June 24, 2008

Top 100 SF/F/H Books You Must Read Meme

World in the Satin Bag

Reading Time

I discovered this list here and immediately thought this would be a great meme. Here is how it works:

Bold all the titles you have read, italicize the titles you hope to read or have seen the movie for (since many of these have been turned into movies) and try to make a distinction between the two, and just mark ones you’ve never heard of somehow (preferably with a parenthesis of some sort).

People tagged:
John of Grasping For the Wind
SQT
Graeme

And here is the list:

100 Books Thou Shalt Read Before You Die
By the Inquest Staff

1. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny
3. The Ender Quartet by Orson Scott Card (read the first book)
4. Neuromancer by William Gibson 5. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson (6 Books total)
6. Foundation by Isaac Asimov (6 Books total) (read the first two books)
7. Dune by Frank Herbert
8. Elric by Michael Moorcock
9. The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K. Dick
10. 1984 by George Orwell
11. Hyperion by Dan Simmons (four books)
12. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
13. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (never heard of it)
14. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
15. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick (aka Bladerunner)
16. The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks (probably will never read)
17. The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers (I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know if I’ll read it)
18. Lightning by Dean Koontz (probably will never read)
19. The Uplift Trilogy by David Brin
20. Ringworld by Larry Niven
21. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (seen the movie)
22. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber (complete series) (never heard of it, though I have heard of Leiber)
23. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
24. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and I’ve seen the movie)
25. The Stand by Stephen King (tried reading it, got bored; tried watching the movie, got bored)
26. Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory
27. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov (seen the movie)
28. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
29. Watership Down by Richard Adams (seen the movie too)
30. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
31. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
32. Helliconia by Brain Aldiss (three books)
33. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (five books) (never heard of it)
34. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathon Swift
35. Mindkiller by Spider Robinson (novella in book Deathkiller) (never heard of it)
36. Blood Music by Greg Bear 37. The Green Mile by Stephen King (probably won’t read, not a fan of King’s work, saw most of the movie though)
38. Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (saw the movie, probably will never read though)
39. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (saw the movie)
40. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (seven books) (read the first two books)
41. The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
42. Watchers by Dean Koontz (probably won’t read)
43. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
44. Emphyrio by Jack Vance
45. The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
46. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (seen two of the movies)
47. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
48. Animal Farm by George Orwell (seen the movie)
49. The Princess Bride by William Goldman (seen the movie)
50. Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan (complete series) (not sure I want to read it)
51. It by Stephen King (seen the movie)
52. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
53. Timescape by Gregory Benford (never heard of it)
54. Pern by Anne McCaffery (complete series) (not sure I’ll read this)
55. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
56. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
57. Fionavar by Guy Gavriel Kay (three books) (never heard of it)
58. Earthsea “trilogy” by Ursula K. LeGuin
59. 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke (four books) (seen the movie)
60. Xenogenesis by Octavia Butler (three books)
61. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
62. Conan by Robert E. Howard
63. Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson
64. Midnight at the Well of Souls by Jack L. Chalker (never heard of it)
65. A Spell for Chameleon by Piers Anthony
66. The Gap by Stephen R. Donaldson (five books) (I’ve not clue what this is)
67. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
68. Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison
69. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
70. Dark Elf series by R. A. Salvatore (not all that interested, especially if this is Forgotten Realms stuff)
71. West of Eden by Harry Harrison
72. A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle (never heard of it, but I know who the author is)
73. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (saw the movie too)
74. Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg (never heard of it)
75. Dragonlance by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman (never read any of this stuff, probably won’t)
76. Lensman by E.E. “Doc” Smith (six books)
77. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
78. The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
79. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
80. Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis
81. The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells (seen at least three movies based on this)
82. Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem (never heard of it)
83. Lyonesse by Jack Vance (three books)
84. Catspaw by Joan Vinge
85. Crystal Express by Bruce Stirling
86. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
87. To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Phillip Jose Farmer
88. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris (never read, didn’t like the style, but saw the movie)
89. Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh
90. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
91. The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke
92. “The Four Lords of the Diamond” by Jack Chalker (never heard of it)
93. Swords by Fred Saberhagen
94. Way Station by Clifford Simak
95. The Kraken Wakes by John Wydham
96. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
97. The High Crusade by Paul Anderson
98. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (seen at least three movies based on this)
99. Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons (never heard of it)
100. The Postman by David Brin (saw the movie)

One Response

Carraka says:

June 24, 2008 at 5:06 pm

I disapprove of this list because it has RJ, but it doesn’t have GRRM.

Well, GRRM was inspired by RJ, but GRRM took RJ’s idea and made it ten billion times better.

I bookmarked the original list, and since I approve of quite a few of the other suggestions, this list might be something for me to work through, while I still have spare time.

And even if you tagged me, I would probably ignore you. D:

Reply

Shaun Duke

Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.

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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

January 22, 2025 No Comments

Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

January 18, 2025 No Comments

And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

2025: The Year of Something

January 9, 2025 No Comments

We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

Top 100 SF/F/H Books You Must Read Meme

Reading Time

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