50 BEST NOVELS EVAH

Daniel Keys Moran posted his list of the 50 Best Novels of all time. Which made me think about what I'd put on my own list. His rules were that he wouldn't list anything that he hadn't read in the last 15 years, which seems like a pretty good guideline, so I'll stick with that.

Now, having said that, there's simply no way I can list them in any kind of order. I just can't. Sorry.

LORD OF LIGHT by Roger Zelazney

I like a lot of Zelazney, but this is not only his best work, it is probably the best science fantasy novel ever written. I know I said I wasn't going to rate the entries on the list, but I lied; this one I will rate absolute number one.

THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER by Samuel Clemens

I like a lot of Clemens, too, but this one is still the best.

TITAN/WIZARD/DEMON by John Varley.

I can't pick just one; each of them have their own strengths, and unlike most series, each installment improves on the previous one. DEMON is by far the most fun of the trilogy, but in places the style is rough, as if Varley might just have needed one more draft to get everything polished up correctly.

MINDBRIDGE by Joe Haldeman

I'm a big FOREVER WAR fan, but to me, MINDBRIDGE is the best thing Haldeman has ever written, which is saying a lot. Also, Haldeman has never released an unedited version of MINDBRIDGE which turned the original reading experience into utter drudgery, as he did with FOREVER WAR. Nor has he written any dumbass sequels to MINDBRIDGE.

EMERALD EYES by Daniel Keys Moran

I enjoy all the Continuing Time stuff, but EMERALD EYES is my favorite... I like Carl Castaneveras, and his cast of contemporaries, much much better than I like any of the next generation who populate the ongoing episodes.

CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY by Robert A. Heinlein

Probably my favorite Heinlein book, and the best of his 'juveniles'.

BLOOD GAMES by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Cool ass vampires in Nero's Rome by a serious student of history who also writes with enormous skill and talent.

THE WARRIOR'S APPRENTICE by Lois McMaster Bujold

The first (or, maybe, the second, or, possibly, the third, sequentially) in the Vorkosigan series... all of them are well worth reading, but this one is probably the best.

DRAGONSBANE by Barbara Hambly

There is much goodness by Hambly, but this one is the best.

TO REIGN IN HELL by Steven Brust - few writers have the balls to take on subject matter like Lucifer's rebellion against God, and no other writer I can think of would have the talent to make it work as well as Brust does. It's unfortunate that this novel is out of print, but it's definitely worth tracking down.

STAND ON ZANZIBAR by John Brunner - Brunner is one of my favorite writers, and has done stuff I like better than STAND, which is actually one of the most depressing novels I've ever read. His other distopian novels that have more upbeat endings, like THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER, THE WRONG END OF TIME, and THE STONE THAT NEVER CAME DOWN are all a lot more fun to read. But STAND ON ZANZIBAR is a masterpiece, and an astonishing accomplishment... and is outdone even in the 'wow, that's depressing department' by its kinda-sorta sequel, THE SHEEP LOOK UP. I can only imagine that every Pink Floyd lyric ever written was inspired by this book.

THE STAND by Stephen King - King's masterpiece, and the story that taught me that it's not always necessary for your heroes to actually accomplish anything. The difference between the original version of THE STAND and the monstrously bloated uncut edition should be enough proof for even the most obtuse just how badly Stephen King needs a competent editor to do, not his best work, but anything beyond incoherent, self indulgent garbage.

I'm very fond of nearly all of King's early work -- CARRIE is like no other book I've ever read, THE SHINING is a masterpiece of creepy atmosphere, THE DEAD ZONE is a very tight and effective bit of character work, and FIRESTARTER is one of my favorite guilty pleasures... but THE STAND is the closest thing to real literature King is ever going to write. Not that that means much to me, but it is without a doubt the book that shows his undeniable talent to the fullest.

Let me interrupt myself for a moment to note as an aside: this Best Novels stuff is a tough gig. Favorite authors would be much easier. In fact, favorite ANYthing would be much easier, I could shamelessly list stuff like Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise work (prose and comic strip) and the Lester Dent Doc Savage stories and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon. But much though I love the way all those authors write (O'Donnell, especially, is an absolute master of simple, point to point prose and compact characterization), I simply cannot in truth call any of their works a 'best' novel. That stuff is all pulp with no redeeming literary value. I love it, and make no apologies for my love of it... but you can't call it a 'best'.

