[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

[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...