Saturday, January 03, 2015

Best SFF Novels Ever

The Telegraph has a list of the best sci-fi and fantasy novels of all time:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (1865)
The War of the Worlds, H G Wells (1898)
Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake (1946)
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
1984, George Orwell (1948)
I, Robot, Isaac Asimov (1950)
The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)
Lord of the Flies, William Golding (1954)
Dune, Frank Herbert (1965)
High-Rise, J G Ballard (1975)
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett (1983)
Nights at The Circus, Angela Carter (1984)
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (1985)
Mother London, Michael Moorcock (1988)
American Gods, Neil Gaiman (2001)
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
Darkmans, Nicola Barker (2007)

THE BEST OF THE REST

Utopia, Thomas More (1516)
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726)
The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe (1840)
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll (1871)
The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse (1943)
Animal Farm, George Orwell (1945)
Childhood’s End, Arthur C Clarke (1953)
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick (1962)
Contact, Carl Sagan (1985)
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
The Scar, China Mieville (2002)
The Road, Cormac McCarthy (2006)
The Lord of the Rings, J R R Tolkien (1954-55)
The Time Machine, H G Wells (1895)
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890)
I've read the ones in bold print. I've tried several times but failed to finish Dick's The Man in the High Castle.

8 comments:

  1. I don't believe I've actually read a book you haven't. Contact by Sagan was one of the books that got me interested in science, as well as Sci Fi. Nice of you to post the list, too.

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    1. I've heard Contact is good. I don't know why I've never read it.

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  2. A lot of these lists of the greatest sci-fi/fantasy books seem to repeat. This list while not completely different has quite a few different entries.

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    1. Yes, I loved seeing The Glass Bead Game and Titus Groan on a list. And I loved the breadth of time periods here.

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  3. Gaiman and Pratchett, but no Le Guin? Personally, I couldn´t make it through "Dune". Sooo boring! I couldn´t even make it through the film, which is usually a way out, education-wise.

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    1. Yes, LeGuin always seems to make these lists. I liked the first 3 Dune books. You might give the miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune a try. It has William Hurt as Duke Leto Atreides, Saskia Reeves as Lady Jessica, Ian McNeice as Baron Harkonnen... There was a sequel miniseries covering books 2 & 3.

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  4. I recognize a lot of the titles and have even read a few. Not a genre I'm usually reading but it nice to have a "best of" list handy if I decide to venture in that direction.

    Darla

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    1. This list is different from some of the others I've seen. I went more by award-winners when I was trying to read more of them.

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