven, yeah, ok. it's a retelling of a bog standard apocalyptic flu narrative, dressed in tweed.
posted by j_curiouser at 2:30 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I like what I’ve read of Ian McDonald, probably Dervish House best but River of Gods is also wild. Honestly in my own top 50 but I’d also add some retrograde epic space navy yarns because “diverting” is often what I look for in SF.

I’ve been reading Cassandra Kresnov novels, they’re fun. I like SF that invites but doesn’t force me to think.

And skipping The Stars My Destination is like leaving The Killer Inside Me off a list of crime novels. A real head-scratcher.
posted by Ice Cream Socialist at 2:59 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Bradbury can be difficult for some since his works are populated with believable humans rather than archetypes...
posted by jim in austin at 3:00 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Say what you will about Hyperion, but using two entirely different technologies but giving them the same name--hawking mats and Hawking drives--should have had us burning the book in great piles in the middle of town.
posted by mittens at 3:06 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Where's Day of the Triffids?
posted by jjderooy at 3:15 PM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

[It's not science fiction at all, but it is a bit of a journey -- The Mad Man.]

I had a customer traumatized by that book. I told him it was a lot to get through, but I thought it was worth it. His wife thought I should have told him that it contained 30 pages in a night in a piss club. It’s well worth reading, but some content warnings apply, at least for the innocent.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:27 PM on April 13, 2023

Jermsplan: I recently read The Echo Wife and I do not think I would include it in my personal top 50. When I told my (regular) wife about it I said I basically felt attacked by a very angry author throughout, but I don't know what my perspective as a husband did to my perception of the book.

Anyone read that book and love it willing to memail me about it or something? I don't know anyone else IRL who has read it.

I read it as well and was really surprised to see it on this list.
posted by synecdoche at 3:35 PM on April 13, 2023

> using two entirely different technologies but giving them the same name--hawking mats and Hawking drives--should have had us burning the book in great piles in the middle of town

Indeed, let us pile them into my Tesla model S, wherewith we can drive to the middle of town and use my tesla coil to ignite them.
posted by 7segment at 4:01 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Regarding Terra Ignota, lots of it felt very uncomfortable to me around gender and sexuality, like thinly disguised right wing culture war takes. Was I missing something?
posted by overglow at 4:07 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I would only recommend the books as a set - either read both or don't bother.

I read somewhere that Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion were written as a single work but split up for publication, so probably they should be evaluated as a single work with, yes, two very different parts- if you want a resolution to most of the stuff in it you need to read the second. I thought the first part was definitely a more interesting read though!

using two entirely different technologies but giving them the same name--hawking mats and Hawking drives

The total lack of consistency in naming stuff was one of the things I actually liked about it. Some things are CamelCased; some things are in all caps- are they acronyms? Who knows! I liked that sort of texture to it.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:14 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I rather liked some of those Miles Vorkosigan books.
posted by wenestvedt at 4:15 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

lots of it felt very uncomfortable to me around gender and sexuality, like thinly disguised right wing culture war takes. Was I missing something?

The whole series is operating under so many levels of meta-reverse irony that it did feel like the author might be holding a knife behind their back the whole time, yeah.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:22 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

i was gonna grumble about no cj cherryh, but no banks is just laughable
posted by Sebmojo at 4:22 PM on April 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

I thought The Echo Wife was okay, but it also seemed like I, a mid 50s queer trans-non-binary person, was not really its target audience. I think it was maybe more a book written to be read by people who would never read it? Which is a strange thing to think, much less say. I like most of Sarah Gailey's works, though. Magic for Liars was pretty sweet.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:23 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am also almost the only person on this site that didn't like Gideon the Ninth.

i hate to be the person who's like 'you should read the others because they contextualise the first to a degree that makes it an almost completely different book' buttttt

actually naw, if you hated gideon it's probably because of the hyperintense style and that's a feature of all three. but the locked tomb books have gene wolfe levels of rereadability, and the author is doing an incredibly wide range of things.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:26 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not really SF but I am enjoying the heck out of Vivian Shaw's Doctor van Helsing trilogy. It reads like fan fiction about the author's own OCs, which, yes duh, but she really dotes on them, and in this case it's pretty cute, and also she's got good characterization and I love her worldbuilding. (Shaw is married to AnnaLinden Weller aka Arkady Martine, of the Teixcalaan series, which I also love.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:28 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

if you hated gideon it's probably because of the hyperintense style and that's a feature of all three

yup, that's it, the style is what turned me off- I had no real grumbles about the plot, which was engaging enough that I finished the book. I guess its register is sort of intentionally fanfic-y? which I don't always hate, but it didn't work for me. Weirdly, I got on extremely well with the Scholomance books, which on paper seem similar, misanthropic teen death magic, etc.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:45 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

hot take gravity's rainbow should be on this list.

i will return later with my thoughts on why terra ignota is a towering accomplishment.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:56 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

i will return later with my thoughts on why terra ignota is a towering accomplishment.

Remember, it needs to be in dance-off form.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:24 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I thought The Echo Wife is a pretty good book if you read it in the context of "the narrator doesn't understand how terrible she is and how she is inflicting on others the trauma which was inflicted on her" which... I'm not sure that's the reading other people got out of it, just judging from Goodreads reviews?

But it's still basically an "Oh yeah, that was quite good" book rather than a top-50-science-fiction-books-of-all-time book.
posted by Jeanne at 5:27 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't really like the Gideon the Ninth books although I recognize that this is unfair since I think that they really are pretty outstanding. I don't like snappy dialogue, for one thing. I don't like
"snappy dialogue to cover up my pain" dialogue, for another. Further, I found the "today's very online-type internet young people except that they are in space with gore" thing just...really difficult to suspend disbelief for. I kept thinking to myself, "what would a person actually be like if they grew up in this society which has had centuries to develop into itself?" and thinking "not space Whedon dialogue teens, that's for sure" and while I recognize that the point of the books is not, you know, psychological realism, it throws me.

Also it feels like one of those situations where the absolute royalty of their social scenes are constantly insisting "oh I'm a big dumb dork who is always making my little mistakes lol" and it's not that they are big dumb dorks it's that it's cool to be all I'm-a-big-dumb-dork while actually being successful, popular, skilled, etc - all the characters are so relentlessly badassified while we get a lot of insistence about how they are just such fragile dumb dorks.

And the lore! You have to really, really like lore to get along with these books. The trajectory of YA (and these are pretty much YA in their structure, focus, emotional patterns, etc) is toward more and more lore, houses, artifacts, titles, etc.

That said, they are pretty solidly interesting - the first book is good enough if you like that kind of thing but gets recontextualized as you go in a way that gives it a lot more weight. The structure and writing get more complex in a fancy accomplished intentional way, although sadly the snappiness is embedded forever.
posted by Frowner at 5:50 PM on April 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

Really, it may be that as time passes, the snappiness will feel a bit more like the world-weary wise-cracking poptimist New Wave voice (see Harlan Ellison or Delany's "Time Considered As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" for example) - no longer annoying because no longer hegemonic. I am sure that if I were reading those in, like, 1968 it would have driven me up the fucking wall.
posted by Frowner at 5:58 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

So many thoughts on Terra Ignota - I read it twice.

