Top 10 Novels / Short Stories

[Spade]

What are your top 10 novels and/or top 10 short stories? Just to make things simple, series can count as 1!

Novels (in somewhat of an order):

1. Dune / Dune Messiah / Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
2. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
3. The Dark Beyond the Stars by Frank M. Robinson
4. Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
5. As On a Darkling Plain by Ben Bova
6. Dune: House Atreides / Dune: House Harkonnen / Dune: House Corrino by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson
7. Orion by Ben Bova
8. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
9. Mars / Return to Mars / Jupiter by Ben Bova
10. Raft / Timelike Infinity by Ben Bova

I seem to have a thing with Ben Bova. Either I really love his work or it's just "meh."

Top 10 Short Stories:

1. Blue Shift - Stephen Baxter
2. The Rocket Man - Ray Bradbury
3. Kaleidoscope - Ray Bradbury
4. Cilia-of-Gold - Ray Bradbury
5. Dog Star - Arthur C. Clarke
6. The Hell-Bound Train - Robert Bloch
7. Jeffty is Five - Harlan Ellison
8. A Sound of Thunder - Ray Bradbury
9. The Visitor - Ray Bradbury
10. The Rocket - Ray Bradbury

 

[Tau Zero]

Well this has been done before, but i'll play.

Top 10 books:

Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy
Alfred Bester, The Stars, My Destination
John Crowly, Little, Big
Philip Jose Farmer, The Lovers
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Joe Haldeman, The Forever War
Frank Herbert, Dune
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
Kurt Vonnegut Jr., The Sirens of Titan
Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

And just to sneak in some more books...

Special mention:

Poul Anderson, Tau Zero
Michael Moorcock, The Books of Corum (6 volumes)
Michael Moorcock, The Elric Saga
Roger Zelazny, Jack of Shadows

 

[iansales]

10. Raft / Timelike Infinity by Ben Bova

These were by Stephen Baxter.

4. Cilia-of-Gold - Ray Bradbury

So was this.

 

[Connavar]

1. Emphyrio - Jack Vance
2. Wolf in Shadow - David Gemmell
3. Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
4. The Moon is A Harsh Mistress - Robert Heinlein
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Philip K Dick
6. The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
7. Foundation original Trilogy - Isaac Asimov
8. Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
9. The Man with The Getaway Face - Richard Stark
10. Altered Corban - Richard Morgan



Any of the top 7 in the list can top my list. I think they are almost equally as great.

My biggest fav writers overall are in this order Gemmell,Heinlein,Vance,PKD.


Short stories i will post later, havent read alot of short stories. Other Conan ones im not sure which i liked most.

 

[iansales]

I've done my top ten novels elsewhere in other threads. But I don't believe I've done short fiction. So here it is, in chronological order of publication:

[FONT=&quot]1.[/FONT] ‘Aye, And Gomorrah’, Samuel R Delany [1967]
2. ‘And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill Side’, James Tiptree Jr. [1971]
3. ‘A Little Something For Us Tempunauts’, Philip K Dick [1974]
4. ‘Air Raid’, John Varley [1977]
5. ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, William Gibson [1981]
6. ‘The Brains Of Rats’, Michael Blumlein [1986]
7. ‘A Gift From The Culture’, Iain M Banks [1987]
8. ‘Forward Echoes’, Gwyneth Jones [1990]
9. ‘FOAM’, Brian Aldiss [1991]
10. ‘The Road To Jerusalem’, Mary Gentle [1991]


Although I must admit I need to find some new ones - the oldest listed above is over 15 years old. I've read some impressive stuff recently, but I need to think on it a bit longer before I decide it's a favourite...

 

[Connavar]

Ian if you read good, great short stories old or new , share them. Maybe there should be thread for short stories.

Its not easy to find about good short stories if you arent fan of the writer and read everything of his,hers.

 

[Spade]

These were by Stephen Baxter.



So was this.

I realize that. I was looking at the line above and copying instead of thinking.

 

[HoopyFrood]

All righty then. These aren't going to be in any particular order (except for the first one, because that definitely is my favourite book). Also, I'm an eclectic reader, so they're not all going to be SFF either.

1. Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
2. The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in five parts - Douglas Adams
3. The Life of Pi - Yann Martel
4. The Gentleman ******* series - Scott Lynch (OK, there's only two books out at the moment, but both are awesome)
5. The Dark Tower series (particularly The Waste Lands)- Stephen King
6. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
7. Othello - William Shakespeare (technically a play, I know, but I love this. And the text is a brilliant read).
8. Metamorphoses - Ovid
9. Decline and Fall - Evelyn Waugh
10. I may have to cheat a little here and say two (but they're both by the same author). I love both Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

Short stories...hmm. This is a little harder. I don't know whether I can think of ten.

1. The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allan Poe
2. The Hound - H.P Lovecraft
3. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
4. The Penal Colony - Franz Kafka
5. The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman

OK, I'll have to come back to this, my mind had gone blank ('tis always the way when someone asks you to think of something )

 

[Alurny]

I fear I have not read anywhere near enough but I agree with Hoopy, my number one is far and away Flowers for Algernon.

 

[GOLLUM]

Interesting thread that's been done before. I've posted my top 5 novels somewhere before but never tried a short story list. I'll have to put my thinking cap on for this one...

