[reading] Fantasy/SF Masterworks

[wispfox]

Not that I don't already have bunches of books to read... but!

I'm curious as to how many of y'all have read and suggest reading the books from the Fantasy and Science Fiction Masterworks series, which ones, and why.


I've already read:

Fantasy Masterworks #6 and 19 (which is the reason I even know about these - it consumed my brain until I finished it)

SF Masterworks HCs #1, 2, 6, 7, 8. SCs #7, 24, 25 (the short story, not the book), and 44.


I strongly recommend both of the Fantasy ones I've read (Riddle Master & Amber series - although the first bunch of Amber books was better than the second bunch) - they were both fascinating.

SF HC #6 (Childhood's End) tends to haunt my brain, and I still haven't decided if it's in a good way (which probably means it is).
SF HC #7 (Moon is a Harsh Mistress), I liked.
SF PB #25 (Flowers for Algernon)'s short story, at least, haunts me just as much as Childhood's End. (Huh. I apparently only like SF an amazing amount if it haunts my brain)
SF PB #44 (The Lathe of Heaven) is something I've seen the movie for, and read - fascinating story.

(Huh. Why don't I have a reading icon?!)

Comments

[bluepapercup]

I think this will be a useful list for me, since I am totally lacking in "classics". When I started reading sci-fi I just read whatever looked good, and I ended up not getting to many of the seminal works.

[catya.livejournal.com]

On the SF list..., from this page, whichi s the one you linked to... http://www.sfsite.com/lists/orion04.htm

paperback:
10 - may have read it, don't remember
9 - wonderful
8 - have read some of his stuff and liked it, not sure if i've read that one.
7 - MUST READ. :) (though it's not my favorite zelazny)
6 - haven't read
5 - quite good
4 - fabulous. and weird.
3 - a terrific book. spindizzies!
2 - haven't read?
1 - good but didn't leave a huge impression.

Hardcovers:
10 - i actually haven't read it, which embarasses me :)
9 - same as paperback 1
8 - must read
7 - MUST READ :) (and strange in a a strange land)
6 - terrific book
5 - weird. worth reading.
4 - on other list
3 - i've read a lot of pkd and don't remember what i thought of that one in particular.
2 - you should definitely read this
1 - MUST READ. :)


wow, i should go through the rest of the 4 pages of list, huh? mmmm.

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

-In Fantasy, I've read:

• The Riddle-Master trilogy, which presents an intriguingly different kind of magic, but wanders a bit.
  
• All the Lankhmar (Fafhrd & Grey Mouser) stories. Classics, highly recommended, get a little weird and pointlessly sexual towards the end.
  
• Most of the Elric stories. Again, classics, and entertainingly decadent, but repetitive after the first few books.
  
• All the Conan stories by Howard (People of Black Circle, Hour of Dragon). And again: classics, but a bit repetitive, and one has to be able to bludgeon through the occasional racism. Still, very glad I read them.
  
• All the New Sun books (Shadow and Claw, Sword and Citadel). Very very good, very very weird. I recommend keeping an OED within reach while reading them.
  
• The Chronicles of Amber. I read all ten books; the first is the best, and is highly recommended. They slowly drop off in quality as one goes on, with a bigger drop between the first five and second five. If you skip the second five, no one will blame you.
  
• Little, Big. Lovely modern and postmodern fantasy. I want that house.
  
• Tales of the Dying Earth. Very stylish, a bit meandering, but worth it for the set-pieces.
  

-Note that Dying Earth, Conan, Elric, and Lankhmar were all huge influences on D&D, second only to Tolkien, and are recommended to those looking for modern gaming's roots in literature.

-In the SF section, I've read most of them:

• Rediscovery of Man. Cordwainer Smith is the poet of science fiction. Very different from most SF (and varies a lot within the one volume), and highly recommended.
  
• Gateway. A definitive Precursors novel, and has an interesting structure, but not a radically distinct shining star.
  
• I've read part of Lord of Light, no opinion yet.
  
• Babel-17. An interesting novel in which the "science" in "science ficiton" is linguistics.
  
• The Stars My Destination. The protagonist is a very bad man who eventually seeks redemption. Has some very nice bits, and some that seem kind of silly now.
  
• Do Androids Dream. Surprisingly nutty-crunchy for the novel that inspired Blade Runner. Given the choice, I'd watch the movie again over reading the book again.
  
• Cities in Flight. Blish thinks big, but I didn't find the Cities novels particularly gripping.
  
• The Forever War. An anti-war classic, which uses time dilation as a symbol for post-traumatic stress disorder. Recommended.
  
• Day of the Triffids. Read it once; it didn't do a lot for me.
  
• Ringworld. Love it, though its flaws have become more apparent as I've gotten older. For fun, try reading it as a remake of The Wizard of Oz.
  
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Another favorite of mine, though the sexism grates a bit. (The main cast consists of a genius computer (usually male), a genius engineer (male), a genius professor (male), and a rabble-rouser (female). The last character's main role is to have things explained to her.)
  
