List of Books - 50 SF novels everyone should read

[inulro]

stolen from nwhyte.

For someone who doesn't really read SF, I've read an awful lot of these. So there are some I wouldn't call SF, but never mind.

Bolded the ones I've read, struck out the ones I hated/didn't finish..

Ubik, Philip K. Dick
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The Lord of the Rings trilogy [sic], J.R.R. Tolkien
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood - somehow, no, despite being a big fan.
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin - but the whole series is sitting on my floor waiting for me to find the time.
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Gormenghast series, Mervyn Peake
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein
Kindred, Octavia Butler
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The City & The City, China Miéville
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Zone One, Colson Whitehead
The Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
The Time Quartet, Madeleine L’Engle - I've been wanting to re-read these for a few years now.
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis - read the first two, maybe three volumes when I was the requisite age & hated them.
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Female Man, Joanna Russ
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson
Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Dune Chronicles, Frank Herbert
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Neuromancer, William Gibson
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
The Foundation series, Isaac Asimov
Discworld, Terry Pratchett Not all, but more than I haven't.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Among Others, Jo Walton
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
Witch World, Andre Norton - I read crime and horror as a young adult and have thus ever read an Andre Norton novel.
Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Little, Big, John Crowley
The Dragonriders of Pern series, Anne McCaffrey - ditto for McCaffrey. Plus anything with talking dragons gives me the stabby rage.
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Patricia C. Wrede
The Castle trilogy, Diana Wynne Jones
The Giver, Lois Lowry