The Most Sig­nif­i­cant SF & Fan­tasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953 – 2002

I finally man­aged to track down every book on the above list, many are/​were unfor­tu­nately out of print. But I did it. I’ve read them all. Mini-​Reviews of all 50 are inside.

1 The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

I’ve bab­bled on about this book and author far too much. Many peo­ple have no desire to read it because so many peo­ple go on and on about it. If any­thing, it belongs at the top of this list sim­ply because its suc­cess as a pub­li­ca­tion showed pub­lish­ers that money could, in fact, be made from sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy in book form. It wasn’t just for the pulps anymore.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Sil­mar­il­lion, The Hob­bit, Roveran­dom, On Fairy Stories

2 The Foun­da­tion Tril­ogy, Isaac Asimov

Nearly as impres­sive as LotR, The Foun­da­tion Series and Asi­mov him­self are respon­si­ble for adding a new layer of com­plex­ity to sci­ence fic­tion, the genre matured from juve­nile escapism in the pulps to com­plex polit­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives. The Foun­da­tion Series is a prime exam­ple of the effec­tive use of spec­u­la­tive fic­tion as a reflec­tion of our own society.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Caves of Steel, I, Robot

3 Dune, Frank Herbert

I read this book my fresh­man year of high school. I remem­ber not lik­ing it. I prob­a­bly missed some of the eco­nomic impor­tance among all the messianic/​prophetic hul­lab­u­loo and sand­worm rid­ing and nukes mak­ing people’s eyes melt. I should prob­a­bly read it again, but I don’t par­tic­u­larly have any desire to do so. Lots of peo­ple like it and it was made into an awful movie, so I guess it has some worth.

4 Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

One of the must-​reads for the sex­ual rev­o­lu­tion in the 1960s, Stranger in a Strange Land seems some­what sim­ple now that AIDS is every­where. Nev­er­the­less, the book is still quite pow­er­ful on many dif­fer­ent lev­els, nature vs. nuture, sex­ual pro­cliv­i­ties, can­ni­bal taboos, you name it. Through­out the book the reader is chal­lenged to eval­u­ate each aspect of cul­ture by see­ing it through strange but sim­i­lar eyes.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Star­ship Troopers

5 A Wiz­ard of Earth­sea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Any­thing writ­ten by Ursula K. Le Guin is worth read­ing. A Wiz­ard of Earth­sea is a great, easy-​to-​read com­ing of age tale with a non-​white pro­tag­o­nist [quite the dar­ing thing to do at the time] that del­i­cately nav­i­gates the treach­er­ous waters of ado­les­cence and man­ages to impart a strong and healthy mes­sage with­out sound­ing parental.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Lathe of Heaven, The Left Hand of Dark­ness, The Birth­day of the World and Other Stories

6 Neu­ro­mancer, William Gibson

I’ve not read much cyber­punk, so I’ve not read much Gib­son. This was one of the first books I read when I started the list. If I remem­ber cor­rectly, this techno-​capitalist soci­ety is alot like orga­nized crime, and the main char­ac­ter is a sort of junkie drug-​runner equiv­a­lent com­puter hacker, lots of cool tech and cool-​like antiheroism.

7 Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke is the go-​to guy when it comes to writ­ing sto­ries that turn deep tragedy into bril­liant pos­si­bil­ity. Childhood’s End is prob­a­bly the best exam­ple of this. Tran­scen­dent human­ity is mixed, insep­a­ra­bly with the destruc­tion of almost every­thing we know as human. A com­pelling read.

My longer review of Childhood’s End.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Ren­dezvous with Rama, 2001: A Space Odyssey

8 Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick isn’t the best writer, but his cre­ativ­ity is so full of mind-​bending psycho-​horror that his sto­ries over­come their words. This book was made into the amaz­ing Bladerun­ner [lots of Dick sto­ries have been made into movies, Minor­ity Report, Total Recall, Pay­check, Sec­ond Vari­ety] and prob­lems con­cern­ing cre­ation and epis­te­mol­ogy are ulti­mately deemed irrel­e­vant in this exis­ten­tial masterpiece.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Selected Sto­ries

9 The Mists of Avalon, Mar­ion Zim­mer Bradley

The only strictly fem­i­nist book on this list, I didn’t like it too much. Of course, I’m not really the audi­ence, but I thought that the women, while puissant-​willed, ulti­mately became the things MZB was oppos­ing. To me they seemed bitchy and manip­u­la­tive, and while it could be argued that was their only way to have power, it still rein­forces stereo­types. Nev­er­the­less, more books with female pro­tag­o­nists would be welcome.

