“Must-Read” SF Novels

Posted on by Chad Orzel

Via a bunch of people, but most directly Matt Ruff, the Guardian has published a list of “1000 Novels Everyone Must Read“. Which has triggered the usual flurry of procrastinatory blog posts indicating which books from the science fiction and fantasy sub-list one has and hasn’t read.

I have other things I really ought to be doing, so of course, I had to follow suit. Below the fold is my list, following Matt’s convention of marking in bold face those books that I’ve read all the way through, and putting an asterisk (*) after books I’ve started or skimmed, but never fully read.

  1. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  2. Non-Stop by Brian W Aldiss
  3. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  4. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
  5. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  6. In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
  7. The Drowned World by JG Ballard
  8. Crash by JG Ballard
  9. Millennium People by JG Ballard
  10. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
  11. Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks
  12. Weaveworld by Clive Barker
  13. Darkmans by Nicola Barker
  14. The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
  15. Darwin’s Radio by Greg Bear
  16. Vathek by William Beckford
  17. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
  18. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  19. Lost Souls by Poppy Z Brite
  20. Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown
  21. Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys
  22. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov* (I got about halfway through it on a plane flight, and then never finished it)
  23. The Coming Race by EGEL Bulwer-Lytton
  24. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
  25. The End of the World News by Anthony Burgess
  26. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
  27. Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
  28. Kindred by Octavia Butler
  29. Erewhon by Samuel Butler
  30. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (What, no If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler?)
  31. The Influence by Ramsey Campbell
  32. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  33. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
  34. Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
  35. The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter
  36. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
  37. The Man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton
  38. Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke
  39. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
  40. Hello Summer, Goodbye by Michael G Coney
  41. Girlfriend in a Coma by Douglas Coupland
  42. House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
  43. Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq
  44. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R Delaney
  45. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
  46. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick
  47. Camp Concentration by Thomas M Disch
  48. Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
  49. Under the Skin by Michel Faber
  50. The Magus by John Fowles
  51. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
  52. Red Shift by Alan Garner
  53. Neuromancer by William Gibson
  54. Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  55. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  56. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  57. Light by M John Harrison
  58. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  59. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein
  60. Dune by Frank L Herbert
  61. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
  62. Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban
  63. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg
  64. Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
  65. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  66. The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
  67. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
  68. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
  69. The Children of Men by PD James
  70. After London; or, Wild England by Richard Jefferies
  71. Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones
  72. The Trial by Franz Kafka
  73. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  74. The Shining by Stephen King
  75. The Victorian Chaise-longue by Marghanita Laski
  76. Uncle Silas by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
  77. The Earthsea Series by Ursula Le Guin
  78. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
  79. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
  80. Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing
  81. The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
  82. The Monk by Matthew Lewis
  83. A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
  84. The Night Sessions by Ken Macleod
  85. Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
  86. Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith
  87. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
  88. Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin
  89. The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
  90. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  91. Ascent by Jed Mercurio
  92. The Scar by China Mieville
  93. Ingenious Pain by Andrew Miller
  94. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr
  95. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
  96. Mother London by Michael Moorcock
  97. News from Nowhere by William Morris
  98. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  99. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
  100. Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
  101. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  102. Ringworld by Larry Niven
  103. Vurt by Jeff Noon*
  104. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
  105. The Famished Road by Ben Okri
  106. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
  107. Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
  108. Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
  109. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake*
  110. The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth
  111. A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys
  112. The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
  113. The Prestige by Christopher Priest
  114. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
  115. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais* (I read bits of it for a class on comedy in college)
  116. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
  117. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
  118. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
  119. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
  120. Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
  121. The Female Man by Joanna Russ
  122. Air by Geoff Ryman* (I got maybe a hundred pages in, but needed something lighter to read, and never got back to it)
  123. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
  124. Blindness by Jose Saramago
  125. How the Dead Live by Will Self
  126. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  127. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  128. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
  129. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
  130. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  131. Dracula by Bram Stoker
  132. The Insult by Rupert Thomson
  133. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
  134. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
  135. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
  136. Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
  137. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
  138. Institute Benjamenta by Robert Walser
  139. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
  140. Affinity by Sarah Waters
  141. The Time Machine by HG Wells
  142. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
  143. The Sword in the Stone by TH White
  144. The Old Men at the Zoo by Angus Wilson
  145. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
  146. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
  147. Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
  148. The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
  149. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

The original “meme” called for italicizing books that you intend to read, but I was surprised to find that there aren’t any of those, other than the ones marked with an asterisk. It also suggested striking through books you wouldn’t be caught dead with, but there aren’t a lot of those, either.

I make it 53 out of 149 read, which isn’t as high as it might be. I blame the excessive Britishness of the list, which includes a number of books I’ve never even heard of, while slighting some American authors (no The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress? No I, Robot?).