100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

I stumbed across the 100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels (arch) and thought it would be fun to se how I compare. My own list is here. Links are to any that I've reviewed, which number... 17. Crass omissions from their list: Hobbit, LoTR, Crowley: the Deep, Engine Summer, Beasts; Icehenge; White Queen; Jack Vance; Aldiss, and more.

1. Dune by Frank Herbert

2. Foundation by Isaac Asimov

3. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - only technically scifi

4. 1984 by George Orwell - ditto

5. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells - way too high

6. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - read as a teenager

7. Neuromancer by William Gibson

8. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin - read years ago; I haven't felt the urge to re-read it; perhaps I should; but Earthsea is her best

9. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick - again, read years ago

10. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury - and again; elegaic, but I dount they rank this high

11. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood - never read

12. Hyperion by Dan Simmons - quite enjoyed this but this is too high

13. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson - decent

14. The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin - tosh

15. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers - never read

16. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - years ago, seems high though

17. Kindred by Octavia E. Butler - never read

18. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke - its OK

19. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. - decent

20. I, Robot by Isaac Asimov - too high

21. Contact by Carl Sagan - never read

22. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by H.G. Wells - I think I read this as a teenager; I think it is likely tosh but don't really remember

23. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes - I think I read this as a short story or novella

24. The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons - can't remember

25. The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin - again, this is the wrong one. Her politics isn't really great; her adventures were better

26. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer - never read

27. World War Z by Max Brooks - never read

28. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville - never read

29. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein - should be higher

30. Solaris by Stanisław Lem - read as a teenager, I recall this as boring and pointless

31. Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky - never read

32. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein - I'd put this higher

33. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman - and this

34. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams - not really scifi

35. Ringworld by Larry Niven - terrible

36. Binti by Nnedi Okorafor - never read

37. Blindsight by Peter Watts - meh

38. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells - I recall the film

39. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - as-a-teenager; decent

40. Anathem by Neal Stephenson - too low

41. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi - never read

42. The Power by Naomi Alderman - never read

43. City by Clifford D. Simak - never read

44. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton - as-a-teenager; can't recall

45. Shards of Honour by Lois McMaster Bujold - never read

46. Gateway by Frederik Pohl - as-a-teenager; decent

47. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - never read

48. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - never read

49. Embassytown by China Miéville - I think I read this after M gave it to me for Christmas years back. It was OK, but didn't inspire me to read others-by

50. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler - never read

51. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick - as-a-teenager; decent, should be higher

52. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan - read, quite liked; see-also Broken Angels

53. Spin by Robert Charles Wilson - never read

54. The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal - never read

55. Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds - yup, liked this

56. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe - should be much higher

57. Light by M. John Harrison - no

58. Wool by Hugh Howey - never read

59. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie - higher

60. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson - decent

61. Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - terrible; DNF

62. Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - never read

63. Red Rising by Pierce Brown - never read

64. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell - never read

65. Under the Skin by Michel Faber - never read

66. A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge - higher

67. Morning Star by Pierce Brown - never read

68. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - I think I read 1 and 2 when D did, on the holiday to Spain

69. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami - never read

70. Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill - never read

71. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham - read-as-a-teenager; can't recall

72. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart - read years ago, not that wonderful

73. Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky - never read

74. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - never read

75. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - never read

76. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell - never read

77. Eon by Greg Bear - meh

78. Diaspora by Greg Egan - never read

79. The Postman by David Brin - never read

80. We by Yevgeny Zamyatin - never read

81. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi - quite liked

82. The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard - read-as-a-teenager; should read again I think

83. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham - ditto

84. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro - never read

85. Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - meh

86. The Night Side of the Sun by David Wingrove - never read

87. Pavane by Keith Roberts - higher

88. The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi - never read

89. The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson - never read

90. To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis - never read

91. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card

92. A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick - read-as-a-teenager; can't recall

93. Dark Matter by Blake Crouch - never read

94. Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey - kinda generic potboilerish, if I recall correctly

95. The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins - never read

96. Recursion by Blake Crouch - never read

97. The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross - never read

98. The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey - never read

99. Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer - never read

100. The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin - never read

Book review: Travel Light

By Naomi Mitchison. We have owned this - or perhaps M has owned this - for time out of mind; and it is possible I've read it before; it is eerily familiar in parts. It is... whimsy; a jeu d'esprit; or so I say. Perhaps I missed anything deeper.