One thing that makes it amazing is that it takes all of these pieces of how the world works and completely flips them, but in uniquely plausible ways. Part of the trick is that many of these flips come from pre-modern ideas about how the modern world (c/sh)ould work. The Servicer program - a life time of community service - is one of the core examples: this was suggested by Voltaire (iirc) as an alternative to prisons. And, like many. of these ideas presented in the book, you go through phases with it. At first, it's a neat idea, and an obviously better alternative to the barbaric carceral state that we have. But eventually it becomes clear that it's just another kind of slavery, and actually it's complicated.

A friend (a certain reclusive writer) described the books as 'what if we took 'smash the family, church and state' to its logical extreme?'

So you get all of these ideas: what if organized religion were super illegal? What if our families were our friends from college? What if we got rid of all national boundaries? What if laws were less of an absolute societal code and instead a chosen personal code, embodying the aspirations we want to hold ourselves to achieving?

And it's a real mix! Some of them you turn over in your head, realize it's pretty fucked up, and can let go. And others still look pretty great in the final balance of things. More than just about any other SF I've read, it encourages me to imagine ways our world could be radically different, in a way that captures the complexity of what a transformed world would look like. That's fucking radical.

It's terrrribly easy to go through life doom scrolling, waiting to boil alive due to climate change, understanding that capitalism is here to break our bones forever and deny us the Star Trek utopia we dreamt of. This is a book that dares us to dream bigger, and basically demonstrates that the shitty world we live in is both arbitrary and changeable.

This book asks (repeatedly!) if you would sacrifice a better world to save this one.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:06 PM on April 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Space Whedon Dialogue Teens is my new band name. We sound like Sex Bob-omb mixed with early Talking Heads.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:13 PM on April 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'd put Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers on the list (and yeet out Stephen King) even though it was published a few months ago. It's that good.
Seriously. Stop reading this thread and go read The Terraformers.
posted by signal at 6:14 PM on April 13, 2023

Oh hey, one thing I particularly remember liking about Gideon the Ninth - something I also like about China Mieville's The Scar - there are several moments where genre structural conventions get broken. There are a lot of books that break various trope conventions - lo, the Chosen One actually isn't Chosen, it's all a mistake; the magic artifact is more of a problem than a solution; the beautiful girl kicks ass in high heels, etc etc etc, but it's much more unusual to set up a narrative path and a form for a book and then just...not do it, balk it, break it off. That makes people react really strongly, sometimes with anger and sometimes with glee. And there are some balks like that, which I really enjoy.
posted by Frowner at 6:15 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I liked Gideon the Ninth a lot for the vibes—I didn't really understand the story and had trouble keeping track of the secondary characters, their alleigances, why things were happening, etc, but I was along for the ride.
I started reading Harrow the Ninth, and really didn't understand what was happening, who these people were, etc, and DNFed it hard.
posted by signal at 6:18 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Frowner: I think all three of Mieville's Bas-Lag books do some really cool things with narrative structure. None of them went where I thought they would.
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:32 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's more that in the Scar we are really set up to believe that The Main Characters are going to the Place and then they don't - that made a lot of people pretty mad on the internet, I've observed. We've learned to expect the story to move us to a certain place and it doesn't and that feeling of sort of braking as you read is what I enjoy.
posted by Frowner at 6:37 PM on April 13, 2023

A couple of things:

I'd throw out King entirely to include Banks, but... I'm gonna be that guy and suggest Consider Phlebas, because it takes one of the most beloved tropes of the space opera, the Ragtag Bunch of Lovable Ruffians, out to the alley in back, roughs it up, and steals its cab fare. Plus, there are some absolute corkers of action scenes. Even if it's not your favorite Culture book, it's an eminently readable introduction to it.

Also, definitely The Scar for Bas-Lag books, absolutely; it takes a throwaway bit from Snow Crash (the Raft, a bunch of ships lashed together into a floating nation) and does something really interesting with it. It also has a slow burn revelation of the overarching plot engine, and then has the guts to ask, hey, what if that's actually a completely stupid and pointless idea? Definitely the most rereadable of the Bas-Lag books IMO.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:47 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

> It's terrrribly easy to go through life doom scrolling, waiting to boil alive due to climate change, understanding that capitalism is here to break our bones forever and deny us the Star Trek utopia we dreamt of. This is a book that dares us to dream bigger, and basically demonstrates that the shitty world we live in is both arbitrary and changeable.

This book asks (repeatedly!) if you would sacrifice a better world to save this one.

okay and like then on top of that it's this perfectly-executed exercise in form in some number more than two ways. we're seeing the thing that replaced the thing that replaced the thing that we've got now, and so the political cleavages don't cleanly map onto anything from the present-day — but also, they're internally coherent, and palmer just positively does not let you ever step out of the perspective of people experiencing it from the inside, completely commits to the neo-enlightment bit.

but also beyond this we're mostly seeing this pick one or more:

attractive utopian democratic oligarchic dangerous sexy stifling murderous peacefulg

universe specifically through the words of the absolute most obtrusive and unreliable narrator ever, and also the way the narrator goes to pieces resembles in form the enlightenment essays that she's citing/building an argument out of, and so on the one hand the system in the novel seems coherent and real, but also there's this like sfumato business where you think you can see the details but really they're kept just out of reach behind the tone-perfect florid enlightenment fever haze.

oh and the like bricolage effect or whatever of how she stitches together disparate genres is, it's just perfect, the metaphorical gear-shift that happens in my brain each time the narration toggles between montaigne or whatever and evangelion or whatever is delightful. and like it is an extended meditation on theodicy, a really adventurous one.

anyway. you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll become a russian cosmist, it's the best.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:49 PM on April 13, 2023

is The Martian Chronicles any good?

I loved it. It's moody and dreamlike and it takes you to another world and makes you feel what it's like to be there. But I'm not sure it's really science fiction, even though it's about Martians and people traveling from Earth to Mars, because it doesn't create any kind of plausible potential reality. It feels as disconnected from reality as a fairy tale.
posted by Redstart at 7:35 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

The problem with Terra Ignota is the last book. It throws away most of the fun stuff (including even the narrator), to pivot hard into bad metafiction. The plot is on rails. This fails as theodicy because our actual universe is not Tommy Westphall's snowglobe. And it fails as literature because if I had wanted to reread The Odyssey, I would have read Emily Wilson's, which is supposed to be good.

The problem with Esquire's list is that it doesn't have many of my favorite novels. Blindsight? Spin? The admittedly unfinished Steerswoman novels? The Expanse? A Fire Upon The Deep? Plus others mentioned above. And since a few short story collections were included, we could include Swanwick, who is best at short lengths.

Also, in some sense the wrong Ted Chiang, except that I cry every time I read the title story, Exhalation. It might be his single best, although I would give it up to get any two of the top five from Stories.

Oh, and the wrong Lem too -- the Cyberiad would be correct. Seduced, shaggy Samson snored!