10 Fahren­heit 451, Ray Bradbury

This book is stan­dard high school read­ing list fare, but its worth lasts unto adult­hood as well. The repres­sive soci­ety reminds me quite a bit of Vonnegut’s Har­ri­son Berg­eron but Bradbury’s tale ends on a slightly more hope­ful note. I quite like Brad­bury, his writ­ing style hear­kens back to sci­ence fiction’s found­ing fathers [Jules Verne, H.G.Wells] but he wres­tles with time­less con­cerns and adds another dimen­sion to his sto­rys by doing so. NB: 1984 [search­able online ver­sion!] didn’t make this list because it was pub­lished before 1953.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, Dan­de­lion Wine

11 The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe [1, 2]

I hadn’t been too inter­ested in read­ing Gene Wolfe, for no real rea­son. I’d been miss­ing a lot. It seems like there are a lot of Catholics writ­ing good sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy, and Gene Wolfe fits that mold. The Book of the New Sun is a four-​volume meta­phys­i­cal mas­ter­piece that goes always in unex­pected direc­tions and has a neb­u­lous sense of agency. One of the best books I read on this list.

My longer review of The Book of the New Sun.

12 A Can­ti­cle for Lei­bowitz, Wal­ter M. Miller, Jr.

I think Ein­stein said that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones, and the post-​nuclear armaged­don world in which Wal­ter M. Miller puts us is a car wreck rub­ber­neck­ing read that seems to say fear and jeal­ousy will trump good sense as long as humans are humans. There are sev­eral morals here, at least one for every­body who reads it.

13 The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov

Where I, Robot mainly focused on the log­i­cal conun­dra of positronic robot­ics and the Three Laws of Robot­ics with a sec­ondary focus on inter­ac­tions with human emo­tion, The Caves of Steel offers more poignant sto­ries where humans attempt to cope with the dis­trust and fear asso­ci­ated with cre­at­ing some­thing supe­rior to them in all ways.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Foun­da­tion Tril­ogy, I, Robot

14 Chil­dren of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras

This book reads some­what like any other mid-​century child­hood adven­ture book. Except all the kids in this one are super­ge­niuses and were osten­si­bly the inspi­ra­tion for the X-​Men. Dur­ing the Atomic Age
radioac­tive acci­dents didn’t always end hor­ri­bly. A nice read, if a bit bland at times.

My longer review of Chil­dren of the Atom.

15 Cities in Flight, James Blish

This thick book is more a com­bined series of novel­las than any­thing else. Early on it offers alter­na­tives to the sci­en­tific method but as time passes, the mas­tery of anti-​gravitic spin­dizzies turn human­ity into the pro­tec­tors of the galaxy, even­tu­ally even unto sac­ri­fic­ing them­selves as new gods. A Mag­num Opus indeed.

16 The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Finally, a bit of humor­ous fan­tasy! Terry Pratch­ett takes the typ­i­cal absur­di­ties of life, mixes in heavy doses of humor and enlight­en­ing satire and pours this sauce over inter­est­ing char­ac­ters of myr­iad vari­eties. The result: Tasty treats of books that enter­tain and illu­mi­nate with­out and sense of heavy­hand­ed­ness. There is always some­thing to laugh about.

17 Dan­ger­ous Visions, edited by Har­lan Ellison

One of the most ambi­tious antholo­gies of all time, this book con­tains pow­er­ful story after pow­er­ful story, on all kinds of bizarre and chal­leng­ing top­ics. 35 years later the sto­ries might not seem quite so dan­ger­ous, but the writ­ing and con­tent still sur­prise and affect. Elli­son intro­duces each author and each author has a bit of a foot­note about the story at the end of each. A must read.

18 Death­bird Sto­ries, Har­lan Ellison

While Dan­ger­ous Visions was a mas­ter­piece, this col­lec­tion of short sto­ries by Elli­son didn’t do much for me. Each is con­cerned with humanity’s new gods, dark gods for the most part. I didn’t enjoy this book nearly as much as I enjoyed Ellison’s Strange Wine [and I only enjoyed half of that]. I think Elli­son is just too brash for my taste.

My longer review of Death­bird Stories.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Strange Wine

19 The Demol­ished Man, Alfred Bester

This is a thriller, a jour­ney into the pur­ga­tory of the mind and a thought­ful explo­ration of what telepa­thy might be capa­ble of. A man with every­thing deter­mines to com­mit mur­der and get away with it. If he does not suc­ceed he will be Demol­ished. That is, have his per­son­al­ity utterly shat­tered. Will he suc­ceed? Read the book to find out!

