The Daily telegraph's top 20 SFnovels ever

[warshipadmin]

Hmm, haven't read it yet, posted for comment

20. What Not (1918)
by Rose Macaulay


We wrap ourselves in bubbles of specious certainty, and only satire can burst these bubbles. Much of SF is satire on steroids. Wartime bureaucracy is the target of this early novel by the author of The Towers of Trebizond. In a Britain that’s breeding for intelligence, so that we can evolve out of war, Kitty Grammont, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Brains, finds she cannot marry her lover, the politically ambitious Nicholas Chester, as there’s a slim but real possibility that he’s an idiot. People say this novel inspired Huxley’s Brave New World. Nonsense: Huxley was satirising the USA. Rose Macaulay had the UK firmly in her sights.
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19. We (1920)
by Yevgeny Zamyatin


Doing for post-revolutionary Russia what Macaulay’s novel did for Britain, We is a journal, both madcap and melancholy, of hero-inventor D-503’s disenchantment with the One State. A bookish sort – “Timetables of all the Railroads” is his particular favourite – D-503 is bowled over by his neighbour, the delicious E-330, even as the One State rolls out its final solution for these sorts of emotional breakdowns.

It all becomes pretty grim: the marching masses are transformed into “some sort of humanoid tractors”. Joseph Stalin did for Zamyatin’s career, but the writer was much more than a mere “dissident”: he’s a maniac in a fireworks factory, sending up every contemporary pretension.
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18. The Female Man (1975)
by Joanna Russ


Much the same could be said of Russ, a New York feminist academic with a penchant for Byzantine structure. The Female Man has 110 chapters in nine parts, set in two 1969s and two futures which may or may not be parallel worlds. Four women, living out lives shaped by their gender in four very different ways, find themselves in psychic communication.

Feminist SF never quite shook off Russ’s influence – ponderous imitations abound – and it’s easy to forget how much sheer fun Russ had with her foundational novel. Long ignored by the anti-feminist crowd, its anti-trans passages are now winning it new opprobrium. Well, to hell with people who won’t let their bubbles be pricked.
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17. Cat’s Cradle (1963)
by Kurt Vonnegut

To write a good spoof, you need a truly hare-brained imagination; SF arises where invention takes on a peculiar life of its own. In Kurt Vonnegut’s fourth novel, a Cold War skit, a writer investigating the development of the atomic bomb uncovers “ice-nine”, a catastrophic polymer capable of solidifying all water. This uncomfortably believable idea – look it up: H2O is odd – pushes Vonnegut beyond satire and into a doomed and hilarious world all of his own.
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16. Camp Concentration (1968)
by Thomas M Disch

America has declared war on the rest of the world, and sinister army doctors have infected Sacchetti, an incarcerated poet, with a strain of syphilis, seeking to boost his intelligence. On these satirical foundations, Thomas Disch, one of the genre’s great jokers, built a terrifying enquiry into the relationship between language and perception, genius and pain. Anyone tempted to plug a chip into their brain, or microdose their way up to a pressing deadline (ahem), is well advised to nail this book to their desk.
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15–11
15. Neuromancer (1984)
by William Gibson

It’s hard to say whether William Gibson wanted to satirise his times, or had got drunk on the Kool-Aid. Either way, Neuromancer defined the 1980s. Case, a hacker, is washed-up and neurologically crippled from accessing cyberspace. With nothing to lose, he signs up for one last job: breaking into the heavily guarded computer systems of a powerful corporate dynasty.

Little does he know, he has become the tool of Wintermute, a rogue artificial intelligence striving to merge with its more powerful sibling and achieve true sentience. Any attempt to précis Neuromancer makes it sound like a bad copy of itself, so let’s try this: before Tenet and The Matrix, before Ready Player One and The Windup Girl, there was this odd, twisted, noirish beast, its skin the colour of television tuned to a dead channel.
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14. The Dispossessed (1974)
by Ursula K Le Guin

By the time you’re taking pot-shots at the human condition itself, you’re less a commentator than a species of philosopher. We follow Shevek, a brilliant physicist (based on Robert Oppenheimer, a family friend of Le Guin), who travels to the capitalist hell-hole planet Urras, while pining for Anarres, his socialist homeworld.

