I set out to list my top ten SF novels after fellow blogger Jim did so this morning. I wasn’t able to pare the list down to ten, and anyway, isn’t that a pretty arbitrary number? The first five are classics, and the remaining ten are my own more eccentric choices, highly recommended for many reasons.

Dune by Frank Herbert
This book is a classic. I first read it in a high school literature class; I’ve since read my paperback version to tatters and have acquired a hardback to replace it. It has everything: epic scope, religion, politics, science, compelling characters, plus it’s very quotable. “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.” Frank Herbert’s sequels are passable, declining in quality with each successive book, but his son’s prequels are mostly pretty awful.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
The tale of precocious and tortured Ender, who goes away to school and ends up winning an interstellar war and wiping out an alien race, is wonderfully told. Ender and his friends are wonderfully well developed characters and the battle school seems real. The author’s parallel story line, returning to view the universe through character Bean’s point of view, is an uneven but fascinating look at the same sequence of events.

Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
This older book is a gripping perspective on the end of the world. If it doesn’t have you stockpiling beef jerky, ammunition and insulin, nothing will. It sure makes me wish I had more truly useful skills than I actually do!

Childhood’s End by Arthur Clarke
Others prefer different Clarke books but this is my favorite. It’s simple, elegant, and desperately sad on so many levels. Clarke’s writing can sometimes be a bit cold, focused on ideas and technology, but this one is very human and we feel the characters’ fear and grief.

Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
I enjoy most of the Heinlein books up to his turning point book, Time Enough for Love. His juveniles are all excellent, and I think read every one of them before I was thirteen. It was tough picking a favorite, but I think Starship Troopers is at the top of my list. It’s a well-disciplined story, with great ideas, a noble, honorable character, a well-defined military universe, and it’s a compelling page-turner too.

Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
Almost everything Lois writes is fabulous. (Unfortunately, I don’t like the Sharing Knife books.) Memory is at the top of my list, though, because it’s about Miles screwing up past all possibility of a solution, and figuring out a way to keep on keeping on anyway. It’s a book about redemption and persistence, and reinvention, and in many ways it’s the most inspiring of the Vorkosigan books.

Clowns of God by Morris West
This book is only tangentially SF because of its religious/post-apocalyptic subject matter. It’s the story of the Pope being given a revelation of the second coming and the end of the earth, being hounded out of office, and pursued by agents that would like to see him fall and fail. It’s very well written, with beautiful characters and a very liberal theology of love and persistence in the face of evil, and a great piece of literature.

Slant by Greg Bear
Many of Bear’s works are wonderful - Moving Mars, Darwin’s Radio, Eon, but this is my favorite. It’s very stylish, readable cyberpunk, with a vocabulary and slate of ideas that’s as fresh and inventive as Neuromancer seemed when it first came out.

This Alien Shore by CS Friedman
Friedman is better known for her dark Coldfire fantasy series, but my favorite is this SF book. It’s a exploration of the cultural definition of sanity and what that means for our future. The universe may require very different capabilities from us someday. It’s also got an excellent paranoid edge; I love paranoid books.

Heavy Time by CJ Cherryh
Cherryh is probably my favorite single author. I have enjoyed all her series, fantasy, sociological SF and hard SF, but my favorite of her books remain her Merchanter/Alliance universe novels. Heavy Time, and its sequel Hellburner, are wonderfully fast paced, paranoid, stylish novels about life in a far future universe where no one is looking out for us but ourselves.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
What if we no longer needed to sleep? What could we do with that additional eight hours a day? Starting from there, Kress extrapolates a scary near future world where humanity splits into rigid classes based on their intelligence and ability to produce - with the Sleepless at the top of the hierarchy.

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall by Sheri Tepper
Most of Sheri Tepper’s books are fairly strongly feminist, and this is one of the most vehemently so. It’s a fascinating story of a group of middle aged women who have remained friends since college. They are fighting a scarily possible theocracy that wants to relegate women to nothing but childbearing vessels - or less. For all that it’s an angry book, it’s also a great story, interweaving legend, action, and possibility together with great characters.

Accelerando by Charles Stross
This is one of the most wonderfully, joyfully creative books I’ve read in the last 20 years. (The other was Slant, mentioned above.) The ideas, the vocabulary, the universe, and the well-realized vision of a possible singularity are all really well done. I’m not usually a fan of experimental fiction because it can be hard to get into, but this had solid and sympathetic enough characters that it was accessible and a fascinating read.

Vigilant by James Alan Gardner
This author has several standalone books in a “League of Peoples” series, but this is the most profound and far reaching. The heroine joins the Vigil, an elite group that oversees the government of a multi-species planet. After years of training, she survives the implant of a live data link. She saves her world, unravels old mysteries, and gets her own life together. She is a great character, really fun to follow, and the book is excellent.

