100 more SF books everybody should read!

Lynn found this list, which differs substantially from the last one I did, so we’ll do the same deal this time: already read it; own it and plan to read it; don’t own but plan to read. With occasional comment.

UPDATE: There’s apparently not 100 here. Oh well. Call it the “Almost a hundred”, then.

The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
Cities in Flight – James Blish
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick (I still haven’t read any PKD!)

The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
Gateway – Frederik Pohl

The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester

Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin (Read it in high school. I’m pretty sure I missed its point entirely.)

The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
Emphyrio – Jack Vance
A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon

Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells

Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
Ubik – Philip K. Dick
Timescape – Gregory Benford
More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
Man Plus – Frederik Pohl

A Case of Conscience – James Blish
The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke

Pavane – Keith Roberts
Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
Nova – Samuel R. Delany
The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke

Blood Music – Greg Bear
Jem – Frederik Pohl
Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
VALIS – Philip K. Dick
The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin

The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke

Eon – Greg Bear
The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
Ringworld – Larry Niven

The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke

Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
Dune – Frank Herbert

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein (Well, I tried once, and bounced off about halfway through.)

The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
Inverted World – Christopher Priest
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells (Hold on, this is on here twice!)

Dhalgren (July 2010) – Samuel R. Delany
Helliconia (August 2010) – Brian Aldiss
Food of the Gods (Sept. 2010) – H.G. Wells
The Body Snatchers (Oct. 2010) – Jack Finney
The Female Man (Nov. 2010) – Joanna Russ
Arslan (Dec. 2010) – M.J. Engh (Given contemporary events, this is a really creepy book.)

In other SF reading notes, I’ll just note here that I stopped reading Startide Rising by David Brin about halfway through. There are tons of nifty ideas in that book, but I didn’t care one bit about any of the characters, to the point where halfway through I was having to look back to the book’s Dramatis personae just to remind myself who was being talked about a lot of the time. Part of the problem, for me, is that a lot of the really interesting stuff in the story (the events of the Streaker‘s finding the derelict fleet) is over by the time the book begins, but another problem is that I just wasn’t roped into caring about the people Brin was writing about. So I looked up a plot summary online just to see where the book went after that, and I’m done. I won’t be bothering with the remaining books in the Uplift series.

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