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.

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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.

Random Michelle K asked for suggestions for story ideas - photos, phrases, etc.

I browsed many photo galleries and came up with a list of links. I couldn’t add it as a comment on her blog because, well, that many links would kick it into the spam queue.

For one reason or another, these pictures tell a story to me:

Sunlight Behind Piñon Pines

Elmore Elk

Grounds Crew at the Masters’ Golf Tourney

Moose Crossing O’Malley

Murder Suspect at her Arraignment

Young Girl giving herself Injection

Cosplay at Norwescon

Tyge & Pleo have a Moment

Vegas Under Fire (by Zach!)

Do you have any pictures or phrases that would serve as a writing prompt? Please note that more than two links in a comment will kick your note into my spam queue as well, and I’ll have to fish it back out later.

Sports Illustrated recently published their list of 25 Toughest Athletes.

As with most such lists, most of the attention is on who earned spot #1. I’d like to instead talk about the #2 guy.

Lance Mackey won both the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod dogsled races. He was the first to have won both in the same year – and he repeated the results for a second year.

Both races are run by a driver, a team of 12-16 dogs, a single sled, and only the essential, required supplies required for the trip: an arctic parka, a heavy sleeping bag, an ax, snowshoes, musher food, dog food and boots for each dog’s feet to protect against sharp ice on the trail. Not only is the driver responsible for arctic survival for him/herself and the team, the driver is also required to take exemplary care of his dogs throughout the race and often runs a good part of the route when he/she wants to reduce the load or compensate for the terrain.

The Yukon Quest, held in February, is a 1,000 mile race from Fairbanks, Alaska to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. There are 10 checkpoints and four mandatory longer rest periods spaced throughout the race, including a halfway 36-hour stop, where facilities and veterinary inspections are provided. Temperatures on the trail can range from -50°F to +25°F. The dogs typically run in a 4-6h on/4-6h off pattern around the clock, with the team and driver resting on the trail during their down time. Mackey’s 2008 winning time was 10d:12h:14m – the red lantern (last place) finisher’s time was 14:04:17.

The Iditarod, run in early March, is approximately 1,150 miles, from Anchorage, Alaska to Nome, Alaska. The route alternates yearly between a northern and a southern trail, and is often warmer and can be more hazardous than the Yukon Quest. There are 22 checkpoints and three mandatory stops on the race, one of them 24 hours. Mackey’s 2008 winning time for this race was 9:11:46, and the red lantern finisher completed the race in 14:19:51.

Oh, yeah – one more thing about Mackey. He’s a cancer survivor. After the 2001 Iditarod he was diagnosed with throat cancer, and spent the year undergoing surgery and chemotherapy. He started the 2002 Iditarod but scratched, took a year off, and has been running cancer-free ever since.

This is a tough athlete.

#1 on the Sports Illustrated list was Tiger Woods. Certainly, Woods plays golf like a genius, and his physical conditioning and mental toughness in a mentally challenging sport are legendary. Could he finish a 1,000 mile arctic dogsled race? After chemotherapy? I don’t think so.

On the other hand, Mackey could probably finish 4 x 18 hole rounds of golf – not necessarily with any kind of great score, but it’s do-able. My bet is he wouldn’t want to, though. No dogs are allowed on the golf course.

The Seattle PI today played around with a concept featured in the book Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, by Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser.

Since I am always game for a writing challenge, I thought I’d try it.

         Dreamed wildly, cherished family, chose conformity.

What would yours be?

As I’ve mentioned in response to excellent posts on a couple of other sites, I struggle with depression. Although I don’t usually talk about personal topics here, nor am I as entertaining and eloquent as Dooce on the subject, I do want to collect and share my thoughts in this forum.

I have battled depression since adolescence, probably since I was 14 or 15. I didn’t know what it was back then, and wasn’t diagnosed until my mid-20s, but it seriously impacted me. I was quite a handful, my moods must have given my parents and college roommates whiplash.

There is a difference between situational depression (my dog died so I’m down in the dumps) and clinical depression (which is ongoing, intractable, not responsive to the ups and downs of life). The variables are usually duration and severity – but please, if this at all applies to you, visit a trained mental health professional to help with that evaluation!

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