I’m A Sci-Fi Kinda Guy

One of the nice things about social media is that when we aren’t screaming obscenities and hurling imprecations at one another, it can spark some pretty interesting discussions.*

Recently a Thread poised the question of what historically were the most important books in the science fiction genre.

Understand that prior to Star Trek / Star Wars the professional science fiction community was quite small and everyone in it had either read every novel written in the genre prior to that or knew of the work through fanzines.  By the mid-1950s through the 1960s the field grew to the point where it became impossible for the average fan or pro to keep up with everything being published. 

Novels and short fiction prior to 1955 had tremendous cross-pollination effect regardless of literary merits. Everything listed below is included because it changed the field after it was published, with other writers imitating / emulating / responding to what these books did. 

Some truly bad books (looking at you, E.E. “Doc” Smith) wielded immense influence on the genre all the way through to Star Trek, Star Wars, and beyond.  Likewise, several extremely influential books that shaped everything that came after them have been rendered passe’ by the passage of time and changes in styles and tastes; I include these for their importance as influences, not necessarily as self-contained works.
While the Thread focused mainly on novels, short fiction made an equal / sometimes greater impact on the genre over the decades.  I won’t include individual short stories on this list but will cite specific anthologies by name.  Conversely, I’m including a few trilogies / sagas that need inclusion because of their influence as a whole, not as individual titles. 

While I’m listing the works by author, I’m also trying to arrange them in rough chronological order.  Wherever possible, links are to either public domain versions of the book or online summaries.

Shall we begin?

Mary Shelley
Frankenstein – The undisputed great-granddaddy of the genre, written by the undisputed great-grandmother of sci-fi writers.   

Jules Verne
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
From The Earth To The Moon / All Around The Moon
Note:  These are adequate translations, not the best translations.  Newer translations restore a lot of the wit and humor lost in earlier editions. 

H. G. Wells
The Time Machine 
The Island Of Doctor Moreau
The War Of The Worlds 

Edgar Rice Burroughs
A Princess Of Mars -- Burroughs wrote better interplanetary romances / sci-fi stories than this but this one is the template all the others derive from, as well as Flash Gordon and a host of other space opera adventurers.

E.E. “Doc” Smith
The Skylark Of Space (with Lee Hawkins Garby) – Badly written but truly groundbreaking space opera, setting the bar for everything in the sub-genre that followed.  There are four novels in this series with Skylark DuQuesne, the last in the series written 25+ years after the others, actually rising to the level of competence.
The Lensman Saga -- The ultimate space opera saga, setting the stage for Star Wars over 30 years later.  Better than the Skylark series, but lordie, still not good.
Triplanetary
First Lensman
Galactic Patrol
Grey Lensman
Second Stage Lensman
Children Of The Lens
Note: Fun fact — Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith had a straight up legit PhD in donut making!

Philip Francis Nowlan
Armageddon—2419 A.D. -- Inspiration for the Buck Rogers comic strip.  Not much of a novel but its indirect influence was felt for generations to come.
Note:  Until we landed on the moon, science fiction was oft referred to as “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff.” 

A. E. van Vogt
The Voyage Of The Space Beagle -- As in Darwin’s ship.  This anthology of linked stories provided much of the inspiration for Alien.
Slan 
The Weapon Shops Of Isher 
The World Of Null-A 
Note:  Unjustly overlooked today, van Vogt got science fiction pros and fans to start reading outside the box with a lot of philosophically challenging work.

Isaac Asimov
The Foundation trilogy – I find this trilogy as dull as dishwater but Asimov certainly got a lot of people reading and talking about his ideas, so this makes the final cut.
I, Robot – a linked anthology, not a proper novel.  Another popular book of its time rendered obsolete by reality.

Aldous Huxley
Brave New World – The first major significant work by someone outside the field.  It ages better than most of its contemporaries.

George Orwell
1984 (also as Nineteen-Eighty-Four) -- The second major significant work by someone outside the field. 

George R. Stewart
Earth Abides -- The third major significant work by someone outside the field.  Not the first post-apocalyptic pandemic story but certainly the best.  Science fiction fans of the era disliked it because it doesn’t end in a rah-rah-we saved-the-day climax but rather philosophical acceptance of the loss of civilization. 

Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged -- The fourth major significant work by someone outside the field.  They can’t all be winners, folks.  A deplorable mess of sociopathy but there’s no denying the influence it had on the genre.  

Alfred Bester
The Stars My Destination (UK title: Tyger!  Tyger!) – Arguably the wildest story on this list.  Highly recommended.
(Galaxy magazine serialization Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4)

Ray Bradbury
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
The Martian Chronicles — Linked stories, not a proper novel.
Fahrenheit 451 
Note:  Unlike most of his peers, Bradbury’s works age well.  Since we’re only looking at science fiction here, we won’t discuss his many fine fantasy / crime / mainstream fiction works.

Robert A. Heinlein
The Past Through Tomorrow (collection) – Most of Heinlein’s early fiction fit into a consistent future history he envisioned.  This gathers most of those stories together though later novels and stories fit in as well.
Have Spacesuit, Will Travel – Starts as juvenile Americana, ends as mind-blowing intergalactic space opera.
Starship Troopers – You may not like Heinlein’s politics, but he champions his beliefs well.
Citizen Of The Galaxy – If Charles Dickens wrote a galaxy-spanning space opera, this would be it.
Stranger In A Strange Land – During a period when he faced severe medical problems, Heinlein went a little wonky.  This is the result and it’s not like anything else he wrote.
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress – Back to classic form with an extremely well thought out and vastly entertaining story of a lunar colony’s fight for independence.