Novik's Scholomance, while technical fantasy, has a rigorous enough approach that I would be inclined to include it on this list. There is a reason for what happens. And it's a good one. It is not less science fiction than the (amazing) Jemisin.
posted by novalis_dt at 7:45 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think my second favorite of all the science fiction books I've read in the last 10 years or so is one that hasn't been mentioned here yet: The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss. (#1 is Exhalation, #3 is probably the Imperial Radch trilogy.)
posted by Redstart at 8:31 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I really liked The Echo Wife, but I do enjoy spending time with the seemingly growing genre of Strong, Well-Realized Characters Making Generally Awful Decisions in a Compelling World.
posted by lumensimus at 9:12 PM on April 13, 2023

Putting in a vote for Nick Harkaway, probably The Gone-Away World if you’re going to try just one. Several important ideas well changed-up, and an exciting story at every local point.

Plus possibly the most unreliable narrator ever.
posted by clew at 9:30 PM on April 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

station eleven, yeah, ok. it's a retelling of a bog standard apocalyptic flu narrative, dressed in tweed.

I was also underwhelmed by Station Eleven, mainly for the reason that it felt like kind of a mishmash of a lot of things I'd seen done very recently across an array of literary/film/TV SF over the previous decade, and arguably done in a more cohesive and fully-fleshed manner. I didn't hate it, but I could basically tell that the author had either read or wikipedia'ed a bunch of the same stuff I had, and then applied a very thin coating of MFA writing program flourishes to it to repackage it as lit-fic. It's very OK, and I can see why it won awards the year it came out, but it's definitely not an all-timer.

So I was extremely surprised to discover that the HBO Max miniseries adaptation was not just a decent adaptation of the novel, but also a solid improvement in terms of toning down some of the book's tropiness, as well as improving the sometimes drippy, undercooked characterization by putting those characters in the hands of some truly incredible actors. It's a great series that zeroed in very directly on the things about the novel I didn't care for and either excised them or gave them more depth.
posted by Strange Interlude at 9:49 PM on April 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

It meets Sturgeon’s Law so checks out
posted by fallingbadgers at 9:59 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think my second favorite of all the science fiction books I've read in the last 10 years or so is one that hasn't been mentioned here yet: The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss.

MOLLY GLOSS MOLLY GLOSS MOLLY GLOSS

Yes! I love her so much. Have you read The Hearts of Horses? It's so. good.

Yes, Molly Gloss deserves so much more attention and respect. Everything she writes is unique, but there's a common thread of kindness, practicality, and humanity.
posted by suelac at 10:32 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

is The Martian Chronicles any good?

I loved it. It's moody and dreamlike and it takes you to another world and makes you feel what it's like to be there.

I would like to subscribe to your pamphlet. He had style and for a time his words were music, certainly in the Martian Chronicles. As was true for Jack Vance who I first encountered via The Moon Moth followed by The Star King but his mordant dialogues were cognac to Bradbury's wines to my mind at the time.

Now my so far top unanswered search du jour is for a humor piece in either Amazing, Galaxy, If and F&SF magazines sometime in the early 60s --- just to narrow it down -- wherein a writer whose name I've forgotten wrote short sharp and funny pastiches of various fantasy and science fiction writers with distinct style, including both Bradbury and Vance. Or maybe just Vance. As I indistinctly remember now. At any rate, I thought his Vsnce had it down and was killer at the time. So I'm on the lookout for that in a desultory way.
posted by y2karl at 10:35 PM on April 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well, since I've been in a bit of SFF reading doldrum of late, this thread is quite welcome. I just took Ammonite off the shelf and put it beside my bed. Cosmonaut Keep and The Best of John Brunner also hitched a ride. Fifth Season was too bulky for the dropship, though.

Other than that I suppose I'm in broad agreement with those asking about omitting Russ, Wilhelm, Brunner, Zelazny etc. Maybe not Bester though as Stars My Destination seems to really grind a lot of people's gears these days. Then again, I haven't seen any complaints about The Demolished Man.

Appreciated the mention of Suzy McKee Charnas. I've been visiting used bookstores for a year or two now, looking for Motherlines.
posted by house-goblin at 10:55 PM on April 13, 2023

Among great books not yet mentioned, Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine is sf so it goes here.

(I genuinely would place it more squarely as scifi than as fantasy or as non-genre whatever, if we care, which I don't personally much, but I promise I'm not just feigning scifiness, see if I were doing that I would smuggle in Sofia Samatar which you can see I am not.)
posted by away for regrooving at 11:04 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

"station eleven, yeah, ok. it's a retelling of a bog standard apocalyptic flu narrative, dressed in tweed."

I did enjoy the focus on "survival is not enough" and things like arts and creation rather than the usual hard men/women doing hard things, but yeah, it in no way is one of the greatest 50 SF books ever. There's a lot of the list that is like that -- books you might want to read, often with a bit of an interesting angle, but in no way books that are truly the greatest.
posted by tavella at 11:21 PM on April 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

"...a writer whose name I've forgotten wrote short sharp and funny pastiches of various fantasy and science fiction writers with distinct style, including both Bradbury and Vance..."
Philip Jose Farmer?
posted by house-goblin at 11:35 PM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

How has no one mentioned Sheri Tepper yet! Grass is one of the best sci fi novels of all time. I think I read it because of an AskMeFi way back.

Other stray thoughts! If an author could get multiple spots, Le Guin would/should dominate. I am glad to see Hyperion on there - it’s one of my favorites but seems to have fallen out of favor. Nthing Stars in my Pocket… instead of Dhalgren, though I love both. And also - remove King and Heinlein and I’d be reasonably happy.
posted by Isingthebodyelectric at 12:13 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Not too bad a list as these things go. I guess my biggest complaint would be that Dhalgren is way, way too low. Top 10 easily.

Would've liked to see Banks, Bester, Leckie, Cherryh, Willis, Vinge, even early Niven (before the right-wing brain worms had assumed complete control).

Re: Ada Palmer - I greatly enjoyed the first 2/3 or so of Too Like the Lightning. I love unreliable narrators, and it was really fun to see the mash-up of neo-feudalism (a seriously old-school sci-fi trope by now) with totally fresh stuff, like the main characters essentially being the management of Uber, and the whole plot being set in motion because someone leaked the content of a listicle(!). But then she lost me with the sharp left turn where we suddenly start focusing on the cabal that rules the world, I just did not find those characters interesting at all...
posted by equalpants at 12:16 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Grass is really terrible! Tepper should be canceled into the sun! Let's party!
posted by away for regrooving at 12:21 AM on April 14, 2023

Plus possibly the most unreliable narrator ever.

Yup The Gone-Away World definitely one of my favourites, gets extra points for pulling its big plot twist in the middle (rather than the end) and just barrelling onwards ....
posted by mbo at 12:45 AM on April 14, 2023

The Esquire list is not entirely terrible. It has several glaring omissions, and several inclusions that I think are howlingly wrong - but both of these faults are probably simply a property of any such list that you haven't made yourself.