 

[Rosemary]

Top Ten Books

Axis Trilogy Sara Douglass
Lord of The Rings Tolkein
Pillars Of The Earth Series Ken Follett
Memory, Sorrow & Thorn Series Tad Williams
The Mage Wars Trilogy Mercedes Lackey
Dragons of Pern Series Anne McCaffrey
The Bitterbynde Trilogy Cecilia Dart-Thornton
The Belgariad Series David Eddings
Malazan Series Steven Erikson
The View From The Mirror Series Ian Irvine

Short Story
Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
War and Peace Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky
Les Miserables Hugo
Great Expectations Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte

I'm always going to enjoy the Classics more than any genre!

 

[iansales]

War and Peace a short story?!

 

[iansales]

Ian if you read good, great short stories old or new , share them. Maybe there should be thread for short stories.

I'll create a new thread where people can post the titles of good short stories, anthologies or collections they've read this year.

 

[Rosemary]

War and Peace a short story?!

Well I thought it was Not as long as Quiet Flows The Don and not much more than the new Ken Follett book I am reading at the moment, with 1111 pages

 

[iansales]

Short story recommendations thread is here.

 

[iansales]

Well I thought it was Not as long as Quiet Flows The Don and not much more than the new Ken Follett book I am reading at the moment, with 1111 pages

Yes, but somewhat more than 7,500 words, which is the upper limit put on short stories by the Hugo Award rules. Fiction around the 500 - 7,500 words is generally accepted as a "short story".

 

[Falsteed]

Well I thought it was Not as long as Quiet Flows The Don and not much more than the new Ken Follett book I am reading at the moment, with 1111 pages

I read Pillars of The Earth on a recommendation, and once toward the end was angry I had spent the time to read it.

 

[gully_foyle]

I had to be merciless and stick to SF, also I can't include my favourite books that I haven't read yet, so my list will change over the coming years. However, in no particular order they are...

Ringworld by Larry Niven
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Algebraist by Iain M Banks
Tiger! Tiger! by Alfred Bester
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
The City and the Stars by Arthur C Clarke
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Songmaster by Orscon Scott Card
Gateway by Frederik Pohl

Fraid I can't do short stories, I don't keep track of them that well.

 

[clovis-man]

I'll just list my favorite series of novels:

Asimov: The first three Foundation novels
Reynolds: the Revelation Space series (including Chasm City)
Herbert: The Dune series
Robinson: Red, Green & Blue Mars
Cherryh: The Faded Sun
Baxter: The Manifold series
Kress: the Beggars series
Tolkien: You guessed it
Zelazny: The Amber novels

I'm sure I'll think of a tenth one if I give it some time.

Jim

 

[Omphalos]

Ive just updated my top ten list on my own forum. Here is the list I put up about a week or so ago:

1. Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore. Probably the best alternate history novel I have ever read, by one of my favorite unknown authors.

2. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, by Kate Wilhelm. An amazing end-of-the-world story involving clones. Wilhelm and her husband, Damon Knight started the Milford Writers Clinic which evolved into the current Clarion Writer's Workshop.

3. The Listeners, by James Gunn. Truly moving first contact story that heavily influenced Carl Sagan in his own more popular but slightly inferior novel called Contact. In this work Gunn pays much more attention to the interpersonal and social reactions to a signal from outer space, where as Sagan focused mainly on the reactions of those with political power who feared what would happen if society in general ever found out what was really going on.

4. Dune, by Frank Herbert. Can I come up with anything new to say about this one? I doubt it.

5. The Legacy of Heorot, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes. An interstellar colonization novel combined with a monster epic. Light reading, and with a strongly conservative tone, but very exciting and worth every effort needed to find and read it. Barnes is one of the very few African American SF authors and despite recent failures, still IMHO has a pretty bright future.

6. The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers. This one, along with Homonculus by James Blaylock and Morlock Nights by K. W. Jeter pretty much started the highly underrated steampunk sub-genre. This is a combination SF and fantasy take on time travel set in a black-magic inspired Victorian England underworld.

7. Lilith's Brood, by Octavia Butler. Actually this is a trilogy of books made up by Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago, which is frequently referred to as the Xenogenesis Trilogy. A race of aliens who achieve genetic diversity by mating with alien races come across Earth a few years after a devastating nuclear war. They nurse fragments of humanity back to health, seduce them and create a new race. Some day after another reading or two this one may be my number one.

8. This is the Way the World Ends, by James Morrow. A darkly humorous examination of the death of our race after a nuclear war. In it the souls of those who would have been born but for the war become animated and put the designers of the war on trial for crimes against the future. Powerfully moving and beautifully written, and absolutely chilling. I don't expect to ever read another one quite like this.

9. Gateway, by Frederik Pohl. A sarcastic look at the swings of luck in a pure SF setting (Last Call (perhaps my number 12 book?) by Tim Powers looks at the swings of luck in a fantasy setting). Maybe Pohl's best work, and considering the quality of his other books, that is saying something.

10. Getting to Know You, by David Marusek. This is a collection of short stories that examines the consequences of nanotech and AI in a highly advanced civilization that has not quite truly gone post-human yet. Marusek is one of my two favorite current authors, the other being Ted Chiang, whose anthology Stories of Your Life, and Others, would be in the number 11 position, if I were going that far.

Ive actually been working on getting a short story review page set up, and have a long list of things I am going to put up. Ill put some thought into what are my top ten favorites. I tell you what, Sturgeon, Bradbury and Sheckley will have to have an entry on that list. Chad Oliver and James Tiptree, Jr. too. Robert Reed too (sorry Tanz), along with David Marusek and Ted Chiang. I know for sure that For White Hill by Haldemann will be on that list. I LOVE that story.