April 2026 List of the Month: Favorite Science Fiction

Strange new worlds. Futures bleak or wondrous. Inventions marvelous and terrible. Science fiction speaks to our curiosity and sense of wonder, and to our quest to discover more and push the boundaries of science and technology. Our April 2026 List of the Month is devoted to our Favorite Science Fiction.

Each member may add ten titles, and is encouraged to add notes explaining their choices.

This list is inspired by a few things. First, the fact that this month is the 100th anniversary of Amazing Stories, the first American science fiction magazine. Thank you to @rgurskey for bringing this to our attention! Unfortunately, we weren't able to devote this month's hunt to the science fiction genre, owing to something else we already had planned (stay tuned...), but we haven't ruled out the idea of a science fiction hunt at some point in the future.

Our second inspiration is the current Artemis II mission around the moon, launched on the first of the month. See this NASA page for updates and more information!

For a complete list of topics covered so far in our project, please see the new section for Lists of the Month on the Zeitgeist page

We would welcome suggestions for future lists. Please add them here, and we will keep them in mind, going forward.

>1 AbigailAdams26: OK, I'm going to be a real nitpicker here, but I'd like a consensus view of the line between science fiction and fantasy. I'm going to name six (seven) works, all of which could be filed as medieval romances (in fact, at least five of them are Joseph Campbell (1) monomyths, which is the essence of both romance and fantasy) but which are modern, and all of which are on the SF/Fantasy spectrum. Where should one draw the line?

1. Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen -- clearly set in an SF universe, but with a fantasy theme loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen.

2. Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light -- underpinned as SF, but with a strong fantasy feeling.

3. Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber -- feels like pure fantasy, but with an SF motif; you could argue that it's SF on earth, fantasy when it visits other worlds.

4. Gordon Dickson's The Dragon and the George -- starts with pure mundane SF experimentation which is used to transport one to a clearly fantasy world, with magic and dragons and so forth. The equivalent of something like Robert A. Heinlein's "multiverse," except that the story isn't gollygoshdarn awful. :-)

5. J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings or Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea -- everyone agrees these books are fantasy, and yet, the rules are so rigid that they could be considered an SF world. Just not our SF world.

6. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter universe -- magic and dragons and absolutely no attempt at consistent rules, logic, a viable economy, or anything else.

I think everyone would agree that #1 is SF, and the #6 is fantasy. But where to split the difference? Anywhere between #2 and #4 strikes me as reasonable, and it wouldn't absolutely sicken me even to include #5 as SF. Personally, I incline to a cut on one side or the other of #3. What do others think? I will list accordingly.

>2 waltzmn: I can't comment on 1-3 since I haven't read them, but I classify 4-6 as fantasy. I can see a case for 4 being scifi as it starts with a scientific experiment, but it jumps into fantasy territory pretty quick if I'm remembering correctly.

>3 amanda4242: You're remembering correctly. That's exactly the tricky part: It seems to start as SF and changes, within a few pages, to fantasy. And yet, it starts in our world -- in a town that I've actually driven in, with the main character driving the same sort of lousy car I've spent my life driving until I gave up and started taking the bus. :-)

I'd call it fantasy, too, but I want to not step on others' toes.

Thanks.

>2 waltzmn: #1 = SF
#2 & 3 = SF with some fantasy tropes (#2 leaning more to SF than fantasy, #3 leaning more to fantasy than SF). Science fantasy?
#4 & 5 = Fantasy
#6 = boarding school stories with fantastic elements

My take, and I have read all of them (but only the first 3 Harry Potter books before I gave up in disgust).

>2 waltzmn:

I haven't read your #1, but I'd call #2 sf also. Not #3, nor any of the others.

My evaluation of sfnality is pretty flexible, and allows a work to qualify via a preponderance of tropes, but not mere speculative rigor.

Historical circumstances of authorship matter too. I consider A Voyage to Arcturus to be just barely on the fantasy side of the line, and The Blazing World to be on the sf side.

>2 waltzmn: I don't know 1 and 4, but the rest are nowhere near SF to me. Perhaps it has to do with what one considers within the realm of possibility, but to me god and god-like characters such as in Lord of Light firmly puts it into fantasy. The rest is even clearer. Also, fantasy does not necessarily take place in a secondary world, so just because something is set on earth is not an SF element in and of itself.

Isn't Dungeon Crawler Carl a LitRPG book? Making it fantasy? (I admit I have avoided it. And some reviews tell me probably a good idea.)

If nothing else, the four responses so far establish why I asked the question. :-) At least we agree that #4-#6 are not SF, and insofar as people know the books, agree with the order. Also that the cutoff is somewhere near the top of the scale.

FWIW, my examples were carefully chosen. #1 and #2, the most SF-ish of the bunch, are both Hugo winners (1981 and 1968, respectively). #5 and #6 are probably the two most famous series now in existence. #3 and #4 were harder to pick, but both were winners of lesser awards (and popular enough that the authors were tempted to add sequels that pretty badly diluted the franchises...).

I'll add one other thought, with which many will not agree, but it's about why I read each: I read SF for the sociology (what would happen if the world were like this?). I read fantasy for the morality ("if you can't solve this ethical problem when it's set out simply, what are you going to do when the ethical problem is mushy?"). (I can only wish a few more presidents, premiers, and Republicans would read some good fantasy.) By that standard, #1 and #2 are SF, the others fantasy. But that's what I read them for -- and I'm an autistic whose library is 80% non-fiction.

Re >5 Maddz: and Science Fantasy: I sort of understand that we want the term for the blurry stuff in the #2-#4 range, but it's never really seemed like a defined thing to me. Just stuff that people can't classify. :-)

>8 gilroy: It's not hard scifi, but I wouldn't call it fantasy: there's an alien invasion and humans are forced to take part in a deadly game for the entertainment of the universe. I actually think it's a better fit for the list than A Wrinkle in Time, which I think of as fantasy with misused scientific terms.

This provoked an interesting trip through my shelves. I kept running across books that were favourites in my teens and 20s, but I haven't re-read them recently enough to know if they are still favourites. For example, Foundation, which was huge for me 40 years ago, but now? I decided not to put it on my list as a favourite because I don't know that it still is.

I still have a couple of spots open on my personal list, but no time to re-read anything to see if it still deserves my affection LOL.

I limited myself to one book per author, and I deliberately aimed at some variety of original publication date. On the latter count, I did not succumb to the temptation to go back to 1666 for The Blazing World, though.

There were a few graphic novels I was tempted to include, but I stayed with prose fiction, although I included one single-author anthology of short fiction, a book of linked novellas, and the first volume of an integral four-volume work.

Sigh. Someone has downvoted one of my picks, Hospital Station, which is definitely science fiction.

>13 tardis: It does not get more SF than that…

>13 tardis: ???
Perplexing.

One thing with these Lists of the Month is that I wish we could add a series as a single entry.

This was an impossible task! I'd like to add at least 30 works.

>16 Maddz:
I would wish that too.

Why do people downvote science fiction in this list? This Is How You Lose the Time War is an epistolary time travel novella set in the far future. Can't people leave their personal idiosyncrasies at home? If the tag cloud says it's science fiction, rest assured it is science fiction.

>19 anglemark: Dunno, there are some things on that list that aren't even close to SF in my book. Including one nominated by our Fearless Leader. :-)

I do feel as if the collection is very short on genre SF. As someone who is almost more a student of SF history than of the actual writings, it seems a strange list (no pre-2001 Arthur C. Clarke? No part of Robert A Heinlein's Future History, and none of the juveniles? No Lester del Rey? No Stanley Weinbaum? I think I'll go back and re-read Solution Unsatisfactory and Superiority and wonder what happened to the good old days. :-)

>10 amanda4242: After reviewing the tags and the description again, I have removed my downvote for it.

>13 tardis: I have a downvoted book that is also clearly fitting for the list -- Ender's Game

>21 gilroy: I have a downvoted book that is also clearly fitting for the list -- Ender's Game

I wonder if that's a political down-vote, no matter what the rules say.

>22 waltzmn: Gotta be?

>13 tardis: Same person also downvoted Speaker for the Dead by the same author. I wish any downvoters would explain the reasons. Some do, but this one didn't.

I think this list of "favorite" sf is shaking out rather differently than typical polls of "best" or "greatest" sf.

