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- 1. J. R. R. Tolkien. The
Lord of the Rings
- In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths,
and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with
his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring
was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth,
it remained lost to him. The Lord of the Rings tells of the great
quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf
the Wizard, Merry, Pippin, and Sam, Gimli the Dwarf, Legolas the
Elf, Boromir of Gondor, and a tall, mysterious stranger called
Strider.
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- 2. Isaac Asimov. The
Foundation Trilogy
- Tells the futuristic story of galactic history in the time
between the two empires.
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- 3. Frank Herbert. Dune
- Set on the
desert planet Arrakis begins the story of a great family's plan
to bring to fruition an unattainable dream.
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- 4. Robert A. Heinlein. Stranger
in a Strange Land
- A Mars-born
earthling arrives on this planet for the first time as an adult,
and the sensation he creates teaches Earth some unforgettable
lessons.
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- 5. Ursula K. Le Guin. A
Wizard of Earthsea
- Ged was the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, but once he
was called Sparrowhawk, a reckless youth, hungry for power and
knowledge, who tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible
shadow upon the world.
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- 6. William Gibson. Neuromancer
- Case was the
best interface cowboy who ever ran in earth's computer matrix.
Then he doublecrossed the wrong people...
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- 7. Arthur C. Clarke. Childhood's
End
- Written in the early 1950s, this acclaimed novel of The Overlords
and their reign on Earth established Clarke as a master science
fiction writer.
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- 8. Philip K. Dick. Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Rick Deckard
hunts androids who are hiding among humans living in the aftermath
of a nuclear holocaust.
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- 9. Marion Zimmer Bradley. The
Mists of Avalon
- Putting a new twist on the Arthurian legends, this beloved
book tells the epic story of the women behind the rise and fall
of King Arthur.
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- 10. Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit
451
- Fahrenheit
451 is the temperature at which book paper burns. Fahrenheit 451
is a short novel set in the (perhaps near) future when "firemen"
burn books forbidden by the totalitarian "brave new world" regime.
The hero, according to Mr. Bradbury, is "a book burner who suddenly
discovers that books are flesh and blood ideas and cry out silently
when put to the torch".
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- 11. Gene Wolfe. The Book of the New Sun
- Shadow
& Claw | Sword
& Citadel
- The saga centers around an orphan whose lifelong quest transforms
him from ruthless monster to savior of a world.
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- 12. Walter M. Miller Jr. A
Canticle for Leibowitz
-
In
the Utah desert, Brother Francis of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz
has made a miraculous discovery: the relics of the martyr Isaac
Leibowitz himself, including the blessed blueprint and the sacred
shopping list. They may provide a bright ray of hope in a terrifying
age of darkness, a time of ignorance and genetic monsters that
are the unholy aftermath of the Flame Deluge. But as the spellbinding
mystery at the core of this extraordinary novel unfolds, it
is the search itself--for meaning, for truth, for love--that
offers hope to a humanity teetering on the edge of an abyss.
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- 13. Isaac Asimov. The
Caves of Steel
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- 14. Wilmar Shiras. Children of the Atom
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- 15. James Blish. Cities
in Flight
- Originally published as four volumes nearly fifty years ago,
Cities in Flight brings together the famed "Okie novels" of science
fiction master James Blish. Named after the migrant workers of
America's Dust Bowl, these novels convey Blish's "history of the
future," a brilliant and bleak look at a world where cities roam
the Galaxy looking for work and a sustainable way of life.
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- 16. Terry Pratchett. The
Colour of Magic
- The Colour of Magic the failed wizard Rincewind burst upon
the world and hasn't stopped running since.
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- 17. Harlan Ellison. Dangerous Visions
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- 18. Harlan Ellison. Deathbird
Stories
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- 19. Alfred Bester. The Demolished Man
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- 20. Samuel R. Delany. Dhalgren
- Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States.
Something has happened there.... The population has fled. Madmen
and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the
cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man
-- poet, lover, and adventurer -- known only as the Kid. Tackling
questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary
marvel and a groundbreaking work of American magical realism.
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- 21. Anne McCaffrey. Dragonflight
- To the nobles who live in Benden Weyr, Lessa is nothing but
a ragged kitchen girl. Now the time has come for Lessa to take
back her stolen birthright. But everything changes when she meets
a queen dragon. The bond they share will protect them when, for
the first time in centuries, Lessa's world is threatened by Thread,
which falls like rain and destroys everything it touches. Dragons
and their Riders once protected the planet from Thread, but there
are very few of them left these days. Now brave Lessa must risk
her life, and the life of her beloved dragon, to save her beautiful
world.
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- 22. Orson Scott Card. Ender's
Game
- Ender's Game
is the story of Ender Wiggin, a boy genetically engineered to
be a superior military mind, and bred to win Earth's long war
with an alien insectoid race by completely destroying their homeworld.
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- 23. Stephen R. Donaldson. The
First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever
- He called himself Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever because he
dared not believe in the strange alternate world in which he suddenly
found himself. Yet he was tempted to believe, to fight for the
Land, to be the reincarnation of its greatest hero....