That said, the Metafilter discussion of this list is a thing of beauty. Thank you all.
posted by AsYouKnow Bob at 12:56 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

And Ada Palmer is the sort of thing we could argue about at length. Personally, I found it to be unreadable trash, from the awful, twee writing style to the "there are only nine people in the Solar System who count, and they all went to high school together" triteness. I even forced myself to finish it, on the premise that others liked it, so maybe it would come together. It did not. YMMV.

I loved it but... I also get the criticism about how too many people in the world seemed to know each other too well. It definitely had a lot of ideas packed into it though.

Regarding Terra Ignota, lots of it felt very uncomfortable to me around gender and sexuality, like thinly disguised right wing culture war takes. Was I missing something?

Maybe? I think part of it is that the baseline of how their society handles gender and sexuality is ultra fluid which is a choice the author made but then they also decided to have a number of key characters be part of a transgressive fetish culture which is deliberately retrogressive.
posted by atrazine at 3:04 AM on April 14, 2023

even early Niven (before the right-wing brain worms had assumed complete control)

In the interests of accuracy (because he’s not worth defending) this is backwards. Early Niven ranged from misogynist to virulently misogynist - easily among the worst of his peers, ruining novels that would otherwise deserve to be all-time classics (The Mote in God’s Eye in ’74, The Integral Trees/Smoke Ring in ’84). I’d love to think his collab with Brenda Cooper on Building Harlequin’s Moon in ’06 was an inflection point, but given the shit he got up to at SIGMA it’s more likely he found a decent editor around the same time capable of telling him “no.” Whatever the case, as of the Fleet of Worlds books that capstone Ringworld/Known Space (’08-’14) it’d all gone pretty beige and sticks to the action / neat twists on his still-impressive library of Big Ideas.

TL;DR: read Ringworld, it’s his best big idea and way less shitty than most of his early output, give the rest of your limited time to authors who aren’t conservative white men.
posted by Ryvar at 4:34 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

One of my the most overlooked Frankenstein details, is some of it takes place on Orkney, Scotland - Mary Shelly wrote "It was a place fitted for such work, being hardly more than a rock, whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves." which was quite understandable as she was 18 and had never been. Actual Orkney is a bit nicer looking than that - so I like to envisage a sunnier version of the tale with more focus on puffins, sea stacks and a monsterly chat at the Stromness post office.
posted by rongorongo at 4:44 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

Honestly, I always get hung up on what exactly makes a book too morally repulsive to read. HP Lovecraft is a good example. His politics as expressed in his books are utterly repulsive. But he has a lot of indirect staying power - there are so many, many books that are either critical readings or else riffs on various cosmic horror ideas stripped more or less of their racism....and so, as far as I can tell, a lot of people end up reading Lovecraft as sort of backfill when they've gotten interested by the post-Lovecraft stuff. You would never put Lovecraft on a true "best of" list but you certainly would need to put him on a "very influential" list, and he does get read and probably will for the medium future term.

You're often faced with books that are very unevenly balanced between ethics and effective science fiction. Sherri Tepper's politics are horrendous the minute you look them square in the face - people generally don't and just sort of coast on a vague sense that she's writing against sexual violence. And she's no dazzling prose stylist either. But all that stuff about the grass towers and the climbing, for instance? Or the sequence where the children rebuild the little temple? Or the pursuit among the sentient mountains? She's extremely inventive and is obsessed with naming and goofy names. it doesn't surprise me at all that people want to read her, or that people work to read her while ignoring her politics. I re-read my favorite parts of Grass while skipping the rest and I must have read The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped three or four times over the course of the pandemic. I am really troubled by her books, I think she has little reflective capacity, I think she'd be a TERF if she were still alive and so I definitely engage with her books from a position of sort of helpless guilt.

What is one's responsibility as a reader? Is it to avoid all books that cross a threshold of problematicness? I'm sympathetic to this view! Most people are even if they won't admit it! That's why we're not all giving each other copies of Mein Kampf and The Late Great Planet Earth "just for the historical interest"! We definitely believe that there is a point after which books are too poisonous! But what criteria ought to be used to establish that point?

And we obviously believe that it's a social point, not a personal one - it's not that I'm over here quietly reflecting that I myself personally have trouble reading Tepper, no, I'm making an argument about whether "we" should read Tepper and if so how much and why. We might say "oh it's up to you" but if we truly believed that we wouldn't spend so much time chewing it over.

~~
But then there's also some built-in assumptions - people rarely criticize Gene Wolfe for his horrible politics, for instance, and I'm not sure why. It's not that he's avowedly conservative, since we sure do criticize Card. (Like, there's literally several stories where women who get divorces are killed in horrible and inventive ways after being revealed as selfish and misguided problem women who don't appreciate how wonderful and pure their husbands are. And the rape! Lots of rape! Lots of rape by the protagonist of Book of the New Sun, for that matter!)

Wolfe gets a pass on being a rape apologist as recently as the nineties and early 2000s, but we feel that we "ought" (and I feel this way) to exclude or give up writers whose political failings are pretty transparently the result of ignorance when you actually read the texts and don't in any case rise to, eg, rape apologism and frank misogyny. I don't know why I tend to boost Gene Wolfe and feel that I have to apologize for, eg, Ammonite.
posted by Frowner at 5:15 AM on April 14, 2023 [14 favorites]

And I think that these conversations often assume that SF writers are fungible - like, we all say "spend your time on writers with better politics", and in the sense of "oh I like space opera in general, I will seek out non-regressive space operas" that is perfectly reasonable. But Tepper isn't smoothly interchangeable with other writers - like, I enjoy The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped specifically because I like the weird bridge society and the ecology of the chasm. When I reread it, it's because I want to read those specific things.

And yet, of course, no one is saying "oh read whatever no matter how repulsive, it's fine" - we don't feel that way, we don't act that way, the whole business of the Sad Puppies and racefail shows that we deeply, deeply don't think that SFF should function that way.
posted by Frowner at 5:21 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

No Verne, no Moore, no Kuttner, no Russ, no Zelazny, no Vance, no Cherryh, no Strugatsky, no Leckie, no Willis, no Banks, no Keyes, no Bujold, no Russell, no Zemyatin, no Abbott, no Martine, no Vonarburg, no Stewart, no Sturgeon, no Brackett, no Ballard, no Brunner, no Wilhelm...
posted by kyrademon

No Stapledon? No Verne? No -

It's a strange list which wants to do history of the genre and not history of the genre at the same time.

Because it's a simple listicle designed to elicit clicks and furious argument. #missionaccompliahsed
posted by doctornemo at 6:40 AM on April 14, 2023

How has no one mentioned Sheri Tepper yet! Grass is one of the best sci fi novels of all time. I think I read it because of an AskMeFi way back.

Ooh, I've been thinking of re-reading Grass for some time now. I think it's probably been 25 years since I last read it. I also really enjoyed Beauty and The Family Tree.

