My Favourite Things (Top Ten Sci-Fi & Fantasy Books)

Member Name: Deany

Product:	Top Ten Sci-Fi & Fantasy Books
Date:	09/11/01 (384 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great books

Disadvantages: Not enough time to read

To begin with, an admission. I don’t like top ten lists. For a start, they are always going to be flawed. Take this top ten sci-fi category – surely the only person qualified to write a definitive top ten sci-fi list is someone who had read every single sci-fi novel ever written. Which is asking quite a lot of one person. Otherwise, the list is bound to be nothing more than one person’s opinion of a small subset of all sci-fi. There is also the problem of writing the list today and then starting to read the best ever sci-fi book the world has ever seen tomorrow. Too late to put it on the list, and you have all the fiddle of coming back to change the op.

And anyway, what do I care what order some stranger thinks of a list of books should be put in, especially when they may very well be books I have never heard of? Then there’s the inevitable come-back of course. You leave someone’s favourite author/novel off the list through oversight, ignorance or perhaps intentionally and they take it as a personal snub. Your comments page gets clogged up with comments on the lines of “you forgot so-and-so”, “surely you are not saying X is better than Y” and so on.

But, as you have probably guessed, I am going to nevertheless have a bash at writing my own top ten sci-fi list. Why? – you ask. Well, to be honest, I’m at a bit of a loose end and can’t really think of anything better to do with my time, so why not?

Now, I don’t really know how to go about this. After all, I have a couple of favourite authors who have each written a fair few books between them, which could mean an instant top ten novels list with very little variety. So, I could maybe give a top ten authors list – but I wouldn’t say I like ALL the novels of a particular author well enough to want them in my top ten. Instead, I think I will opt for a bit of a mix. How about “top ten sci-fi novels/ser
ies”? It may mean the list ends up with 20+ books in it but, hey, it’s my list – so there.

After all that rambling, then, here’s my list (in no particular order). Oh, and a warning – it’s quite long!


IAIN M BANK’S CULTURE NOVELS

These are: Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Excession, Look to Windward and (sort of) Inversions.

Let’s kick off with a bang. Iain M Banks writes what is commonly referred to as “Space Opera”. You know - huge spaceships, impossibly named aliens with tentacles and fangs, laser gun battles, galaxy-spanning stories. But, this is space opera with a brain. The setting for the novels, the Culture, is a utopian society populated by humans and sentient machines. The humans in the Culture have long since handed over control of day to day matters to the Minds (sentient supercomputers) and spend most of their life relaxing, studying or travelling the galaxy in the aforementioned huge spaceships (which have great names like “Only Slightly Bent” and “I Thought He Was with You”).

As you can expect, the humans sometimes get bored and the Minds (which are way too clever for their own good) get annoyed at the mess developing cultures are making of their societies. So, the novels usually revolve around some attempt by the Culture to interfere in the society of a less developed species, or they examine the consequences of such action. In “Look to Windward”, for example, we see the consequences of the Culture trying to abolish the caste system on a developing world and unwittingly triggering an interstellar civil war.

The novels are all epic in scope, yet somehow manage to concentrate on the fates of the individuals involved. As in Banks’ “straight” fiction (i.e. non sci-fi) there is a dark thread of humour running through most of the novels. Although all set in the same fi
ctional universe with some overlaps of plot, the novels can be read independently of each other and the same characters rarely appear twice – especially as there are often hundreds, if not thousands of years, between the times when each novel is set.


1984 – GEORGE ORWELL

My second choice could not really be any more different to my first. We go from the galaxy-spanning utopia of the Culture, to the grim dystopian vision of a “future” that now lies in the past. 1984 was written in 1948 and paints a chilling picture of the way Orwell imagined the world could have turned out by now.

This is one of the books that many people, especially those with more “literary” leanings, are not often willing to admit is sci-fi. There is a very much a sense of snobbery concerning “proper” literature on the one hand and sci-fi, horror etc. on the other. When a respected author veers away from the mainstream it is very rare to hear the words “science fiction” mentioned for fear of somehow tainting his or her reputation. Or, any review opens with something along the lines of “Although the author may be playing with the conventions of science fiction, he/she is actually …” or “This may be science fiction, but the author is really showing us…”. Needless to say that this annoys me. Sci-fi is just another genre, there is nothing to be ashamed of. A good book will stand out as a good book whatever genre it is classed as, just as a bad book will always be a bad book, even if you give it a nice sparkly cover. If it’s sci-fi, call it sci-fi.

Anyway, 1984 paints a dark picture of the life of Winston Smith, an employee at the Department of Truth in a brutal control-freak state. Everywhere the inhabitants of this state go, they are watched over by the omnipotent Big Brother and free thought is discouraged. Even language is being altered to make it impossibl
e to criticise the state. The novel follows Winston as he comes to understand the oppressive nature of the regime and finds it impossible to carry on living the life he once knew.


HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY – DOUGLAS ADAMS

These are: The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, Mostly Harmless

Another change of mood – this time to humour. The “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” series does not really need much of an introduction, most people have heard the radio show, read the books or seen the TV series. Basically, the novels concentrate on the exploits of Arthur Dent, last survivor of the human race, who escapes from the Earth shortly before it is demolished to make way for an interstellar highway.

On his subsequent travels, Arthur meets all sorts of weird and wonderful characters such as Marvin, a depressed android with a brain the size of a planet, and Zaphod Beeblebrox, ex-president of the galaxy and starship thief.

The books are inventive, witty, sometimes just laugh-out-loud funny and somehow manage to avoid slipping into an all-out farce that would make you lose your sense of belief in the galaxy Adams creates. The Hitchhikers Guide itself is a wonderful book – a collection of just about every useful fact in the galaxy – and clever fictional inventions like the Babel fish that acts as a biological interpreter unit constantly make you think “oh, that’s quite ingenious”.

And, after reading these books, you will never look at the number 42 in quite the same way again.


RAMA SERIES – ARTHUR C. CLARKE (with Gentry Lee)

These are: Rendezvous with Rama, Rama II, Garden of Rama, Rama Revealed

Any sci-fi list would not be complete without some sort of entry from Arthur C. Clarke. He is probably most famous fo
r 2001: A Space Odyssey, but has a huge list of other novels published and is one of the most recognisable sci-fi names around. I have to admit that I read these books a few years ago while I was still at school and my memory of them is not too clear – apart from that at the time I thought they were the best books I have ever read. I suppose I will have to re-read them at some point, but I don’t expect I will be disappointed when I do.

“Rama” is an object that wanders into our solar system in the not too distant future. It is a huge cylinder, obviously made by some alien race, and a team of astronauts are sent out to investigate. They find the cylinder devoid of life, but with a city inside and a great circular sea at its centre. The first novel concentrates on this expedition and the discoveries made before Rama carries on its course and leaves the solar system again, the reason for its existence still a mystery. The remaining books, which were written quite a while after the original, chart the events when a second Rama appears in the solar system – only this time the group sent out to investigate ends up stuck in the cylinder when it leaves the solar system and events unfold to include a human colony being set up aboard for Rama’s creators to study. Like I said, this was all a while ago, so my details may be a bit dodgy, but the overall impression these books left me with a feeling that can only be described as “wow”.


THE FOREVER WAR – JOE HALDEMAN

Here, we are veering back to space opera a little. This novel kicks off the Orion SF Masterwork’s series of sci-fi novels which have been reprinted to bring them to the attention of a new generation of readers. It focuses on an interstellar war fought by humans against a foe they have hardly ever even met. The war is made more difficult by the problem of relativity – each “jump” through a collapsar (like a wor
mhole – I think!) takes years to an external observer, but only a couple of minutes to those on board the spaceships. This means that a soldier will set off for a battle, think he is away from Earth for only a few weeks, but will come back home to find that years, decades or sometimes even centuries have passed. New recruits become classed as seasoned veterans after one battle and the length of the war means that most people on Earth tend to forget it is even happening.

The story is told from the perspective of William Mandella, a new military recruit at the beginning of the war who ends up missing centuries of life on Earth although he only ages a matter of months. The element of this novel that really interested me was the mixture of fast-paced military action against more reflective passages when the military recruits spend shore-leave back on Earth and try to adjust to a society that has changed beyond all recognition in their absence.

Some readers have compared this novel to the war in Vietnam, of which Haldeman had experience. The descriptions of military life are certainly detailed and fascinating and Haldeman is not afraid to confront the harsher realities of warfare. The reader would do well not to get too attached to any of the characters – as in real life, they can be and often are killed in combat.

This is a great book. The futile nature of the war (which at its most basic level is due to a cross-species misunderstanding) is balanced against the vivid characterisation, and the frequent trips back to Earth provide an interesting insight into the way Haldeman imagines the world will develop.


DUNE SERIES – FRANK HERBERT

These are: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, Chapter House Dune

“Dune” is an amazing book, just amazing. It manages to construct an entire future society with its own entirely believable economic and political
framework, history, religious cults, myths, interest groups and warring factions. It does this on a galactic scale while for the most part concentrating on just one planet that is over 99% desert – Dune. Frank Herbert also managed to write this galaxy spanning series of novels without resorting to using an evil alien enemy. All the characters in the books are human (or from some offshoot of humanity), which intensifies the situations Herbert describes by making them more accessible and “real”. The enemies in the books may be repulsive and cold-hearted, but they are human and entirely believable. Even technology is largely absent. Previous to events in the book there has been a “jihad” against artificial intelligence and computers are banned. All data processing has to be done by humans with specially trained minds called Mentats.