Yet we don’t: the more Shevak remembers, the more stultifying Anarres seems. Urras is no picnic either: adrift in its shallowness and brutality, Shevak’s loneliness is visceral. How, then, should we live? No point asking Le Guin, who drove critics mad with a novel that insists readers think for themselves.
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13. Last and First Men (1930)
by Olaf Stapledon


Let’s start at the end. Barely warmed by the light of an ageing Sun, the last man reflects on his species’ history: how it evolved, blossomed, speciated and died. Last and First Men isn’t merely a novel; it’s an imaginative history of the solar system across two billion years, detailing the dreams and aspirations, achievements and failings of 17 different kinds of future Homo. At last, extinction beckons: “It is very good to have been man… And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage.”
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12. Station Eleven (2014)
by Emily St John Mandel


Bring that thousand-yard stare back down to earth, and turn it upon our 21st-century lives, and you wind up with books like this one – not that there’s anything quite like Station Eleven. A few days before a flu pandemic ravages humanity, celebrated actor Arthur Leander dies on stage. His friends and family remember and misremember him, living as much in their versions of the past and conceptions of the present as they do the future – and it begins to dawn on us that Leander, by his passing, may just have saved humanity.
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11. Engine Summer (1979)
by John Crowley


In this melancholy and uplifting vision, Rush That Speaks, a young man dedicated to “Truthful Speaking” (harder than it sounds), goes in pursuit of his lost love Once A Day. His quest takes him across strange lands, and among peoples transfigured by disaster and alien visitation into attitudes of rare gentleness. Humanity has adapted in fascinating ways to what, at first, seems a quite hostile environment. Crowley makes a poignant and often heartbreaking drama out of our happy future.


10. The Time Machine (1895)
by HG Wells

On the other hand, you could just frighten the life out of people: The Time Machine is one of the genre’s great, foundational shockers. HG Wells’s nameless narrator builds a machine to take him to the year 802701 AD, where he finds humanity split into gentle, stupid Eloi and cruel, clever Morlocks.

The Eloi are beautiful, gentle, charming – and tasty, which is why the Morlocks are farming them. Despite what you might have been told, The Time Machine isn’t a political fable. Wells trained under the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, and this is a powerful, well-informed novel about evolution, as Huxley’s generation understood it. Time annihilates any attribute that proves useless to survival – even beauty and intelligence.
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9. Plague of Pythons (1965)
by Frederik Pohl

As society succumbs to a plague of madness, an engineer called Chandler, who committed rape and murder while out of his mind, must fight to clear his name. The plague, in reality, is the doing of mysterious “possessors” who inhabit and manipulate other people as though they were living costumes to be shed at will.

Chandler falls in with a cult that uses pain to ward off possession, and learns that the possessors are hackers who’ve developed technology that can penetrate the human psyche. But, having fallen under their control once again, how can he stop them? Social media has given this agelessly nasty idea new life: Plague of Pythons is an inadvertent parable for our age.

8. The Islanders (2011)
by Christopher Priest

So much for moral angst. Sometimes you just want your imagination to let rip. In prose that could be pernickety to the point of bizarrerie, Christopher Priest monomaniacally rearranged two or three foundational ideas into brilliant, haunting sui generis novels such as this. The Islanders is his mischievous and magical gazetteer of the Channel Islands, recast as the Dream Archipelago, in which we drift through a chain of fragmentary consciousnesses, and both time and space prove unreliable. It must be the strangest shaggy-dog story ever written.

7. The Stars My Destination (1956)
by Alfred Bester

Gully Foyle is uneducated, unskilled, unambitious, cowardly, venal and weak. He’s trapped aboard a derelict spaceship, and the company that should rescue him is leaving him to die. But, after surviving his ordeal, Gully plots a revenge as transformative as it is terrible, as he leaps from world to world, acquiring strength after strength and skill after skill. No one, before or since, matched Alfred Bester for energy or economy; no one, with the possible exception of Quentin Tarantino, has ever shown such love for or commitment to pulp fiction.

6. Rogue Moon (1960)
by Algis Budrys

Give the imagination enough rope, and you soon end up in a place about which you can’t even ask sensible questions, never mind receive comfortable answers. Thrill-seeker Al Barker is repeatedly copied and his copies teleported into an alien artefact on the Moon, which kills him again and again and again.

Maybe it’s trying to communicate, but who knows? “Perhaps it’s the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle’s burrow? […] Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can there to torment it – or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to mystify it?”

5. Roadside Picnic (1972)
by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

In 1957, a massive explosion at a nuclear waste dump in the eastern Urals contaminated several hundred square kilometres of land. To prevent people wandering into the forbidden zone, the Soviet government turned it into a nature reserve. Fifteen years later, two Russian brothers wrote Roadside Picnic.