>20 waltzmn: As someone who is almost more a student of SF history than of the actual writings, it seems a strange list (no pre-2001 Arthur C. Clarke? No part of Robert A Heinlein's Future History, and none of the juveniles? No Lester del Rey? No Stanley Weinbaum? I think I'll go back and re-read Solution Unsatisfactory and Superiority and wonder what happened to the good old days.

Almost everything you mention here is short fiction, which means it's much less likely to end up on what most people are seeing, I suspect, as a list of books. My list of ten favorite short sf stories would have very little connection to what I submitted, which was fundamentally a list of ten favorite novels.

>20 waltzmn: Dunno, there are some things on that list that aren't even close to SF in my book.

If the tag cloud says it's science fiction, nobody should spoil other members' votes because their idiosyncratic view of what is SF differs. Period.

>26 Stevil2001: or maybe the contributors just have a different, newer taste?

My Ray Bradbury short story collections were just outside of my top ten (even when ruthlessly culling to one per author). I never would have considered Arthur C. Clarke or Heinlein. Of that vintage I think A canticle for Leibowitz makes a better addition to the list, or maybe More than Human. Although in a way I am proving your point as they are novels as well.

>25 paradoxosalpha: I think this list of "favorite" sf is shaking out rather differently than typical polls of "best" or "greatest" sf.

It sure is. And in unpredictable ways. But it's worth noting that the "greatest" sf is usually voted by specialized audiences: those who are particularly devoted to SF. (Professional authors or WorldCon attendees, e.g.) The general reading public will have different tastes. I was surprised, but it makes sense on consideration.

>20 waltzmn: Almost everything you mention here is short fiction, which means it's much less likely to end up on what most people are seeing, I suspect, as a list of books. My list of ten favorite short sf stories would have very little connection to what I submitted, which was fundamentally a list of ten favorite novels.

I only mentioned two actual stories, and I wouldn't consider them favorites either. What they are is clear examples of one aspect of SF. Taking Solution Unsatisfactory, it failed to predict the exact form of nuclear weapons, but it predicted something close enough -- and went on from there to predict the Cold War. That's a brilliant piece of SF deduction. Great story? Not particularly. But a brilliant example of SF as a way of investigating what we might have to worry about in future.

My list, if I decide to submit one (I'm starting to wonder) will mostly be novels. (I have one short piece firmly in mind.) But it will be much more "genre" SF than most of what is listed here. That's not some sort of revenge. It's just that I read a different sort of SF.

>27 anglemark: If the tag cloud says it's science fiction, nobody should spoil other members' votes because their idiosyncratic view of what is SF differs. Period.

And if the tag cloud says "fantasy?" :-p

As I say, I'm adjusting my expectations. It's quite clear that my ideas of SF are not the general public's -- and not in the way I wondered about in >2 waltzmn:.

>26 Stevil2001: My list of ten favorite short sf stories would have very little connection to what I submitted, which was fundamentally a list of ten favorite novels.

The genre really has been defined by short fiction, and it's a shame that there isn't more of it here. All Systems Red is a novella, of course, and I think it may be a harbinger of a shift toward shorter works read as e-books. But the countervailing trend has been for big books that can provide "immersion" in a more extensively realized setting. Of course, long series of shorter works have this potential also, and The Murderbot Diaries may be pointing the way here too.

My list has one book of short fiction, the single-author anthology Sea-Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories. While The Fifth Head of Cerberus is billed as "three novellas," they are crucially interlinked. I considered The Best of Lester Del Rey, but it doesn't make my top ten.

10 is not enough. I didn't plan out a list, just liked my favorites as I saw them, and I ran out before I got to the end. Moon is a Harsh Mistress is missing among others.

>24 perennialreader: The downvoter put a note on that book, and proved he didn't read the instructions.

>30 paradoxosalpha: The genre really has been defined by short fiction, and it's a shame that there isn't more of it here.

And even more to the point, this list is in honor of "the 100th anniversary of Amazing Stories," which really, really points to short fiction. :-)

But that's what is called genre science fiction. The amount of non-genre SF we're getting is... part of why I'm not sure I even know what to list. :-p

It might be good to emphasize anthologies like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, the first two volumes of which contain some truly extraordinary short fiction.

But short SF is very different from long SF. Short SF is about ideas (as in the two examples I cited); longer SF is often about worlds and plots. Neither is "better" than the other, but they work on the mind in different ways.

>32 gilroy: I just saw the "explanation". Thanks.

As >19 anglemark: says "Can't people leave their personal idiosyncrasies at home? If the tag cloud says it's science fiction, rest assured it is science fiction."

>33 waltzmn: ... and so I added one of my fave collections, Women of Wonder, edited by Pam Sargent. It was (and still is) a good introduction to so many writers whose work I still like.

>33 waltzmn:

Your distinction "genre science fiction" is new to me, and the phrase seems redundant. But I think I get it: you mean sf published under an explicit sf imprint for genre readers, as opposed to sf published under a general fiction imprint. The latter does seem to have burgeoned in the last decade or two, although we can go back to Gravity's Rainbow or most Kurt Vonnegut for examples that predate the trend. One of my favorites is Palahniuk's Rant, and most of David Mitchell's books probably qualify.

Of course, foundational works by Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, etc. could not be published "as genre" but cannot be excluded from "the genre."

>36 paradoxosalpha: Your distinction "genre science fiction" is new to me, and the phrase seems redundant. But I think I get it: you mean sf published under and explicit sf imprint for genre readers, as opposed to sf published under a general fiction imprint.

Pretty close. I'm using it as defined in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction -- a massively and incredibly useful work, by the way, even though now out of date. Page 483:

GENRE SF By this term, used widely in this encyclopedia, we mean sf that is either labelled science fiction or is instantly recognized by its readership as belonging to that category -- or (usually) both. The implication is that any author of genre sf is conscious of working within a genre with certain habits of thought, certain "conventions" — some might even say "rules" -- of storytelling. These conventions are embedded primarily in a set of texts which are generally agreed to contain them. This might seem to be a circular definition, as though one were saying that genre sf is a set of conventions located in genre SF stories, but it is in fact a spiral.

The article continues, through examples and characteristics of genre SF, to clarify the meaning of this. I'll give my own examples of these spiraling conventions. One would be the word "robot." Before R. U. R., there was no general word for artificial human-like devices capable of doing work; afterward, they are "robots." Before H. G. Wells, you might talk about shifting from one time to another, but only after Wells was it done with a "time machine." Before Isaac Asimov's Robot Series, you could have human-killing robots and not have to justify them; afterward, broadly speaking, you have to explain why no one built in the Three Laws of Robotics or equivalent.

There is (justifiable) dispute over exactly what Hugo Gernsback accomplished by founding Amazing Stories. After all, Jules Verne and Wells preceded him (and count as genre SF, I think, because Gernsback reprinted their works). But Gernsback gave rise to the idea of a specific genre based on scientific extrapolation (as opposed to gadget fantasy like The Steam Man of the Prairies or the stuff in the Munsey magazines). Then John W. Campbell came and forced a much higher degree of refinement on it.

To give an example of how this affected things, consider tall tales. They've been around probably for as long as people could sit around the fire and imagine a bigger and nastier wolf hiding in the shadows. But only after genre sf came along would Arthur C. Clarke have been able to write Tales from the White Hart, because Harry Purvis's stories are all tall tales based on SF tropes.

Isaac Asimov, Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Fred Pohl, Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, C. M. Kornbluth, Theodore Sturgeon -- these are the sorts of authors I think of when I think of genre SF. "Star Wars" (say) is not. And I personally much prefer genre SF -- though I am glad that it is no longer the sexist club it once was; what would SF be without Ursula K. Le Guin? (I shudder at the thought.) And authors like Harry Turtledove do sometimes push the boundary a bit. But just being about the future, or using alternate physics, does not make something genre SF. No doubt some of those non-genre works are better than some genre works. But they are different.

I can lecture more if anyone cares, but that's probably more than most people want. :-)

>37 waltzmn: The Encyclopedia has moved online and is continuously updated.

Genre SF

>38 anglemark: And that Genre SF definition matches my earlier inference quite well.

Delving off into the "Scientific Romance" entry reveals the extent of the editors' critical idiosyncrasies.

>39 paradoxosalpha: Delving off into the "Scientific Romance" entry reveals the extent of the editors' critical idiosyncrasies.

I entirely agree.

