November 14th, 2006
by
Yonmei
From the Science-Fiction Book Club: 44 books by men, 6 books by women.
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Update: actually, it’s 43 books by men, 7 books by women. As was pointed out to me in the comments thread, I’d overlooked one writer because she had (as so many women have found it necessary to do, when writing in a field claimed as masculine) made a gender-ambiguous name out of her real name for publishing purposes.
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I’ve read most of them. Because of this, instead of marking off the ones I’ve read, I’ve listed them with Bold: unread, Italic: on to-be-read pile, and for a very special category: Underscore: Can’t remember
I know I haven’t read 12 books on the list: one of them is sitting on the bookshelf downstairs waiting for me to go on a long train trip. Of the books I haven’t read, all but two (the ones by Kurt Vonnegut and Alfred Bester) are by this time (after 25 years or so as an SF/F fan) on the list of “books I might well read if I were stuck in a hotel in rural France for two weeks and had nothing else in English to read” but not otherwise.
The “can’t remember” category is a more interesting one. Most of the books – the ones I have read, or if I haven’t read I know enough about them to know I don’t much care if I ever read them or not – I would agree stand out from the mass of SF/F published since 1952: never mind their quality, they’re mostly memorable books.
I know I’ve read at least one William Gibson novel: maybe more than one, back when everyone was talking about him. (From the library: I wasn’t interested enough to buy copies.) I know I’ve picked up Neuromancer, but I can’t remember if it’s one of the novels by Gibson that I’ve actually read.
I know I picked up a copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, at some point after I’d seen Bladerunner, but I can’t remember if I actually read it: Philip K. Dick is just not that good a writer. (His novels certainly make good films, but then, the scriptwriter fixes the dialogue and the actors present themselves as real characters.)
I have read the first short story on which Children of the Atom is based (or the first part of the novel) but I can’t recall if I’ve read the rest, or read the whole novel. The short story was memorable – the lonely, isolated child is someone I could identify with, as many fans probably can – but from what I know of where Shiras went with the rest of the novel, it just wasn’t that good once he gave up the idea of the isolated child and went with the idea of the subspecies of superkids.
I know I’ve read most of at least one novel by Neal Stephenson, but I can’t remember if it was Snow Crash or some other one.
The title Timescape rings a bell. I may have read it in the library soon after it came out, but I don’t remember: I certainly don’t recall reading or looking for other books by Gregory Benford. (When I first discovered I liked SF/F, though, I read undiscriminatingly any book I found in Newington Library that was so labelled: on Saturday mornings, the library opened at nine and stayed open till one, and I could go there about ten and stay there for two or three hours, lost in perfect bliss, before going home for lunch with an armful of books to last me the rest of the weekend.)
I have an excellent memory for books I’ve read. Many of the books on the list are books I’ve not just read but re-read, time and and again. My personal opinion is: If a book is one I can’t even remember reading or not reading, it isn’t a significant book. A significant book ought to be, at the least, memorable.
Here’s the list itself:
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer
No one will ever agree with all the books on any list like this. But we can notice that there are a lot of (unsurprising) omissions from this list. Most women are excluded: Ursula K. Leguin is in (twice) and so is Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey, Anne Rice, and J.K.Rowling. These are the only five women. Octavia E. Butler is missing: so is Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Kate Wilhelm, C.J.Cherryh, Sheri Tepper, Pat Cadigan, Gwyneth Jones, Lois McMaster Bujold, Pamela Sargent, Suzy McKee Charnas, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Hambly, Zenna Henderson, Diana Wynne Jones, Vonda N. McIntyre, Andre Norton, Joan D. Vinge… It reminds me of a comment someone made many years ago in The Women’s Periodical – “The fact is there have been no major artists who are women” – without noticing that she was conflating an “opinion” – what makes an artist major? with fact – artists considered as “major” are (mostly) never women.
Cutting the list down to size, I say:
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. The Earthsea trilogy, Ursula K. Le Guin
4. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
5. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
6. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
7. The Caves of Steel/The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov
8. The Discworld series, Terry Pratchett
9. The Harry Potter septology, J.K. Rowling
(This may seem to be an outrageous example of identifying all books in a sequence as one book. But I think it’s foolish to pick out the first book in the sequence as the “significant” book, as the compiler of the list above did, when if either writer had only written that one book, neither one would be on this list.)
9. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
10. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
11. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
12. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
13. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
14. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
15. Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice
16. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
17. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
18. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
I wouldn’t disagree with any of these 18 books being labelled as “significant” – however the list compiler is defining “significance”.
Your suggestions for the other 32 books (or more, if you disagree with the 18 I kept) are welcomed. (I’ll add my list in a comment.)
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- More blogging by
Yonmei at
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Filed under Books & Literature, FSF | Comments (16)
Off the top of my head (the best way to write these lists):
19. Walk to the end of the world/Motherlines, Suzy McKee Charnas
20. The Stand, Stephen King
21. Brothers In Arms/Mirror Dance/Memory/Komarr/A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold
22. The Female Man, Joanna Russ
23. The Adventures of Alyx, Joanna Russ
24. Warm Worlds and Otherwise, James Tiptree (this one is tough, because while Tiptree is definitely a significant *author*, how do you pick which of her anthologies count as significant *books*? So I went with the first collection of hers that I read.)
25. Stars in my pocket like grains of sand, Samuel R. Delany
26. Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh
27. Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin
28. Don’t Bite the Sun/Drinking Sapphire Wine, Tanith Lee
29. Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany
30. The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones
31. Women of Wonder, edited by Pamela Sargant
32. The Xenogenesis trilogy, Octavia E. Butler
33. The Gate To Women’s Country, Sheri S. Tepper
34. Cuckoo’s Egg, C.J.Cherryh
35. Escape Plans, Gwyneth Jones
36. Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy
37. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
38. The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov
39. The Year’s Best S-F, edited by Judith Merril (no, I’m not going to pick any one example: but in terms of getting magazine-published short fiction out for people without access to newstand magazines, this was certainly a significant series and the first of its kind.
40. The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S.Lewis (yes, considered as a septology, this just creeps into the required period)
41. Grinny, Nicholas Fisk
42. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
43. This Perfect Day, Ira Levin
44. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
45. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein
46. The Mars trilogy (Red, Green, Blue), Kim Stanley Robinson
47. The Space Merchants, Cyril Kornbluth/Frederik Pohl
48. Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Camilla Decarnin, Eric Garber, Lynn Paleo.
49. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, edited by Peter Nichols
50. The Darkover Chronicles, Marion Zimmer Bradley (again, an awfully sweeping inclusion. But Darkover – and the Darkover anthologies that Bradley had published – were significant, though I’d hate to have to pick out any one book from the Darkover lot and say that one was “the” significant one).
That’s my list. What’s yours?
Wilmar Shiras was actually a woman, btw.
D’oh! I should have thought, given that “Wilma” comes easily out of “Wilmar” and given when the novel was published.
My most significant books are greatly dependent on the reading I give them. & reading is a transitory act…
Most significant = most widely read?
Or whose signs are most important? Begging the question: to whom? And why?
Most consequent? Lingering in the memory is a consequence. Acting based on what you’ve read is a consequence.
This is all terribly relativist. The elaboration of personal canons is a bit too religious for me, & I default to the existential. General canons are loaded & prone to backfiring. So if it’s in my power to make one up, I would choose my ammunition with a thought to my target audience.
Sans compter qu’on ne parle pas toujours le même langage.
Dangerous Visions included a couple of fairly seminal female SF, written fairly early. Not any more than 2, but you take what you can get.
ovular, sorry.
underscore? hey yonmei, on my (safari/osx) browser your underscores appear more like strikethroughs. i notice that you’re not actually using the U (underscore) tag … In fact your tag is some sort of very strange tag: del datetime=”2006-11-14T12:51:54+00:00″ … I wonder if you see the difference on your browser between this (underscored with the U tag) and
this (underscored with your DEL tag. anyway, give U a shot if you feel like it.I also find it really interesting that JK Rowling is included, but no other children/teen fantasy/scifi is included.
