Paul McAuley – Wis[s]e Words

McAuley on the essential fortyfour fantasy novels

Published on April 10, 2009

As a sequel to his list of fortyeight essential science fiction titles, Paul McAuley has now revealed a similar list of fortyfour essential fantasy and horror titles and he’s asking for help to bring the list up to fifty. Like the other list, it is to be used in teaching a creative writing class or something like that and there’s a not quite arbitrary cutoff year of 1984. Bolded are the ones I read, struck through the ones I don’t think belong. Notice by the way that both lists start with the same book.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
Tales of Mystery and Imagination EDGAR ALLAN POE 1838
A Christmas Carol CHARLES DICKENS 1843
Jane Eyre CHARLOTTE BRONTE 1847
The Hunting of the Snark LEWIS CARROLL 1876
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON 1886
The Well At The World’s End WILLIAM MORRIS 1896
Dracula BRAM STOKER 1897
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary MR JAMES 1904
Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things LAFCADIO HEARN 1904
The Wind in the Willows KENNETH GRAHAME 1908
Jurgen JAMES BRANCH CABELL 1919
A Voyage to Arcturus DAVID LINDSAY 1920
The King of Elfland’s Daughter LORD DUNSANY 1924
The Trial FRANZ KAFKA 1925
Lud-in-the-Mist HOPE MIRRLEES 1926
Orlando VIRGINIA WOOLF 1928
~~The Big Sleep~~ RAYMOND CHANDLER 1939
The Outsider and Others HP LOVECRAFT 1939
Gormenghast MERVYN PEAKE 1946
Night’s Black Agents FRITZ LEIBER JR 1947
The Sword of Rhiannon LEIGH BRACKETT 1953
Conan the Barbarian ROBERT E HOWARD collected 1954
The Lord of the Rings JRR TOLKEIN 1954-5
The Once and Future King TH WHITE 1958
The Haunting of Hill House SHIRLEY JACKSON 1959
The Wierdstone of Brinsingamen ALAN GARNER 1960
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase JOAN AIKEN 1962
Something Wicked This Way Comes RAY BRADBURY 1963
The Book of Imaginary Beings JORGE LUIS BORGES 1967
Ice ANA CAVAN 1967
One Hundred Years of Solitude GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ 1967
Earthsea URSULA LE GUIN 1968-1972
Jirel of Joiry CL MOORE collected 1969
Grendel JOHN GARDNER 1971
The Pastel City M JOHN HARRISON 1971
Carrie STEPHEN KING 1974
Peace GENE WOLFE 1975
Gloriana, or the Unfulfill’d Queen MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1978
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories ANGELA CARTER 1979
Little, Big JOHN CROWLEY 1981
The Anubis Gates TIM POWERS 1983
The Colour of Magic TERRY PRATCHETT 1983
Mythago Wood ROBERT HOLDSTOCK 1984

Like his science fiction list, this is interesting as it both shows a fairly consistent take on fantasy and horror, consistent with the earlier list, as well as some strong clues to his own influences. There’s a lot of pre-Tolkien British fantasy/weird fiction on the list, quite a few recognised literay classics as well as a fair smattering of intelligent genry fantasy, again mostly pre-Tolkien, and finally the sort of fantasy equivalent to New Wave science fiction like Moorcock’s Gloriana.

It’s cutoff date means it misses a fair few important writers I would’ve put on my list (Glen Cook, Steve Brust, Mary Gentle, Steve Erikson, George R. R. Martin), as does its bias against genre fantasy (Stephen Donaldson for one). The one writer that really jumps out at me however, that fits the mood of the list is Avram Davidson, whose collection Or All the Seas with Oysters should be on it, as it’s an excellent collection by a master of the American fantasy tradition at the peak of his powers.

(The reason I struck out The Big Sleep is not that it’s a bad book, but it’s neither fantasy nor horror in my opinion.)

