This is not my beautiful list

[calimac]

Eric Rabkin has provided Business Week with his "personal favorites" list of 15 Great Science Fiction Novels.

No question about it, those are 15 great SF novels. No argument there. And if they're his favorites, one can't dispute that either. What struck me is how far they are from being my favorites. A few I haven't read, but though I only detested one that I have read (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), none of them would make my favorites list except for possibly A Canticle for Leibowitz. No, not even The Left Hand of Darkness. It's a good book, but there's at least three SF novels by Le Guin I like better, not to mention most of her fantasies. It seems to me, especially from the emphasis in his write-ups, that Rabkin's taste runs strongly to social-realist message SF. I can do that too: my best list would definitely include

• Timescape by Gregory Benford (the all-time great SF novel about science)
  
• Kim Stanley Robinson's Orange Country trilogy (the all-time great SF books about urban planning)

both of which have a cleanliness to their discourse - I don't mean dogmatism, not at all; I'm referring to something in the prose style - that really appeals to me. But most of my SF favorites seem to go in a slightly different direction. Books like

• A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Arnason
  
• something by Philip K. Dick, possibly VALIS
  
• Replay by Ken Grimwood (I say it's a thought-experiment novel, and I say it's SF)
  
• Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, with an insistent "me too" from The Lathe of Heaven
  
• The City, Not Long After by Pat Murphy
  
• The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg or, if that doesn't count, Dying Inside
  
• The Color of Distance by Amy Thomson (to date my favorite Novel By An Author I Knew When)
  
• Smoke by Donald E. Westlake (surprise! it's an unflinching invisible-man novel, and that makes it great SF by me)
  
• Free Live Free by Gene Wolfe
  
• Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny

at the least. For my olde classics, I'd include

• The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
  
• Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp
  
• 1984 by George Orwell

and that's 15 entries total so let's stop there, even though that's top of the head and not a slow-considered list. I believe a distinct preference for fantasy can be detected even in some of my SF list. I believe something can also be told by some authors I've read who are not on the list: no Heinlein, no Gibson, no Card; no Bujold, no Cherryh, no Willis.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I really liked Smoke as well. Some of those leave me blinking, others I nod at least in understanding, if not agreement.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Besides Le Guin, which make you blink?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Arnason, which seemed to be Le Guin lite in the sense of treading carefully, and most respectfully, ground already well trod, the Thomson, which was okay, but nothing new there, and the Murphy, ditto. These were fine books, but I just don't see them on a "best" list.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't think I'd ever read a book with quite the flavor of Murphy's, and the Thomson seemed to me to quite rethink the subject. Arnason's was just done so well, and with a degree of puckishness foreign to Le Guin's novels.

Since there is nothing entirely new under the sun, the question becomes how well you do it. It's less if a book is a retread than whether it feels like one. (If you've read a million retreads, and come across the now-old fresh original with no knowledge that it was new when that author did it, can you tell?)

The book that everybody else adored that gave me a reaction of, "This is pleasant enough, but haven't I read it several times before?" was War for the Oaks.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I guess like most things it depends when, where, and how one comes at these.

War for the Oaks was the first of the human-band-against-the-bad-Sidhe stories I saw; for a while about five, six years after she published that one, you couldn't see to get away from that plot.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Another vote for Smoke, though maybe not Top 15. I've enjoyed a lot of Westlake's books.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Smoke is wonderful, of course.

I've never had any trouble thinking of The Book of Skulls as SF, but Free Live Free, based as heavily as it is on The Wizard of Oz, I've always thought of as more a fantasy novel...