(3) DOUGLAS ADAMS –
THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1979-1982)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series – of which I prefer the ‘original’ trilogy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and Life, The Universe and Everything) gave us so many things – not least, the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. 42 to be exact, which of course begs the Question to Life, the Universe and Everything. It also gave us the most important thing in life, which is to have your towel, as well as the only practical advice you’ll ever need, which is written in large and friendly letters on the cover of the titular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Don’t Panic!

In short, it needs little introduction as a cult classic science fiction comedy. Indeed, it is my top ten entry that I would recommend to non-readers of science fiction, as it is really more absurdist comedy of our world writ large as Galactic civilization, with the science fiction trappings or tropes played for comedy – starting with Earth being demolished for a hyperspace bypass…

FANTASY & HORROR

Not really – as even its SF trappings or tropes are more played for absurdist comedy.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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(4) PHILIP JOSE FARMER –

RIVERWORLD (1971 – 1983)

Philip Jose Farmer brought the kink to my science fiction.

Actually, Philip Jose Farmer brought the kink to science fiction in general. In the words of Joe Lansdale, Farmer gave science fiction sex – and not just conventional sex, but kinky alien sex, most notably in his Hugo Award-winning 1952 short story “The Lovers”, subsequently expanded into a novel. And also religion – “in his odd blending of theology, p0rnography and adventure” as per literary critic Leslie Fiedler. If that’s not a compelling advertisement, I don’t know what is!

Leslie Fielder also applauded Farmer’s approach to storytelling as a “gargantuan lust to swallow down the whole cosmos, past, present and to come, and to spew it out again”.

And yes, he did actually bring the kink to my own personal science fiction. My sexual imagination was permanently, well, blown by The Image of the Beast, and its sequel, Blown, in my adolescence. I wouldn’t recommend them for the faint-hearted – they were explicitly written, in every sense of the word explicit, for a publisher of science fiction literary erotica.

Farmer also gave science fiction his Riverworld series, the definitive posthumous or afterlife fantasy – well, apart from the original posthumous fantasy by John Kendricks Bangs by which it was inspired.

Every human (and sapient hominid species) that has ever lived and died in history or prehistory finds themselves resurrected en masse in the mysterious Riverworld, in a style somewhat similar to the Matrix and equally engineered.

Like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, its concept was too large for its narrative finish and it falls apart somewhat in the concluding volume, but the journey through Riverworld is unforgettable – and part of me still awaits to be resurrected there.

FANTASY & HORROR

The fourth of my four posthumous or afterlife fantasies that I’ve smuggled into my Top 10 SF list – because they’re written by writers I know primarily through their SF.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(5) ROBERT SILVERBERG –
TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING (1990)

Straight outta the afterlife!

Robert Silverberg is a prolific author of fantasy and SF – one whom deserves his own Top 10 list from either his novels or short stories (or both!). Ironically, this is not the novel I would recommend as introduction to Silverberg – that would be his epic planetary romance, Lord Valentine’s Castle, which combines elements of fantasy and SF to please fans of either genre.

However, it is his posthumous fantasy here that earns my Top 10 SF entry. Evolved from his story “Gilgamesh in the Outback”, his contribution to the posthumous fantasy anthology series, Heroes in Hell. Everyone who has ever lived and died throughout humanity’s history – and prehistory – finds themselves reborn in the afterlife, a mysterious and vague limbo. It is not unlike terrestrial existence – one can even die in it but is then reborn elsewhere – but more plastic in its reality, as geography and even memory can be unreliable or untrustworthy.

Like limbo, humanity’s main purpose in the afterlife is to find ways to pass eternity – or for protagonist Gilgamesh (of the Sumerian epic) to find a way back to life, mirroring his epic quest.

FANTASY & HORROR

Yes – it’s the third of four posthumous or afterlife fantasies by an SF author in my Top 10 SF Books

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(6) LARRY NIVEN & JERRY POURNELLE –
INFERNO (1976)

Another posthumous or afterlife fantasy which I rank in my Top 10 SF, because I make my own rules and break them anyway.