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Stars My Destination

20 Dhal­gren, Samuel R. Delany

In post­mod­ern sci­ence fic­tion with a han­ker­ing toward shock and awe through sex­ual pro­cliv­i­ties, dis­cus­sions on the nature of art in a world of warp­ing real­i­ties, in a city where build­ings burn and are not con­sumed, and pro­jected images seem more real that the gangs who con­trol them, who bet­ter to guide you through this than a filthy amne­siac mad­man who writes poetry in the cor­ners of a found notebook?

An excerpt from my favorite part of Dhalgren.

21 Drag­on­flight, Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaf­frey has pro­duced nearly innu­mer­able nov­els about Pern. Drag­on­flight is the first one, and the only one I’ve read. As books go this one has some cool time and space warp­ing drag­ons an inter­est­ing exam­ple of cul­tural evo­lu­tion and a pretty believ­able female pro­tag­o­nist. It def­i­nitely blurs the lines between sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy and is def­i­nitely orig­i­nal in idea, if not exactly in style.

22 Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

This is more mil­i­tary sci­ence fic­tion, but when it comes to think­ing around things Orson Scott Card man­ages time and again in this book. Ender Wig­gin, a genet­i­cally bred boy genius is trained to exhaus­tion in order to save humankind from an incom­ing alien inva­sion and cer­tain anni­hi­la­tion. Another clas­sic must read.

23 The First Chron­i­cles of Thomas Covenant the Unbe­liever, Stephen R. Don­ald­son [1, 2, 3]

When it comes to atyp­i­cal pro­tag­o­nists, the lep­rous and cow­ardly Thomas Covenant takes the cake. While this book could have dealt quite stun­ningly with the nature of mad­ness and psy­chic trauma, it takes a dif­fer­ent path and spends three books wal­low­ing in its own mis­tery. Meh.

My longer review of The First Chron­i­cles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.

24 The For­ever War, Joe Haldeman

In a sense this is more mil­i­tary sci­ence fic­tion, but it is also hard sci-​fi, tem­po­ral rel­a­tiv­ity is the prime mover and cause of more men­tal anguish [kind of a trend here isn’t there? I won­der if it has to do with the time period these books were writ­ten in…] as a space sol­dier spends sev­eral years sub­jec­tive time fight­ing in dif­fer­ent parts of space, while thou­sands of years pass objec­tively. Halde­man is excellent.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: All My Sins Remembered

25 Gate­way, Fred­erik Pohl

Space travel, explo­ration and mis­un­der­stood alien tech are the heart­wood of this begin­ning to Pohl’s tales of human­ity and the Heechee. This is a danger-​filled adven­ture tale like a walk through dark and strange woodland.

26 Harry Pot­ter and the Sorceror’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

Despite its almost clichéd sta­tus in pop­u­lar cul­ture, the first book in the Harry Pot­ter series was an unex­pected delight for folks of all ages. Just enough humor, just the right mix of famil­iar­ity and strange­ness and a very British feel to it make this book a quick and enjoy­able read.

27 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dou­glas Adams

Every­body should read the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Don’t Panic, it is more com­edy than sci­ence fic­tion, so even if you typ­i­cally asso­ciate sci-​fi with Vogon poetry this book is funny enough for you to for­give it for being out of this world.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Ulti­mate Hitchhiker’s Guide

28 I Am Leg­end, Richard Matheson

Richard Math­e­son wrote lots of stuff for The Twi­light Zone, so if you expect I Am Leg­end to be like that rockin’ series you’re both right and wrong. This book was made into a few movies The Omega Man is the one I’ve seen. Look, it is about the last man on earth when every­one else is a vam­pire. A great book.

29 Inter­view with the Vam­pire, Anne Rice

Most folks have prob­a­bly seen the movie. This is one of the rare cases where I like the movie and the book equally. Anne Rice does an excel­lent job show­ing us what life is like when you are a regret­ful hedo­nis­tic vampire.