Overshoot by Mona Clee
Clee is one of those frustrating authors that only wrote a couple of things and then disappeared. Overshoot is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s the intertwined stories of a young woman learning about her world in the seventies, and the same woman as as an old woman living after the collapse of civilization in a global-warming disaster. This one, too, makes me want to stockpile bottled water and penicillin. If you can find it in print, it’s a very entertaining and all-too-prophetic book.

———–
What was also interesting was looking at books on my shelf that I loved 20 years ago but leave me cold now. I have a huge collection of Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Lee Modesitt books that I haven’t picked up in years. I guess I’ve outgrown them.

Caltech student Virgil Griffith has put together a fascinating data correlation on Books that Make You Dumb.

He’s taken the most popular books at every college, and correlated them with the average SAT score of those colleges. The resulting graphic runs a wide gamut, containing books from chick-lit to classics, and even includes a control choice called “I Don’t Read”. By his logic, books that correlate to a lower SAT score than “I Don’t Read” seem to be sure winners in the make-you-dumb contest.

Harry Potter was the most popular book mentioned on college sites, more popular than the Bible. With the odd exception of Fahrenheit 451, science fiction books seemed to appear above the median. The smartest book was Lolita; the dumbest was Zane.

The creator of this study is quick to point out that correlation does not infer cause & effect – but nonetheless, the resulting data is pretty fascinating.

I’ve read 49 of the books mentioned, heavily skewed to SF/F, modern lit and classics, but overall scattered throughout the median area. Not that a single data point has the slightest relevance here, but I believe my SAT score was a good but not spectacular 1270.

Note: if you regularly read BoingBoing, then this particular post isn’t news to you – I found this information there.

The hard-working IT Catholic Mom is starting up a blogger book club on her site. Blogger Readerville (to the tune of Margaritaville) sounds like it’s going to be a lot of fun!

While there is no official theme, I think it’s going to be general & women’s fiction – but she and I agree on one thing - no romance.

Drop by and see if you’re interested, and if so, join us!

I have been fortunate enough to receive an advance review copy of Kristine Smith’s new science fiction novel Endgame.

It is the fourth book in the Jani Kilian universe, following Code of Conduct, Rules of Conflict, Law of Survival, and Contact Imminent.

My challenge with this review is to talk intelligently about the book without spoiling it for those who will want to read it.

The Story

Endgame’s protagonist, Jani Kilian, is a compelling, complex, driven hero. Injured over 20 years ago in a messy conflict between humans and the alien idomeni, she was rebuilt using idomeni genetic material.

In the intervening years, she’s survived the inevitable medical crises of her physique hybridizing. She’s also navigated multiple bloody and paranoid political, alien-human and personal upheavals by staying always on the run.

Until now.

Jani has found a home with a group of fellow hybrids on Thalassa, where she serves in the role of religious leader and diplomat. When her new home is threatened by human and idomeni political and economic pressure, she decides to confront the issues and fight.

Her battle is staged across multiple worlds, at bedsides and in boardrooms, and with guns and prayers. Through it all, she remains a driven, charismatic, polarizing presence. Enemies despise and fear her, allies love her, but all respect what she stands for.

This book should be accessible as a standalone novel, however, having read all the predecessors was helpful in understanding characters and worlds.

The Writing

I admire Kristine Smith’s writing. Her style is intricate, layered and detailed, but her pacing is rapid and her characters vivid.

Jani is a tremendous, multidimensional protagonist. (I won’t demean her by calling her a heroine – she will never require a rescuer on a white horse.) She’s brilliant, driven, strong, paranoid, angry, hopeful and visionary, and her every action consistently builds her character. I cheered and agonized for her through every step of her battle.

The author’s worldbuilding, as well, is outstanding. Although the stories and settings are not similar, the political and religious themes rival Dune in their complexity and reach. You feel the wind and heat as she stands on a Thalassan cliff, the sterility of shipboard life, and the sun-baked immensity of the idomeni homeworld.

The idomeni are a well-drawn alien race. They may look similar enough to pass as humans, but their culture, taboos, behavior and violent reactions all mark them as entirely, well, alien from us.

In this story, the author brings multiple story arcs to a close successfully. Idomeni internal politics threaten to explode, human politics and anti-hybrid sentiments come to a head, and Jani’s personal life falls apart. Jani, of course, has a hand in resolving all of it.

The final scene is spectacular – compelling, symbolic and poetic. It’s a fitting conclusion to Jani’s saga and left me very pleased with this book.

Endgame’s release date is November 1, 2007. Buy it and read it!