I also really enjoyed The Echo Wife - I did listen to it on audiobook, so perhaps connecting the narrator to a human being helped to humanize the character for me.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 7:59 AM on April 14, 2023

You would never put Lovecraft on a true "best of" list but you certainly would need to put him on a "very influential" list, and he does get read and probably will for the medium future term.

I think this is exactly right, and honestly I wouldn't have even brought him up if it weren't for the strangeness of seeing The Stand on the list. But now I've done it, and so maybe I should make a (small, limited) case for why, even if he's not on one's top-50 best-ever SF, he does belong on a "you could, maybe, read this to understand the world we're living in" list.

I don't know how evenly the modern approaches to Lovecraft are split, but they do seem to be split, between the fandom starting with Derleth's work, passing through Avon Books publishing a Necronomicon, and ending with a pile of Cthulhu plushies; and the critical reappraisals that try to figure out what to do with all that racism. The first approach, by emphasizing the Mythos, really the weakest part of Lovecraft, makes the work into an endlessly-exploitable franchise. More tentacles, fewer swarthy strangers staring at you from the docks. In this he has achieved a kind of longevity that none of the Golden Age writers who came after him would manage, and has taught us that the key to that longevity, under capitalism, is to write about things that can be made into merchandise. I don't think that approach really necessitates going back and reading him; it's enough to enjoy the jokes and toys.

But I think there's an argument that the second approach opens a door to reading Lovecraft that revitalizes him and makes him extremely useful for understanding our current day. It doesn't redeem him--I don't want to give the impression that I think we need to forgive his nastiness. Mid-century critics would see a sort of "latent homosexuality" in the sexlessness of his life and work, and I think that's wrong (and homophobic), but points in the right direction: Lovecraft is an incel. He is absolutely recognizable in our modern age; he's a snobby neurotic white kid with a big vocabulary and no social skills, unable to hold down a job, with friendships that are entirely long-distance mediated by the written word, having to room with his family because he cannot function on his own, and living in a state of paralytic terror that is transmuted into hatred by ingesting Great Replacement theories.

Houellebecq gets at this in Against the World, Against Life, but that study suffers from being written before the internet had turned a couple of generations of boys into Lovecrafts. Lovecraft isn't a garden-variety racist, he's a xenophobe, where in this case the -phobe part is absolutely accurate. You could have Lovecraft without Cthulhu--you could replace the Mythos with nearly anything--but you couldn't have him without the fear of The Other impinging on his safe white spaces, and the constant meddling required on the part of his frightened white protagonists to keep those spaces clean and safe. It's a losing battle because there are so many of Them, compared to the few upstanding white academics who really understand what's going on. They are always arriving on our shores--Lovecraft wants you to understand how dangerous borders and docks are. There's even the idea in The Whisperer in Darkness that strange aliens are arriving to earth--to America! to Vermont!--to mine our precious minerals and carry them back home, which had me thinking of all the current furor over rare earths and who has the rights to them.

I went back and read some of the stories after reading Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country a few years ago, and felt what I think is the normal "oh my god" feeling when you re-read them with adult eyes, but recently I've gone back to them again, and felt such a recognition; there's nothing alien about these stories at all, they could have been written today, and in fact are being written, it's just that they are news stories and opinion pieces in the right-wing media. And in homes across the country, boys are learning of the eldritch horrors just beneath the surface of the world, only instead of assembling ancient tomes to protect themselves, they are buying assault weapons.

This, I think, more than any cyclopean tower of disposable Funko Pop Cthulhus, is Lovecraft's legacy, and while it's a bitter, poisonous read, and one I don't think anyone should be required to undertake...it's useful. It's very useful.
posted by mittens at 8:04 AM on April 14, 2023 [31 favorites]

Plus he's still alive.
posted by y2karl at 8:37 AM on April 14, 2023

Silverberg's an interesting case, as I generally liked the stuff of his that I read, but didn't make a point of seeking it out, and I wonder how well some of it has aged. (The World Inside, with its society of highly-populated ultrahigh-rises where all relationships were open, seemed fun when I was a teenager, but reading the Wikipedia description now--"most people are married at 12 and parents at 14"--seems like it might be considered problematic.)
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:32 AM on April 14, 2023

Tepper went for me from "read, yell at book" to "book full of nope" at this interview. Granted she is operating in grumpy rant mode more than legislate mode, but the fundamental attitudes she's showing are woven back through her fiction. Faith in a judgement system to determine people of lesser value. Second Wave as a determined stopping point. Epistemic closure.

None of this, "Oh, he's fine when he's on his meds, but he forgets to take his medicine." [...] Walled cities will be built in the wastelands and all nonhuman persons will be sterilized and sent to live there, together, raising their own food. There will be no traffic in, no traffic out, except for studies that may be done which might lead to a "cure."

I love some of her prose. There but for graceful aging go I.
posted by away for regrooving at 9:37 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

To me its a drag that Solaris is always the recommendation for Stanislaw Lem. More like slowlaris amirite? Not what I would recommend as an introduction to his work. How about Fiasco or even Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

Similarly, 1Q84 is not Murakami's strongest. To be honest I bogged down and quit in the middle. Hard Boiled Wonderland was more entertaining and, bonus, way shorter.

Seems like "has a film adaptation" is a big part of the ranking here.
posted by Ansible at 9:54 AM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

"The name Robert Silverberg is surprisingly missing..."
I considered mentioning him, maybe for Dying Inside (or something from that era of his), but my rather rapid second thought was that he never wrote anything I'd consider "50 Best Sci-Fi Books" material. More of a top 200, maybe 100, sort of guy.

Same would go for writers like Andre Norton or CJ Cherryh. I've read and enjoyed a lot of books from those two, but I don't think any of them are "50 Best Sci-Fi Books" contenders. Then again, I haven't read any of Cherryh's "big" novels like Downbelow Station.

And since it is "50 Best Sci-Fi Books" list, put me down for expelling The Stand. I don't care that it's got science-fiction rationales, it's horror genre. Plus, it opens the door to "if The Stand why not I am Legend" quibbling. Somewhat ditto for Atwood, she writes speculative fiction not sci-fi, so her stuff can vie for a spot in the "50 Best Speculative Fiction Books" list (but only if AM releases Ellison's hyperbolic shade and it deems her work Spec-Fic).
posted by house-goblin at 10:47 AM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

a writer whose name I've forgotten wrote short sharp and funny pastiches of various fantasy and science fiction writers

Larry Tritten?
posted by hanov3r at 11:18 AM on April 14, 2023

I regret to be the bearer of bad news but it seems that the world has not yet caught on to the fact that Dune is bad in every conceivable way.
posted by sinfony at 11:25 AM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have always thought of The Stand as The Whole Idiot's Guide to Earth Abides For Dummies Catalog. In one, everybody dies while in the other. a couple hundred pages alone are spent on the how to's of decomposed corpse removal in what was a largely depopulated pre-pandemic Boulder, CO.

Upon review: no, not Larry Tritten. This was a short short in one of the afore named pulps in the 60s. It sounds like a job for File770 had I the skillz to ask it there. But thank you so much for looking.
posted by y2karl at 11:27 AM on April 14, 2023

Wasn’t Reginald Bretnor by any chance, was it, y2karl?