But that's the online version. You can't blame me for the definitions of a term in an edition I didn't know existed and that has been heavily revised. :-p Reading that article makes me want to stick with the print edition! E.g. that term "Fantastika" isn't in the print edition, and isn't in the definition of scientific romance. Whoever rewrote that article really rewrote it. The print edition begins:

SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE The most common generic term applied to UK sf in the years before the end of WWII, at which time the "science fiction" label became sufficiently commonplace to displace it....

The print edition goes on to talk primarily about H. G. Wells. But other sources often refer to Jules Verne's works as scientific romance, plus things like the aforementioned The Steam Man of the Prairies. A lot of it was -- the stuff that was published in Argosy in the early twentieth century, e.g. -- what I would now call "gadget fantasy," with no science at all.

For me, at least, there is something that makes Genre Science Fiction different from the rest of this stuff. I don't claim to like all genre SF (I'm sneering at you, Harlan Ellison), but I pretty reliably dislike non-genre SF. Personal taste, of course. But I've now put together my tentative list of ten (and, like everyone else, struggling to hold it to ten), and, except for one piece that goes back so far that the term "science" hadn't been invented yet, it's all genre SF, and much of it foundational to the genre of "genre." :-)

I'm having a really hard time accepting Hitchhiker's Guide as science fiction. Just sayin'

>41 jjwilson61: It's SF parody. Ditto some of Terry Pratchett. The first genre on both is surely "humour." How many genres is a book allowed? :-)

I'm more bothered by Perelandra, which to me is obviously religious fantasy. Ditto A Wrinkle in Time.

But I have scientific training. That doubtless creates a bias. :-)

Been a few days since I looked at the list and I'm seeing more downvotes on clearly science fiction books. I suspect people are downvoting books they didn't like, or in one case, because they hate the author.

I was tempted to add Split Infinity to the list, because it has both science fiction and fantasy elements, but figured it would get downvoted faster than Wrinkle in Time

>41 jjwilson61: Not me. Satire does not take away from basic science fiction setting and tropes. OTOH, I'm debating whether to include one of my favorite books of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five, in my list since I don't consider that SF, but a rendering of a mind ravaged by trauma that resembles and plays with SF tropes :D

>44 SandraArdnas: It's one of my ten, but that's a fair objection.

The fantasy/sf boundary is a longstanding and interesting discussion, but as a more general issue, I see no need for genres to be exclusive. I've read a number of stories that are both sf and noir detective tales, for example. In those cases, I suppose the sf label tends to predominate, but it doesn't efface the participation of the other genre.

I certainly don't see any reason that sf can't be satirical. Satire isn't even a genre, as typically understood by libraries and booksellers. (It is one of the four "genres" in Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, but that's a highly etic usage, which would exclude sf as a "genre.")

>46 paradoxosalpha: I certainly don't see any reason that sf can't be satirical. Satire isn't even a genre, as typically understood by libraries and booksellers. (It is one of the four "genres" in Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, but that's a highly etic usage, which would exclude sf as a "genre.")

Nitpick: Frye had four essays on types of criticism, but what there are five of what you called "genres": mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, satiric.

This is a bit off-topic, but I think your description sort of mis-characterizes what Frye was trying to do. Frye didn't deny that genres exist; he just didn't classify that way. He was classifying "modes," not genres -- it was a description of style and characters, not tropes. SF exists in most of the modes. Roger Zelazny wrote a lot of things in the mythic (Lord of Light) and romantic (This Immortal/"And Call Me Conrad") levels, though both, especially the latter, are clearly SF. Something like John Wyndham's The Chrysalids has a pretty romantic plot, but with mimetic characters.

Satiric SF certainly preceded Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, though they had the most success with it. My first thought was of Arthur C. Clarke's Tales from the White Hart -- but I did a little looking, and there are people who would classify (for instance) Gulliver's Travels as SF satire. So it goes back quite a ways.

Frye's modes and our genres are orthogonal: You can have a high mimetic mystery (Sherlock Holmes) or a satiric mystery (The Pink Panther, maybe?); you can have a mythic romance (The Epic of Gilgamesh) or a romantic romance (The Lord of the Rings) or a high mimetic romance (The Gest of Robyn Hode) or a satiric romance (Sir Thopas, Don Quixote).

And that is, again, probably enough lecturing. :-)

The genre debates are, of course, legion and take many different vantage points. Those many vantages are a big part of why they are legion! This has been more interesting to me than most, whatever "lecturing" may have been involved.

>47 waltzmn:

I was wrong about Frye's use of "genre"--having made the mistake of refreshing my memory with an online summary which was inaccurate. Correcting that based on the actual TOC for Anatomy, I see that the four I remembered as "genres" are "mythoi" (an even more etic usage).

I don't know how you took me to say that Frye denied the existence of genres. I was trying to point out that the category in which he itemized satire used a completely different set of qualifications than he or we would use to identify sf or other "bookstore genres."

Your characterization of these different appraisals as "orthogonal" is spot-on I think.

>49 paradoxosalpha: I was wrong about Frye's use of "genre--having made the mistake of refreshing my memory with an online summary which was inaccurate. Correcting that based on the actual TOC for Anatomy, I see that the four I remembered as "genres" are "mythoi" (an even more etic usage).

And I used "modes" because my memory too is imperfect and I was too lazy to dig out the book.

I don't know how you took me to say that Frye denied the existence of genres.

Well, when you say that Frye used genres in a sense different from how we understand genres, that would seem to imply that he doesn't admit the normal genre classification. It was the use of genres to mean Frye's classification that was misleading.

Your characterization of these different appraisals as "orthogonal" is spot-on I think.

And, of course, a bit of abstruse usage of my own. But I dislike using "perpendicular," because people then tend to think in two dimensions, whereas I'm open to genres, Frye classifications, and other classification systems (e.g. audience age range), all of which are simultaneously valid but don't inform the others -- a multi-dimensional classification system. Admittedly, as you say, that doesn't work too well in bookstores.

Since I see no way to easily look up all of someone else’s choices, I’m going to list my ten here, with annotations, along with the others I would have added had we been allowed (a lot) more. Yes, I’m a “monster of vanity and arrogance” to do so. If nothing else, my picks are pretty different — I note that all but one of mine are genre SF, most are hard SF, and many of them are collections containing short pieces (all relatively rare in the nominations posted so far); I have explained all in no-doubt-excessive length. I find it interesting that, as of when I posted, there were only three other votes for any of my books, although several of my secondary choices did fairly well.

It is interesting that my choices are very strongly influenced by the history and sociology of SF, which does not seem to be true of many other posters. But, to me, the history and sociology are a big part of what makes SF significance, so I’m not just picking stories for their “significance”; I’m picking stories because their being good makes them significant. If two stories are equally good but one is by a more important author, or raises a more important point, or had more influence, then I go for the one with more influence.

This contains bits and pieces of an essay on the history and utility of science fiction, but no one asked for that, so only bits and pieces. :-) At least I kept it to about 3000 words, a length any SF magazine editor would love. :-)

The first list is alphabetical by author/editor, not in order of preference; there is a sort of an order of development in my secondary picks. I ended up with so many touchstones that I got an error, so I’ve had to cut all but the ones for my Top Ten.

The Top Ten

Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
The first Lije Baley novel, and the best; still one of the greatest SF/detective stories, and the first full-length Positronic Robot novel. Far better than its sequels, and a pioneering work; there weren’t many early mystery SF stories. It eventually tied in with the “Foundation” series, too. Is it better than the other prototype SF/mystery, Hal Clement’s “Needle”? Glad I don’t have to decide.

Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame
No one else seems to have thought of this short work, but it is certainly speculative fiction: What was it like to see the earth from space when flying like (well, beneath) a bird? What happens when a human meets an intelligent alien (well, a pedantic talking eagle)? How much science can a great poet pack into a comic poem? A lot, as it turned out, though most of it was wrong. But Chaucer was well-informed in medieval science, such as it was (remember that he wrote the very first technical manual in English!), and his speculations about the House of Fame and the House of Rumour are a surprising preview of influencer culture, divergent “facts,” and “fifteen minutes of fame.”

Arthur C. Clarke, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke
Clarke was one of the Big Three of early SF, along with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, and he was at his best in the short story form. Two in particular strike me as worthy of inclusion here, the tragic “The Star” (his best work of any length) and the ironic, perhaps prophetic “Superiority,” which reminds us that superior technology does not guarantee victory in a contest. And the tall tales of Tales from the White Hart are always good for an eye-roll and a smirk.

