50 SF Novels That Everyone Should Read

List from here. As usual, I have bolded those I have read, italicised those I started but did it finish (in this case, series where I have not read every book), and struck through those I bounced off. Also links where I have reviewed the books (or at least some of te series) online.

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
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin
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
(Odd not to list the entire series)
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
The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis
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
(Yes, I have read all 45 novels)
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
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
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

I confess I have not heard of Colson Whitehead or Lois Lowry, and I have not read anything by Charles Yu or Patricia Wrede; does anyone have any particular thoughts on those writers? The others on the list which I have not read are all works I plan to get around to, or at least sample, by authors with whom I am familiar.

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