He was the author of the Papa Schimmelhorn stories and the extended puns which graced the final pages of a fair number of F&SF stories over the years and appeared over the name 'Grendel Briarton', which is a anagram of his name.
posted by jamjam at 12:10 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

martian chronicles is outstanding. if you dig in, I'd advise you to look for a pre 1997 edition. the story 'way in the middle of the air' was removed from the collection.

written in about 1950, it's a tale of a black diaspora to mars to escape racism. it is of its time, with problematic vocabulary, but is ultimately a liberation story.

a line i recall from the very first time i read it led me to the autobiography of malcolm x, then invisible man, then letter from birmingham jail, and so on. it was a pretty early awakening for a sheltered, suburban, white kid. a little cryptic without context, it's the line

"what you goin to do nights, mr. teece?"
posted by j_curiouser at 12:49 PM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]

Honestly, I feel like any list of SF novels is gonna reflect the evolution of the genre way less than a list of short stories. I think that’s somewhat particular to SF.
posted by showbiz_liz at 3:52 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm going to take that as a call to not only eject King and Atwood, but any books that aren't short story collections or fix-up novels.
posted by house-goblin at 7:41 PM on April 14, 2023

No "Lord of Light" (1967) by Roger Zelazny?? This list is strong in the bogosity. I won't even mention my deeply-felt personal belief that always renders me dismissable that "The Left Hand of Darkness" is a beautifully written book of nothing. Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron" or Moorcock's "Behold the Man" were twice the sf and half the literary over-refinement.
posted by Chitownfats at 4:07 AM on April 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

> What is one's responsibility as a reader?

isn't it like with people; weigh the good with the bad? books contain multitudes!

also no greg egan? :P
posted by kliuless at 4:48 AM on April 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

Spinrad's "Bug Jack Barron" or Moorcock's "Behold the Man" were twice the sf and half the literary over-refinement.

Oh, man, you should read Joanna Russ's book review in the February 1970 The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction wherein she eviscerates Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron in comparison to Jack Vance's Emphyrio -- describing the latter as a transparent coracle composed entirely of invisible forcefields and equipped with a reactionless faster than light drive as compared to Spinrad's chrome finned Cadillac trying to keep to ninety on the curves -- which can be laboriously accessed in this pdf of The Country You Have Never Seen -- Essays and Reviews by Joanna Russ. I remember reading the review when it came came out and it has stayed with me ever since. Her contempt was palpable. But, you know, tastes differ and what did she know? Other than a lot...
posted by y2karl at 8:42 AM on April 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Books on the list that people on this thread have declared to be Extremely Bad, Actually:

Dune
The Left Hand of Darkness
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Oryx and Crake
The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet
Shikasta
Hyperion
The Three-Body Problem
Never Let Me Go

Bear in mind, this is excluding “does not belong in a 50 best list” or “not the author’s best work” comments. These were “this book is garbage” comments.

In a couple of cases I might even agree. But, man, there is NO SUCH THING as a list everyone agrees with.
posted by kyrademon at 3:36 PM on April 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

Lovecraft is an incel. He is absolutely recognizable in our modern age; he's a snobby neurotic white kid with a big vocabulary and no social skills, unable to hold down a job, with friendships that are entirely long-distance mediated by the written word, having to room with his family because he cannot function on his own, and living in a state of paralytic terror that is transmuted into hatred by ingesting Great Replacement theories.

I dunno. This is probably not the place to talk about Lovecraft as he was pretty much not an SF writer, but...

Lovecraft, for all his faults, was not an incel. The past, even 100 years ago, was a different place, with different assumptions. Lovecraft is fairly unique in that we have a huge amount of his correspondence, and an equally huge glimpse into his interior life. There is stuff in there that is hugely problematic, but he shows no resentment towards women. He tended to treat women as correspondents, with a moderately annoying mix on condescension and warmth and autodidact erudition and bullshit, but not noticeably more than than he expressed towards men. He was a particular sort of fallen New England Anglo aristocracy, which affected him much more than that whiny man-babies that we call incels today. Yes, he was a xenophobic mess, but viewing his behavior through the view point of the 2020s is a mistake. He lived in an era where communicating by letter was the norm, and imagining that that has some resonance with 21st C internet culture is missing the point entirely.

Also, your analysis misses his impact as the first really atheist horror writer. Christianity and even his beloved Western Culture has no sway in his universe of horrors. If Lovecraft has a fault, it was a failure to see how his basic metaphysical stace doesn't leave room for his racism and xenophobia. Literally, who cases about the Serbs, when there is cosmic horror on the line>

TL;DR Lovecraft was a grotesque mess of repugnant ideas, but he needs to be been seen in his time, which was not the internet of the 21st century. I suspect he would have had as little time for incels as he did for social movements of his day.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:54 PM on April 15, 2023 [11 favorites]

"I suspect he [Lovecraft ]would have had as little time for incels as he did for social movements of his day."
Yeah, that incel comment, despite a favourable first impression, has been nagging at me ever since. Like, his ex-wife described him as "an adequately excellent lover." (Note: it's always sounded like a backhanded compliment to me--and I have questions about how this HP factoid came to be.) Additionally, if memory serves, she said something about him ~~boning~~ reading up on biology/sexuality because he wanted her to enjoy their honeymoon. I also seem to remember reading that he met up in person with quite a few of those penpals of his and good times were had by all.

But, yes, a grotesque mess (surely, congeries?) of repugnant ideas.
posted by house-goblin at 6:49 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Like, his ex-wife described him as "an adequately excellent lover."

Well he did confess to Sonia Haft Greene Lovecraft that she was the first woman she ever kissed, which says a lot about his mother, not to mention that also according to Sonia, he was a virgin when they married.

But since it was her second marriage, not to mention her name was also linked to Alistair Crowley before she married either Samuel Greene or Lovecraft, one would think she had more than enough experience in such matters from which to make such an assessment -- so her adequately excellent is not exactly faint praise, all things considered.

What boggles my mind about Lovecraft is that while he was a racist, a white supremacist and an anti-semite, he had a lot of Jewish friends and one Jewish wife. Who supported him for 19 years and never got around to actually divorcing him.

I also seem to remember reading that he met up in person with quite a few of those penpals of his and good times were had by all.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft whooping it up with his penpals? Oh, dear. Well, one of them was gay -- even if Lovecraft wasn't -- but as he did marry another penpal, you are, oddly enough, slightly right even if mostly wrong.
posted by y2karl at 1:11 AM on April 16, 2023

What boggles my mind about Lovecraft is that while he was a racist, a white supremacist and an anti-semite, he had a lot of Jewish friends and one Jewish wife. Who supported him for 19 years and never got around to actually divorcing him.