Hal Clement, Needle
The first major SF/mystery novel (1949), demonstrating that the combined genre was possible. Is it better than the next major work of the type, Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel? I’m glad I was able to list both.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters
We can’t leave out perhaps the greatest SF/Fantasy writer not named Tolkien, can we? Or omit the woman who finally and completely broke the male dominance of SF (yes, there were female SF writers before Le Guin, but none of them were so powerful as to force the field to take notice). She also showed readers that psychology and anthropology are sciences, too, and can lead to just as much speculation as physics. It’s tough to leave out The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. As a folklorist, even Rocannon’s World has a good bit of attraction to me. But I am bound to include Le Guin’s best short story, arguably the best short story ever published, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” This can be had in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, and The Hugo Winners, Volume 3, and elsewhere, but this is the book with the introductory notes. Also, many of the stories here tie in with the best of her longer works. “Winter’s King” is a follow-up to The Left Hand of Darkness. “The Day Before the Revolution” is a prequel to The Dispossessed. There are two stories that explore the rules of Earthsea, though those are obviously fantasy. And “Semley’s Necklace” became the opening chapter of Rocannon’s World — a story which admittedly has all the roughness of a first novel but which has a powerful plot that shows how Le Guin would use anthropology to shape her writings.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye
First-meeting-with-aliens stories are a dime a dozen, but the amount of care in drawing out the implications sets this book apart. And it’s fairly hard SF, despite an interstellar drive and defensive force field. The sequel, The Gripping Hand, is even more exciting but not as deep.

Robert Silverberg, editor, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One
A book that truly lives up to its hype; no other volume contains more of the stories that defined science fiction in its early years: Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy,” Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” Daniel Keyes’s “Flowers for Algernon,” C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag,” Lewis Padgett’s (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore’s) “Mimsy Were the Borogoves,” Theodore Sturgeon’s “Microcosmic God,” Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” and many more; also Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall,” although one might argue that that is over-exposed. The second volume, of longer pieces than this one, has some great stories too, such as Sturgeon’s “Baby Is Three,” del Rey’s “Nerves,” and John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There,” as well as seminal works like Robert A. Heinlein’s “Universe” and H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine,” but if you’re going to get only one, Volume One is the richer of the two.

Joan D. Vinge, The Snow Queen
A cross between Hans Christian Andersen and a medieval romance, but offered as pretty hard SF. Moon, the main character, may be a little too good to be true, but to see someone come out victorious by the combination of determination and pure kindness is utterly winning. Amor omnia vincit!

John Wyndham The Chrysalids
For the neurodiverse, this is truly a great book about failure to fit in and its costs. Had the standalone novel not been listed by someone else, I would recommend getting the book as part of Anthony Boucher’s A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, which also contains Theodore Sturgeon’s thought-provoking “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff” and Alfred Bester’s much-loved “The Stars My Destination.”

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light
The only one of my ten choices that veers a little away from hard SF, but, like The Snow Queen, it partakes of the medieval romance, with right finally prevailing after defeat after defeat.

Some Other Favorites That I Had to Cut

I should preface this list by saying that, in the case of the Anderson and Vance anthologies below, I don’t have the exact book cited; instead, I have read the short fiction I cite in other collections. (The problem with stories of less-than-novel length!) But I have tried to find the anthologies which combine the great stories with the best “other stuff.”

I feel as if I should put some Philip K. Dick in here, for his ideas, but I just don’t enjoy his writing that much. Similarly, Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee did much to establish “alternate history,” but it simply isn’t as good as the books of that type which followed it.

Also, while I value ecological SF, I cannot bring myself to include Frank Herbert’s Dune, despite its great popularity; as someone pointed out to me once, it isn’t really SF; it’s the world’s most elaborate gadget fantasy. And besides, do you really care whether the Atreides or the Emperors win their conflict? I don’t like the Fremen Conquest any better than what went before, and I refuse to believe that, were that world real, those are the only choices!

Also, I am autistic, and I have hyper-empathy, and I have had to stop reading certain books after just a few pages because they open with acts of undeserved and unjustified violence. Examples are S. M. Stirling’s The Peshawar Lancers and N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.

Isaac Asimov, Before the Golden Age
There is no agreement on when speculative fiction first came into existence, even in the western tradition; there are people who proclaim The Odyssey is the first example. I above looked at The House of Fame. Of course, it can’t really be “science fiction” before there was science! So you might argue that Johannes Kepler’s speculative fiction was the first “science fiction.” Starting with the Industrial Revolution, gadgets start to replace pure science in speculative fiction. At least three different SF histories have pointed to Frankenstein as the first work of “modern” science fiction.
In the nineteenth century, there arose a great crop of “scientific romances” or “gadget fantasies,” in which some character allegedly produced some gadget and had some adventure with it. Some of these things were based on true science — Jules Verne is the shining example of this sort of work, and even Rudyard Kipling dabbled with it — but much of it was completely unscientific, and made no attempt to probe the effects of the invention (that was left for H. G. Wells, but even he didn’t always do it). Often these works were published as “dime novels,” or in boy’s magazines or publications like Argosy. They accustomed people to “future fictions,” but they also gave this sort of work a (deservedly) bad name. So it wasn’t until 1926 that Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted solely to this sort of fiction, and announced a sort of aspirational goal to make it educational. Gernsback largely failed — he published too much of the old gadget fantasy — but in 1938, John W. Campbell took over one of the successor magazines, Astounding Science Fiction, and finally made Gernsback’s dream come true.
Isaac Asimov was growing up in this period, and in this anthology, he assembled many stories from the Gernsback-to-Campbell period of magazine SF. Sadly, with a few honorable exceptions like Charles R. Tanner’s “Tumithak” stories and Henry Haase’s “He Who Shrank,” they aren’t great stories. But they often introduce ideas that would become important later — for instance Murray Leinster’s “Proxima Centauri” gives us our first “Generation Starship,” an idea which Robert A. Heinlein used to great effect in “Universe,” and Campbell’s “The Brain Stealers of Mars” gets at ideas he would later use in “Who Goes There,” one of the greatest of all SF novellas.
Along with the stories, Asimov gives a history of how the SF magazines evolved from Gernsback’s first attempt at SF-as-educational-literature to Campbell’s fully evolved genre. This isn’t always entirely accurate — Asimov had an amazing memory, but there are things he simply wasn’t in position to know! — and it isn’t always fair. For example, Asimov largely dismisses the so-called “Clayton Astounding, the first rendition of what became the greatest SF magazine. Yet the Clayton Astounding was edited by Harry Bates, whose works included ”Farewell to the Master,” a story which perhaps might give us something to think about even in today’s AI debates. So: There are better histories of the SF magazines. There are better anthologies of early genre SF. But there is no other book which serves both needs at the same time.

Ben Bova, editor The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two
See comments about Volume One above. Were I to add a third anthology of pre-1965 great SF, it would probably be Raymond J. Healy & J. Francis McComas, editors, Adventures in Time and Space, which adds such great works as Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (still, I think, the best time travel story ever written), but on the whole, the Hall of Fame volumes cover the field better.

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy
Not the first great future history — that was Robert A. Heinlein’s Future History — but surely the one that has stood up the best. I don’t love it as much as I used to — Asimov’s attempt to combine it with the Positronic Robot sequence strikes me as a slight flop — but the grandeur is still there.

Lester del Rey, ...And Some Were Human
Lester del Rey’s greatest work was probably as an editor, but he first gained fame as a writer. Del Rey’s best works were probably two early stories, the short “Helen O’Loy” (one of the first looks at a sympathetic and un-dangerous robot, before Asimov’s “Positronic Robots”) and the mid-length “Nerves” (the first real look at the dangers of nuclear waste), which was later expanded into a novel. I’m not sure it gained from that. Sadly, there is no book which contains both works in their proper forms. This book includes “Helen O’Loy” and several other fine stories, notably “The Day Is Done” and “The Wings of Night.” Those three can also be found in The Best of Lester del Rey, with still more good stories, but this is the original book version, and used copies seem to be cheaper.

Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit, Will Travel
I’m too young to have been around when the Heinlein Juveniles were first published, but like many genre SF fans, I did grow up with them, and this is easily the best. Ironic that I never read this particular one as a child. All were written before Heinlein’s Great Political Turn became obvious (Heinlein’s politics shifted radically in the late 1940s, from liberal to radical right; he in fact submitted Starship Troopers as a juvenile, only to have it rejected out of hand for its politics). In fact Have Space Suit was written well after he changed his views, but he hadn’t yet let on.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
The first real hit of Le Guin’s “Hainish” sequence, which put Le Guin on the map, and especially interesting now in light of modern issues about gender identity. And it was one of the first SF books to get mainstream respect — historically important. Plus Le Guin showed an interesting example of creating “folklore” to fit an alien world — something we see even in J. K. Rowling — who also, be it noted, borrowed Le Guin’s idea of a school for wizardry

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Another Hainish novel, in my youth this vied with Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers to influence my mind. Both Le Guin and Heinlein advocated for “anarchy,” but the two kinds could hardly be more different! Neither won entirely, but I’m a lot more of a Le Guin-ist than a Heinlein-crypto-fascist!

Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
No Heinlein book made my ten best list, because he decided to blight his own career, but still, Heinlein. There was no more important figure in 1940s SF. I find it interesting that LT shows him as less popular today than is Asimov, but at his height, he defined the field. (I recently did a sort of a census of top SF writers, and I note with interest that the liberal ones — Le Guin, Asimov, Clarke — seem to have stood the test of time better than the conservatives such as Heinlein and Niven.) So I had to include one or another adult novel of his. I vacillated between this one and Double Star — the latter more pleasant, but this one is deeper and more exciting. It’s also the only good book he published after he went to war with his publishers and put out Starship Troopers. All his other good books reflect his pre-transition politics. But this, his best adult novel, was late.
The 1960s was the era of the “New Wave” in SF, which broadened the field but made it much less interesting for us old scientist types :-), but I could make a case that the real change in 1960s SF was not the “New Wave” but the fact that Heinlein decided went into what Alexei Panshin called his “period of alienation.”

Harry Turtledove, The Guns of the South
Turtledove started as an SF author, then shifted more to “alternative history.” This shows him using both sets of skills with brilliant success. His only other comparable work is The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, which is truly brilliant, but it is fantasy. Or something. I’m not sure it has a true genre.

Poul Anderson, No Truce With Kings
The main reason for this is actually to get the other Hugo-award-winning story it contains, “The Longest Voyage,” which is one of the greatest mid-length stories I’ve ever read, dealing with human aspirations to be more than they are (something our current politicians seem to have forgotten entirely, preferring to be as venal and short-sighted as possible). But “No Truce With Kings” is also a Hugo-winning medium-length story.

Hal Clement, Iceworld
Clement was the ultimate master of hard SF, as shown by books like Mission of Gravity, about a world we would have a hard time imagining but which follows directly from Newton’s Laws. Larry Niven also liked these unlikely-corner-of-the-universe stories — much of the Known Space sequence, including Ringworld, is based on this sort of extrapolation. And Robert L. Forward had even more far-out ideas -- but he could hardly write. Clement wasn’t as great a writer as Niven, either, which is why I can’t include Mission of Gravity in my list — but for some reason, I’ve always liked Iceworld, generally considered one of Clement’s lesser works. Although, as is typical in a Clement story, I like the aliens better than the humans.

Jack Vance, The Jack Vance Treasury
Jack Vance’s specialty was perhaps worlds far different, sociologically, from ours, and his greatest works seem to have mostly been in middle lengths — “The Dragon Masters,” “The Last Castle,” “The Moon Moth.” They’re all here.

Gene DeWeese and Robert Coulson, Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats
Most people, if asked about humorous SF, will mention Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett or maybe Eric Frank Russell. But this book, about the odd things that happen when aliens (in order to maintain their government funding) attempt to infiltrate an SF convention, has always struck me as being at least as off-the-wall as Pratchett.

>51 waltzmn: “Since I see no way to easily look up all of someone else’s choices…”

If you can find their name anywhere on the list, click on it to display their list.

Alternatively, click Your List, then replace your user name with their user name in the URL. Thus, anyone can see your list using the same URL as you see when you click Your List: https://www.librarything.com/list/47672/waltzmn/Favorite-Science-Fiction

>52 Charon07: I thought I tried the first one. Evidently I didn't try hard enough. :-) Thanks.

>53 waltzmn: I'm glad you posted list, both for explanations and the honorable mentions

>54 SandraArdnas: Glad someone liked it. Thanks!

>51 waltzmn: And you don't seem to understand that the list is "Favorite" science fiction, not "Best" or "Most Significant" science fiction. It shouldn't hard to understand that many people have picked the works of sf that they just enjoyed the most.

>56 jjwilson61: And you don't seem to understand that the list is "Favorite" science fiction, not "Best" or "Most Significant" science fiction.

On the contrary, these are my favorites. You aren't reading carefully. "Most significant" would be The Time Machine, and E. E. Smith's The Skylark of Space, and whichever of Robert A Heinlein's short stories established the Future History series (I'd have to look that one up), and maybe Dangerous Visions, and a bunch of other milestones that I didn't bother with. I don't like Smith, Wells has been surpassed, the Future History series looks rather feeble compared to later future histories, and I found most of the stories in Dangerous Visions disgusting.

Note what I actually said: my choices are very strongly influenced by the history and sociology of SF.... But... I’m not just picking stories for their “significance”; I’m picking stories because their being good makes them significant.

In other words, I looked at stories that I like, but if they have an historical role, I am likely to appreciate them more because of that role.

Imagine, perhaps, a tile mosaic. The individual tiles may be beautiful. But the mosaic is more than the sum of the tiles: It is beautiful tiles beautifully placed. I care more about the quality of the story than about its history, but I see the story at both levels. Historical significance split some near-ties, but I didn't list a single story I didn't like a lot.

Nobody even notices Iceworld, and LT users have fewer than twenty copies of Charles Fort Never Mentioned Wombats, but they're on my list. Historically significant? Hardly.

Wait- does Project Hail Mary count as Science Fiction?

>58 louisisaloafofbreb: Yes.

>59 amanda4242: Well I'm glad bc I like the movie, and I'm gonna read the book when my library gets it! (its on a wait listttttttttt)

>60 louisisaloafofbreb: I've read the book, but not seen the movie. I think the book's okay, but it seemed to me it was trying too hard to be clever.

>60 louisisaloafofbreb: If you look at the tags for the book version of Project Hail Mary, "science fiction" is at the top of the list, and the definition used around here is basically "science fiction is what people tag as science fiction." :-)

Andy Weir is in fact one of the top current practitioners of "hard science fiction" -- the kind that tries to get its science right. Major past practitioners of this style of SF include Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, and Larry Niven among others. Sadly, Hollywood almost always ruins the science in the best SF, but with luck, that means you'll like the book better than the movie. :-)

>62 waltzmn: Ohhhhh okay!

>61 amanda4242: Ive seen quotes from the book, but that's about it, and people have said that people should listen to it as an audiobook with how they do Rocky's like chirps and noises

>46 paradoxosalpha: "The fantasy/sf boundary is a longstanding and interesting discussion, but as a more general issue, I see no need for genres to be exclusive. I've read a number of stories that are both sf and noir detective tales, for example. In those cases, I suppose the sf label tends to predominate, but it doesn't efface the participation of the other genre."

This.

I've been thinking and having conversations about the boundaries of different genres for decades now, and that can be an interesting and even useful conversation in some contexts.

I confess that, as a reader cataloging books, on this list I'm going with my personal preference: I like it when stories use elements of any or all corners of literature. Just one thing? Yes. Balance of two types?* Okay! Mostly one thing plus bits of three other things? Yes, please. There are so many good stories out there.

* Cue the old Reese's Peanut Butter Cups commercial: You got chocolate in my peanut butter! You got peanut butter on my chocolate! Mmmmm.

>64 louisisaloafofbreb: I may have to check out the audio; sometimes a good narrator can give a boost to a book.

>66 amanda4242: Yeah, I dont normally listen to audiobooks since its kinda overwhelming for me but if I do it during like the gym I can focus on it, and I hope the audiobook is good! The author on Audible for Misery was really good, I like how she did the Anne's voice

>57 waltzmn: I never said that they aren't your favorites but you're post had an incredulous tone that the contents of the communal list didn't conform to your preferences.

