OK, the book meme it is.

[unixronin]

From radarrider and others.

At listofbests.com is this list of the 100 Science Fiction Books You Just Have to Read, reproduced below.  I've divided them four ways, not three.  Those I know I've read are bold, those I'm fairly sure I've read (but I'm not 100% certain) are bold italic, those I know I haven't read are struck out, and the few left plain I'm not sure about.  Several errors by listofbests.com have been corrected.

1. Childhood's End -- Arthur C. Clarke
2. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov
3. Dune -- Frank Herbert
4. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K. Dick
5. Starship Troopers -- Robert A. Heinlein
6. Valis -- Philip K. Dick
7. Frankenstein -- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
8. Gateway -- Frederik Pohl
9. Space Merchants -- Frederik Pohl
10. Earth Abides -- George R. Stewart
11. Cuckoo's Egg -- C.J. Cherryh
12. Star Surgeon -- James White
13. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch -- Philip K. Dick
14. Radix -- A. A. Attanasio
15. 2001: A Space Odyssey -- Arthur C. Clarke
16. Ringworld -- Larry Niven
17. A Case of Conscience -- James Blish
18. Last and First Men -- Olaf Stapledon
19. The Day of the Triffids -- John Wyndham
20. Way Station -- Clifford D. Simak
21. More Than Human -- Theodore Sturgeon
22. Gray Lensman -- E.E. "Doc" Smith
23. The Gods Themselves -- Isaac Asimov
24. The Left Hand of Darkness -- Ursula K. Le Guin
25. Behold the Man -- Michael Moorcock
26. Star Maker -- Olaf Stapledon
27. The War of the Worlds -- H. G. Wells
28. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea -- Jules Verne
29. Heritage of Hastur -- Marion Zimmer Bradley
30. The Time Machine -- H. G. Wells
31. The Stars My Destination -- Alfred Bester
32. Slan -- A. E. Van Vogt
33. Neuromancer -- William Gibson
34. Ender's Game -- Orson Scott Card
35. In Conquest Born -- C. S. Friedman
36. Lord of Light -- Roger Zelazny
37. Eon -- Greg Bear
38. Dragonflight -- Anne McCaffrey
39. Journey to the Center of the Earth -- Jules Verne
40. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert A. Heinlein
41. Cosm -- Gregory Benford
42. The Voyage of the Space Beagle -- A. E. Van Vogt
43. Blood Music -- Greg Bear
44. Beggars in Spain -- Nancy Kress
45. Omnivore -- Piers Anthony
46. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov
47. Mission of Gravity -- Hal Clement
48. To Your Scattered Bodies Go -- Philip Jose Farmer
49. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
50. The Man Who Folded Himself -- David Gerrold
51. 1984 -- George Orwell
52. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde -- Robert Louis Stevenson
53. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson
54. Flesh -- Philip Jose Farmer
55. Cities in Flight -- James Blish
56. Shadow of the Torturer -- Gene Wolfe
57. Startide Rising -- David Brin
58. Triton -- Samuel R. Delany
59. Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner
60. A Clockwork Orange -- Anthony Burgess
61. Fahrenheit 451 -- Ray Bradbury
62. A Canticle for Leibowitz -- Walter M. Miller Jr.
63. Flowers for Algernon -- Daniel Keyes
64. No Blade of Grass -- John Christopher
65. The Postman -- David Brin
66. Dhalgren -- Samuel R. Delany
67. Berserker -- Fred Saberhagen
68. Flatland -- Edwin Abbott
69. Planiverse -- A. K. Dewdney
70. Dragon's Egg -- Robert L. Forward
71. Downbelow Station -- C. J. Cherryh
72. Dawn -- Octavia E. Butler
73. The Puppet Masters -- Robert A. Heinlein
74. The Doomsday Book -- Connie Willis
75. The Forever War -- Joe Haldeman
76. Deathbird Stories -- Harlan Ellison
77. Roadside Picnic -- Arkady Strugatsky
78. The Snow Queen -- Joan D. Vinge
79. The Martian Chronicles -- Ray Bradbury
80. Drowned World -- J.G. Ballard
81. Cat's Cradle -- Kurt Vonnegut
82. Red Mars -- Kim Stanley Robinson
83. Upanishads -- Various
84. Alice in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
85. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams
86. The Lathe of Heaven -- Ursula K. Le Guin
87. The Midwich Cuckoos -- John Wyndham
88. Mutant -- Henry Kuttner
89. Solaris -- Stanislaw Lem
90. Ralph 124C41+ -- Hugo Gernsback
91. I Am Legend -- Richard Matheson
92. Timescape -- Gregory Benford
93. The Demolished Man -- Alfred Bester
94. War with the Newts -- Karl Kapek
95. Mars -- Ben Bova
96. Brain Wave -- Poul Anderson
97. Hyperion -- Dan Simmons
98. The Andromeda Strain -- Michael Crichton
99. Camp Concentration -- Thomas M. Disch
100. A Princess of Mars -- Edgar Rice Burroughs

And if you're thinking, "Damn, there's not very many titles struck out in that list, are there?"   ...Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

Comments

[dafydd.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was thinking Stranger in a Strange Land should be highter on the list,... and The Puppet Masters shouldn't have made the list at all!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Speaking of books that shouldn't be on this list at all....