Eeeeeeeh. It's not exactly unknown for bigots to be attracted to the subjects of their hate and fear. Lovecraft was also at least somewhat discrete about his beliefs with at least some of his friends. His close correspondent and friend Samuel Loveman was apparently ignorant of Lovecraft's antisemitism, or at least the depths of it -- after lovecraft's death, Sonia Greene told Loveman and he burned burned all of his correspondence with Lovecraft out of grief, anger, and/or disgust. Also, Greene did divorce Lovecraft; he never signed the papers, however, and she only discovered that she was a bigamist when she received some of his papers after his death.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:58 AM on April 16, 2023

Anyway, this isn't a Lovecraft thread, so maybe that should go elsewhere. Regardless, I don't think Lovecraft (or King) belong on this list because they don't really write SF -- even when their stories have SF trappings, the themes, tone, and intent is horror, not SF. It's obviously a blurry line, but those two are on the horror side, much the way that Mira Grant's Newsflesh series, although about zombies, is SF, because the approach and intent is SF, not horror, and the tone is more of a thriller.

I am more or less in agreement with the people who feel that the list is a little incoherent and is constrained by the urge to a) be representative and b) pick titles and authors thatWestendfeld thinks her readers will find familiar. Which leads to an excess number of "literary SF" novels that received wider notice outside of the field despite their general lack of impact within it (most fall into the "vague dystopia" subgenre, which is wide-spread but not particularly impactful) as well as a lot of newer novels, which, whatever their virtues, have not stood the test of time yet. It also missed a number of very significant movements within the genre, notably the huge contributions of women in the 70s and 80s and even the New Wave of a decade earlier.

Westendfeld's criteria are also a hindrance and one that they don't really follow. She apparently intends the first book of a series to stand in for the whole thing, which... I agree that Chamber's Wayfarers books enhance each other, making the series better than the individual novels, but no matter how much you love Dune, you are likely to agree that the series is vastly inferior to the first book. She wanted to include books that brought something new to the genre, then included all those novels by more mainstream authors, where the prose might be fantastic, but the genre ideas are well-worn, as well as "classics" that didn't do much with their ideas (The Time Machine is a very early time travel story, but it doesn't even hint at the possibilities of time travel in stories to come).

It also fails to deal with the fact that SF (along with horror) is one of the few genres where the short story has always been as important as the novel. Any collection of "SF greats" that ignores short stories (yeah, I know there is one collection on the list) is missing half the field, especially since there are many authors who worked almost entirely in the short medium (Tiptree was noted above).

All of this is less original thinking on my part than a summation of my thoughts as I read through the thread. Final verdict: While this fails as the "50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time," and contains some real clunkers (Snow Crash is my vote for a book on the list which is well on its way to deserved oblivion), it's not a bad set of books for a curious reader to try out. If it was called "Want to Read Some SF , but Don't Know Where to Start?" I would have few quibbles, although I would organize that list by theme and sub genere to help people find things they might like.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:58 AM on April 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

"The Left Hand of Darkness" is a beautifully written book of nothing.

Okay, NOW I'm gobsmacked.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:03 AM on April 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

A list of "five books you probably won't hate" in each of these genres: space opera, time fuckery, dystopian hellscape, genetic anomalies, robot overlords, alien enemies/lovers, fascists are bad, god is real (and she's pissed), and everyone just needs a hug
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:08 AM on April 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

A list of "five books you probably won't hate"

As it happens, Five Books is one of my favorite sites for book recommendations!
posted by mittens at 7:12 AM on April 16, 2023

> Five Books

On the front page they're recommending Dune as Sci-Fi for beginners.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:15 AM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Even if [Consider Phlebas is] not your favorite Culture book, it's an eminently readable introduction to it.

Ooh. No. If it had been my first Culture book, it would also have been my last one. What happens on the island... Nope nope nope.

(Fortunately, I'd already read and enjoyed Player of Games, so I was willing to give Banks another chance.)
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 9:21 AM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

"...as he [Lovecraft] did marry another penpal, you are, oddly enough, slightly right even if mostly wrong."

Sorry for prolonging the Lovecraft derail, but I gotta respond. Sonia Greene first met Lovecraft at a convention for amateur journalists, after which they became penpals. So, welcome to the Slightly Right, Mostly Wrong Club, I nominate you president as you clearly have the ineluctably masculine confidence the position demands.

While I'm at it, as a last stab at the notion Lovecraft was seriously socially inept, of that first meeting Greene wrote, "I admired his personality but frankly, at first, not his person."

Anyway, to try to reconnect this derail back to the main rail, I've been thinking lately that Wolfe is kinda/sorta the new Lovecraft. Like Lovecraft, he's been put on quite a high pedestal which seems to inspire a need to destroy, or at least severely minimize, any criticisms, especially those about the rapes. It just seems reminiscent of how Lovecraft's racism was generally handled for decades.

And maybe that's partly why Wolfe, despite his literary reputation, isn't on the list. Given the many rather recent selections on the list, it wouldn't surprise me if the list maker has more sympathy for the criticisms than the defences.
posted by house-goblin at 11:53 AM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

If anybody's willing to mention a good place to start with Elizabeth Vonarburg, I'd appreciate it.
posted by house-goblin at 12:08 PM on April 16, 2023

So, welcome to the Slightly Right, Mostly Wrong Club, I nominate you president as you clearly have the ineluctably masculine confidence the position demands.

Apart from the ineluctably masculine confidence (!?) part, point taken. But...

I also seem to remember reading that he met up in person with quite a few of those penpals of his and good times were had by all.

-- I was reacting to that insinuation. It was like you were trying to out Lovecraft, which just seemed so weird to me for obvious reasons.

I've been thinking lately that Wolfe is kinda/sorta the new Lovecraft...

On that we agree. This r/gene wolfe on Reddit is illuminating in that regard. Wolfe's language was sumptuous but upon closer re-examination, things can be so eeyew to me.

On a sidenote: I always try to Archive my links now before posting so that they stay alive and somewhat paywall free. What confounds me is that it was impossible to put that Wired article about Sonia Greene into the Wayback Machine. Is that a thing with Wired, that it cannot be Archived? If so, I wonder why.

seconding the other hob here on this. Say wha?
posted by y2karl at 3:04 PM on April 16, 2023

If King & Lovecraft shouldn't be on the list (and I think they shouldn't), I think one could also make a strong argument that Frankenstein shouldn't be either. To me it is more literary horror than proto-Sci Fi, despite the time spent on Dr. F's medical studies.

3-Body Problem [is] badly-written garbage

THANK YOU! I do not understand the praise heaped upon this novel. I read it once, thought it was terrible, came back a year or two later to give it another chance, and felt the exact same way. There are maybe some interesting ideas, but so much bad, bad writing.
[Minor spoilers follow]
Most of the characters are superficial parodies of human beings -- there's even a street-wise, tough-talking police detective who LITERALLY chomps a cigar at one point. The supposedly super-realistic, totally immersive VR game many of the characters play is never actually demonstrated to be as amazing as we're supposed to believe; the narrator/characters just tell you, "Oh wow, this game is so realistic, you can tell that there's so much amazing depth in it because of how awesomely immersive it is." Also, the whole premise of the alien society doesn't make a lot of sense -- maybe it is explained better in the other books (not that I care to read them) but as described in this novel, it seems impossible that any sort of intelligent life/civilization could actually evolve there, but whatever, let's look past that. And a bit of a nitpick: if the planet has 3 suns, wouldn't it be the FOUR-body problem? Like, the planet and the 3 suns? (I will readily admit, however, that I ain't no physicist, so maybe I'm missing something there.) Finally, the technology the aliens use to influence humans is also described so vaguely and poorly they might as well have just said "A wizard did it." I did like the computer made out of squads of soldiers moving around and interacting in different ways to replicate logic circuits, though.

