io9 on 10 Science Fiction Novels You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Actuall

[jgaiser]

Finally got around to looking at the list.

I've only read 4 completely and 2 more attempted.

Read:
Cryptonomicon - Read at least three times. Love everything about this book except the weak ending
Dune and Foundation - Read more years ago than I'm willing to admit. Enough years ago that I really don't remember much about the stories.
1984 - Almost everybody in my generation read it in High School - Though once again it's been a long while.

Attempted:
Jonathon Strange and Mr. Norrell - I've tried twice
Infinite Jest - Science Fiction??? - I've tried at least twice. Someday I really want to read this. A strange book and so much hype.

[charlesatan]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Anything that is properly written will stand the test of time because it is self-contained, this is what the classics are. IMO.

Not that I'm a big fan of the book (in fact I don't like it for the reasons you stated), but there's Neuromancer by William Gibson...

[Harper Kingsley]

I read Dune when I was in sixth grade. I remember hiding it in my desk and reading while I was supposed to be doing math I read up to God Emperor of Dune, then had to walk away after that. Probably because my dad got into this whole tangent about how spice is actually oil and the Freemen are Arabs, blah blah blah, and the whole metamorphosis into a worm was because Frank Herbert was on chemotherapy at the time and lost his hair, etc, etc. Plus it got "kind" of weird.

I've only read 4/10 on the list and I'm pretty much a sci-fi fiend--CJ Cherryh, Poul Anderson, Alan Dean Foster, Andre Norton, Jerry Pournell. Maybe I'll take the rest of the list to the library and see if any of them strike my interest.

[Yapyap]

I've read 1984 and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell from that list; I can't say I ever thought of the latter as science fiction, though (seemed pretty straightforward alternative history fantasy to me, from what I recall).

I'm a science fiction reader in theory - the overwhelming majority of science fiction I've read have been Doctor Who and Babylon 5 tie-in novels, with a handful of other stuff thrown in. I like the idea of science fiction but for some reason most actual science fiction books/series don't appeal to me; possibly because I much prefer character-driven stories to plot-driven and hard (as well as most "classic") science fiction seems to be largely plot- and idea-driven.

[orlok]

I've read Dune, Foundation and 1984. I have tried Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, but gave up as I found it tedious and uninteresting (my wife has almost finished it, and likes it, though). Certainly wouldn't be in my top 10, or top 10,000 come to that... Not that this list is a top 10, exactly, but they are saying we should have read them all.

And for me many of the real Sci-fi classics don't get a look in on the list. What about Heinlein or Wyndham?

[mediax]

Originally Posted by din155

I have read Dune, 1984 and Foundation. Just out of curiosity, has anyone read later books of Dune series? I could not bring myself to read rest of the series as the characters got altered just too much for my taste.

I share your readings, plus Cryptonomicon.

I've tried a few of hte later Dune books and I think they gradually degenerate into exploitative garbage. Personally, I'd recommend anyone to stop reading after Dune Messiah.

I agree with several other people that a few of the books seem strange selections for a science fiction list.

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by Harper Kingsley

Probably because my dad got into this whole tangent about how ...

spoiler tag? I stopped reading quickly since I plan to read the book soon.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by twowheels

spoiler tag? I stopped reading quickly since I plan to read the book soon.

Meeah, no real spoiler there...

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Meeah, no real spoiler there...

OK. :-) Looked like it was turning into a spoiler, so I stopped reading. I'm bad about spoilers, won't even watch previews for TV shows or movies because they always give away too much. I literally run out of the room, cover my ears, and hum to block out the noise. A bit extreme?

(Good thing I don't watch much TV, otherwise I'd be doing this a lot! The series I was watching ended, and I have no others in mind, so it'll probably be a few years before this is an issue again.)

[shootingMaNs]

I've read 5 of the 10- Dune, Foundation, 1984, The Long Tomorrow, and Dhalgren. I'll try Cryptomonicon at some point, but the rest really don't interest me.

[din155]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I believe I read the first two sequels but not beyond that....got too crazy.

I read the synopsis of the sequels and that was it, just didn't want to ruin Dune

[din155]

Originally Posted by mediax

I share your readings, plus Cryptonomicon.

I've tried a few of hte later Dune books and I think they gradually degenerate into exploitative garbage. Personally, I'd recommend anyone to stop reading after Dune Messiah.

I agree with several other people that a few of the books seem strange selections for a science fiction list.

I intend to read Cryptonomicon someday. At the moment just too many in the TBR list.

[taosaur]

As I commented on the article, who pretends to have read books? Sounds borderline neurotic.

I agree that Dune holds up, having read all of the pre-humous books for the first time earlier this millennium, fully two generations after first publication and when I already had a pretty solid sci-fi and pop culture pedigree. My mom wasn't even old enough to read Dune when it came out, but I found nothing dated or overexposed in the premises. I also found nothing "degenerative" in the sequels up through God Emperor (#4), though Children of Dune doesn't do much besides bridge Messiah and God Emperor (both of which are arguably better than the original novel). Heretics and Chapterhouse just got neck deep in the characters (or character lineages) and history in the way so many series do, without the standalone thematic strength of #s 1, 2 and 4. I avoided the son's apocrypha entirely.