Also because Niven and Pournelle wrote extensively in SF, both separately and in collaboration with each other, and I read them there first – notably Lucifer’s Hammer, Footfall and The Legacy of Heorot (Beowulf IN SPACE!).

Niven is perhaps most famouse for his SF novel Ringworld (and sequels or series) but he was also a deft hand at fantasy, most strikingly with The Magic Goes Away, in which a prehistoric fantasy Earth has a magical energy crisis (and which also named the trope in TV Tropes for magic waning from a fantasy world). I also have a soft spot for Pournelle’s Janissaries.

But back to their collaborative posthumous fantasy, the afterlife setting is the literal Inferno – as in Dante’s Inferno, literally updated in all its infernal glory of its nine circles of hell, from the perspective of SF author John Carpentier (or is that Carpenter?) who dies and finds himself in it.

However, abandon not all hope ye who enter there, as he is led on a quest from its outermost levels to its innermost depths with Satan himself – a quest for the way out of hell, as told in the original Inferno by Dante. And playing Virgil to his Dante is a figure that may catch some by surprise, although it was obvious to me at the outset from historical association and that he has read Dante in Italian, but even so was compelling (and I’d like to believe that he did indeed find redemption leading lost souls out of Hell).

FANTASY & HORROR

The protagonist – literally a posthumous SF writer – comes to realise that he is in fantasy rather than SF. And given that it is hell, there are elements of horror, even if they are not used as such.

RATING : 4 STARS****
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Perhaps the most iconic image of Jim Morrison – the photograph of him in a 1967 shoot by Joel Brodsky prior to The Doors releasing their debut self-titled studio album

(7) MICK FARREN –

JIM MORRISON’S ADVENTURES IN THE AFTERLIFE (1999)

The title alone should be enough to tantalize and titillate – even more so, as the subject of the novel is indeed Doors’ singer Jim Morrison’s adventures in the afterlife, effectively a posthumous fantasy replay of Mick Farren’s earlier psychedelic science fiction DNA Cowboys Trilogy.

In the DNA Cowboys, reality was plastic as a result of hyper-technology, that can effectively produce almost limitless amounts of anything at will – with the more dominant inhabitants of that reality shaping it to their beliefs, or more usually, will to power, so that it resembles a shifting fantasy landscape of human imagination, loosely arranged around various city-states (or perhaps more precisely mind-states), from technofantasy Western or kung-fu wuxia.

In Adventures in the Afterlife, reality is plastic simply as the nature of the afterlife, to much the same effect as in DNA Cowboys.

But “when you start building an existence” in the afterlife, “a billion other sons of bitches are trying to do the same thing” – add in supernatural entities (and aliens) and you have a roller-coaster ride of sex and violence through a fantasy landscape of the survival of the fittest, where various dystopian fantasy city-states, empires and adventurers strive for supremacy.

Not to mention the other half of Jim Morrison’s adventures – Semple, one of the sexiest female characters in science fiction and one half of the psyche of former evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, split between her two personalities in the Afterlife.

FANTASY & HORROR

The first of four posthumous fantasies by SF writers in my top ten.

No substantial horror elements.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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(8) NEIL STEPHENSON –

SNOW CRASH (1992)

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherf*cker in the world… Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken.”

How can you not love a book whose hero protagonist is literally named Hiro Protagonist? As he replies to when it’s mocked as a “stupid name” – “but you’ll never forget it”.

And yes – my feature quotation might well apply to readers of Snow Crash. Until someone has read Snow Crash, they still think that they could read – or perhaps write – the coolest and most badass book in the world. But then you read it and know that position is taken.

You have Hiro Protagonist – “a sword-slinging hacker who teams up with an extreme skateboarder in a post-cyberpunk disincorporated USA to fight Snow Crash – a computer virus for the brain”.

