Over at Ian Sales’s blog he has mentioned a meme that seems to come from the SF and Fantasy Masterworks Reading Project.

There seems to be a few more books on Ian’s list than on the Reading Project’s site, in all nearly a hundred. Some appear twice because there are two lists, one in Roman numerals and the other in Arabic.

I suppose the reason that not many of these are recent publications is that it takes time for a book to be appreciated as a masterwork.

The ones in bold I have read. For those starred (*) I have read the short story from which the novel was developed. Those with double stars I believe I read many moons ago but do not now have a copy. The italicised one is in the TBR pile (and has been for donkey’s ages.)

SF Masterworks Index:-

I – Dune – Frank Herbert
II – The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K. Le Guin
III – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
IV – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
V – A Canticle for Leibowitz – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
VI – Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
VII – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
VIII – Ringworld – Larry Niven
IX – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
X – The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham

1 – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
2 – I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
3 – Cities in Flight – James Blish
4 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5 – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
6 – Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
7 – Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
8 – The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
9 – Gateway – Frederik Pohl
10 – The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith

11 – Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
12 – Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
13 – Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
14 – The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
15 – Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
16 – The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
17 – The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
18 – The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
19 – Emphyrio – Jack Vance
20 – A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick

21 – Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
22 – Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
23 – The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
24 – The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
25 – Flowers for Algernon* – Daniel Keyes
26 – Ubik – Philip K. Dick
27 – Timescape – Gregory Benford
28 – More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
29 – Man Plus – Frederik Pohl
30 – A Case of Conscience – James Blish

41 – Jem – Frederik Pohl
42 – Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
43 – VALIS – Philip K. Dick
44 – The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin
45 – The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
46 – Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
47 – The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
48 – Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
49 – A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke
50 – Eon – Greg Bear

51 – The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
52 – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
53 – The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
54 – The Space Merchants** – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
55 – Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
56 – Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
57 – The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
58 – The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
59 – Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
60 – Ringworld – Larry Niven

61 – The Child Garden* – Geoff Ryman
62 – Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
63 – A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
64 – Tau Zero** – Poul Anderson
65 – Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
66 – Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
67 – Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
68 – Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
69 – Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
70 – Mockingbird – Walter Tevis

71 – Dune – Frank Herbert
72 – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
73 – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
74 – Inverted World, Christopher Priest
75 – Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
76 – The Island of Dr Moreau, HG Wells
77 – Childhood’s End, Arthur C Clarke
78 – The Time Machine, HG Wells
79 – Dhalgren, Samuel R Delany
80 – Helliconia, Brian Aldiss
81 – Food of the Gods, HG Wells
82 – The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney
83 – The Female Man*, Joanna Russ
84 – Arslan, MJ Engh

Ian Sales on his blog mentioned a while back a meme that is going about, where you list the fifteen books that influenced or affected you most and have stayed with you. I don’t know if I can come up with fifteen off the top of my head but here are some.

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert
The Man In The Maze by Robert Silverberg
The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin
Winter’s Children and Hello Summer Goodbye both by Michael G Coney
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Sinner by James Hogg
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke
Pavane by Keith Roberts

The Herbert is there because it was the first Dune book I read (out of the local Public Library, when I devoured any yellow jacketed book in the SF section.) I didn’t know when I picked it up it was a sequel. It still made sense, and is a better novel than Dune anyway. So is Children Of Dune; but the later ones are increasingly forgettable.
The Man In The Maze made me realise what SF could be and do. Silverberg has written books even more impressive but I was on the verge of stopping reading SF till I read this. So Robert Silverberg is to blame for my continuing involvement with the genre.
The Left Hand Of Darkness just blew me away.
All the Michael G Coneys from around that part of his career are superb as I remember. Lump in Mirror Image, Syzygy, Charisma, The Girl With A Symphony In Her Fingers* (aka The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch) and Brontomek! to that list.
Lanark, while being a masterpiece by anyone’s definition also let me know it was actually possible to be Scottish and still get literature of a speculative bent into print.
Confessions Of A Justified Sinner is the prototypic Scottish novel. Jekyll and Hyde, your inspiration was surely here – also, in many senses, my story “Dusk,” despite the fact that stylistically I was more attempting to echo Silverberg. But if you live in Scotland that streak of fatalistic, Calvinistic gloom just gets to you.
2001. Amazingly, I read this before I saw the film. Sense of wonder plus. (At the time.)
Pavane opened up for me the delights of Altered History.

*This, I read only a few years ago, though.

I see the total comes to eight; fourteen if you count all the Coneys. But then I haven’t enumerated all the Silverbergs, nor the Le Guins. And now I think about it there ought to be a Roger Zelazny in there somewhere; any from He Who Shapes, This Immortal, Isle Of The Dead or Doorways In The Sand.

Now, if there were a meme for books that stayed with you for all the wrong reasons…..

Big Rab tagged me with this and I’ve been stuck for a response as I’m pretty boring really (the good lady has a lot to put up with) and I can’t think of many things even vaguely amusing, interesting or unusual about me – beyond the obvious one of being a published author of fiction.