84. Alice in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll

Whiskey tango foxtrot, over?

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Well done, you've covered most of 'em... I haven't done a full analysis, but I'd guess I'm somewhere around the 30-40% mark. Thing is, I didn't tend to have much diversity, I'd find an author I like and read everything they ever wrote, then find another, and so on.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I did that too. I discovered Isaac Asimov and read Asimov until I ran out of Asimov, then I discovered Edmund Cooper and read Cooper until I ran out of Cooper, read Michael Moorcock until I ran out of Moorcock, read "Doc" Smith until I ran out of Smith, and James Blish, and John Wyndham (aka John Beynon), and J. G. Ballard, and Arthur Clarke, and Saberhagen ...... And I was doing this with books on physics, chemistry, mathematics and astronomy at the same time I was working my way through the SF section author by author. When I was 13, I understood general and special relativity and had the Lorentz transformations memorized.

I devoured my way through my town library's science and SF sections until the library staff asked my parents if they minded the library issuing me an adult library card at 13, because I'd read everything in the entire library that I could get at on a juvenile library card that I had any interest in reading, and I was looking for more.

[ehintz.livejournal.com]

Heh. I might have made your numbers if I hadn't have been such a juvenile delinquent...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

o/"  But it seems to me, to the contrary
     Of all the crap they're gonna put on the page
     That a wasted youth is better by far
     Than a wise and productive old age  o/"

-- Meat Loaf

[iphy.livejournal.com]

And I was thinking Heritage of Hastur isn't sci-fi at all and makes the whole list suspect as far as I am concerned.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the whole Zimmer-Bradley circle is .... less science fiction than fantasy, and then at least as much again projective navel-gazing. MZB wasn't the least abashed about writing people she knew into her books, usually without their permission (and occasionally cunningly disguised under their real names). Her daughter ended up really screwed up, at least partly because MZB used her (basically completely undisguised) as the model for the main character in Stormqueen.

I think everyone has books on this list they'd question. My prime "Hey, wait just a minute..." book on the list is Alice in Wonderland. Whiskey tango foxtrot, over?

Sierra November: Alfa Foxtrot Uniform. Over.

[zeekar.livejournal.com]

"Whiskey tango foxtrot, over?"

You said that already. But the answer is simple - see the subject line.

Anyway, any fantasy book can be treated as SF. Insert one portal into an alternate dimension with different laws of physics, and poof! Wonderland as SF. Maybe Alice's looking glass had technological bits behind it, like Trelane's in Squire of Gothos. One well-known example of a story that makes this fantasy->SF trick explicit would be the instance of Piers Anthony's story called the Apprentice Adept series.

Re: Sierra November: Alfa Foxtrot Uniform. Over.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"instance of Piers Anthony's story". heh. :)

He actually does have more than one. Just a hell of a lot of common threads and elements that show up in almost everything he writes. I'm not saying it's one per book, but there is more than one. :)

Re: Sierra November: Alfa Foxtrot Uniform. Over.

[zeekar.livejournal.com]

Okay, granted, Anthony has more than one story. It's just hard to recognize the differences, buried as they are among all the similarities. :) And those similarities are not just themes, but explicit events (the Awkward Quasi-Sexual Encounter) and plot devices (The Protagonist Must Use A Simple Code of 1=Yes 2=No To Communicate).

I stayed up way too late on too many nights in high school finishing Bio of a Space Tyrant. At least he didn't go on to extend that series into ludicrosity as he had with Xanth. In college he hooked me in again with the first two entries in Incarnations of Immortality, but it was downhill from there. I pretty quickly lost my ability to read any of his stuff after that.

Re: Sierra November: Alfa Foxtrot Uniform. Over.

[uxmal.livejournal.com]

heck, heinlein is almost as bad... though his tend to be recurring (and recurring and recurring) characters...

On WTF... one definition of science fiction (though normally it goes under "speculative fiction") is "fiction set in an environment with other-than-usual baseline assumptions or behaviors" Which Alice fits pretty well.. but it's a big stretch, considering that it's also normally qualified with "consistent with known or possible principles"... sorta thing. Never mind the fact that Alice is political allegory...