And by disincorporated USA, I mean some of the most blackly comic worldbuilding in SF. A United States whose government has ceased to exist – apart from vestigial organizations like the FBI or “Fedland” which monitor their employees to a ridiculous extent including three-page emails regarding the proper use of toilet paper in an office environment. Other parts of the government have become been privatized to or out as corporations or entrepreneurs – the CIA merging with the Library of Congress as the for-profit CIC, or the Army and Navy as competing private security corporations (General Jim’s Defense System and Admiral Bob’s Global Security).

A United States whose currency has inflated past billion-dollar notes (which some of those aforementioned Fedland employees are tempted to use for toilet paper) to trillion dollar notes – which most people eschew for yen or Kongbucks.

A United States whose economy has receded to only four things Americans do better than anyone else – music, movies, microcode or software, and high speed pizza delivery. The latter the monopoly of the Mafia or Cosa Nostra, who “in an anarcho-capitalist world gone mad” are “just another corporation, no more or less ruthless than anyone else…sure, they have hired killers on their payroll and will whack employees who screw up” – notably pizza delivery drivers who fail to deliver in their pizza in half an hour – “but this isn’t particularly unique in a world where franchised neighborhoods are guarded by killer cyborg dogs.”

A United States whose former territory is “now a patchwork of autonomous corporate franchises and Burbclaves”, the latter essentially neighbourhoods franchised to extraterritorial “nations” run by corporations, such as Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong (not affiliated with mainland China or the island of Hong Kong).

Also a United States where you can have the aforementioned Raven – “baddest motherf*cker in the world” – as a literal one-man nuclear power, with a hydrogen bomb in his motorcycle sidecar and rigged to blow to “EEG trodes embedded in his skull”, probably near the tattoo on his forehead POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.

And then you have the Metaverse, “the internet becoming cyberspace for real” – and where Hiro, one of its creators, owns some prime real estate on the Street.

Oh – and you have the Tower of Babel and Sumerian mythology in there as well, complete with Sumerian pictographs.

“Apart from its frenetic action sequences and overt use of the Rule of Cool, the book is surprisingly deep, with a substantial portion of the plot given over to exploring metaphysical interpretations of the Tower of Babel myth. Typical for a Stephenson novel, the plot juxtaposes action sequences, lengthy humorous digressions, and extremely detailed infodumps seemingly at random”.

Where is the film or TV adaptation?! (Short answer – bouncing around in development hell).

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(9) PETER F. HAMILTON –

NIGHT DAWN TRILOGY (1996-1999)

I do like my space opera and it doesn’t get more, ah, space operatic than Peter F. Hamilton’s Night Dawn trilogy – with all the space opera tropes set to maximum in a zombie apocalypse IN SPACE! Or Evil Dead IN SPACE!

It’s enjoyable just (or perhaps even more) for the world-building (or galaxy-building) of the lush galactic civilization of 27th century humanity linked by faster than light travel. Lush, that is, if you’re rich. Being rich rocks. However, being poor sucks, a recurring characteristic of Peter F. Hamilton’s fiction (arguably art imitating life).

Earth especially sucks (except for its body-hopping secret conspiratorial overlords). And it turns out the afterlife exists (in some sort of weird quantum way), but it also especially sucks. For everyone. Hence the weird quantum zombie apocalypse – mind-possessing, reality-warping super-powered energy zombies

And if you enjoy that, you can replay it in Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, with its lush galactic civilization of 24th century humanity (with immortality through rejuvenation and memory storage, alien space elves, and an independent machine civilization), where it still sucks to be poor, and which faces its own apocalypse in the form of alien invasion

RATING: 4 STARS****

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(10) CHARLES STROSS –

LAUNDRY FILES (2004-2023)

“I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos – in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever – was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.”

Great Cthulhu in the Cold War!

One of my favorite SF short stories is Stross’ A Colder War, which is something of a precursor to the Laundry series, albeit in an alternative universe. What would have happened if the Antarctic expedition in H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” actually happened in our world? In short, nothing good – or a fate worse than global thermonuclear annihilation.

