Skip to main content

My Hall of Shame

 


I am a science fiction reader. I read lots of other things too, but science fiction is my genre of choice. I consider myself extremely well read in science fiction. I have read the old masters like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Mary Shelley, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jules Verne, and the newer masters like William Gibson, Ann Leckie, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Simmons, N. K. Jemisin, John Scalzi, Cixin Liu. And many, many more. But . . .

There are some important works of Science fiction that I have not read (Well, they are supposed to be important, but since I haven’t read them, I just have to go with my gut). This is my list of shame. This is your chance to say, “you call yourself a science fiction fan and you haven’t even read _________” So, here is my Hall of shame. The list of books that all worthy science fiction afficionados should have read by this point in their life.

 

Contact – Carl Sagan

A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle

Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keys

Children of Men – P D James

The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

Jurassic Park – Michael Crichton

Okay, in this first group of seven, I have seen the movies made from them. I know that doesn’t count. Of course, it doesn’t count! Books are always a completely different experience than movies. So, watching the movie in no way removes it from my list. But it has somewhat reduced my imperative to read them.  The list continues:

A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet – Becky Chambers

Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel

Children of Time – Adrian Tchaikovsky

Snow Crash – Neal Stephanson

The Stars my Destination – Alfred Bester

The Sparrow – Mary Doria Russell

More than Human – Theodore Sturgeon

Binti – Nnedi Okorafor

Nova – Samuel R. Delany

Mona Lisa Overdrive – William Gibson

The Rise of Endymion – Dan Simmons

This particular list will be getting shorter because I have started to read Children of Time and have purchased the Becky Chambers series.

The list of books that every science fiction fan should read is as subjective as any other list of what is good and what is not. Since you don’t know what I have read and what I have not, you will just have to take my word for it and accept that this is my list of the books I should have read. You would have a different list.

What’s in your hall of shame?

Star Liner

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Second Wind

  You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running.   In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, wh...
1 comment
Read more

The Outsider

  I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up...
1 comment
Read more

A Child of the . . .

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...
Post a Comment
Read more