• Childhood's End. An absolute classic.
  
• Canticle for Leibowitz. A bit patchy, but a very intriguing treatment of post-apocalyptic religion.
  
• Man in the High Castle. Worth reading, but didn't do a lot for me, possibly because it's been so often imitated.
  
• Left Hand of Darkness. I prefer The Dispossessed, but this is the definitive novel about androgyny.
  
• Dune. The first novel is a must-read landmark classic; the film and TV versions are barely adequate to convey the intelligence in this book.

[tablesaw]

I'm working my way through the Lankhmar stories, so while I haven't read either of the two books fully, I'm probably going to seek out those collections. And I've read most of the major Cthulhu stories, though I doubt I've read all of the ones in the collection.

For SF, I've read Time Out of Joint, The Lathe of Heaven, A Scanner Darkly, Valis, Flowers for Algernon (or possibly just the short story), The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Lord of Light, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Man in the High Castle, The Left Hand of Darkness, and Dune. Most of the Dick and Delaney I haven't read yet are on my shelf and in the queue.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

I'll skip the ones we both have read.

For the Fantasy list:
14 - Beauty: *hated* it, because it's very anti-male and I repeatedly wanted to pummel the main character. I think Tepper is very overrated.

6 - Amber's OK. The first series is pretty good - avoid the Merlin books like the plague. Fun gaming system attached to it.

For the SF list:

14 - The Demolished Man - Bester kicks much ass, in a sort of hard-boiled way. I haven't read anything by him I didn't like.

5- The Stars my Destination - see above.

HC #5 - A Canticle for Leibowitz - I found this to be at times incoherent, and very overrated.

HC #3 - The Man in the High Castle - by today's standards, I found this a bit slim and underdeveloped; it's more of a novella than a novel. It's got great ideas, though, and it's very well-written.

I notice the SF list is dominated by just a few authors.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

I thought _Beauty_ was pretty much anti-everyone. (And yes, I wanted to pummel the main character, too.) It is, though, a good read.

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

Agreed on "A Canticle for Liebowitz". It brought up some interesting ideas, but didn't execute them very well. Blah.

[khavrinen.livejournal.com]

From the ones on these lists, the only one I have read that I liked enough to recommend is #43 on the Fantasy list, Ken Grimwood's Replay. (Aside from The Riddlemaster of Hed, which I love probably more than I should, but you've already read that.) The synopsis given there is pretty good, but it leaves out one key thing: he's not the only one.

I thought it was kind of interesting that they categorized it as "Fantasy;" I suppose that technically it is, since there isn't even an attempt to explain the phenomenon scientifically, but it "felt" more like SciFi to me. Something about the attitudes of the main characters, I think, and the fact that it is a contemporary setting (well, mid-eighties, so sort-of contemporary). I liked the exploration of the "what would you do if you could live your life over" idea, particularly in that they discovered how what you think are "better" choices than you made the first time around don't always turn out that way.

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

Replay is an excellent book.

Time Travel is always a weird concept. It seldom fits well into sci-fi or fantasy.

They seemed to place all time travel books under Fantasy for this list.

[sharp-blue.livejournal.com]

Here are brief comments on the ones I've read:

• The Forever War starts strongly, ends weakly and is obviously a fix-up novel; but this last fact makes the dislocative effect of the book substantially stronger.


• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? seems more dated than I expected. On balance, I prefer the film!


• The Stars My Destination is remarkably fun to read, but I've found I remember very few of the details after a few years.


• Babel-17 I thought was inconsequential. I don't really understand what all the fuss was about.


• The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a very interesting set of novellas about identity. Like Wolfe's Book of the New Sun I finished it thinking I'd missed not just all of the solutions but most of the problems too. It reminds me of Swanwick's Stations of the Tide.


• Gateway has a great sf premise and some good writing and characterisation to go with it. I think it might seem more impressive if I'd read the sequels too.


• Last and First Men is astonishingly and sustainedly inventive, but by no means a novel (having no novelistic virutes such as characterisation or plot). At the time, this must have been as radical as Bernal's roughly contemperaneous essay "The World, the Flesh and the Devil (http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Bernal/)", which has similar themes.


• Earth Abides is beautiful, bleak, haunting and sad; one of the best novels I've ever read about the aftermath of the collapse of a civilisation.


• The Demolished Man is like the other Bester but more controlled, more original and generally superior.


• The Dispossessed is a wonderful book, but one that makes utopia sound dull.


• Star Maker: like Last and First Men, but more so!


• The Time Machine / War of the Worlds must surely be two of sf's greatest novels. Who can resist the vision of the end of life in the former or the opening paragraph of the latter?


• A Case of Conscience blows its early promise and by the end I found it tedious.


• The Fountains of Paradise is one of Clarke's better works. The narrative is more coherent than many of his novels, and the overall effect is the kind of poetic hard-sf that he sometimes gets just right.


• The City and the Stars I read long ago and all that now lingers is a faint perfume of wonder.


• Blood Music has one of my favourite invocations of the truly alien.


