A bit of a switch-up here for today: I’m in the middle of a few very long books and not ready to write any of them up. But a friend on Facebook directed my attention to a curated list on Bookriot by K.W. Colyard, “The Most Influential Sci-Fi Books of All Time”, and I thought maybe it would be fun to quibble with the list a bit.
I’m not going to take anything away from the list. I approve of the author’s guiding principle, as I see it, which is to add works by marginalized or overlooked authors as far back as possible and argue that in fact those works are influential partly because they have been continuously looked to by authors and readers who felt shut out of the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the SF canon as it once existed.
And I acknowledge that lists as a light and pleasurable form of canon-making, lists have to follow some principle of parsimony. You can’t add everything without making the list unreadable, and every addition invites someone to get annoyed by yet another omission. “Influential” is also an interesting organizing principle. It gets you out of the headache of “best” or “greatest”. It even lightly sidesteps the complicated assumptions in the word “important”. A lot of work can be brought in as “influential”—ultimately all you need is one or two other important creators saying they found the listed work to be really important, or some evidence that a community of readers have subculturally canonized a work.
But here’s what I would insist has to be on a list of “influential sci-fi” in addition to Colyard’s choices:
H.G. Wells, War of the Worlds, 1898. I get why lists of this kind limit every author to a single mention, but War of the Worlds had such a titanic influence on the genre and on popular culture overall that it seems hard to just list him for The Time Machine.
E.E. Doc Smith, First Lensman, 1950. Not only influential directly in that the Silver Age Green Lantern and his entire backstory more or less swiped a lot of Smith’s Lensman books, but also directly influential on specific SF writers (Heinlein most notably) and on a lot of SF cinema and TV in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s lost a lot of influence in more recent years, but a list like this shouldn’t be entirely presentist.
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination, 1956. In broad terms, way before its time, with its deeply unsettling protagonist, but it had a huge impact on SF writers at the time and more importantly afterwards; it opened up a major creative possibility in terms of a protagonist who was not just a square-jawed Zapp Brannigan.
Andre Norton, Witch World, 1963. I grant that this book poses problems of genre definition, rather like McCaffrey’s Pern novels (technically SF, but really more fantasy in content), but that would be one of the things that is influential about the book—that it laid out a way to bridge fantasy and SF that other authors have used since.
John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider, 1975. His other well-known book Stand On Zanzibar might be deemed more influential, I suppose, but Shockwave Rider is one of the more notable SF books to shape conceptions of and vocabularies for things that happened after the book was published; it also had a big influence on the genre.
Frederick Pohl, Gateway, 1977. I suppose you could argue that Gateway didn’t have a strong influence on the wider culture (I’m still surprised that it hasn’t been adapted into a series or film: it seems eminently doable) but I think the complicated, morally flawed protagonists as well as a really rich approach to the “strange alien artifact” genre of SF have had an enduring impact.
C.J. Cherryh, Downbelow Station, 1981. Probably the best known of her books about a single space-opera setting, but I think you can see the influence of her general oeuvre all over all subsequent space operas, all that way up to Arkady Martin and Becky Chambers.
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game, 1985. I don’t like Scott Card or his politics or his attitude any better than most contemporary SF readers, but when your list is about influence and not just works I like and approve of by authors I want to hold up, you can’t kick Ender’s Game off just because its author is odious. The book had a huge impact on readers at the time and you can see its fingerprints on a number of later works (as well as its connections to older work).
Iain Banks, The Player of Games, 1988. You gotta have a Culture novel on the list! I think this is maybe the most widely read or commented upon.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, 1992. Robinson has had a significant impact on SF generally, but his Mars trilogy seems especially important to mention—you can see it shaping a whole range of books (Allen Steele’s Coyote series, for example).
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep, 1992. Vinge’s novella True Names is arguably more influential, but that begins to open the door to short stories as candidates for influence and that would unsettle the whole exercise rather mightily.
David Brin, Brightness Reef, 1995. I think this is the best of Brin’s Uplift series, but I also think it’s a reasonable candidate for “most influential” of the series and maybe of Brin’s work overall.
Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon, 2003. Ok, so the Netflix adaptation seems to have bombed, but the book was both a marker of how certain themes in cyberpunk and SF had developed and has had a significant influence since then.
So if you made it this far, two questions for readers. (Open to all!)
What would you add to a list of the influential? (Let’s not argue about taking something away.)
What book is absolutely not influential but should be? Let’s make a new list. E.g., a book that you acknowledge is obscure or forgotten but should have had a big impact on SF? I’d nominate David Zindell, Neverness.
Image credit: "Star Projector Zeiss Univerarium Mark 8" by nosillacast is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
There are a few Heinlein and K. Dick books I’d take over the two listed(e.g. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress). I’d maybe add Von Neumann’s “The Computer and the Brain” which reads like science fiction in an age where literacy increasingly means re-tweeting a tiktok, instagramming an abdomen, or youtubing an unboxing video of expensive shoes.
Thank you for Witch World and Andre Norton! You know I am on board with John Brunner, as well, although Stand on Zanzibar is the one embedded in my head. I would like to see James Tiptree Jr’s short stories on the list. For me, there is little more influential than Schmitz’s Witches of Karres, one of the funniest SF novels ever written, which stands behind a myriad of whimsical space operas since. (Can we escape Douglas Adams? Do we want to?) Harlan Ellison was a jerk, but Dangerous Visions was an anthology/set of anthologies that set up a whole new way of writing SF. Also, CJ Cherry’s Cyteen opened up some new ideas about cloning and parenting for me.