Philip K. Dick
The Man In The High Castle 
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? – The basis for Blade Runner.
Note:  It’s been said that Dick was the finest novelist ever to work in the science fiction field and that he wrote six of the best science fiction novels ever written but nobody can agree on which six!  These two are always finalists, however.

Walter M. Miller Jr.
A Canticle For Leibowitz -- Not a proper novel but three linked novellas.
“A Canticle For Liebowitz”
“And The Light Is Risen”
“The Last Canticle”
Note:  Miller was a tortured soul suffering from WWII related PTSD as well as depression.  He wrote relatively little though his short stories were popular and admired.  A Canticle For Leibowitz was his only novel-length work published in his lifetime, a story of hope and perseverance in the face of near universal loss.  

Anthony Boucher, ed.
A Treasury Of Great Science Fiction – One of the mainstays of science fiction, a collection kept in print for decades thanks to it being a premium introductory offer in Doubleday’s Science Fiction Book Club.  The two-volume sets contains four novels and numerous short stories, including two novels mentioned above.
Volume One (The Weapon Shops Of Isher by A. E. van Vogt among other stories and novels)
Volume Two (The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester among other stories and novels)

Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange – A morally complex and thoughtfully worked out look into the (then) near future.

Frank Herbert
Dune – Less science fiction and more science-fairy tale, Herbert creates a complex world / culture / ecology that harbors more secrets than it shares. 

Damon Knight, ed.
Orbit (original anthology series) – As is often the case, not the first to do a particular thing, but certainly the one to do it better than anyone else.

William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
Logan’s Run – Bill and George locked themselves in a Malibu motel room to blitz out this novel in 11 days in order to get Bill off the hook for back alimony, their only rule being to include every idea they came up with, no matter how insane. The first mainstream best seller sci-fi novel.

Harlan Ellison
The Essential Ellison: A 50-Year Retrospective Revised & Expanded (anthology)
Dangerous Visions (original anthology)
Again, Dangerous Visions (original anthology)
Note:  Harlan’s best early work fell outside the science fiction genre, hard hitting crime and contemporary fiction stories, but in 1965 he got his science fiction / fantasy mojo in gear and produced a series of incendiary short stories and novelettes. He also assembled the Dangerous Visions original anthologies, recruiting talented writers in and out of the genre to write (then) taboo breaking short stories no one else would publish.  Few writers ever challenged / changed the genre as he did.

Ursula K. Le Guin
The Left Hand Of Darkness 
The Dispossessed
Note:  Despite Mary Shelley being the great-grandmother of the genre, and despite there being a large number of female fans, science fiction could be just as sexist and patriarchal as mainstream publishing.  Le Guin’s best works challenged those presumptions and prevailed.

Barry M. Malzberg
Beyond Apollo
Herovit’s World
Note:  You have no idea how badly Malzberg pissed off the rest of the science fiction community back in the day, but he forced them to pay attention and respond to his work.

Michael Crichton
The Andromeda Strain – Arguably the first science fiction novel written as a science fiction novel with a mainstream audience in mind. 

William Gibson
Neuromancer – As is often the case, not the first example of an examination of what the digital world would bring, but the first to ring science fiction’s bell and ring it hard.

Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale – Male science fiction writers like their dystopias big and noisy, Atwood showed it’s going to be much quieter than that.

In closing, again I state this represents the key influencers in the field of science fiction prior to Star Trek / Star Wars, not necessarily the best science fiction has to offer.

There’s any number of good books I omit because despite their literary quality and reader enjoyability, they added nothing new to the equation; conversely several listed above are semi-literate dreck but did they ever make a long lasting impact on the field.

Why end it where I did?  Because by the time Star Trek arrived in 1966, mainstream audiences were primed to accept science fiction as just another genre, not a self contained literary ghetto of its own.

Prior to the 1950s, there were no movies mainstream audiences recognized as “science fiction.”  There were plenty of sci-fi serials and the occasional major production like Metropolis or Things To Come but not a clearly defined genre as with Westerns or musicals or mysteries.

The 1950s changed that, with science fiction becoming a marketable genre to mainstream audiences despite the reins of creativity still being held in relatively few insider hands.

It wasn’t the writing that changed that perception but rather things outside the science fiction universe such as rockets, guided missiles, and atomic bombs being used in WWII, television exploding on the scene in the post-war world, and the flying saucer hysteria that captured the imagination of  millions of non-sci-fi readers in a way no pulp magazine or well written literary novel could.

Star Trek took down the tollbooth, but Star Wars opened the floodgate, and after that the genre was no longer guided by a clique of devotees but was democratically thrown open to all who wanted to participate.

There’s too much being done in too many different areas for any one work to have the same impact as older stories once did.

In one sense, good; let all who wish to participate do so in any shape / manner / form they envision.

In another, we’re losing something that bound us together as a community.

In any case, it’s been one helluva ride.

© Buzz Dixon

*  It also gives me a lot of portable content I can use to pad out this blog.  (Relax, everything here is based on my input; I’m not pirating anyone else’s list.)