30 The Left Hand of Dark­ness, Ursula K. Le Guin

The only rea­son I can think of that this book is so far down on the list is that Mrs. Le Guin already has a book in the top five. She seems to chan­nel her anthro­pol­o­gist father Al Kroe­ber in this participant-​observer tale of polit­i­cal intrigue in a land where the androg­yne inhab­i­tants can take on either male or female sex­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics depend­ing on their envi­ron­ment. Like I said, any­thing she writes is worth a read.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Wiz­ard of Earth­sea, The Birth­day of the World and Other Stories

31 Lit­tle, Big, John Crowley

One of the big sur­prises on this list is Lit­tle, Big. It is an ethe­real, mean­der­ing, mys­te­ri­ous and quite potent med­i­ta­tion on rela­tions between our world and Faery. You can almost pick it up at any place and start read­ing with­out miss­ing much. A book to read more than once, for sure.

32 Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

On a planet where an immor­tal oli­garchy pre­tends to be the Hindu Pan­theon, on god, the Lord of Light is con­stantly offed and reborn to oppose them. Should we be sur­prised that he is the Bud­dha? Not really. I don’t think I quite got this book. It was weird. I think I missed the point.

33 The Man in the High Cas­tle, Philip K. Dick

The weak­est thing I’ve read by Dick, lots of peo­ple say this is his finest work. It is revi­sion­ist his­tory as only sci-​fi can do it. What if Japan and Ger­many had won World War II? That is a pretty cool idea but Phil spends too much time dick­ing around in mun­dane events and wor­ries for my taste.

My longer review of The Man in the High Castle.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Do Androids Dream of Elec­tric Sheep?, Selected Sto­ries

34 Mis­sion of Grav­ity, Hal Clement

This is hard sci­ence fic­tion with a main char­ac­ter who is basi­cally a big olé cen­tipede. It is also a sea adven­ture, albeit on an ovoid planet with the strangest grav­ity imag­in­able. All the char­ac­ters are out for their own best inter­ests which makes for some inter­est­ing hag­gling and interaction.

35 More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon

I really like Theodore Stur­geon. His sto­ries are decep­tively sim­ple. He hints at things that you only real­ize after you put the book down. More than Human is a story about half-​wits and half-​humans becom­ing greater than the sum of their parts, ulti­mately exceed­ing their human­ity, despite or per­haps because of their innocence.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Com­plete Sto­ries of Theodore Stur­geon [10 volumes]

36 The Redis­cov­ery of Man, Cord­wainer Smith

This book should be much higher on the list. It is a col­lec­tion of all of Cord­wainer Smith’s short sto­ries. Mr. Smith is respon­si­ble for start­ing the sci­ence fic­tion careers of more than a few peo­ple on this list and his 30,000 year chron­i­cle of humanity’s con­stant strug­gle toward even it doesn’t know what is orig­i­nal from the first page to the last one.

A bit more from me on Cord­wainer Smith and a review of Norstrilia.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Norstrilia

37 On the Beach, Nevil Shute

This book was per­haps the most sur­pris­ing one that I read on this list. I think it should be much higher. It prob­a­bly isn’t only because it isn’t quite as sci­ence fic­tiony as the oth­ers. It is a heartwrench­ingly bru­tal con­tem­po­rary mid-​20^th cen­tury story of post-​nuclear anni­hi­la­tion in Aus­tralia. Aus­tralia hasn’t been hit, but the jet stream is slowly bring­ing the radi­a­tion to the con­ti­nent. Every­one knows they are under a death sen­tence. It is an amaz­ing and thought-​provoking anti-​war story that is quite effec­tive at deeply per­sonal level. I need to scrounge up one of the movies [1, 2].

38 Ren­dezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

This is more space explo­ration involv­ing alien tech­nol­ogy, only this time the humans are inside a mys­te­ri­ous and vast alien craft that con­founds almost all of their attempts to explore it. How do you explore the inside of a sphere? of a cylinder?

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey

39 Ring­world, Larry Niven

To quote Niven:

40 Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys

A story of manip­u­la­tion on mul­ti­ple lev­els and in mul­ti­ple places, Rogue Moon is the story of an explorer who must, by trial and error, find his way through an alien con­struct. The only prob­lem is, each time he errors, he dies, and the psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of this are just as unknown and incalculable.

