Favourite Science Fiction

r/scifi asks us:

"What are your alltime top five science fiction novels"

https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/upaxq8/what_are_your_alltime_top_5_scifi_novels/

** Top Five (in no particular order):

• A Deepness in the Sky
• Protector
• Permutation City
• Blindsight
• The Sparrow

** Runners Up for Top Five (again in no order, but none of these displace one of the top five for me):

• Children of Time / Children of Ruin
• Foundation (and the rest of the trilogy)
• Dune
• Flowers for Algernon
• Seveneves
• The Worthing Saga
• The Mote in God's Eye
• Anathem
• Marching through Georgia (and sequels)
• Most of Larry Niven's early stuff, none of his later stuff, plus several of the Man-Kzin Wars stories 

 

** Not novels, but nicely mind-blowing in the way that good novels are:

• That Alien Message (Eliezer Yudkowsky) 
• Lena (by "qntm")

** Interpreting SF rather broadly to include fantasy series that are nevertheless set in worlds with consistent rules

• A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones and sequels.
• Lord of the Rings / Fellowship of the Ring and sequels
• Liveship Traders / Ship of Magic and sequels

** And finally, on the basis that these were science fiction when written (take our best theory of the world and run with it) but have become fantasy over the years, and also that they can get away with not being novels because novels weren't a thing:

• Paradise Lost
• Inferno
• The Odyssey
• The Aeneid
• Agamemenon
• Iphigenia at Aulis
• The Bacchae
• Metamorphoses
  

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It was a good question! And I rather got into it.

For me, the books on the list above have something transcendent and poetic about them, as well as having the essential speculative fiction characteristic of being set in very well thought out, believable worlds where an idea is taken seriously and the implications are followed up.

Of the two, I prefer the second characteristic to the first, but if you get both, that book's a real work of art.

All of these stories have changed the way I think about the world, both in the intellectual sense of pointing out things I didn't know about things I already knew, and in the emotional sense of altering my reaction to things.