McAuley’s fifty fortyeight essential sf titles

Published on April 1, 20092 Comments

Yesterday, Paul McAuley put up a list of what he thinks are the fortyeight essential science fiction titles. As per usual, I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read and struck through the ones I dislike.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus MARY SHELLEY 1818
Journey to the Centre of the Earth JULES VERNE 1863
After London RICHARD JEFFRIES 1885
The Time Machine HG WELLS 1895
The House on the Borderland WILLIAM HOPE HODGSON 1912
We YEVGENY ZAMIATIN 1924
Brave New World ALDOUS HUXLEY 1932
Star Maker OLAF STAPLEDON 1937
1984 GEORGE ORWELL 1949
I, Robot, ISAAC ASIMOV 1950
The Martian Chronicles RAY BRADBURY 1950
The Dying Earth JACK VANCE 1950
~~Childhood’s End~~ ARTHUR C CLARKE 1953
The Space Merchants CM KORNBLUTH & FREDERIK POHL 1953
Tiger! Tiger! ALFRED BESTER 1956
The Death of Grass JOHN CHRISTOPHER 1956
The Seedling Stars JAMES BLISH 1957
The Midwich Cuckoos JOHN WYNDHAM 1957
Starship Troopers ROBERT A HEINLEIN 1959
A Canticle for Liebowitz WALTER M MILLER JR 1959
Solaris STANSLAW LEM 1961
Hothouse BRIAN ALDISS 1962
A Clockwork Orange ANTONY BURGESS 1962
Cat’s Cradle KURT VONNEGUT JR 1963
Martian Time-Slip PHILIP K DICK 1964
Dune FRANK HERBERT 1965
The Crystal World JG BALLARD 1966
Flowers For Algernon DANIEL KEYES 1966
Lord of Light ROGER ZELAZNY 1967
Nova SAMUEL R DELANY 1968
Pavane KEITH ROBERTS 1968
The Left Hand of Darkness URSULA K LE GUIN 1969
Roadside Picnic ARKADY AND BORIS STRUGATSKI 1969
334 THOMAS M DISCH 1972
Dying Inside ROBERT SILVERBERG 1972
The Fifth Head of Cerberus GENE WOLFE 1972
Ten Thousand Light Years From Home JAMES TIPTREE JR 1973
The Forever War JOE HALDEMAN 1974
Inverted World CHRISTOPHER PRIEST 1974
The Female Man JOANNA RUSS 1975
Arslan MJ ENGH 1976
The Ophiuchi Hotline JOHN VARLEY 1977
The Final Programme MICHAEL MOORCOCK 1968
Kindred OCTAVIA BUTLER 1979
Engine Summer JOHN CROWLEY 1979
Timescape GREGORY BENFORD 1980
Neuromancer WILLIAM GIBSON 1984
Divine Endurance GWYNETH JONES 1984

An interesting list. You can’t really argue with it, as it is after all a personal list of essential titles. It is very New Wave orientated: Roberts, Ballard, Dick, Priest, Moorcock, Delany, Le Guin, Disch undsoweiter, but with some surprises. I wouldn’t have expected to see Starship Troopers on this list based on what else is on it. On the whole, for anybody who wants to get acquainted with this particular strand of science fiction: literary, somewhat gloomy and less interested in the hard sciences than the soft sciences, this would be a good start.

In terms of McAuley’s own writing this list also makes a lot of sense. You can see the influences at work in his own novels and stories.

Space is big

Published on March 30, 2009

artistic impression of Pluto and Charon. From the New Horizons website

It’s hard to believe how far we are from anything else created by humankind. Except for our own, now-derelict third stage, nothing made by people or from the Earth — nothing — is within more than a billion miles of New Horizons.

From the latest news update of the New Horizons Project, NASA’s attempt to reach Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The latter being the belt of Pluto sized planetoids at the edge of the classical Solar System. It’s some 30 to 55 Astronomical Units away; one AU being the distance from the Sun to the Earth, or about eight light minutes, or some 8 x 60 x 300,000 kilometres. Space is big, as Douglas Adams already noticed.

Space is not just big in distances, but also in time:

But you won’t have to wait another three years for our next significant distance and flight-time milestones — they come next year, when we cross the halfway point! But whenever quoting such milestones, I have to be careful about the meaning. So when will our spacecraft be halfway to Pluto? Well, that depends on which halfway you mean. (No, I am not kidding.)

If one asks, when have we traveled half the flight time to reach Pluto? That halfway milestone occurs on October 17, 2010.

But if one asks, when will we be half as far from the Sun as Pluto will be at the time of our encounter on July 14, 2015? That occurs somewhat earlier, on April 20, 2010.

And if one asks, when will we have traveled half the heliocentric distance to Pluto from our launch at Earth? That milestone occurs even earlier, on February 25, 2010.

So, as you can see, the answer to the halfway question depends on precisely what it means to be halfway. In fact, you could even ask when the halfway day was from New Horizons project inception on December 20, 2000, to Pluto arrival on July 14, 2015 — that was April 4, 2008. Or one could ask about the halfway day from when we began our push for a Pluto mission on May 4, 1989 (when we had our first meeting with NASA officials) until Pluto encounter — that was on June 9, 2002. So in some ways we’re already halfway there, and in other ways, we have well over a year to go to reach the halfway point.

In other words, any big deep space mission consumes a significant chunk of somebody’s career. Sure, a trip to Pluto is an extreme example, but even missions to our planetary neighbours like Mars or Venus require years of planning, preparation and monitoring.

Science fiction is too often impatient with these distances, zooming around the Galaxy through Hyperspace or Warp speed or whatever. It’s all so easy that real life space travel just seems unnecesarilly complex and difficult. Now I like a good space opera as much as the next guy, but I would like to see more attention paid to our own Solar System, because it is vastly more complex and big as Golden Age Science Fiction ever suspected. Surely it must be possible to write a good, exciting novel taking into account the realities of space travel rather than resorting yet again to shortcuts?

(Paul McAuley, from whose blog I plucked this link, has done his bit with The Quiet War, which makes full use of the latest research results on what our solar system actually looks like.)