I sit up and take notice when the folks at Flashlight Worthy Books posts a list of science fiction books. Their latest was compiled by the creative team behind 365 Tomorrows, a flash fiction web site which itself looks very interesting. But it was the list that caught my eye. Yes, it contains the usual suspects: Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Dick. Sigh, the only woman listed is a translator. But it also contains books by Steve Erickson (not Steven Erikson), Haruki Murakami and a classic Russian SF novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin that I’m embarrassed to say I’d never heard of. I like to see people with a wide range of interests.
2 thoughts on “An Interesting List”
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Personally, I’m always suprised when Zamyatin’s We isn’t on a list of great SF, considering it’s early importance and influence (especially on Orwell’s 1984, which sometimes seems to be cribbed from it). When it’s not included, it tends to make me think of the list more as a “Best of American/English Language SF” and figure that the makers of the list were being a bit parochial.
Heh, it was reading Orwell that pushed me towards both Huxley and Zamayatin. I read We once in seventh or eighth grade, after I had been pointed to it in the afterword printed in my copy of 1984, and reread it in my junior year of high school after I’d had the math to understand the more mathematical parts of the story. It’s pretty good. It’s not my most favorite Russian science fiction (that goes to “Roadside Picnic”) but it’s not bad either.
Of course, I had a thing for dystopian fiction in middle and high school, as seen in old writings I still have from that period. And I think it was that love of dystopian fiction that was my gateway drug to science fiction. We all have to start somewhere, no?
-kat