>58 louisisaloafofbreb: Why on earth wouldn't Project Hail Mary count as sf?

>69 jjwilson61: Idk- I was just asking

The downvotes on this list boggle my mind.
One is very clear why they are voting as they are, since it fits their user name perfectly. (Wonder if they'd defend a certain Scottish author or downvote them too.)
Others are not labeled, but I don't understand.

Project Hail Mary has a downvote
Fahrenheit 451 has a downvote
1984 has a downvote (maybe they feel this is now general fiction or even nonfiction?)

>68 jjwilson61: I never said that they aren't your favorites but you're post had an incredulous tone that the contents of the communal list didn't conform to your preferences.

Again you misread me. Maybe try reading more carefully? I admit the post is long, but if you're going to draw conclusions, at least try to understand what I'm saying, or ask question before you start making critical comments.

I don't expect people to like what I like; the fact that I have very few similar libraries proves that what I like is different. (I will spare you demonstrations.) I am surprised, however, that there seems to be so much non-genre material in the list, and so little genre SF. This is a problem of definitions. If your SF and my SF do not overlap at all, is there not a definitional problem? What I truly don't understand is why someone would brand, say, A Wrinkle in Time as SF. Given that SF is so often branded as escapist, this risks getting what is primarily religious fiction tarred with a false brush.

Someone who likes A Wrinkle in Time is extremely unlikely, I think, to like much militantly atheist SF. If they are regarded as different genres, the problem is unlikely to arise.

This confusion is not the fault of the readers, since the publishers are largely responsible. But I really, truly don't understand why the publishers do it. And I am also surprised that what is basically a tech site has so few readers of genre SF.

>72 waltzmn: I don't think I misread you since you admit that you are surprised by what others are putting on the list. I don't think it's that surprising. You said yourself that much of what you added were short stories which just aren't going to do well on a list on this site because most short stories don't have their own work, and people aren't going to remember in what short story collection they read a particular tale. Then a lot of people catalog their own library, but a lot of the genre sf that you're talking about was first published a long time ago and people may no longer have those books and if it isn't in their library they may not remember to add it to this list.

Then many users on this site weren't alive when those older sf stories were written and have only more recently began reading sf so they aren't going to list a work as a favorite if they've never read it.

I just glanced through your list and I didn't notice anything written since the 70's, so I'm not surprised that you didn't get many matches for the works on your list. I just don't know why you're surprised.

Okay, I get that Alice in Wonderland isn't really sf. I don't consider it such, although I wouldn't sacrifice one of ten precious favorites to weigh in on the question. Every other downvote I see on the list is impertinent, and has nothing serious to do with whether or not the item is sf, just whether it "should" be anyone's favorite.

Of my ten, only three are in the top fifty (with current global ranks of 8, 17, and 44), but the top fifty are certainly all sf, and for all of those I've read, I can certainly see why they might be somebody's favorite.

The top ten looks about right. Dune often tops this sort of list, and I'm impressed to see All Systems Red beat it out, but not very surprised.

>73 jjwilson61: I will let the argument drop, except for two minor factual points.

Then many users on this site weren't alive when those older sf stories were written and have only more recently began reading sf so they aren't going to list a work as a favorite if they've never read it.

Well, I wasn't alive when The House of Fame was written, and it's still on my list. :-p

I just glanced through your list and I didn't notice anything written since the 70's, so I'm not surprised that you didn't get many matches for the works on your list.

The Snow Queen was 1980. Technically 1970s, but pretty marginal. The Guns of the South was from 1992. And some of the sequences, such as the Foundation and Positronic Robot series, extended after the 1970s -- Forward the Foundation was published in 1993. I grant that that is still "old" if one is a publisher.

On the other hand, being from the 1960s hasn't hurt Dune. Indeed, it appears to be more popular now than it was when it came out -- it split the 1966 Hugo award with Roger Zelazny's And Call Me Conrad, now usually known as This Immortal, but the Zelazny book isn't contending for #1.

Being modern by itself doesn't appear to be a big deal on LT; if you look on the Zeitgeist at the most popular books on LT, most of those that are not Harry Potter go back to the 1960s or earlier. Often much earlier. The Odyssey is very early indeed. :-)

Still, you are right; my list doesn't have anything really new on it. And I am surprised by that. I'm willing to read older books; most of my favorites were written before I was an active reader. But I do read newer things, too (I did try The Fifth Season; I just couldn't read it). I'm not entirely sure what that says. It's not that modern work is darker, per se, since a lot of what I read is pretty dark.

Possibly it's just that there were things that didn't slip through in the past -- we know that a lot of the Heinlein Juveniles were cleaned up. In some, like Tunnel in the Sky, rather visibly. It's amazing how many virgin births seemed to be happening in that book. :-)

>72 waltzmn: Well now I'm very interested in your list of "militantly atheist SF", just to see if the prediction holds true. :-)

>76 hipdeep: Perhaps I should have said militantly atheist authors. But Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird" is a story about a contest resulting in the destruction of the creator/God. This seems to me to be very similar to a story in Dangerous Visions (or maybe it was Again, Dangerous Visions) in which humanity makes it its mission to destroy God (I think it was "Evensong" by Lester del Rey, but I lost my copy of Dangerous Visions in a move, and it was such an irritating book that I haven't tried to replace it).

Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" looks at just what might have lit up the eastern sky in about 6/7 B.C.E.

Isaac Asimov writes in his biography about the lengths he would go to to avoid religious ceremony, and gives a twist on the creation of the universe in "The Last Question."

Those are all short fiction, which for some reason I remember better than longer works. Trying to think of novel-length stories.... Harry Turtledove has written a whole lot of what I can only call pantheist fiction. Alpha and Omega frankly drove me nuts, even though I grant that it's not atheist exactly. :-)

I would be genuinely interested in a religious person's take on James Blish's A Case of Conscience.

>73 jjwilson61: I thought about this overnight. I was reacting negatively to your tone (which I still think was unfair), but you are absolutely right that I haven't found a new SF author that I like for twenty years or more.

Totally coincidentally, I came across a comment by Isaac Asimov in his book I. Asimov; on p. 254, he wrote, "But then came the 1960s, and again there was a radical change. A new breed of science fiction writing came into being. Television had killed the general magazines that had been heavy with fiction. The new writers had lost their natural market and turned to science fiction because it had survived television. They brought to science fiction something called 'the New Wave.' Stories rich in emotion and stylistic experimentation began to appear, as did mood pieces and stories that were downright surrealistic and obscure." He goes on to say how he was sort of glad to get out of SF as a result.

I have no idea if his explanation of the New Wave is right (I rather suspect it isn't). And it always seemed to me that a big part of the New Wave was that authors were suddenly free to talk about sex, and a lot of them did, endlessly, which is utterly monotonous. I came along after the New Wave, but with the marginal exception of Roger Zelazny (whose more radical experiments generally were fantasy, not SF), I preferred the writers of the old style. And still do. And all the authors I used to read are dead or pretty well used up. And because the shelves are so full of other stuff, I have not been able to find new authors -- they're probably there, but I don't know how to locate them. It isn't that I haven't tried -- I tried N. K. Jemisin and couldn't handle the violence. I tried The Peshawar Lancers, and couldn't handle the violence. I entirely agree with the premise of Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower -- it clearly reflects the after-effects of our climate denialism and rejection of scientific fact -- but creating a new religion is hardly an answer to a world where the leaders of the four strongest nations are all clearly evil.

It's perhaps also significant that I don't read anything purely for pleasure. I read mostly to try to learn things (about 90% of my reading these days is non-fiction).

So, yes, in terms of SF, jjwilson61 is right, and I'm an artifact. (I'm an artifact in a lot of other things, too.) I am surprised that there aren't more like me, because I managed to find that older SF decades after it was first published. But admittedly it wasn't as many decades after as it is now. :-)

>78 waltzmn: I wrote this whole enormous thing about the general reasons for that, then realized this is the monthly list thread and you're probably just talking about the LT population. I'll post it if you want to read it, but specific to your post:

The Fifth Season gets recommended a lot because it's generally considered her best work, but I can't get through it myself for similar reasons. If you'd like to try again, consider The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms or The Killing Moon. I would not recommend The City We Became or How Long 'til Black Future Month? for you.

>77 waltzmn: I would be genuinely interested in a religious person's take on James Blish's A Case of Conscience.

