peristaltor | Seminal Sci-Fi: A Call for Nominees (Reply)

Almost a week ago, I found myself at a neighbor's modest Labor Day lawn gathering with a few other neighbors and friends of the host. A couple of friends there were, like the host, writers, folks who banged keyboard for a living (unlike me, who bangs them to punish them for not giving me a living).

One writer specialized so heavily in weird fiction (Poe and Lovecraft present the most obvious examples of the genre) that, as he confessed, he hadn't read any science fiction since about 1968. And so, eavesdropping socially on a conversation I and another guest were having about books we've read, he asked what I thought to be a perfect party talky topic: Which ten science fiction books written since 1968 can be considered seminal enough to have affected subsequent publications?

I think I'll submit my list unordered, more a stream-of-consciousness list than a proper hierarchy of greatness. I'll also include novellas, for reasons that should become obvious.

A Boy and His Dog by Harlen Ellison. Dad, a high school teacher who offered a class in science fiction, gave me a compilation of the World's Best Science Fiction Stories of 1970. Ellison's post-apocalyptic story shown, and had a final punchline worthy of a *ahem* shaggy dog joke.
Ringworld by Larry Niven. Though it's more of a classic quest tale of disparate heroes, this book postulates I think one of the best constructed habitats in all of sci-fi. The Dyson sphere is just overkill by comparison. I like the Kzin, and the subsequent Man-Kzin wars series proves great fun. It also has a great punchline ending (regarding Teela's unlikely dumb luck).
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlen Ellison. If you haven't read it yet, you are probably still thinking the coming self-awareness of the Terminator is the worst thing that could happen to mankind. You are wrong.
Gateway by Fredrich Pohl. No, it's not his best story, but it is by far his best character tale. The world he posits in this first of his later Heechee series is one of the only that focuses on what happened to the main character, and proves a far better psychological yarn than most sci-fi writers can conjure.
Neuromancer by William Gibson. To be fair, the entire Neuromancer trilogy, including Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, should fit here as one, but one has to start somewhere. As I explained to the man who started the conversation at the party, if you need to understand where sci-fi could go (as opposed to where it's already been), starting with the author that coined the term "cyberspace" might be a good start.
A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick. I've read 28 of Dick's books, starting with Time Out of Joint, followed by about 120 of his short stories. The bad thing is that they all seem to bleed together, the themes orbiting about self-awareness (and characters that think they have it, but really don't) and dystopia prominent. Scanner is the first of these, I think (with the possible exception of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said) that relate the characters in a possible world today, rather than a possible world in the future; all you have to do is posit tech that would have almost worked in 1973 and throw in a recreational wonder drug. Scanner is the kind of dark writing that makes Ellison seem happy-go-lucky by comparison.
The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons. Never mind Hyperion or the other wandering narratives Simmons has written. Yes, they did better in sales; but there is something to be said for a book that stands alone with a great story. That story is simple, but dark; what if you could read minds, but couldn't stop reading them? Really, what would you do? What the character did in the book will blow your mind. (I know, I know, it's not exactly "seminal," but I enjoyed it each of the three times I read it. That has to count for something.)
Strata by Terry Pratchett. Seminal? How else can you explain the sci-fi book that started the best series in his career, and perhaps the best in the English language? I'm not exaggerating here; check out the number of Discworld stories ranked in the United Kingdom's Big Read of the top 200 books of all time. He holds the record for the most books in the list, fifteen total, and all Discworld. No other English language author has managed that.
The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Most of my friends would put Snow Crash in the list as the most influential Stephenson book to date, but I find The Diamond Age far more fun, and a better example of post-scarcity speculative fiction (you know, a world transformed by a seminal technology and suddenly therefore without physical limits). A world with nanobots so abundant that when airborn bots compete for dominance the air becomes befouled enough to call these competition "toner wars"? Where home replicators are real, even to the lowest of incomes? Loved it. (I almost listed Cryptonomicon here, especially since it is the start for his quite seminal Baroque Trilogy, but most of my friends and I agree that it suffers from a weak ending. Sorry, Neal. Money only works that way to technogeeks.)
Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. I know, I know, he's a despicable homophobe. Credit where due, though, this is a good book, the best new book dealing with time travel. Buy it used to deny his creepy views any monetary reward.