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- 24. Joe Haldeman. The
Forever War
- Private William
Mandella is a hero in spite of himself -- a reluctant conscript
drafted into an elite military unit, and propelled through space
and time to fight in a distant thousand-year conflict. Although
he never wanted to go to war, he performs his duties without rancor.
The true test will come when he returns to Earth. While he's
been aging months, centuries have passed on Earth.
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- 25. Frederik Pohl. Gateway
- The first
book of the Heechee saga. Gateway opens on all the wealth of the
Universe--and on reaches of unimaginable horror. The humans who
rode the alien Heechee spacecraft stored on the planetoid couldn't
know whether the trip would make them millionaires or corpses!
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- 26. J.K. Rowling. Harry
Potter and the Philosopher's (Sorcerer's) Stone
- Rescued from the outrageous neglect of his aunt and uncle,
a young boy with a great destiny proves his worth while attending
Hogwarts School for Wizards and Witches.
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- 27. Douglas Adams. The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Just before the Earth is demolished, Arthur Dent is plucked
off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect.
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- 28. Richard Matheson. I Am Legend
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- 29. Anne Rice. Interview
with the Vampire
- We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he
speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically
charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the
living dead.
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- 30. Ursula K. Le Guin. The
Left Hand of Darkness
- The story
of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants
can change their gender.
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- 31. John Crowley. Little,
Big
- Little, Big tells the epic story of Smoky Barnable -- an anonymous
young man who meets and falls in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater,
and goes to live with her in Edgewood, a place not found on any
map. In an impossible mansion full of her relatives, who all seem
to have ties to another world not far away, Smoky fathers a family
and tries to learn what tale he has found himself in -- and how
it is to end.
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- 32. Roger Zelazny. Lord
of Light
- Long after
the death of Earth, a band of men on a colony planet has gained
control of technology and has given itself immortality. There
is only one who dares oppose them: Mahasamatman, Binder of Demons
and Lord of Light.
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- 33. Philip K. Dick. The
Man in the High Castle
- It's America
in 1962--where slavery is legal and the few surviving Jews hide
anxiously under assumed names. All because some twenty years earlier
America lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany
and Japan.
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- 34. Hal Clement. Mission of Gravity
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- 35. Theodore Sturgeon. More
Than Human
- A group of remarkable social outcasts band together for survival
and discover their combined powers renders them superhuman.
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- 36. Cordwainer Smith. The Rediscovery of Man
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- 37. Nevil Shute. On
the Beach
- A novel about the survivors of an atomic war, who face an inevitable
end as radiation poisoning moves toward Australia from the North.
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- 38. Arthur C. Clarke. Rendezvous
with Rama
- When a space
probe confirms that the celestial object, that astronomers dubbed
Rama, is an interstellar space craft, Earth prepares for it's
first encounter with alien intelligence.
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- 39. Larry Niven. Ringworld
- A new place
is being built, a world of huge dimensions, encompassing millions
of miles, stronger than any planet before it. There is gravity,
and with high walls and its proximity to the sun, a livable new
planet that is three million times the area of the Earth can be
formed. We can start again!
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- 40. Algis J. Budrys. Rogue Moon
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- 41. J. R. R. Tolkien. The
Silmarillion
- The story of the creation of the world that set the stage for
The
Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings .
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- 42. Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five
- Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's
odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured
lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
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- 43. Neal Stephenson. Snow
Crash
- In the not-too-distant future, the Mafia controls pizza delivery,
the United States is revealed to be a tangled web of corporate-franchise
city states, and the Internet is all-powerful. In this mind-altering
21st-century adventure, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior in the metaverse
and helps a friend who freaks out on a new designer drug called
Snow Crash.
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- 44. John Brunner. Stand on Zanzibar
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- 45. Alfred Bester. The
Stars My Destination
- In this pulse-quickening novel, Alfred Bester imagines a future
in which people "jaunte" a thousand miles with a single thought,
where the rich barricade themselves in labyrinths and protect
themselves with radioactive hit men--and where an inarticulate
outcast is the most valuable and dangerous man alive.
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- 46. Robert A. Heinlein. Starship
Troopers
- A recruit
of the future goes through the toughest boot camp in the universe--and
into battle with the Terran Mobile Infantry against mankind's
most frightening enemy.
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- 47. Michael Moorcock. Stormbringer
- There was a time when great movement fell upon the earth and
above it, when the destiny of men and gods was hammered out upon
the forge of fate, when monstrous wars were brewed and mighty
deeds were designed. Greatest of these heroes was a doom-driven
adventurer who bore a runeblade that he loathed.
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- 48. Terry Brooks. The
Sword of Shannara
- Here are strange lands, valiant friends, awesome monsters,
and ultimate evil.
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- 49. Gregory Benford.
Timescape
- In the year 1998, a group of scientists works desperatey to
communicate with the scientists of 1962, warning of an ecological
disaster that will destroy the oceans in the future--if it is
not averted in the past.
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- 50. Philip Jose Farmer. To
Your Scattered Bodies Go
- Over the course
of this landmark five-book series, a remarkable cross-section
of compatriots, including Sir Richard Francis Burton, Mark Twain,
and Jack London, sets out to confront humankind's mysterious benefactors
and learn the truth, innocent or evil, about the astonishing and
legendary Riverworld.
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