Guardian's Books Every One Must Peruse - SF/Fantasy

[faustus]

Read, unfinished, hated. Some typically perverse choices - and every pleasurable inclusion is matched by a stupid exclusion . Roundabout 70 out of 149. The first time I've felt well read!

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Brian W Aldiss, Non-Stop (1958)
Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1951)
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000)
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things (1987)
JG Ballard, Crash (1973)
JG Ballard, Millennium People (2003)
JG Ballard, The Drowned World (1962)
William Beckford, Vathek (1786)
Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory (1984)
Iain M Banks, Consider Phlebas (1987)
Clive Barker, Weaveworld (1987)
Nicola Barker, Darkmans (2007)
Stephen Baxter, The Time Ships (1995)
Greg Bear, Darwin's Radio (1999)
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (1956)
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
Poppy Z Brite, Lost Souls (1992)
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798)
Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon (1960)
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1966)
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1960)
Anthony Burgess, The End of the World News (1982)
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1912)
William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Ramsey Campbell, The Influence (1988)
Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (1977)
Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (1984)
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
Arthur C Clarke, Childhood's End (1953)
GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
Michael G Coney, Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)
Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales (1996)
Samuel R Delaney, The Einstein Intersection (1967) [argh – spell the name right!]
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Philip K Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Thomas M Disch, Camp Concentration (1968)
Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
Michel Faber, Under the Skin (2000)
John Fowles, The Magus (1966)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
Alan Garner, Red Shift (1973)
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
M John Harrison, Light (2002)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
Robert A Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)
Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Michel Houellebecq, Atomised (1998)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Unconsoled (1995)
Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
PD James, The Children of Men (1992)
Richard Jefferies, After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
Gwyneth Jones, Bold as Love (2001)
Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925)
Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Stephen King, The Shining (1977)
Marghanita Laski, The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas (1864)
Ursula K Le Guin, The Earthsea series (1968-1990)
Ursula K Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (1961)
Doris Lessing, Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
CS Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)  [parts read, not all]
MG Lewis, The Monk (1796)
David Lindsay, A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
Ken MacLeod, The Night Sessions (2008)
Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (2005)
Michael Marshall Smith, Only Forward (1994)
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954)
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Patrick McCabe, The Butcher Boy (1992)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Jed Mercurio, Ascent (2007)
China Miéville, The Scar (2002)
Andrew Miller, Ingenious Pain (1997)
Walter M Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (2004)
Michael Moorcock, Mother London (1988)
William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor (1969)
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
Larry Niven, Ringworld (1970)
Jeff Noon, Vurt (1993)
Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman (1967)
Ben Okri, The Famished Road (1991)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (1996)
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey (1818)
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946)
Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (1953)
John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance (1932)
Terry Pratchett, The Discworld series (1983- )[cheat!]
Christopher Priest, The Prestige (1995)
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space (2000)
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
Geoff Ryman, Air (2005)
Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)
José Saramago, Blindness (1995)
Will Self, How the Dead Live (2000)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Dan Simmons, Hyperion (1989)
Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker (1937)
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Rupert Thomson, The Insult (1996)
JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937) [spelt right for once]
JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan (1959)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
Robert Walser, Institute Benjamenta (1909)
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (1926)
Sarah Waters, Affinity (1999)
HG Wells, The Time Machine (1895)
HG Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898)
TH White, The Sword in the Stone (1938)
Angus Wilson, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)  [first book only]
Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids (1951)
John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (1924)

Comments

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Heh - I make my total ten, including two (Lord of the Flies, The Midwich Cuckoos) that I was forced to read as part of my school's anti-reading programme. The others are Hitchhikers', The Wasp Factory, the whole of Discworld, 1984, The Hobbit, the first Harry Potter and The Sword in the Stone.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Again, why is it one Harry Potter, not the entire series if you are specifying all the Discworld, Book of the New Sun, Narnia, His Dark Materials, Earthsea books? That's about sixty books boiled down to half a dozen.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

45. Hmm, I'm well behind you! lol

Although I think counting some of these as one is, as you say, cheating. I've read all of Narnia, but I've only read one Philip Pullman. So all of Narnia counts as 1 and 1 of Pullman counts as 0. Unfair! And surely Jonathan Strange counts for at least 2....

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

And most of Pratchett is 1. Gah! Whereas I've read all the Once and Future King AND the lost Merlin book. Meh.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I've counted reading one of a series enough to bold that series (my gaff, my rules...)

(Why Bold as Love alone?)

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Ah. So I can count Earthsea :). Read the first three I think, and some of the spin-off shorts, but everyone keeps saying Don't Read Book 4!

No idea. Why no "Count Zero"?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I read it but have memory aside from a sense of agenda - but that may have been from reading the reviews.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

I read it before "Neuromancer", and it blew me away. 'Mancer itself was a bit of a disappointment.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

So - I meant I read Tehanu after some negative press.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Oh! Misunderstandings abound with squirrels around!

Tehanu, yeah, Book 4 of Earthsea, on same page for once now :D.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I lost the -rry in that So a message back - "Sorry - I meant I ..."

Neuromancer I read via reading the response then reading it. Not clever.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Ya know, I'm getting a teensy suspicion that the people putting these lists together know less about reading than me and thee.

Less, because we're not the ones publishing magisterial lists of what we universally recommend. I mean, one could. Perhaps you even do, with your professional prescriptive hat on.