Halla as a baby is rescued from the court by her nurse-turned-bear, stays with the bears for a while, then as winter and hibernation approaches is transferred to the dragons, with whom she grows up. Slowly - later on, towards the end, it is revealed that the stoary has taken many generations and perhaps hundreds of years - men grow stronger and dragons more precarious; her protector is killed, and following a chat with the All-Father she heads off towards Midgard-aka-Byzantium, travelling light, forsaking the golden ornaments that her dragon-self loves. In Byzantium her ability to talk to animals allows her to predict the chariot races, earning money for her friends and an audience with the Emperor, and eventually the replacement of an Evil Governor that her friends had come to petition for. Returning, the result is less rosy than hoped, and she ends up heading north to Holmgard, where she abandons the world of men for the Valkyries.

So, a nice story nicely told of higher than usual literary quality. There are digs at heroes and their antics along the way, and men as a sex don't get a good book. Is there a point? Not a clearly defined one and perhaps it is all the better for that; the point is the look-n-feel.

Book review: The Twilight of Briareus

By Richard Cowper, aka John Middleton Murry. I like this one; it is from my childhood. Wiki will tell you about it; and also that there is no star or constellation called Briareus.

The tone is "subtle, lyrical and moving" which is kinda fair I think; there's a sort of eerie tone not dissimilar to some of the faerie parts of Pavane. The story, read through from the start without foreknowledge, mostly works. Here's an enthusiastic Goodreads review with which I largely agree; or this one.

Reading it again but with foreknowledge, and as an adult, the gaps and oddities are more obvious. Quite what the "newcomers" want of us, quite what they are offering that is worth a risk of extinction, really isn't clear. Quite how our bodies have decided to shutdown reproduction, quite how our old brains have recognised something that our new brains have not, ditto. But never mind; one can still glide over these improbabilities. The ending jars; Calvin kills himself for no obvious reason, other than to fulfil some unclearly expressed prophecy; I don't like prophecy.

A consequence of the supernova is a shutdown of the gulf stream, leading to England becoming snowbound. That's a nice part of the story - it gives him a ready isolated environment for his characters - and isn't particularly implausible.

Book review: The Neutral Stars

By Morgan and Kippax, authors of "Seed of Stars". This one is #3 (SoS was #2) and the theme of Earth-space-colonies-menaced-by-aliens continues, as does the theme of harmful mutation. The book itself is a bit disjointed, and I think doesn't work as well as SoS; to say why requires spoilers, which I'll provide, since the chances of you finding this slim tome, let alone reading it, are negligible. Goodreads isn't impressed.

The action centers around <planet>, which has been colonised and run as a great success by the mighty, and thus inevitably in this sort of book evil or at best amoral <corporation>. A fish biologist, of all people, sent out to investigate, realises that the wonderful harvests of ever-increasing salmon have been accompanied by a strong and - utterly implausibly - unnoticed dimunition in lifespace of the millions of human colonists. How they are supposed to have not noticed is beyond me, never mind, the response is that the <corporation> realises that the <bureaucrats> will order the colony abandoned. So, in order to avoid embarrassment they decide to nuke the colony and wipe out the survivors, and trust that everyone will assume it is the naughty aliens.

Meanwhile, a second plot - which doesn't get resolved in the book - has people looking for a Warp Drive, since the aliens clearly have one. Although why they don't just look for a faster FTL drive I'm not sure, since they already have one FTL drive.

In the end - which is pretty slow of them, I guessed much earlier - everyone guesses that it wasn't the naughty aliens, since last time they just used a <space ray> that turned the entire planet to slag, so why would they descend to nukes this time? And anyway one of the nukes didn't go off, and was labelled "I am a human nuke" as a clue.

In the end - and I give the book some credit, it isn't clear in advance how it was going to end, with the <corporation> evil but triumphant, or destroyed, or what - the <corporation>'s bosses daughter kills the <evil CEO> and life continues much as before. Except for the dead folk, obvs.

