Here’s my top ten list of science fiction and fantasy books I want you to read. I don’t claim they’re the best, but they meet criteria such as: I’ve read them, they touched by mind in some cool way, which might be another way of saying they’re weird.
I’ve included only stand-alone works, but part of that is that no volume in a series quite made my list.
1. The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin.
This is one of the books that blew my away as a teenager. Then, after I’d been at least three different people and gotten back into spec-fic, I read it again, and … wow!
Like, after I wrote a gender questioning novel, I read Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness to compare notes, and I didn’t get what all the hype was about. But The Dispossessed … hey, it’s not just that I’m an anarchist. This novel hits all the notes, and I found myself trusting the author to be the dictator of my anarchist utopia.
2. Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
I was into Zelazny aged 15-20 because my friends were: from my intellectual neighbors my age growing up, all the way to my stoner friends in college. The Amber novels, hey, some psychedelic nonsense, but not bad! His lesser works, well, I read one in early middle-age and thought, maybe adult me doesn’t like him no more?
But Lord of Light stands out, the poor author perhaps a tool of forces greater than himself.
The Star of India bring survivors of the end of Earth to a new planet, where the elite pose as the Hindu pantheon, and an amoral rebel poses as the Buddha to overthrow them, but all fall victim to science fiction,
If I didn’t have Lord of Light here, I’d have suggested Zalazny’s Jack of Shadows.
3. The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
When I hear or read about Octavia Butler in general or The Parable of the Sower in particular, she always sounds like the most conscious, multicultural, and well, “woke” writer of all time. While I’m fine with all that, one of the joys of reading her work is she’s more interesting than that, harder to define.
The first half of the book traces the painful collapse of society. But the immediate problem isn’t jack-booted thugs, it’s gangs of drug-crazed bandits. It’s a society that’s lost it’s sense of itself. The powers-that-be are, rather than fascist fanatics, indifferent and oblivious. The heroes are working class families trying to survive a mess they and other decent people didn’t create.
4. Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
Nothing comes close.
Before I go on: a midwestern city is abandoned because of a catastrophic event. The event is mysterious both because it is not understood and the author isn’t interested in describing it. Where two million once lived, there are now a few thousand, living without conventional government and infrastructure.
The introduction (in the edition I read) emphasizes this as product of the counterculture. Yes! When I first started it in 1986 (it’s like 800 pages), I didn’t get it, but in 2019, after decades in countercultural spaces, ‘twas obvious:
There’s a band of pacifist anarchist-hippies who manage free food and other basic social stuff. What passes for a public safety is a morally ambiguous street gang. A tavern serves all-comers indefinitely, including such randoms as an actual astronaut who’s been to the moon, in a city where money has no value. Absurd but serious, neither utopian or dystopian, this place is refreshing.
And poetic, but not as poetic as …
5. To Challenge Chaos by Brian M. Stableford
I found this gem in the pulp section of some forgotten bookstore. The hero must goes to the planet Chaos X: half of which is in our spacetime and the other half in Ultra, a medium not only for interstellar travel but also where the usual rules of mortality and physics and reason don’t exist.
It’s the weirdest book I’ve read (and there’s some competition). Though the rules of Chaos change every page, somehow I never lost the flow. Part of that is how poetic—unpretentiously and still prose—it is.
6. The Heroesby Joe Abercrombie
Someone in the Erotic Reading Circle told me that, as someone who writes fantasy in modern-ish language, I should see how Jor Abercrombie does it, starting with The Blade Itself. It was okay, basically a wizard, a dwarf/elf, a warrior … with some healthy snark, but I wasn’t captivated. But later, it came up when I was trying to read “military” fantasy—I read it and my mind be blown.
It has the anti-war irony of The Forever War, but is also grounded in the complex world building of Abercrombie’s earlier work (it’s in the same world as The Blade Itself and its sequels). And … his wit is transformed, from humorous parody of tropes to painful swipes of the stupidity of war—his absurdistic fantasy battlefield evokes the sadness of Terran world wars.
Heck, it’s also a cruel jab at humanity. The pragmatic hero who wants peace dooms all, especially himself. The “Casualties” chapter, in which each scene is in the POV who killed the POV character of the last scene, creates a sense of delightful pointlessness that makes we wonder why am I typing this, or doing anything.
7. Ape and Essenceby Aldous Huxley
You likely know Huxley from Brave New World, his defining debut in dystopia. But he wrote stories and novels for decades. In the years before his classic his fiction revolved around the trauma of British young men after World War I, combined with an existential cynicism all his own. His later work got cosmic, in a beautiful way I dare say, considering his utopian standard Island and his mescaline essay, The Doors of Perception.
His weirdest work is my favorite, Ape and Essence. A thin Hollywood frame story connects the tale to the atrocities of World War II, and the main tract is a screenplay. New Zealand survives the neclear-etc. cataclysm mostly okay, and a team from there arrives in what was Los Angeles where satanic mutants have taken over.
It’s Huxley: the stranded proper New Zealand white guy discusses philosophy with the mutant satanist leader (they use the horn-hand sign even though this was written in 1948 long before heavy metal) for like forty pages. You need this.
8.Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury
Decades later, Ray Bradbury is still the undisputed master of sappy, humanistic sci-fi and fantasy. And we love him for it, and for the influence this mushiness has left on speculative fiction forever. But Fahrenheit 451 is different, as much as it’s different from the image of the book in mainstream culture: bleeding-heart librarians trying to made sure you read something.
It’s a subversive anti-war novel in the vein of 1984, but with Bradbury’s folksy Twilight Zone warmth. The book-burning firemen aren’t the real story, more a symbol of it. It’s not bookworm snooty, those who dare to think in this regime are those who dare to care. It is so relevant in the current era of artificial stupidity and exploding fishing boats.
9. Briefing for a Descent into Hellby Doris Lessing
Lessing is a prolific Nobel Prize winner. Her books span her struggle to break her mind out of traditional Communism (Stalinism), a sci-fi fantasy series about alien angels managing human history, journalism embedded with the Afghan Mujahidin in the 1980s, and a bunch of novels spanning the space between speculative and literary.
I started her work when I stumbled across a copy of Briefing for a Descent into Hell, and I recommend you start there too; it’s still my favorite. A man who cannot take care of himself nor communicate has been placed in a mental hospital where an sketchy experimental therapy is administered to him, while he experiences fantasies (or memories) of a perilous solo sail on treacherous seas which leads to travel across the solar system.
It gets weirder and more poignant from there.
10. Le Morte D’Arthur by Thomas Mallory
If you’re gonna read whatever I tell you to, I want you to read this. I read it when I was fifteen.
Published in 1485, it’s a compilation of all the Arthuriana written and spoken up to that point. Pretty much everything written after it in the Arthurian milieu after it uses it as the primary source.
It’s jumbled, so overall plot and some of it is plotless even as short story. I saw the same word spelled three different ways in one page! Mallory said somewhere that wanted to promote knightly virtues, but like with Greek myths, good and evil as we know them don’t seem to apply: it’s pre-enlightenment. There are no ideals, just swords and gashes.
It’s good to see the awesome raw sludge from which beautiful fantasy has somehow been spun.