What ensues is a Cold War arms race, but with extra-dimensional entities instead of nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union has its ultimate doomsday ace – or rather joker – in the hole in the form of a particular entity based on captured Nazi research into a certain underwater city. The United States has its own contingency plan in the form of 300 megatons of nuclear weapons, and when that fails, a backup contingency plan or insanely desperate last resort. There are worse things than death in the Cthulhu Mythos…

His Laundry series ups the ante on his use of the Lovecraftian horrors of the Cthulhu Mythos. Commencing with the first book (and still my favorite), The Atrocity Archives, extradimensional entities of evil serve as the backdrop of a secret history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, espionage and government bureaucracy – all combined in the British spy agency known as the Laundry. Magic is simply higher mathematics – which applied in certain circumstances can open gates to other dimensions. The protagonist, a computer expert known as Bob Howard, unintentionally did just that and found himself conscripted by the Laundry, Britain’s occult secret service. Unfortunately, incidents like it are becoming increasingly common with the increasing computational power and mathematical applications of the modern world (and of human minds) – indeed, the Laundry anticipates this increase (amongst other things, such as the position of our world in space) will inevitably align or open up our world to other dimensions (“when the stars are right” in the parlance of the Mythos) and has contingency plans for extradimensional invasion. Of course, the Laundry is not exactly optimistic about humanity’s prospects – its usual best-case scenario is for repopulation after an extinction event – but it plans to go down swinging…

FANTASY & HORROR

Yes – this is one of my SF entries that obviously overlaps with fantasy…and cosmic horror.

RATING: 4 STARS****

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Theatrical release poster for the first Star Wars film in 1977 – replicating the common pose or leg cling trope of pulp fantasy or SF covers

“Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable.” – Rod Serling.

Counting down my Top 10 SF Books – running parallel to my Top 10 Fantasy Books, and for matter, my Top 10 Literature, in that this is my Top 10 SF Literature or my top 10 written works of science fiction  As I noted for my Top 10 Fantasy Books, comics tend to be fantasy or SF – at least the ones I like – but I have a separate Top 10 Comics list. Similarly, I like many fantasy or SF films or TV series, but they have their own top ten lists.

But what is science fiction? And what is it as opposed to fantasy – with which it has so many overlaps, not least in pop cultural niche (or “ghetto”)?

Just as magic is often seen as or argued to be the defining feature of fantasy, so too are science and technology for science fiction, only even more so. After all, it’s called science fiction – it’s in the very name of the genre!

And yes – I would argue that science or technology is the defining feature of science fiction even beyond magic is for fantasy. While not common, there are fantasy works that have low or no magic – it is harder to think of science fiction works without technology or at least science in their plot or premise.

Essentially, if one were to attempt as comprehensive a definition of science fiction as possible, that might be to propose it as the imaginative or speculative extrapolation of science, technology or society. In other words, the fiction of asking what if?

However, as I noted for fantasy, fictional genres can be notoriously difficult to define or difficult to distinguish from other fictional genres, with the two looming largest – and closest – to science fiction being fantasy and horror, with all three often being classed within the category of speculative fiction.

As I did for my Top 10 Fantasy Books, I will note where fantasy or horror loom large or close to the science fiction for my entries. Indeed, I will make one such note now – one of the quirks of my Top 10 SF Books is that it includes four entries for what might better be classified as posthumous fantasy or fantasy set in the afterlife, because they happen to be my favorite books by authors whom I otherwise like for their science fiction.

And just as the fantasy genre could be divided between high fantasy (as the core of the genre) and low fantasy, so too the science fiction genre can be divided up into hard SF (similarly as the core of the genre) and soft SF.

Hard SF tends to have its focus in the science part of science fiction and in turn relies on either established science or careful extrapolation from it. Its counterpart of soft SF does, well, less so – often being more fantastic in its plot or premise. TV Tropes has some fun with this with its Moh’s Scale of Science Fiction Hardness.

Again, these distinctions or subgenres within science fiction fascinate me as much as the distinctions between SF and other genres – and yes, SF sub-genres are worthy of their own top ten.

Anyway, these are my Top 10 SF Books.