Vacation continues. This is a great moment to fill the gap in reading and take up books that previously did not have enough time. Of course, each of us has his favorite position, but it is also necessary to apply to these popular on the other. For this reason we decided to present our proposal in the list of novel (storybook) fantastic of all time. We asked the developers and journalists involved in culture, including the editors of the Cavern, for help. Of course, we invite you to discuss these names, as well as to expand the list of your proposals.
Peter Watts
As the first will vote Peter Wattsowi, whose contribution to the rating is so interesting that his books were listed others. Additionally, watts testified that he was licking some kind of Polish literature.
The request that addressed to me was a bit ambiguous: I had to create a list of “the best fantasy/NF books of all time”, as well as “books that are still relevant to me and still evoke emotions”. Competencies allow me to achieve only the second criterion. I’ve definitely read too few books to be competent about the former, and even I – with such limited competence-can I see how little common SF work (Diuna, 1984, or androids dream of electric sheep? these are just a few of them) and my personal favorites. I can’t state that any of the following titles are timeless classics of the genre (however, in giving justice, it is). I can only assure you that they influenced me, shaped my views, and that if I could achieve half of what their authors were, I would die as a happy average. These are the books the author would like to be.
Samuel Recently Arrived High Quality Natural: Dhalgren – described by William Gibson as “a riddle that should never have been solved” is the second of the bizarre and brilliant books I’ve ever read (right next to William S. Burroughs ‘ lunch). Delaney’s prose is always at least dazzling (Delaney, Robert Silverberg, and William Gibson are the people I’d most like to steal from, stylistically), and this great, layered, recursive epic has shown me that a novel that doesn’t reveal everything-a novel that intentionally leaves almost all questions unanswered-can be more successful than one whose parts perfectly fit Best Fantasy Books for Adults together. (Concord, people who have read Echopraxia can be transformed into how I have fully learned this lesson.)
At the age of thirteen, I spent most of the summer trapped in a basement apartment in some provincial Oregon city, having little more work than reading, while my dad attended summer classes at a local University. However, over the weekend I was collecting from the beach what the sea washed up-during the trips of the oregońskim coast this summer my teenage brain came up with the idea of a” reasonable ocean ” – a type of distributed network, neural, in which plankton behaved like neurons. I wanted to write a story about it, even sketched out a few buildings based on this idea.
Two weeks later I discovered Solaris in the local library.
I’ve been hiding a grudge against LEM ever since. But at the same time I felt that it trembled. LEM was not, because only the teacher in showing us the true meaning of the word “alien”; not shied away from confrontation with those that mean the word “alien”. Sometimes the unknown is unknowable. Sometimes the abyss is too huge to even see the other side, much less to cross it.
All in Zanzibar Brunner: all in Zanzibar – another discovery when I was 13. Since then I have read it several times and each time it decomposed me on the shoulder. Brunner was the first author I read to mix the usual traces of SF – AI, overpopulation, genetic engineering, bioterrorism – with the dirty politics of real racism, colonialism, and all the other isms that most of his contemporaries have carefully responded to in his beletrystyce. Brunner’s worn and patchwork style initially keeps you at a distance and then pulls and doesn’t let go anymore. And the total amount of research and considerations that are included in this book is unimaginable.
John Brunner: The Sheep Look Up
So, two Brunner books on the same prestigious list, because Brunner – perhaps more than any other author – shaped my vision of the world. Here it goes back to the intense sensitivity of the pubescent volume of everyone on Zanzibar and narrows it down to the (then) insurmountable environmental crisis of the 1980s in the United States. In retrospect, his ability to predict US policy is astounding: he actually predicted the presidency of Reagan and George W. Bush. Prose, descriptions, a desperate feeling of slipping the everyday world into an abyss – all sharper and more expressive than the (also excellent) Zanzibar, even if the perspective is not so wide. This is one of the two books that sealed my belief to become a biologist, do something damn (the other one was a whale for killing Farley Mouath).
William Gibson: Neuromancer – reluctantly ate that book again for fear of getting ugly old (I remembered the reference to “30MB of hot Ram” as a valuable black market good). But when he came out for the first time in 80 years., kicked a whole genre after a decade of nothing plexiglass. Ultra-power prose and ultra-immersion into building the world: I don’t know if anyone does it better than Gibson when he’s in his element.
Awards: Alfred Bester is the star of my destiny and dying inside Robert Silverberg. Although I already too has dispersed.