Side note: although the mighty Venturer Twelve and friends are nominally there to protect Earth and the colonies, it becomes clear - more in #2 than here, though here by default - that they are actually fuck all use; the only aliens they meet are so powerful that the Earth ships and weapons are useless.

Book review: Tales of Pirx the Pilot

Tales of Pirx the Pilot (Polish: Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie) is a science fiction stories collection by Polish author Stanisław Lem, about a spaceship pilot named Pirx, says wiki.

They are... of a type. Kinda soviet-ish; but also of the naive scifi era. When spaceships were sent out "on patrol" - why would you do that? When space had sectors. And when displays were cathode ray.

They also feel a bit tame. As though Lem wasn't really sure what he was allowed to do with the new medium, and felt obliged to not stray to far from classical ideas. The prose is often of decent quality rather than pulp rubbish, but the ideas perhaps less so.

For example the last one is something of a ghost story, transmogrified: assigned to an old refurbed ship, Pirx discovers the reactor being maintained by an old robot who is revealed to have survived the crash years ago that killed all the previous crew, slowly. For no obvious reason it starts tapping out in morse code transcripts of the crash. This unnerves Pirx who ends up rather thoughtlessly recommending scrapping the robot, thereby removing the unsettling from his life and settling for the known.

This Goodreads review is a little harsh - I would be kinder - but is substantially correct.

New Blue Montane Coat and Rab Trousers

Ellis Brigham in the Lion Yard are having a "refit sale" so I got this coat for half of its std £250; and the trousers for half their std £90. The coat weights 390 g, 110 more than my previous Rab Orange at 280 g. It is a Cetus (not the Lite); arch; officially 395 g but I see I have a "small" (accidentally; it was on a L coathanger and I failed to check. Still, it seems to fit, including over a down jacket).

What sold me on the coat was the pockets; the orange Rab only has one, and it is high. This means that when walking I can't put my hands in my pockets; or, I have to lift up the coat and put my hands in the pockets of whatever is underneath. Either is annoying, and I readily get cold hands. The new coat is slightly (but only slightly) stiffer material - which I think I only notice because the Rab is so nice and slinky. The "true mountaineering style" is high pockets so the harness doesn't get in the way, but well: I spend more time walking than with harness; and quite often put the coat over the harness anyway.

The new trousers are the same model as the previous, except they are in a women's make, which seems to mean a smaller waist. I think that's OK; for £45 it was worth an experiment. The old trous have a minor hole in one knee, as tends to happen.

Refractive lens replacement surgery

After Scotland, I finally decided that I cared enough to look at laser eye surgery. The problem is rain-on-glasses; on the summit plateau of Ben Nevis, I could barely see anything, and white snow and white cloud makes it hard to see what you can't see. This has obvious implications for safety. After some research-aka-googling, I went to talk to Optical Express, who told me I would get Refractive lens replacement surgery not lasering. This is because... natural lenses tend to start going around sixty or whenever; I forget the exact details doubtless you can find them if you care. Getting tested takes an hour and a half and involves about eight different machines, and ends with what is doubtless intended to be a reassuring video narrated by what looks like a prosperous farmer in a nice three-piece tweed suit, but is actually their CEO. Mostly, they are trying to reassure you that the chances of them miss-slicing up your eyeballs are small.

Lens replacement is more expensive; I was quoted and accepted £9590 for both. Trying to scout around for comparison is tricky, since people are shy about revealing prices. I decided to wing it and not go for two or three quotes.

The promise is that I won't need glasses afterwards. They are a touch vague about exactly how much I won't need them, but I'm reasonably confident they'll do as well as anyone, so I'm just going to suck it and see.

I thought about it for a week and could see no reason not to proceed so I did, booking my appoinment for early-April and handing over my £1k deposit. Naturally there is financing available, but I avoided that. Now I wait, having paid my £8590 balance (actually £8690, because they mistakenly added in a £100 price increase, but they have promised me the £100 back).

2026/3/31: I had my I had my videophone (Teams) chat with my eye surgeon today. All well, he answered my questions (mostly: what is the delay post-op about? Ans: mostly, letting a non-symmetrical lens settle in, so that any shocks won’t cause it to rotate). He did say they weren’t certain of getting my lenses in on time, but we’ll see (geddit?).