Foundation, on the other hand, seemed mostly superfluous after having read the Dune series In general, I find Clarke's own books inferior to the authors (and filmmakers, and whatnots) he inspires. He's the Velvet Underground of sci-fi, which is hardly a bad thing.

1984... hasn't literally everyone read it? To me it was Brave New World's uptight sister. Rigid, hammer-you-over-the-head allegory tends to fall flat with me.

Starmaker I read as a teen and it was certainly influential, but it's hard to say how it would strike me now.

I don't know if I would have stuck with Cryptonomicon if I hadn't read Anathem first. The "sci" in its sci-fi is not sexy stuff--mostly math, in the form of comp sci and crypto, with a little geology and metallurgy. It's an easy book to zone out on or fall asleep to. The ending technically wraps up all the plots, but in a way that you just quietly say, "Oh," and set the book down. Nevertheless, I felt enriched for having read it. It made my world a little bigger--on the inside.

Of the others on the list, Dhalgren is tentatively TBR and I might feel masochistic enough to tuck into Gravity's Rainbow at some point. I hadn't heard of The Long Tomorrow, but it looks interesting. I'm a big fan of The Man Who Awoke by Laurence Manning, and it sounds a bit similar.

[specsavage]

I first tried to read Dune on a SwissAir flight to Germany in 1973...and several times since. I must say that I liked the 1984 movie version, but just never finished it in book form--or any other Frank Herbert book, for that matter.

Dhalgren (and all Samuel R. Delany, for that matter) seems to be one of those love-or-hate books. I thought it was crap, almost totally unreadable.

As for Asimov, he was a much better non-fiction writer than fiction.

Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is only slightly interesting, much the same as Judith Merril's Shadow On the Hearth of about the same period. Leigh's work for Planet Stories was much more satisfying.

Never could get interested in Neal Stephenson--even Snow Crash left me cold.

1984 is just too depressing, and not at all entertaining.

In fact, the entire list makes me tired. I've been reading SF and fantasy for about 50 years now, and I guess I've reached the point of longing for the "old days" when you could actually read ALL the books (or at least all the major titles) published every year.

If you can find them, try Emergence by David R. Palmer, Doris Egan's Ivory trilogy, L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach, Mike Moscoe's Society of Humanity duology (actually the background for the Kris Longknife series he does as Mike Shepherd), and (chuckles, here) Mike Resnick's Goddess of Ganymede and Pursuit on Ganymede--two of his first three books, and respectably done pastiches of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Sorry. I still tend to lump SF and fantasy together as one genre, as the various subgenres were still in the process of being defined as I grew up.

For straight SF--Heinlein, every single time. Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's The Mote In God's Eye, almost anything by Charles Sheffield and James P. Hogan, David Weber, the first couple of books by Robert L. Forward, early David Gerrold (When Harlie Was One and The Man Who Folded Himself), and, of course, Harry Turtledove's Guns of the South.

I haven't read any Philip K. Dick in thirty years, and the only one I remember with any fondness is Time Out of Joint. Think I'll have to reread him--I already have them all.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Strange to find one of my oldest and former best friends quoted in that article. I'm curious as to how Anders knows him, and whether Gawker is connected in some way to Boing Boing and therefore the old Mondo 2000 writers, whom the gentleman in question, having lived fairly close to San Francisco, still knows well.

Years ago, I remember mentioning the sense of motion in Gravity's Rainbow to my friend and saying it was a function of the style more than the narrative; I'd just read The Crying of Lot 49 and felt it was clearer structurally (given its Orphic underpinnings, Lot 49's the equivalent of Coltrane playing an old standard).

"Hand it over," he said, grabbing my paperback of GR. He read intently for a few pages, then closed the tome with a wince.

"Is the whole book in present tense?" he asked. "Present tense makes me tense!"

It took about a year for the taint of that memory to recede so that I could resume reading GR myself. I hate catchy phrases about books I haven't finished. They pull you out of the intricacies of the work; they're the prose equivalent of earworms.

About that io9 article:

The list-maker is either trying to be meta or incorporating literature deemed relevant regardless of genre, as certain publishers and critics like to do when they decide to blur the stratification of levels of culture and taste.

A few years back, I felt that genres were most usefully (and least confiningly) seen as lenses rather than forms, and that you could switch between them within a larger work if the structure justified the contrasts.

In that respect, Kill Bill's an example of what not to do when switching lenses. In music, however, we have Alfred Schnittke, who could have given Tarantino master classes in building solid forms out of pastiche (or polystyle, as Schnittke called it).

I always thought of Herbert as an old hippie who was determined to write like an Elizabethan.

I tend not to be concerned about lists -- I read Dhalgren when I was younger than certain teenaged characters in the book itself, but I've never made it through anything by Arthur C. Clarke. I do like certain of Stephenson's books, but if the writing itself doesn't establish the necessary music, I can't be arsed about the concepts (however intriguing). For me, writing has to have a groove.