STARTIDE RISING by David Brin - Brin's obstinate blind pigheaded utterly misguided insistence on writing about events rather than characters turned the remaining Uplift books into increasingly aggravating exercises in frustration, as after reading STARTIDE RISING, all anyone wanted in the world was to find out what happened to Jillian, Toshio, Creideki, Tom, Akki, and Lucky Kaa... and what we got was the equivalent of George R.R. Martin writing one book about the Stark kids and then giving us five more novels set in the same universe, but telling the stories of fifty or sixty entirely different and urelated characters on the other side of the planet.

Regardless of that, though, STARTIDE RISING is without a doubt one of the best novels ever written and one of hard science fiction's most shining achievements. Brin's POSTMAN is also one of the best post apocalypse SF stories ever, but I like STARTIDE a little better... perhaps just because they've never turned it into a cinematic turd starring Kevin Costner.

THE ODESSA FILE by Frederick Forsythe - I admit it, as far as books go, THE DOGS OF WAR and even DAY OF THE JACKAL are probably better, but I really enjoy this one. It's probably Forsythe's only novel with a really admirable and likable protagonist, and it's also the only one that managed to completely surprise me the first time I read it with that great twist ending.

MARATHON MAN by William Goldman - most people who'd put a Goldman book on a Best Of list would go for THE PRINCESS BRIDE every time, and I like TPB a great deal. But MARATHON MAN is Goldman at his absolute best, hitting you with a genuinely surprising twist every chapter, and has a fabulously satisfying resolution. It even made a pretty good movie.

SYSTEMIC SHOCK by Dean Ing - nuclear war shakes but does not shatter civilization and the Mormons emerge as the new power elite in post apocalypse Streamlined America. Ing only ever wrote one solidly good book, but that one is definitely one of the best.

BRIGHT ORANGE FOR THE SHROUD by John D. MacDonald - I enjoy all the Travis McGee novels, but if I have to pick a favorite, it's this one. Wonderful settings, terrific plotting, and as nasty a set of villains as anyone could ever ask for make this, to my mind, the best of the McGee run, which is really saying something. The world took a big hit the day it lost John D. MacDonald.

THE HOBBIT by J.R.R. Tolkien - I recently reread this, and was charmed to discover that, as with C.S. Lewis, Tolkien really writes better when he thinks he's writing a children's story. Everything charming about the Middle Earth setting is present in this story, and the fairy tale nature of the plot makes it almost impossible to notice just how two dimensional all the characters are... something that becomes extremely evident a chapter or two into THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

THE CALIFORNIA VOODOO GAME by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes - I love the entire Dream Park trilogy, but I think Niven and Barnes saved the best for last. TCVG takes all the elements previously introduced in the first two books -- amazing basic concept, wonderful characters, interesting plots-inside-plots, corporate intrigue -- and amps it all up to unprecedented heights in this mad geek romp through a deserted arcology infested with zombies.

THE MOTE IN GOD'S EYE by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle - It's... yeah, I mean, it's almost mandatory on any Best Novels list compiled by a middle aged SF/fantasy geek, but, well, there's a good reason for that; the book is that frickin' good. Just read it.

RED DRAGON by Thomas Harris - back before Harris completely lost both his mind and his dignity and forgot the importance of anything except royalty checks, movie rights, and best seller list status, he was probably the finest writer America had, and RED DRAGON may very well be his strongest book. BLACK SUNDAY and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS are all very much worth reading, too, but Harris was at his peak in this one. The less said about immoral trash like HANNIBAL and HANNIBAL RISING the better.

WILD TIMES by Brian Garfield - the autobiography of fictional Western hero Hugh Cardiff, WILD TIMES is not only the best thing once popular author Brian Garfield has ever written, it's probably the best piece of Wild West 'literature' ever written. If David Milch didn't read this book forty times before he ever pitched DEADWOOD, well, he should have.

The original FOUNDATION trilogy by Isaac Asimov - I enjoyed all the new installments, but the first three are still the best.. not just the best Foundation books, but the best Galactic Empire space opera ever written. You can't really be a science fiction fan if you haven't read these.

THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE by Pat Conroy - forget the truly horrifying movie adaptation, this tale of ritual humiliation at a thinly disguised fictional version of the Citadel may be one of the most powerful books ever written about friendship, military tradition, honor, hypocrisy, and the wonderful effects of chocolate Ex-Lax brownies on a class of sadistic asswipes.

BLACK AND BLUE MAGIC by Zylpha Keatley Snyder - Ms. Snyder wrote nearly as many charming children's novels as Beverly Cleary, and Snyder's were a lot whackier, too. This one is my all time favorite, a delightful tale of a young kid who does a favor for a down on his luck peddler of magical goods, and as a reward, is given an enchanted potion that gives him big white wings. The story of his magical summer of adventures flying around San Francisco Bay getting into trouble and back out again is just tremendous good fun.

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN by Ray Bradbury - Bradbury was my first ever 'favorite writer', and this book contains probably the most brilliant framing sequence for an anthology of otherwise unrelated short stories ever dreamt up by the mind of mortal man. A few of the stories are clunkers (that's right, "The Man", you crappy, crappy, crappy religious allegory, I'm talking about YOU), but many of them -- the incredibly creepy "The Veldt", the hauntingly atmospheric "The Long Rain", the melancholy "The Rocket Man", and the brilliantly evoked "Marionettes, Inc", just for a few -- are among Bradbury's finest stories ever, which, of course, means they are SF/fantasy classics in their own right.

NEVERWHERE by Neil Gaiman - They haven't made a mediocre movie adaptation of this one yet, so, to date, I regard this as the best of Gaiman's novels.

THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, by C.S. Lewis - Like J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis writes better when he thinks he's writing for children. The NARNIA books are all frankly wonderful, except for THE LAST BATTLE, which is a stinker, and a wretched no fun stinker at that, but if you just ignore it, the rest of them are tremendous and must reads for any real fantasy fan. Ignore all the unfortunately overly obvious Christian allegory and just enjoy them for the wonderfully written fantasies they are.

MIND OF MY MIND by Octavia E. Butler - few writers can pull off that cool shifting narrative viewpoint thing that Joe Haldeman does so effortlessly, but I suspect Haldeman learned the trick from Octavia E. Butler, who expertly employs her shifting viewpoints to portray the tale of the deathless Doro and the subculture of his psionically powerful descendants that he breeds as psychic food... and what happens when one of his prize subjects grows powerful enough to battle him for her freedom.

JUMPER by Steven Gould - this astonishingly original and charming reworking of a standard sf cliche bears nearly no resemblance to the wretchedly bad movie that was based on it, a dichotomy Gould attempted to close by writing another version of the book based on the incredibly bad movie script. I had a hard time forgiving him for that, but it should be noted that the original JUMPER is, in addition to being a fabulous story in its own right, one of the few novels that has a sequel, REFLEX, which is just as good as the original.

THE GAME OF FOX AND LION by Robert R. Chase - star spanning corporate intrigue, interstellar warfare, genetically engineered superhumans and the Unified Church of Humanity - give sf hackmeister supreme Ben Bova all those elements to write about and you'd end up with a literary turd big enough to choke a New York City sewer tunnel, but in the hands of Robert R. Chase, it's all transmuted into one of the best space operas since FOUNDATION. Chase wrote a sequel to this book called CRUCIBLE which is also pretty good, but it can't hit this book's level, nor can Chase's other book, SHAPERS, although that one is an excellent and original SF novel in its own right. It's a pity Chase seems to have stopped writing SF, as with these three books, he established himself as one of the authors I still search for new books from whenever I'm in a bookstore.

HOMUNCULUS by James Blaylock - Completely indescribable, this book is... well, it's out of print, for starters, but if you can get a copy, snatch it up and read it. It's just tremendous -- set in Victorian London, this is sort of a steampunk version of Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus! without all the incoherent Joycean stream of consciousness bullshit to fuck up the narrative. If you can possibly dig a story featuring six inch high artificial men, secret societies, heroic tobacconists, and dirigibles piloted by dead men, among many, many, many other fantastical plot elements, then this is definitely a book for you.