Aliens have visited Earth and left their rubbish behind. Redrick “Red” Schuhart, is a stalker, one of many who illegally brave these abandoned and overgrown “picnic spots” in search of powerful, transformative, toxic and often deadly litter. In some cases, the weirder SF gets, the more it comes to resemble reality.
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4. Dune (1965)
by Frank Herbert


Cast into the wilderness of planet Arrakis by invading House Harkonnen, young Paul Atreides learns the ways of the desert and becomes in one swoop a focus for royalist hopes and religious fanaticism – all while riding on the back of an enormous sand-worm. Dune’s several film and TV adaptations all do a splendid job of conveying the novel’s epic scale. What they can’t do so easily is convey its oddness: like much of Herbert’s best work, Dune is set in a world that has overthrown its own thinking machines, and must now, and for its own survival, breed, drug and otherwise warp individual humans into becoming something very like gods.
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3. Fiasco (1986)
by Stanisław Lem


The trouble with becoming divine is that there’s no finishing line: no point beyond which you magically acquire the wisdom and patience you need to govern your new power. In Lem’s great novel, first published in German translation before it appeared in the original Polish in 1987, idealistic human explorers approach the planet Quinta, which seems to harbour intelligent life. They try to establish contact, but the Quintans are engaged in a war, and refuse to pay any attention to the humans’ arrival. The explorers’ efforts to force the aliens to engage grow increasingly violent, in this bleak, brilliant account of good intentions gone horribly awry.
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2. Ubik (1969)
by Philip K Dick


In the end, wherever we go, we’re stuck with ourselves. Technician Joe Chip is caught in a corporate ambush, and his boss, Glen Runciter, is killed. Reality quickly unravels: objects regress in time, deteriorating into earlier forms, and Joe and his friends find themselves moving backward through the decades. Maybe they’re dead, and Runciter is alive. Runciter certainly seems to think so: he’s constantly turning up in advertisements, pushing “Ubik”, a substance that can temporarily reverse the universal decay. In Dick’s world, we only have each other. The very fabric of reality depends on other people.
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1. The Day of Creation (1987)
by JG Ballard


Mallory is a WHO doctor in war-torn central Africa, where he dreams of bringing water to the parched land. Funnily enough, while digging, he unleashes a powerful, ever-growing river. Becoming obsessed, he names the river after himself and embarks on a journey upstream, through Edenic lands that grow steadily more poisonous and feverish, while the river turns into a force only Mallory can stop.

The Day of Creation caps a formidable series of explorations of psychological “inner space”, that began with 1962’s The Wind from Nowhere. Ballard’s central insight was that no one experiences reality, only those bits of it that seem relevant. That’s where science fiction starts.

[warshipadmin]

I've read about half of them. Ubik is an odd choice, A Scanner Darkly would be mine of PDK's works. I wouldn't put Ballard at #1.

[Craiglxviii]

There are about 500 better contenders for a Top 20 Sci Fi list than… yes, than every one on that list. IMO.

[kdahm]

Nothing by E.E. Smith, Heinlein, or Asimov.

It must be an attempt by a wannabe literati to put together a list of 'value'. Either that, or the old thing of putting up something wrong in order to get the right answer.

[warshipadmin]

Stapledon Wells Le Guin Bester and Dick would be on my list, but man every Lem I ever read was a hate read.

[Nik_SpeakerToCats]

This list's skewed perspective reminds me of Whatshername's 'The Handmaids Tale', acclaimed by literati, panned by SF readers: They'd seen scenario done much better, many times, long, long ago...

But, even such hapless bumbling may yet strike rich seam.
In no particular order,
The Time Machine, a truly cautionary tale.
Last and First Men, for which 'epic' does not begin to suffice.
Neuromancer, a most unsettling romp through a scary-possible near-future.

Some of the others, I cannot fairly judge as I've not read them, nor even heard of some: Given my pre-cataract reading speed could reach a novel an hour, that's, um, harsh...

The lack of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein etc etc
The lack of moderns such as Asher, Stross etc
The lack of sundry wonders, some by but one-hit authors...
Huh.
==
Now off to wrangle several too-clunky paragraphs in Fresno_#101...

[Craiglxviii]

Nothing by E.E. Smith, Heinlein, or Asimov.

It must be an attempt by a wannabe literati to put together a list of 'value'. Either that, or the old thing of putting up something wrong in order to get the right answer.

This was exactly my thinking.

[Micael]

Nothing by E.E. Smith, Heinlein, or Asimov.

It must be an attempt by a wannabe literati to put together a list of 'value'. Either that, or the old thing of putting up something wrong in order to get the right answer.

This was exactly my thinking.

Yeah, it seems to be a very haphazardly put together list.

[warshipadmin]

When I was a yoof EE Smith was still held in high regard. I tried a couple and decided if I wanted stories about magic there were better options. Now that's quite funny because I enjoy reading Iain Banks, whose entire universe is based on magic.

[Craiglxviii]

When I was a yoof EE Smith was still held in high regard. I tried a couple and decided if I wanted stories about magic there were better options. Now that's quite funny because I enjoy reading Iain Banks, whose entire universe is based on magic.

I don’t really mind the Lensman books even now, although the later ones were better than the earlier. Vortex Blasters not so much, but Spacehounds of IPC I have always really liked.