And yeah, I find it really stupid that LOTR and the Foundation trilogy was listed as a group, but several others weren’t that should have been. I mean, I can see picking out just Ender’s Game, but why the not the first three Dragonrider books? Or all of the books in the Hitchhiker series? If you are going to include any of the Shannara books, why Sword of Shannara and not the more interesting books that completed the first trilogy?
I find the differences between your list and the SFBC list interesting. One of the first things I noticed was that there are five works I’m not familiar with on the SFBC list; there are seventeen on your list (though in most cases on both I’m familiar with the author). (Also interestingly, I’ve read 12 books from each list, about half of which are overlap.) If I’m representative, I think that indicates that the books on the SFBC list are more consistent with a shared canon — though that doesn’t answer the question of whether they ought to be. There are also several collections on your list, whereas the SFBC list is (I think) entirely novels and collections of stories by one author.
That said, I was very surprised that Atwood, Butler, Tepper, and Tiptree didn’t appear on the list. I don’t know if I would overhaul it as much as you did, but I would definitely add them and take off — well, I’d start by taking off the works I hadn’t heard of.
I hate to trash talk, but two books on there I absolutely loathe: Gene Wolfe’s New Sun and Childhood’s End. They keep coming up on every “best of” list and they just. wont. go. away. It’s like Eddie Van Halen’s “Volcano” solo–it appears on every list Rolling Stone cranks out. It’s like, people are making new and creative things that have certainly surpassed the old stuff. But screw that–if you weren’t writing in the golden age of sci-fi, or if you weren’t male, then you don’t have any credibility, now matter how good you are. Sigh–sorry for the caffeine deprived rant!!
I love to trash talk! I could trash Book of the New Sun all day long but I’d still put it on the list. In fact it’s way overdue for a good feminist analysis and tearing apart. Here are some points that occur to me
- lots of female characters
- who all fuck the teenage dude of course.. annoyingly…
- who are magically beautiful
- Valeria the witch girl. Had potential. But then… nothing.
- Thecla. Dead. Consumed and co-opted….
- Thecla’s sister, what’s her face. Not so bad…
- …but then they both have whore versions of themselves, the khaibits, in case you missed that women’s main quality is their fuckability and their existence in mirrors.
- Dorcas. Dumb, innocent, emotionally wise or something, dead, his grandma. Did I mention she was dead and had amnesia and was all innocent and sort of virginal in a gross way? Oh and also doesn’t she annoyingly remark on Severian’s dick size and is like, magically tight yet able to take him up to the hilt? Or was that some other book with a confused blonde dainty chick ?
- Jolenta. Magic beauty. Vanity. There is a somewhat cool hint of slut power… and it’s trying to be a commentary on stereotypes of women but… then it comes off to me mostly as just the stereotype played out again.
- If it were a comic book then Agia wouldn’t have *really* been dead, ever, and the whole story could be improved by her staying the fuck in it, but not being obsessed with her brother – not a coincidence that the best female character had a boy-side to her
- Gunnie/Burgundofara which pissed me off mightly when I read the 4th book long ago (it’s not one I’ve re-read) but the point being there was apparently a big effort Wolfe made to make a tough-assed space pirate chick who was not 17, not magically pretty pony, and who was competent and powerful; but no, she has to like, have time travel fuck around with her and become a wide-eyed ingenue version of herself. Maybe it’s not as bad as I’m remembering. When I first read it though, I was so pleased and kind of going, “Awww, an attempt to be not so much dicklit!” and then it cocked right up again halfway through the book.
- the giant undines. Hmmm.
I think my favorite scene in the books is the scene during the war with the Asciians in the hospital tent.
l
From that list I have to say that “The Gods Themselves” is a good example of a book that blew my mind in 1977 but also nauseated me with its dumb gender stereotypes even though there were 3 genders. It was just girliness and emotionalness vs. logic pointy phallo-thing, with babysitting…
Well, Gene Wolfe is just a big ol’ sexist in all his works and days…(although, honestly, I love the Book of the New Sun.) Virtually all his women characters are either perfidious women who won’t be faithful (especially women who have been so incredibly perfidious as to get married and then be unhappy in marriage and want divorces), googly-eyed ingenues who are adorably damaged, or the very occasional inbetween character who is both googly-eyed ingenue and slightly perfidious (that’s women for ya!) at the same time. Moreover, the perfidious women will be punished (I kid you not–eated by sharks, carried away by demon owl-creatures, etc.) The ingenues will also sort of be punished by the narrative by having something VERY, VERY SAD happen to them but it won’t be their fault, so it’s really not that bad, per the narrative.