But why? See how it makes any discussion bounce off the surface.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

It does remind me of the constant Acnecon quest to find the book that all of us had read. I don't think we ever succeeded, because someone had never read Lord of the Rings or Neuromancer. If there was one, it was clearly not some that was actually memorable.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Is McCarthy's The Road on there to demonstrate how good writers can do really bad SF?

[iansales.livejournal.com]

No, The Children of Men is there for that.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

But he said *good* writers...

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

I loved "The Road"! *puts on boxing gloves*

And "The Children of Men" is one of the most boring novels in the entire world....

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

The Road two people walk a bit, get hungry, hide from some other people, walk a bit, find some food, walk a bit repeat until publisher says there are enough pages for a book.

Really, it says nothing that Ellison's A Boy And His Dog (to pick just the most obvious of McCarthy's many antecedents) doesn't say and it says it in a less interesting way, and without punctuation.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

You won't persuade me that I didn't love it :D.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Could of bin worse. Might of been O-Zone or Sykaos Papers. Or Computer One.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

You Swine... you had to go and remind me of Computer One... !

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

My work here is done.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

'I'll get you for this, Butler!'

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

"Great!" "Super!"

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Sixty-one. More or less, given above discussions about which ones are one and which are more than one. Like, surely I should get a Pratchett point, but oh no. And Mervyn Peake's being another series here represented by only the first volume. And why those Angela Carters, and not, say, Wise Children?

I am entirely unimpressed with the Guardian's list as any sort of guide to what to read next.

And they've left out Clute's Appleseed...

[iansales.livejournal.com]

Wise Children appeared in the Family list.

[maryread.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah. So I guess I can't count that twice!

The Magic Toyshop! Heroes and Villains!

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

None of Jeanette Winterson's sfnal books appear here. The omissions are endless.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

They've left out anything by Greg Egan. Gah.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Is he still in vogue? I've not read any of his since the 1990s. At which point I could see a Best Books by Greg Egan, alongside their best books by Ballard. And no straight men are radical - three women and Geoff Ryman. No China Mieville on the radical list.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

In vogue? Probably not, lol, but I loved "Quarantine". Book.love.

Why no Connie Willis? Surely she's in vogue!

[iansales.livejournal.com]

Only at Christmas. And only among readers of Asimov's.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

She's had various Huge and Nobblies over the years though. As has Robert Sawyer, and he's not there.

[iansales.livejournal.com]

I can't read Willis' stuff any more. Haven't been able to for years. Tweeeeeeee!

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I think fishlifter soured me for life before reading any.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Twee as in "it's about people and relationships" or twee as in "not nearly enough people die"? :)

[iansales.livejournal.com]

It shows you how much sf readers blog - there's been little or no reaction to the other lists, but this one is starting to spread all over the blogosphere...

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Or how little non-sf bloggers read... Or is that the same thing?

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Maybe non-sf bloggers don't read each other. Whereas SFF is a community.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Again I'm all about the ambiguous phrasing today (yesterday): I was thinking that bloggers might read lots of sf but little non-sf rather than those who do not blog about sf read little of anything. As a hunch rather than a fact.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

A lot of SFF folks seem to read Patrick O'Brian. I read quite a lot of non-SF these days, mostly non-fiction, but some fiction. But nobody reads me, lol.

[iansales.livejournal.com]

It's the seems the average is 15 - 20 read of the list on the blogs I've seen is far, which is a little sad.

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Is there any sense of this being a factor of the perverse nature of the list or - paradoxically - its spread (whilst it omits big names)? Or less reading goes on than before? Or that whilst fandom greyed, blogdom might have a younger average age (again a theory - don't worry about facts Dr A) hence fewer years in which to have read? Or, actually, even sf fans don't read?

[iansales.livejournal.com]

The lists I've seen show that some bloggers have not read the big names - Dune, for example; or Aldiss, or Delany, or even Simmons. I suspect that this is because classic sf has almost become a separate genre - or is at least treated as if it were one...

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

Something between the vanishing midlist and backlist? I suspect most Delany is available via Wesleyan editions, and the Grafton versions out of print. There's a Vintage Dhalgren and a Gollancz classic Nova, but aside from that. Aldiss decamped to the House of Stratos - Simmons had Hyperion in the Gollancz series. It strikes me that backlists are harder to pick up in charity shops and secondhand venues than when I was filling in my gaps twenty years back.

[buffysquirrel.livejournal.com]

Filling in the gaps is becoming almost impossible for me. £70 for "Gather Yourselves Together"? £140 odd! for the first Year's Best SF? What am I meant to be, a millionaire?

I have a hell of a lot of Larry Niven, whose writing I'm not even very fond of, cos he's so easy to find secondhand. Maybe that should have told me something! "Non-Stop" is actually on my wishlist (it was featured in SFX a while ago), but I find Aldiss very hit-and-miss. Hated his Frankenstein book so much I gave up on it. So many books, though. I have over 100 on my to-read list, and that's just the ones I've listed.

Why Cuckoos and not Chrysalids, which is the far superior work? Just cos it's not as well known?

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling that Cuckoos was on the O Level syllabus - and Village of the Damned probably gives it a currency. And as Rowlie Wymer seems to be the first to point out, Chrysalids is distinctly not-cosy, ending as it does with spoiler.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Oh yes The Chrysalids is an obvious ommission. By far Wyndham's best novel, IMHO, and probably the single novel i have read more times than any other (double figures easily).

[iansales.livejournal.com]

Most of the lists I've seen have been by US bloggers, and a lot of classic US sf authors are still in print over there. Or readily available from "used" book shops.