The novels open with the House Atredies – a noble and ancient family in the galactic empire – leaving its home planet under the orders of the Emperor to take control of an outpost on the desert planet of Arrakis, or Dune. The House previously entrusted with this job (the House Harkonnen) is angry at the decision and sets out to ruin the Atredies family. You see, Dune is not any ordinary planet. In the desert live huge worms whose life-cycle leads to the production of the spice melange – a hallucinogenic drug prized by the religious Bene Gesserit sisterhood and needed by the Navigators who pilot starships through hyperspace. Whoever controls Dune controls spice production, and whoever controls spice production has nearly as much power as the Emperor.

If all this sounds complicated, just wait until you start reading about the Kwisatz Haderach, or chosen one, of the Fremen who is also known as Muad’dib, or desert mouse. In fact, Herbert comes up with so many of his own words to describe the worlds he creates that most editions of Dune have a glossary at the back for the co
nfused reader to consult. Some people may find this annoying, but for me it added to the sense of reading something other-worldly and futuristic, much the same was as someone from the middle ages would need a dictionary of some kind to understand a novel set in the present day.

The first Dune novel follows the fate of the Atredies family on Dune and one of the character’s conversion into something akin to godhood. The subsequent novels span hundreds of years and vary between novels that focus on later generations of the family and those that look at the galactic situation as a whole. My only gripe is that the series comes to an abrupt end – due to the author’s death. The last novel ends on a cliff-hanger that cannot ever be resolved and I really wanted to read the next in the series – but there isn’t one. Nevertheless, this is required reading for any sci-fi fan.

Oh, and there is a film adaptation and a TV mini series as well. Both of them have a good go at dealing with the material but ultimately there is just too much information in the book and the screen adaptations both end up confusing and hard to follow. My advice is to read the book, imagine the Dune universe in your own mind and only then have a bash at the films.


THE HANDSMAID’S TALE – MARGARET ATWOOD

When I wrote about 1984, I called it one of those books that is ashamed to admit it is sci-fi. Well, here’s another. Many literary critics balk at the idea that a respected novelist like Margaret Atwood could possibly “lower” herself to write sci-fi and so this tag is often omitted or simply referred to quickly in passing. Nevertheless, this book is sci-fi and so I have included it here.

The book is set in a post disaster world where a fundamentalist religious society has come into being. In the state of Gillead, the disaster (radiation from a nuclear war?) has caused the majority of the female popul
ation to become infertile. Those women still capable of bearing children are herded together into camps and then farmed out to the rich and powerful to act as “wombs for hire”. Such action is all justified against a flawed system of religious beliefs.

The world that Atwood creates is entirely believable. Women capable of bearing children are denied any rights – which includes having to wear a red robe at all times to show their fertility and renouncing their own names (the main character in the novel is called Offred, or “of Fred” – a name that merely shows that she belongs to a man called Fred). Upon seeing the pictures of women in Afghanistan recently who must cover their entire bodies in public, I was instantly reminded of this novel. And it is precisely here that the novel’s power lies. As Atwood herself has said “It is an imagined account of what happens when not uncommon pronouncements about women are taken to their logical conclusions”.


A CLOCKWORK ORANGE – ANTHONY BURGESS

While we are at it, I might as well mention my last reluctant-to-admit-it’s-sci-fi book. Most people will have heard of “A Clockwork Orange” because of the controversy surrounding the film version. Both the film and the novel contain a fair amount of violence and, while most people can cope with violence on the page, violence on the screen will always be accused of inciting copy-cat attacks and eventually the director (Kubrick) felt it was better to withdraw the film. It is only recently that it has been re-released – and I have to say I have not got around to seeing it yet.

The irony inherent in the decision to withdraw the film can only be fully appreciated once you have read the book. The central theme is violence in young people and how it can be treated – the treatment experienced by the main character is being forced to watch gruesome acts of violence on
film while at the same time being conditioned to experience pain in association with these images.

The novel itself is set in the not-too-distant future. The settings are instantly recognisable, if slightly skewed from how we are used to seeing them. The gang of teenage boys at the centre of the tale hang around in a milk bar drinking spiked drinks and spend the rest of the evening prowling the streets and looking for people to beat up, rape or even kill. At its most basic, they can be said to be doing this for want of anything better to do. However, Burgess is wary of portraying the characters as one-dimensional monsters and the scenes of ultra-violence contrast sharply with the main character’s love of classical music and insights into life.