• Dune is the sort of complex and richly imagined space opera that seems so rare nowadays. Some of the sequels are almost as good.


• The Left Hand of Darkness is brilliant and moving anthropological sf.


• A Canticle for Leibowitz is epic and tragic and funny and bleak and wise.


• Childhood's End is Clarke's greatest novel and his best invocation of cosmic melancholy.


• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is more admired by others than by me. There was a little too much libertarian wish-fulfillment for my tastes, and I'm a libertarian!


• Ringworld is worth reading for Niven's descriptions of the ring itself.


• The Day of the Triffids scared the life out of me when I was a kid...

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

* = Strongly Recommend

Science Fiction:

I've read and liked other books by Frederick Pohl, Cordwainer Smith, James Blish, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Ursula K. LeGuin, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Gene Wolfe, Gregory Benford, Kurt Vonnegut, Theodore Sturgeon, Greg Bear, Sherri S. Teppe, H.G. Wells, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverburg.

*(HC 8) Ringworld by Larry Niven, and its sequels

(PC 6) Not a fan of Samuel Delany, I read his Trouble on Triton book.

*(HC 7) I've read a lot of the rest of Heinlein's books

(HC 5) A Canticle for Liebowitz. It's okay, but not highly recommended.

(HB 16)* The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. Good book, not sure whether it's a book to read again for a while though. Rather heartwringing.

(PB 25)* Flowers for Algernon


Fantasy

I've read other books by L. Sprague DeCamp, Sherri S. Tepper, George R.R. Martin, Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, Poul Anderson.

(20)*Time and Again: One of the best time travel stories I've ever read.

(19)*Riddlemaster: I can't say enough about this trilogy, or about Patricia McKillip in general.

(6)*Amber. resorts to fascinating

(15, 5) I never finished either... They were good, but not page-turning enough. I'll have to try again sometime.

(43)*Replay: The base premise is reminiscent of Groundhog Day, but this is a lot more elaborate and dramatically emotional.

[australian-joe.livejournal.com]

Wah! I don't have the time right now to go through all of them and say which ones I have and haven't read!

I've read about 60% of the fantasy titles and 90% of the science fiction.

Our main huge alternative bookstore in town has a shelf each devoted to the two Masterworks collections. Every now and then I pick something I haven't yet read off it. (Which is where The Riddle-Master Of Hed came from prior to my last trip.)

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

don't have the time right now to go through all of them and say which ones I have and haven't read!

*notes that you could come back to this post at some point, when you _do_ have time*

[danodea.livejournal.com]

I've read quite a lot of these, but not in these editions.

Ones I've read...

Fantasy Masterworks:

2: Time and the Gods
3: The Worm Ouroboros
4: Tales of the Dying Earth
6: The Chronicles of Amber
8: The People of the Black Circle
10: The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea
11: Lud-in-the-Mist
14: Beauty
15: The King of Elfland's Daughter
16: The Hour of the Dragon
17: Elric
18: The First Book of Lankhmar
19: Riddle-Master
21: Mistress of Mistresses
22: Gloriana or the Unfulfilled Queen
23: The Well of the Unicorn
24: The Second Book of Lankhmar
26: The Emperor of Dreams
27: Lyonesse: Suldrun's Garden
29: The Dragon Waiting
30: The Chronicles of Corum
31: Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams
32: The Broken Sword
34: The Drawing of the Dark
35: Lyonesse II: The Green Pearl and Madouc
36: The History of the Runestaff
37: A Voyage to Arcturus
39: The Mabinogion
40: Three Hearts & Three Lions
42: Grendel

Of these, I would personally recommend:
2,3,4,6,10,11,14,15, 21, 26, 27, 29, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, 42.

I found Moorcock's novels terribly depressing, so I wouldn't recommend those.

SF Masterworks: Hardcover
1: Dune
3: The Man in the High Castle
4: The Stars My Destination
5: A Canticle for Leibowitz
6: Childhood's End
7: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
9: The Forever War
10: Triffids

I would recommend 1, 6, and 9.

SF Masterworks: Softcover
1: The Forever War
3: Cities in Flight
4: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
5: The Stars My Destination
6: Babel-17
7: Lord of Light
12: Earth Abides
14: The Demolished Man
15: Stand on Zanzibar
16: The Dispossessed
19: Emphyrio
20: A Scanner Darkly
21: Star Maker
22: Behold The Man
23: The Book of Skulls
24: The Time Machine and War of the Worlds
25: Flowers for Algernon
26: UBIK
27: Timescape
28: More Than Human
34: The Fountains of Paradise
37: Nova
38: The First Men in the Moon
39: The City and the Stars
40: Blood Music
41: Jem
46: Flow, My Tears, the Policeman Said
47: The Invisible Man
49: A Fall of Moondust
40: Eon

Of those, I would recommend:
4, 7, 14, 24, 25, 28, 38, 40, 46, 47

Lords of Light is probably my favorite from this list, and probably the only one that I would consider re-reading.

I don't read nearly as much SF as F, nor do I find it as engaging, and my recommendations point to that.