41 The Sil­mar­il­lion, J.R.R. Tolkien

The Sil­mar­il­lion is my favorite work of Tolkien’s. It is grand mythopo­etic sub­cre­ation, with incred­i­bly rich and some­what archaic lan­guage. It is easy to see why this was his life’s work and it would be quite inter­est­ing to see what it would have even­tu­ally become had he not died before com­plet­ing it.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Lord of the Rings, The Hob­bit, Roveran­dom, On Fairy Stories

42 Slaughterhouse-​5, Kurt Vonnegut

Even peo­ple who hate sci­ence fic­tion seem to like Von­negut. Deeply satir­i­cal and simul­ta­ne­ously sen­ti­men­tal time-​travel must have atavis­tic appeal to most humans. As anti-​war books go, this one is prob­a­bly one of the top five.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Cat’s Cra­dle, Wel­come to the Mon­key House

43 Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash is a cyber­punk novel filled with arche­typal char­ac­ters with delib­er­ately odd lives. Con­tem­po­rary life is extrap­o­lated into a future where sexy 16 year old sk8r grrls wear nar­cotic vagina den­tata, pizza deliv­ery guys who live in U-​Stor-​Its are gods of the inter­nets, and large Aleu­tians with glass razors kill peo­ple like noth­ing. It was a good read, but a bit over the top.

44 Stand on Zanz­ibar, John Brunner

This is a deeply per­sonal book, you can really feel John Brunner’s soul being poured into it. Con­cerned with over­pop­u­la­tion, first world com­pla­cency, vic­ar­i­ous life through tele­vi­sion, and a chronic and acute exis­ten­tial anomie, it ulti­mately admits its love for all of us, despite our imperfections.

My longer review of Stand on Zanzibar.

45 The Stars My Des­ti­na­tion, Alfred Bester

Alfred Bester has two books on this list for a rea­son, his sci­ence fic­tion is unlike any­thing you’ll ever read. He sort of prog­nos­ti­cates the cyber­punk genre, espe­cially in this work, where a thug named Gully Foyle jaunts around seek­ing revenge for being aban­doned in a derelict spacecraft.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: The Demol­ished Man

46 Star­ship Troop­ers, Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve read this book prob­a­bly eight or nine times since I first nabbed it on this lit­tle quest of mine. It is said to be a rather con­ser­v­a­tive out­look on a mil­i­tary soci­ety, but I think it mixes just the right amount of piz­zazz with quite thought-​provoking civics lessons to come up with the best use of nation­al­ism pos­si­ble. This novel is approx­i­mately infi­nitely bet­ter than the bat­shit crazy movie adap­ta­tion.

Rec­om­mended other read­ing: Stranger in a Strange Land

47 Storm­bringer, Michael Moor­cock

This dark fan­tasy is dri­ven by a pro­tag­o­nist who is inher­ently evil, an alien being who is moti­vated and wracked by shad­owy emo­tions. It is vio­lent, escha­to­log­i­cal, and quite short. I didn’t par­tic­u­larly enjoy this book because Moor­cock is so effec­tive at cre­at­ing twisted behav­ior, strange emo­tion and alien­ation that I had noth­ing to hold on to. Just because I didn’t enjoy it doesn’t mean it sucked though. Moor­cock wrote many other books in the Storm­bringer series.

48 The Sword of Shan­nara, Terry Brooks

This book should not be on the list. It is ter­ri­ble. The only book I didn’t fin­ish on this list. It is so unabashedly a cheap and lame and crummy Tolkien rip-​off that I got 200 pages in, real­ized that plot point for plot point the novel was copy­ing Tolkien and stopped read­ing. A large num­ber of other sci­ence fic­tion and fan­tasy books could replace this one. I think it only made it because of its pop­u­lar­ity. Even Terry Good­kind would have been a bet­ter choice.

49 Timescape, Gre­gory Benford

Hard sci­ence fic­tion with deeply per­sonal char­ac­ters, this novel deals with the inher­ent dan­gers of time travel, but only time travel com­mu­ni­ca­tion, not phys­i­cal time travel. There is a lot of physics in this book, but Ben­ford makes it rel­a­tively easy to under­stand. The world is being destroyed due to pol­lu­tion and a few sci­en­tists are try­ing to speak to the past in order to change the future. The effi­cacy and after effects of this are some­what ambigu­ous, and Ben­ford, like a good sci­en­tist, lays out the prob­lem as he sees it, and lets the reader decide.

50 To Your Scat­tered Bod­ies Go, Philip José Farmer

Every­one who is dead wakes up on this River­world. No one knows why, or how. The main char­ac­ter seeks to find out why and how. He ends up get­ting killed, but then dis­cov­ers that he just wakes up the next day some­where else on the river. So, play­ing the odds, he loses any restraint on keep­ing him­self intact and hops from death to death hop­ing even­tu­ally he’ll come to the end of the river. Along the way he runs into all kinds of famous peo­ple, Nazis, Nean­derthals, you name it. A really fun book.