bobquasit | Recommended Reading

To my amazement (although I shouldn't have been surprised) someone tonight asked for reading suggestions on Advicenators. And not just any kind of reading, but science fiction and fantasy particularly.

It's a miracle that my head didn't literally explode with possibilities.

But I collected myself and spewed out the following list:

SF/genre fiction:
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
The Last Unicorn - Peter S. Beagle
The Bridge of Birds - Barry Hughart
The Foundation series (just the first three books) - Isaac Asimov
The Instrumentality of Mankind (short story collection) - Cordwainer Smith
Norstrila - Cordwainer Smith
Ringworld - Larry Niven
The City and the Stars - Arthur C. Clarke
Starship Troopers - Robert A. Heinlein
The Amber series - Roger Zelazny
Cities in Flight - James Blish
The Devil's Day - James Blish
Dune - Frank Herbert (the other Dune books are good - although all of them are terribly complicated. Avoid ANYTHING written by his son - Brian Herbet he's done some "Dune" books - and they're beyond bad)
anything by Fredric Brown
The Vlad Talos series by Steven Brust (but make sure to read them in order)
Lord Valentine's Castle - Robert Silverberg
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame - volume 1 (probably the best collection of classic short stories available)
The Dorsai series - Gordon R. Dickson
The Dragon and the George - Gordon R. Dickson
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat - Harry Harrison
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers - Harry Harrison
Time and Again - Jack Finney
The God Box - Barry Longyear
Superstoe - William Borden

I also quite like almost anything by Lawrence Watt-Evans, Robert Sheckley (particularly his short stories), Ron Goulart, David Brin, Lyndon Hardy, Anthony Boucher, Michael Moorcock, James White, and Lord Dunsany.

Some non-genre books you might enjoy (I do):
Kim - Ridyard Kipling
Shogun - James Clavell
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
The Catcher In the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Almost anything by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (you might want to start with Welcome to the Monkey House)

I know as soon as I'm done with this I'm going to think of 20 other books and authors I should have included, and I'm going to kick myself.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oddly, some people think Kurt Vonnegut is science fiction. Well, my ninth grade English teacher did.

Kiralee

I know. In fact, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle made a big deal out of Vonnegut's supposed "lying" about being a science fiction writer in their Inferno. But since he himself prefers not to be considered that way, and since the majority of his later work is, in my opinion, not science fiction, I - oh, who am I kidding? I just wanted to sound less geeky by expanding my non-genre list. :D

I like to talk about things that are both accepted as literature, and are clearly genre works. And to point that out.

So, Vonnegut does belong in the non-genre list, because he's respected that way. Some of his books also belong on the genre list... although, since I've only read one, I'll let you decide which ones.

My opinion is, so he uses science fiction tropes as literary devices and not as "real" things. He still uses them... and every science fiction writer is using them as a literary device on one level or another.

And I get so fed up with the idea the just because something is good (that is, respected by High-Brow culture) it can't be a genre work.

Kiralee

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