I am "religious but not spiritual" and of an abstruse religious persuasion besides, but you could read my review. The most religiously interesting sf I've read lately was Lester Del Rey's "For I Am a Jealous People." It occurs to me Del Rey's story might be tonic for contemplation of the present geopolitical gestures at "holy war."

>79 Watry: I wrote this whole enormous thing about the general reasons for that, then realized this is the monthly list thread and you're probably just talking about the LT population. I'll post it if you want to read it, but specific to your post:

I was talking about the LT population, but if you've already written it, I'll read it. (No promises to agree. :-) If no one else asks to see it, then please send it to me in a private message.

The Fifth Season gets recommended a lot because it's generally considered her best work, but I can't get through it myself for similar reasons. If you'd like to try again, consider The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms or The Killing Moon.

Thank you. I've added them to my watch list.

>80 paradoxosalpha: I am "religious but not spiritual" and of an abstruse religious persuasion besides, but you could read my review. The most religiously interesting sf I've read lately was Lester Del Rey's "For I Am a Jealous People." It occurs to me Del Rey's story might be tonic for contemplation of the present geopolitical gestures at "holy war."

I have that in Gods and Golems, but I find I don't remember it. I'll put that on my "immediate re-read" list. Thanks.

Regarding your review: I actually thought Blish did a good job of making his Manichaean argument work, but the ambiguity of the ending (did God cause the blowup, or the secular cause, or both) is the point on which I cannot predict a Catholic's response.

The second part is to Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land as King Kong is to Tarzan.

Not having any contact with the popular works, I can't comment on your metaphor, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw the thematic relationship between A Case of Conscience and Stranger in a Strange Land.

ludicrously based on an unwarranted privileging of humanity

Yeah, well, there's that. :-) But that is Christian doctrine. Of course, it's complicated enough that it actually caused C. S. Lewis to create a heresy that no one seems to have noticed except me. (For complex reasons, I've spent a lot of time on the historical study of Christian heresies.)

>80 paradoxosalpha: Lester Del Rey's "For I Am a Jealous People."

I read this yesterday, and didn't recognize it. Either I missed it somehow (strange, since I have it in both Gods and Golems and in The Best of Lester del Rey) or I conflated it in my head with del Rey's later story in which the battle between humanity and God reaches its end.

I see your point about present applicability. My basic thought was from "With God on Our Side": "If God is on our side, he'll stop the next war."

I also thought of a heretical answer to the problem posed, in the Marcionite heresy. Marcion proposed that the God of the Hebrew Bible, who created the world, was the "demiurge," a powerful but not infallible nor particularly moral being, and that the Christian God, and Jesus, were a different, compassionate, infallible God. So the inspirer of conflict in the del Rey story would be the demiurge, with the "real" God still aloof. Thus a Christian could, in that context, keep on believing in Jesus, just not in YHWH.

Then my science-fictional-analysis brain kicked in and came up with a third idea: That there is a race of aliens that likes to watch species in a sort of gladiatorial conflict, and these aliens set up the battle. How? By instilling a religion of conflict in both sides. Why is it the same religion? Budget, no doubt: Cheaper to build up one fake religion than have to try to create two. :-)

But I doubt any true believer is going to like any of my "explanations." :-p

>83 waltzmn:

Marcionites weren't the only classical misotheists. These days, we have Cthulhu and the Space Bankers. But I thought Del Rey's church minister protagonist put a fine point on the whole affair.

(I figure one crude reading of current events is to see the US/Israel as the extraterrestrials in Del Rey's story.)

>84 paradoxosalpha: Marcionites weren't the only classical misotheists.

But the Marcionites weren't misotheists; they were worshippers of God and followers of Jesus. What they rejected was the demiurge who, they claimed, created the world. (And I do see their point in separating the Hebrew Creator from the Greek Savior, though I could argue that the Later Prophets should go with the New Testament rather than the split being between Hebrew and Greek Bibles). So the Marcionites were misodemiurgists, if you'll accept the word. And they were very strong in the second and third centuries, though they faded fast after that. Indeed, they were so strong in the early centuries of Christianity that there was a twentieth century school of textual criticism that hypothesized that the New Testament books they considered canonical (Luke and the major Pauline epistles) had been heavily corrupted by Marcionite readings. (This seems to be false; the Greek text translated in the King James Bible is corrupt in sometimes-spectacular ways, but it wasn't because of Marcion!)

And I suspect that many evangelicals, if put in that position, would simply say it was God's will: "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord." After all, they expect the end of the world, and the Antichrist to precede that. I am sometimes tempted to say that they're right -- except they have the wrong Antichrist....

But I thought Del Rey's church minister protagonist put a fine point on the whole affair.

Which makes sense, if del Rey's account of having once been an evangelist is true. (I've read that there are a lot of questions about his early life.) He himself was the former evangelist whose experiences led him to turn away from his faith. So the spiritual journey of the story is his, even if the context is fictional.

>85 waltzmn:

I am unimpressed with the technical distinction. To make the creator and governor of the world a corrupted and pernicious force is a misotheist perspective, even if the adherents reserve "God" for some distinct salvific influence.

>86 paradoxosalpha: I am unimpressed with the technical distinction. To make the creator and governor of the world a corrupted and pernicious force is a misotheist perspective, even if the adherents reserve "God" for some distinct salvific influence.

I'm not defending the Marcionites; they were pretty goofy. But I don't see much functional distinction between that and orthodox Christianity, in which a "good" God creates the world in the knowledge that it will be corrupted by an evil influence which will become "the ruler of this world" (John 14:30).

Of course, that's the problem I run into with all theology; eventually, somehow, you have to explain how we ended up in a world whose leaders follow chimpanzee morality.....

Given enough time and voters, Dune did eventually make its way to the top of the list.

The downvoting is brimming over with stupid. I'm thinking they are all "I don't like this" downvotes, contrary to the rules.

Downvotes for: Dune, Project Hail Mary, Ender's Game ("bigots can't write science fiction"), Foundation Trilogy ("Wooden characterization"), Fahrenheit 451, Hyperion, A Wrinkle in Time, The Sparrow, The Handmaid's Tale, and Stranger in a Strange Land, which all together makes for exactly half of the top twenty titles.

>90 paradoxosalpha: I didn't downvote anything, because it's a waste of effort, but let it be said that I don't consider Dune ("Paul Atreides and the Philosopher's Stone") to be SF (the Spice is patently not possible -- a longevity drug that also give the ability to foretell the future and gives access to ancestors' lives? It might as well be the Philosopher's Stone), and A Wrinkle in Time is fantasy by any standard I use. But I certainly agree that most of them are SF -- and, as I say, I didn't actually downvote anything; I just shook my head with disbelief. You're right in general even if you're wrong in detail. :-)

>91 waltzmn:

Your rejection of Dune on scientific feasibility grounds is idiosyncratic. It is a genre-defining work that routinely tops lists of sf novels. And its ecological sensibility gave it an actually scientific perspective that was just beginning to be glimpsed in sf at the time.

I consider the spice just as likely as transluminal "warp drives" (i.e. not), but conscious ancestral memory seems like as good a basis for historical precognition as any other.

>92 paradoxosalpha: Your rejection of Dune on scientific feasibility grounds is idiosyncratic. It is a genre-defining work that routinely tops lists of sf novels. And its ecological sensibility gave it an actually scientific perspective that was just beginning to be glimpsed in sf at the time.

First, remember that I agreed with your general point.

And recall that I didn't actually flag Dune, plus I agree about the ecological sensibility. Also, for that matter, it has a very detailed back story, although we only see a little bit of it in Dune itself.

But my definition of SF -- which is not one I invented, though I perhaps phrase it idiosyncratically -- requires that one can "get there from here." (That is, there is some reasonable set of changes that can cause the present universe to become the story universe.) That doesn't mean that the universe follow the exact laws of physics as we know them (after all, we don't know all of them!), but it requires explaining away any deviations. Hence, e.g. "warp drives" -- they explain FTL travel in an otherwise-Einsteinean universe. But Dune simply has an unconscionable number of deviations. The Philosopher's Stone/Spice. FTL travel. Human beings who can process near-infinite amounts of data without making mistakes. Force shields that blow up when you fire a "lasgun" at them. Why don't they blow up when you turn a flashlight on them? When you stand in sunlight? When an atom of carbon-14 in the wearer's body decays and emits a photon? When the wearer gives off body heat? When a virtual photon emerges from the quantum soup of the universe? They're a logical impossibility.