Except:-

I once performed an impromptu Hokey-Cokey in Soviet Russia.
I was on a school cruise which stopped in Leningrad, as it then was. A few of us were taken to the Pioneers’ Palace – Pioneers being described as the Soviet version of Scouts – and they performed some sort of Russian folk dance for us. To reciprocate we Scots did the Hokey-Cokey as it was the only loosely dance-based thing that the adults present thought we would all know.

As far as I know I was the first person ever to discover an incidence of that weakish attractive force that is called a hydrogen bond from a hydrogen atom that was bonded to a sulphur. (Usually they only occur when H is bonded to N, O or F atoms.)
I made a thiol substituted camphor derivative compound which had the hydrogen atom bonded to the sulphur close enough in space to the oxygen atom located elsewhere in the molecule for it to be attracted enough by that oxygen that the hydrogen was effectively weakly bonded to the O as well. The infra-red spectrum showed this as an unusually sharp line.

I have twice appeared on television by accident.
Once on the terraces at Firs Park when the BBC filmed a Shire-Dumbarton Cup tie and I could be glimpsed in a background shot. The other time was years earlier. I was the only passenger on Renton railway station when some TV show or other was recording there for some obscure reason.

I’m only two handshakes (or maybe conversations) away from Adolf Hitler.
Some years ago now I met a (still youngish) bloke who’d guarded* Rudolf Hess at Spandau.

I can’t think of anyone to tag with this. If you’re offended by this omission let me know and I’ll add you!

*Since Hess (if it was Hess – there are conspiracy theories) died a while ago now my acquaintance must have been one of the last to do this. He said the Russians treated the prisoner pretty poorly; so they obviously thought he was the real Hess.

I’ve been tagged.
I gather this is some sort of bloggers’ chainletter. At least it’s not a pyramid scheme.
Won’t it run out soon? (Probably! see below.)

Princess Diana’s death – 31 August 1997
I was in bed, heard it on the radio, and my first thought was, “That’ll mean the TV’s all up the creek for today, then.” I was right – except it was for the week.
The country went collectively mad – or at least the media did. Whatever happened to restraint and the stiff upper lip?
What irked me most was that Scotland had a crucial World Cup qualifier unnecessarily delayed because of the funeral. Who has a funeral on a Saturday?
And all over a glorified clothes-horse. She seemed not to understand that (sadly as it happens) royal wives are nothing but baby machines. Katherine (I believe she doesn’t like being called Kate) Middleton, take note.

Margaret Thatcher’s That woman’s resignation – 22 November 1990
I think I was at work and someone came in and told me; but I could be confusing this with John Major’s resignation as Tory party leader (I accidentally typed praty there at first, how apposite) as I don’t think I believed it. It’s not that easy to get rid of the wicked witch is it?
(I know the above might sound sexist; but she really was an aggravating so-and-so and destroyed a large part of what made Britain great. Part of that destruction was that she ensured devolution would come to Scotland sooner rather than later.
I no longer live in the country I grew up in. It’s a harder, harsher, much more selfish place now. And that is a loss.)

Attack on the twin towers – 11 September 2001
Doctorvee, I was at home because I was ill. (I didn’t have another day off sick for over five years.)
The footage, of the second aeroplane sharking in (participle copyright Martin Amis) on looped repeat, seemed unreal. We’re so familiar with multiple camera angles that it somehow wasn’t convincing with only the one. It was the fires in the towers and their subsequent fall that hit me. (We did finally get footage from ground level of the planes hitting the towers.)
I never thought it could be an excuse for us co-invading a foreign country, though I had predicted in 1979 that our next war would be in the Middle East, over oil. (I was wrong about that because of the Falklands, but that wasn’t a war, oh no, that was a “police action.”)
Of course, Blair sent more troops overseas to more places than anyone since Churchill (who had, after all, had a bloody good reason.)

England’s World Cup Semi Final v Germany – 4 July 1990
What in the name of the wee man is this doing here?
We’re celebrating (ahem) a side reaching a semi-final?
That sums up the England football team’s achievements away from home in a nutshell.
Anyway, I watched the game on TV and harrumphed derisively as the “greatest goalkeeper in the world” failed to manage to take a couple of steps backwards and then jump, as Germany scored. Lineker’s equaliser was a class act, though. Gazza’s tears? Big Jessie.
I was sad for Bobby Robson.

President Kennedy’s Assassination – 22 November 1963
At home, I don’t think the TV was on. My dad came in from the shop across the road – it was a Friday night, I know, because this was a family ritual on Fridays. (Don’t ask, I was a child.) The shopkeeper had told him Kennedy had been shot. We didn’t yet know he was dead.

I don’t really feel I know enough bloggers well enough to tag five and doctorvee’s bagged one of them in onebrow.
So:-
Alastair
Big Rab
Simon Barrow
paul cockburn
Jim Steel
Sorry guys; you’re it.