"The Left Hand of Darkness" is a beautifully written book of nothing.

I half-agree. I think there is something good in there, but I just wanted... more of that something. I can't remember how much of the novel is the two main characters trudging across the tundra, mile after mile, but it's A LOT and it gets a bit monotonous.

I haven't read Tepper's work, mentioned above, but upon investigation I see that she's been critiqued for her biological determinism, which put me in mind of Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood/Xenogenesis trilogy. I loved Kindred (although maybe a little high on the list at #5), but I found these three books really problematic because of the overt theme that humans are genetically predestined to destroy each other and require a superior species to impose a benevolent eugenics program to save us from self-destruction. What bothered me about it is that the novels essentially confirm that judgement: some of the humans try to deny it, but basically it's shown to be correct. Given that the relationship between the Oankali and humans is, in part, an analogy of the European colonizer/African slave relationship, that makes the whole story even ickier. I also found the books very heteronormative and, if I'm being frank, a little juvenile in how human romantic relationships are presented (I have similar thoughts about the romantic relationships in Parable of the Sower, a book which I otherwise mostly liked). For example, in the first book, the rescued and resuscitated humans IMMEDIATELY start pairing off and hooking up, like, as soon as they meet each other. Maybe that's how people would react in such a strange, terrifying situation (isolated in an alien space craft, no knowledge of what's going on outside their little area), but it seemed rather simplistic and more of a narrative short-cut to setting up different factions. I think there may be ONE gay character in the trilogy, and I'm pretty sure he gets murdered pretty quickly. Anyway, I like a lot of Butler, but I haven't seen that trilogy get the critical eye it probably deserves. (granted, I haven't looked that hard...)
posted by Saxon Kane at 4:09 PM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

as a last stab at the notion Lovecraft was seriously socially inept, of that first meeting Greene wrote, "I admired his personality but frankly, at first, not his person."

That sounds to me like she's saying his social skills were fine but she wasn't physically attracted to him at first. Maybe you see making yourself attractive as a social skill?
posted by Redstart at 4:11 PM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

For Vonarburg, I’d say start with The Maerlande Chronicles. It’s like starting Herbert with Dune — a chunk to bite off, but it’ll give you the best idea of Why This Author Is Great. If you like that, then read Slow Engines of Time and whatnot.
posted by kyrademon at 5:02 PM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Okay, I keep trying to get out of the Lovecraft sidebar, but the non-euclidean geometries of the thread keep pulling me back in.

"I was reacting to that insinuation. It was like you were trying to out Lovecraft..."
There was no subtext. It was an apparently failed attempt to say Lovecraft wasn't the social incompetent he's often made out to be, that he didn't just lurk in his auntie's attic scribbling letters, that he went out and socialized with a decent number of people.

The "ineluctably masculine" crack is a silly reference to something Robert Silverberg once wrote about James Tiptree Jr.

"That sounds to me like she's saying his social skills were fine but she wasn't physically attracted to him at first."
Yes, that's what I thought too.

But that's enough about HP (I hope), because I have some bad news about LeGuin. This thread is not the first time I've heard those criticisms of The Left Hand of Darkness. And I've heard worse about The Dispossessed--literally: worst book I've ever read, HATED it, only read it because my Lit class forced me to, so boring, NOTHING HAPPENS!

In summary, your best sci-fi sucks.
posted by house-goblin at 9:45 PM on April 16, 2023

>> In summary, your best sci-fi sucks.

returns teacup to saucer, puts down copy of Time War, removes spectacles

Pardon?
posted by Molesome at 2:17 AM on April 17, 2023

This thread is not the first time I've heard those criticisms of The Left Hand of Darkness. And I've heard worse about The Dispossessed--literally: worst book I've ever read, HATED it, only read it because my Lit class forced me to, so boring, NOTHING HAPPENS!

Per Le Guin's own "Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," this is a feature, not a bug.
posted by HeroZero at 1:11 PM on April 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

previously :P
posted by kliuless at 8:56 PM on April 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, so, the, admittedly obscure, point was not that I think LeGuin sucks, but that no matter how unassailable you think your favourite is, somebody out there thinks they are crap.

And while I have heard criticisms of LeGuin’s later work that are probably answerable by her Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, I don’t think it really applies to the Disliker of The Left Hand and Hater of the Dispossessed. For one thing, they were Atwood and Allende readers, not Howard and Heinlein devotees. LeGuin was just not for them, though I bet one of them would like the Carrier Bag essay. My guess, now these many years later, would be they would have been better served by Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time.

So, to add a corollary to the point above: the people who think your favourite thing is crap are not always full of crap themselves.

And to reiterate the original point somewhat, having just reread Carrier Bag I have to say it has a number of anthropologically based claims that I (guess what my major was) find questionable. That makes it a tough read for me because I largely agree with the overall argument.
posted by house-goblin at 8:18 PM on April 22, 2023

Peace proposal: Let's convert #28, The Body Scout, into a free space for any perceived omissions.
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 1:16 PM on April 23, 2023

I submit that Ursula le Guin was brilliant and... boring. Except Earthsea.. those first 3 are masterpieces and more happens. Nothing wrong with boring but it's not for everyone.
posted by latkes at 2:33 PM on April 23, 2023

they were Atwood and Allende readers, not Howard and Heinlein devotees. LeGuin was just not for them

LeGuin is a lot closer to Atwood and Allende than she is to Howard and Heinlein.
posted by tavella at 10:25 AM on April 27, 2023

“LeGuin is a lot closer to Atwood and Allende than she is to Howard and Heinlein.”

Do you think LeGuin’s Carrier Bag critique applies to Atwood and Allende as well as it does to Heinlein and Howard?

Really, the friend who didn’t like Left Hand, her comments were similar to the criticisms Joanna Russ and Stanislaw Lem made of the book.

Moving on, I should mention that I managed to read Ammonite. It’s quite good! And I would bet that Griffith took account of Russ’ criticism of Left Hand while writing it. However, frowner is right about the pretty essentialist premise.

As far as the main topic goes, it seems odd nobody mentioned Thomas Disch. Not so long ago it seemed like Camp Concentration was pretty much a mandatory inclusion for such lists.
posted by house-goblin at 3:07 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am so sick of seeing listicles for 10 best books, records and blah blah woof woof. There is a never ending flood of them. Often the self-congratulatory reviewer bios on the page are more than half of the page. Especially annoying is when they go on and on bragging about how they derived the lists by designing statistical formulas for analyzing Amazon reader comments on the Amazon pages for the books they have never read. Talk about being proud of one's ignorance.
posted by y2karl at 3:32 PM on May 9, 2023

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