Ecology or no, Dune is scientifically absurd.

I read something somewhere that made a point: SF is often set in the future (though it doesn't have to be). Therefore we have a tendency to assume that fiction set in the future is SF. But most definitions of SF do not include a future setting as either a necessary or a sufficient condition.

Dune is set in what sounds like the future, and it is so carefully thought out as to make it look like SF. But I really don't think it meets the common definitions -- even though it has influenced SF since its time.

Get there from here or get there from where the author was at the time it was written? Is War of the Worlds not science fiction because we now know there weren't be alien civilizations on Mars? Can we only have science fiction with faster than light travel until the date at which it became obvious it'd never be possible?

A lot of 60s-70s science fiction has a certain amount of telepathy/telekinesis because people were wondering if this might be something science could come to understand. Conversely in the 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' realm, you can still posit some combination of nanobots and wireless technology that allows people to communicate mind to mind, without it being being an evolved superhuman power.

On those grounds I'm happy to consider A Wrinkle in Time as a form of science fiction - Meg's parents are doing the beginnings of a possible future science, 1960s style, that they are only just starting to understand, the beings that she meets are so much further advanced scientifically that the things they do - travel, communicate - look like magic to us.

>94 Aquila: Get there from here or get there from where the author was at the time it was written?

I would say "get there from whatever time the story diverges from our world." A lot of SF is deliberately set in the past, after all! So for Larry Niven's Known Space sequence, the divergence point would be at least a couple of million years ago, when the Pak protectors arrived on Earth. For Robert A. Heinlein's Future History, it would I think be 1939, the time of the story "Lifeline." For Isaac Asimov's Foundation sequence (at least the original part of it), it's probably a point still in the future. Something that was SF when written would not cease to be SF because time passes it by.

But this isn't just an historical thing; it's also a scientific thing. Much of SF requires changes in science -- the speed of light limit being an obvious example. Similarly your Psi powers example; it's something that never replicated, but authors (even hard SF authors like Niven and Arthur C. Clarke) ran with. That's acceptable; you can "fork" science, as long as you acknowledge the fork.

I don't think you can define SF solely on the "you can get there from here" criterion; by that standard, all fiction is SF except for some explicit fantasies. :-) But I think it a reasonable "necessary condition."

Incidentally, since the flash point here seems to be Dune, I should note that I was not the one who realized that it fails to meet this definition of SF. It was a fellow I used to know named Don Nicholls who pointed it out to me, with sufficient evidence that he convinced me. (I had always thought of it as SF until then -- but I hadn't thought about it much.) I don't know whether he thought it up himself or if he got it from someone else. But it's at least an idiosyncrasy of two, not one. :-) You can still blame me for believing it, but it isn't just me. Or, at least, it wasn't at the time DoN told me. :-)

>95 waltzmn: If you based your opinion of what science fiction is based on get there from whatever time the story diverges from our world, then so much science fiction would fail your metric because the world changed during the editing process. It's too narrow a perspective to allow the genre of science fiction to exist.

Does it help that people writing in the 60s thought that the early 2000s was the far future? Heck, technically Star Trek's biggest event is approaching if we looked at their timeline. (WWIII is 2063) And we haven't had the eugenics wars or the sanctuary cities.

Back to the future claimed we'd be watching 3d hologram movies in 2015 and have flying cars.

The world's technology all moves at different rates. And people expect things from technology that may or may not happen or may take longer to happen than some writers predict.

>96 gilroy: It's too narrow a perspective to allow the genre of science fiction to exist.

Agreed. For the vulgar masses, sf tends to be defined by what it thinks about (future eras, interplanetary travel, nanotech, robots, etc.). Literati might prefer to consider it in light of how it thinks about those things, but to be too prescriptive or rule-bound about such thinking defeats some of the chief purposes of speculation.

>93 waltzmn: Force shields that blow up when you fire a "lasgun" at them. Why don't they blow up when you turn a flashlight on them? When you stand in sunlight? When an atom of carbon-14 in the wearer's body decays and emits a photon? When the wearer gives off body heat? When a virtual photon emerges from the quantum soup of the universe? They're a logical impossibility.

That's a weird complaint. There are a lot of explosives you can hit with a hammer or light on fire without them exploding. I can quickly find a real scientific article on β lead azide being triggered by a laser.

>98 prosfilaes:

I'm not going to argue any more about what is or is not SF, because the bottom line is simply that I don't like most stuff that gets called SF these days, even though much of what I do like is labelled SF. But this comment does require a response:

That's a weird complaint. There are a lot of explosives you can hit with a hammer or light on fire without them exploding. I can quickly find a real scientific article on β lead azide being triggered by a laser.

Lead azide is a very unstable compound that explodes easily -- normally due to impact, but the point is simply that you supply enough energy to trigger it and it explodes. That's how all explosives explode. Supply them with the activation energy, and off they go.

But firing a laser at lead azide does not explode the laser. Hitting lead azide with a hammer does not cause the hammer to explode from the inside.

Herbert's shields are different. What happens if you hit them with a hammer? They halt its velocity. No explosion. What happens if you shine light on them? Nothing, seemingly. Not even if they're getting as much total energy as the laser would supply. What explodes them is only lasguns. (Well, and high static charges, but that doesn't destroy the source of the charge.)

So is it coherent light that explodes the shield? Or a particular wavelength? The latter I would accept -- but it wouldn't explode the laser. And, if it's a particular wavelength, then get a lasgun with a different wavelength. If it's coherent light, that's harder, but maybe I'd buy it, but it still wouldn't explode the laser.

It's the mutual explosion that is the impossibility. The shield is impossible on other grounds (conservation of energy! Where does the energy go when you hit it with a high-speed projectile? Heat? Why don't the shields fry people?). but even if you toss all that, it can't explode the laser.

I don't object to the shield exploding. I object to the laser exploding.

FWIW, I have a bachelor's degree in physics.

>99 waltzmn: Herbert's shields are different. What happens if you hit them with a hammer? They halt its velocity. No explosion. What happens if you shine light on them? Nothing, seemingly. Not even if they're getting as much total energy as the laser would supply. What explodes them is only lasguns.

What happens when you hit C4 with a hammer? The C4 halts its velocity. No explosion. You can ignite matches with a laser, but not with sunshine. And if lasguns use lasers to cause physical damage, they're a lot more powerful than any normal laser.

I don't object to the shield exploding. I object to the laser exploding.

You did object to the shield exploding. And once we have prophecy and faster than light travel, I can come up with technobabble causing the explosion to track back up the laser and blow up the batteries.

>100 prosfilaes: You did object to the shield exploding.

All right, looking back, I concede that's what I said. But I was intended to refer to the mutual destruction of shield and lasgun. I meant the explosion of the lasgun; that is what really irks me. The shield violates the first law of thermodynamics, which is the basic law of the universe and makes anything fantasy (no matter what politicians seem to think), but the explosion of the lasgun also violates causality, so it is even worse.

So, as I recall, giving a thumbs-down takes up one of your allotment of picks. Was this limitation "fixed"? Or did someone just figure out how to game it?
https://www.librarything.com/list/47672/pnppl/Favorite-Science-Fiction has ten picks and thirteen downvotes, most of which are not at all disputing the sfnality of the books, but are instead criticizing their quality and/or ideological merit.

>102 paradoxosalpha: That's been fixed for a while, IIRC.

>103 hipdeep:

Based on my observation in >102 paradoxosalpha:, maybe it ought to be un-"fixed."

>104 paradoxosalpha: I go back and forth on this. When lots of people are violating the criteria, I'm glad for the extra votes. (Arab and Arab Diaspora Literature and Best Graphic Novel Nonfiction both had serious problems with people who misunderstood the categories.)

Then you get a list like this one, where the vast majority of the downvotes are really arguments over quality (or, in my opinion, indefensible positions that a book must have one and only one genre). By my count, there are more people casting multiple bad-faith downvotes than books which really are out of scope.

Hi All: sorry it has taken a little while to respond to this. It looks like the downvote option is being abused here, and some members are disregarding the instructions to only use this option for things which are not science fiction. I have edited the list, so downvoting is no longer allowed, and we're working on a way to remove the existing downvotes.

>106 AbigailAdams26: Thank you!