A WRINKLE IN TIME and sequels, by Madeline L'Engle - If you've tried to read these books, then either you love them and absolutely agree without hesitation or reservation that they belong on any Best Novels list ever compiled, or you gave up halfway through WRINKLE and cannot comprehend what the hell all the fuss is about whenever those people you know who actually read for fun get together and talk about their favorite books ever. It should be obvious which side of that divide I fall on. I loved the TIME books as a kid, and I was recently delighted to discover that since the last time I checked (probably fifteen years ago) L'Engle had written two new ones, and the latest, MANY WATERS, was in many ways the most fascinating entry in the series. As with the NARNIA books, there's a lot of annoying Christian allegory (if you're the sort, like me, that finds that stuff annoying) but again as with the NARNIA books, the writing is good enough to let you ignore it and just dig the story.

 

YEAR OF THE UNICORN by Andre Norton - I read a lot of Andre Norton when I was growing up and I have a lot of respect for Ms. Norton's talents. Having said that, a lot of her books kind of blend together after a while. YEAR OF THE UNICORN, though, is probably her best novel, the one where she manages to bring her Witch World setting most vividly to life, and to create her most three dimensional protagonists, as well. I can't claim anything Andre Norton has ever written has been all that influential on my writing style, but certainly, YEAR OF THE UNICORN has been hugely influential on how I design fantasy roleplaying backdrops. Which doesn't mean much to anyone but me, but, hey, I'm the one posting this, and it's not like anyone out there is going to wade all the way through this nonsense anyway.

ALTERNITIES by Michael Kube-McDowell - probably the best alternate timelines novel ever written, bar none. This book is so good that I keep trying to read other stuff by Kube-McDowell, and I keep ending up disappointed... apparently, this was his best idea ever, and nothing else will ever compare. But this is a fantastic book.

PARATIME by H. Beam Piper - It's an anthology, not a novel, but I don't care; PARATIME needs to be on this list. If you haven't read it, I urge you to rectify your error... assuming you're a science fiction fan. If not, you're not reading this list anyway, so, whatever.

1984 by George Orwell - It's great, it's brilliant, it's tremendous, it's iconic, it's awesome, it's one of the finest novels ever written, and it's un-fucking-believably depressing. Reading this book is much like Orwell's description of fascism, i.e., having a boot stamp on your face over and over again forever, or, at least, until you finish it and put it back on the shelf for another decade. But if you haven't read it, you should. Everybody needs a little face stomping once in a while, to keep them honest.

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF by David Gerrold - In many ways one of the most twisted books ever written, but you have to give Gerrold his props, he sat down and thought this bastard through. If there's a kinky, raunchy potential ramification of personal time travel that Gerrold doesn't pretty thoroughly explore in this NC-17 rated extrapolation of Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps", well, it's beyond my ability to imagine... and to paraphrase Han Solo, I can imagine a LOT of kinky, raunchy time travel ramifications.

THE OUTSIDERS by S.E. Hinton - the original teen angst novel, and still the best. I myself kind of like THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW a little better, but THE OUTSIDERS is a better book, on its literary merits, anyway.

LEST DARKNESS FALL by L. Sprague DeCamp - I love DeCamp's writing; like British writer Colin Wilson, he's someone who has so much writing talent that he can literally write anything, and write it in clear, clean, beautifully expressive text that anyone can understand, no matter how complex a concept or sequence of events it is he's trying to explicate. I am especially fond of DeCamp's pulpier stuff like the Krishna series or his Conan adaptations (Robert E. Howard was a reasonably talented hack, but DeCamp actually understands characterization, story structure, and every other aspect of the craft of writing beyond atmosphere and setting, which is pretty much all Howard knew how to do), but for a Best Novels list, you have to try and find something with at least a little redeeming literary value. So this story of a time traveling engineer trying to import modern high tech into the Roman Empire in order to forestall the Dark Ages is the one that gets the props.

THE DEMON PRINCES by Jack Vance - Galactic Empire fiction meets the Chronicles of Amber, and only the strong shall survive. If you've read Vance and aren't in absolute awe of his talent and his imagination, clearly, you're reading him wrong.

THE GIVEN DAY by Dennis Lehane - Lehane is probably the best literary writer working in America now, and THE GIVEN DAY may be his best novel. For all that Lehane still has no idea how to actually end a story or resolve a plot, his prose is so full of wonderment, and this novel in particular is so chock full of amazing historical details, that I'll forgive him for these minor failings.

Okay, that's 42 listed separately, but if you count all the actual novels in all the series I've listed, we're well over 50, and I'm tired of typing this. So there you go.