Or there’s the story where the girl who has been driven crazy by her family (as stated directly in the text) allows herself (!) to be torched to death by a psychopathic genius because she is too depressed to be cured (!) but burning her to death will work through his “issues with women” (again from the text) and allow him to go out and Save the World. If that’s not the central narrative of patriarchy, I don’t know what is!
See, Gene Wolfe often gets a pass on his sexism because he uses an “innocent” boyish narrator–Severian in BoTNS or the boy in “The Death of Doctor Island”. Or, more infuriatingly, he uses a fake-innocent narrator, like the one in “This Tree Is My Hat” (NOT a story for the shark-anxious among us!) There, the narrator is this world-weary, kinda-sinful ex-international-bureaucrat. Wolfe pretends that he’s an ambigious character, but really we’re supposed to feel sorry for him and think he’s a pretty decent guy. The main point of the story is that his wife gets eaten by a giant shark, because she is evil and wants a divorce. She (and he, but he doesn’t deserve it because he’s such a nice, manly guy) are also punished by having one child killed by the shark and one child maimed. (At the end, it looks like the shark may get him, too, but it’s all his wife’s fault.)
In general, women who have sex in Wolfe are bad. But there are exceptions–the pious ingenue like Dorcas can have a heteropatriarchy sexbot sexuality, as can the Native Girl character in “This Tree Is My Hat”. The giant, naive prostitute in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, too, although the upper class girl who has sex is punished.
I can’t stand any of Wolfe’s “messages”–and he is a VERY “message” writer–the nostalgia for the purity of boyhood, the hatred of any kind of independent female sexuality dressed up as a hatred of sexual immorality generally, the dreadfully toxic notions of marriage…
The other thing is he doesn’t know a god-damn thing about women but he thinks he does. Or at least, the women he knows things about are nothing like any woman I’ve actually met. That’s why his women characters are mostly such ridiculous sexbots/virginbots…’bots generally. He sometimes writes women who have ambitions or some character separate from their desire to have sex with the hero, but almost always these women need to be old, ugly or otherwise bizarre. If they aren’t–like Agia–then they are EVIL, because they have desires and ambitions when, being beautiful, they should simply have passive sexual longings. Wolfe can’t conceive of a woman intellectual, really. (But then, who’d be an intellectual when you could be having it off with hunky, hunky Severian?) It occurs to me that in the future world of BoTNS, gender roles have actually totally reverted to a sort of imaginary middle ages where there are no learned women, no women with political power, and no women writers or artists.
But when he’s not on message (and he isn’t always) he is a wonderful (and rather amoral) writer. And he’s got a bizarre genius with words. I mean, the House Absolute! The fact that there is only one starship, with its immense silver sails, plying back and forth across time! Fuligin, the color darker than black! The cacogen who speaks in iambic pentameter! The way the poisonous leaves of the avern have killed all the long grass beneath it, and the way you fight by throwing its leaves! Severian’s perilous descent down the mosaic cliff! The stories told by the wounded soldiers in the long noons, and the tale of the youth fleshed from dreams!
Oh Frowner! Marry me! I mean, don’t marry me! Have an egalitarian non-patriarchal Thing with me where we rant all night and day and my bookshelves make out with your bookshelves! How wildly you have fulfilled my wildest dreams of commenthood. That is exactly why I hate and love the Book of the New Sun…
Oh – and – The slightly wanky yet immensely pleasureable way the commedia dell’arte play echoes everything else in the book! The guy cleaning the painting of the moon landing!
I was looking back over these lists and just noticed another difference. The SFBC includes only one book per author on their list, which I think is a good idea; you’ve got e.g. three books by Delany and two by Heinlein. While limiting books to one per author no doubt makes it more difficult to choose, I think it’s a good way to promote variety. (Perhaps ironically, since their list wasn’t terribly varied in some ways.)