The main character is the ring-leader of the gang and after one particularly violent night he is arrested and sent for the treatment described above. The book raises many questions about treating violent youngsters and whether the end results justifies the methods used. Can violence be effectively treated with violence? The main character appears “cured” at the end, but this is merely a Pavlovan response, a desire to avoid pain – his motivations and desires are still intact.

One final point worthy of note is the language in which the book is written. Burgess invents a new youth slang that draws on many different languages (especially Russian). At first this is difficult to read, but the language is used consistently and after a few pages it becomes quite a pleasant task to feel you are learning a new form of language.


EARTH ABIDES – GEORGE R STEWART

This is my second choice to be taken from the Orion SF Masterwork’s series, a collection of books that any devoted sci-fi reader should have on his or her bookshelf. The novel handles a theme that most people will be familiar with – a plague breaks out that kills almost the entire human race
and only a very small band of humans survive. I first encountered this idea in Stephen King’s “The Stand”, but Stewart’s take on the idea is much less mystical.

In this book, a young university student from San Francisco, Ish, heads for the hills one summer to carry out fieldwork. He is stung by a rattlesnake and spends the best part of a week locked up in a hut by himself, delirious from the venom. When he eventually emerges he finds that everyone he knew is now dead. The first half of the novel is quite slow-going as Ish explores the barren wasteland that was once the United States. He travels from San Francisco to New York and does not encounter more than three or four survivors of the plague. Eventually he returns to San Francisco where he slowly builds up a small group of family and friends, numbering seven or eight people. From this group a community begins to emerge.

I enjoyed this book because it attempts to discover what would actually happen if the world was struck with such a plague. All the post-plague events are based upon facts and Stewart accurately describes a world slowly coming apart with not enough people left to look after it. The domesticated herd animals die, water stops coming from taps, the Golden Gate bridge rusts and collapses in an earthquake, knowledge is lost as the libraries collapse and burn in freak accidents. This is not a romanticised or supernatural view of what might happen, and we see members of the small community dying from diseased like pneumonia that would not be deadly if the hospitals were still open, but in the post-plague world there is neither the knowledge nor the medicines to treat them.

All in all, an excellent book. My only complaint is that the first 100 or so pages before Ish decides to settle down can drag a little.


THE NIGHT’S DAWN TRILOGY – PETER F. HAMILTON

These are: The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, The Na
ked God (and A Second Chance at Eden)

For my final selection (thanks for sticking with me if you have got this far!), I have a trilogy of books set in the future interstellar society of the Confederation. This is a grouping centred on Earth in which humankind have populated 100 or so different star systems. Mankind itself has split into two groups, referred to as the Adamists and Edenists. The Edenists have embraced genetic technology – they breed their own biological and sentient spaceships and space-stations and have modified their genetic makeup to give themselves the ability to communicate mentally with each other and their vessels. The Adamists, in contrast, rely on technological implants to achieve the same ends, travel in traditional starships and outnumber the Edenists by quite a large margin.

However, the conflict is not between the Adamists and Edenists. Although distrustful of each other they manage to live in relative harmony. The story kicks off when a group of colonists arrive at a virgin planet. One of the colonists sets off into the woods to carry out a satanic ceremony and unwittingly unleashes a “reality dysfunction” – a link between the worlds of the living and the dead. Human spirits (ghosts, if you will) rush through the dysfunction and possess the colonists before heading out into space and endangering the whole of humankind.

The plot may sound a little odd, and I have to admit that the mixing of horror and sci-fi takes a little getting used to, but once you accept the basic premise you will be hooked. Each book in the trilogy is huge (nearly 1000 pages) and Hamilton manages to weave a dizzying number of plotlines together. The length of the books means that the universe he creates is detailed and intriguing, yet somehow the author manages to avoid writing for the sake of it and the books are never boring. My only gripe is that the ending is a little weak – although after 3000 pages of b
uild-up I think it would have been hard to end the trilogy in an entirely satisfactory manner.

For those of you who finish the trilogy and need another fix of the Confederation, there is also a collection of short stories charting the centuries leading up to the events in the trilogy entitled “A Second Chance at Eden”. It adds little to the actual trilogy, but it does give some information about the split between Adamists and Edenists and is an enjoyable read on its own. There is also a “Confederation Handbook” that details the events in the trilogy and I suppose would be useful background reading – but I don’t have this and have never read it, so can’t really comment.

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Well, that’s that I think. I was going to try to put these in some sort of order once I had finished, but I don’t actually think I could now. I hope I haven’t bored you too much, thanks for reading my rambling thoughts!

Why not go out and try a couple of these if you haven’t already? And don’t forget to let me know what you thought of them!

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