The Best Science Fiction Books (According to Reddit)

I just started reading David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691133808/sr=8-1/qid=13150...), which is where Malcolm Gladwell stole / sourced his New Yorker article "Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity?" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...). Galenson says:

There are many common misunderstandings of the history of art, but perhaps none is more basic than the confusion over what determines the quality of art. Although it is of course possible to consider separately the quality of a number of different attributes of an artist's work, the overall importance of art is a function of innovation. Important artists are innovators whose work changes the practices of their successors; important works of art are those that embody these innovations. Artists have made innovations in many areas, including subject matter, composition, scale, materials, and technique. But whatever the nature of an artist's innovation, its importance ultimately depends on the extent of its influence on other artists.

It should immediately be noted that the importance at issue here is not the short run-interest that gains an artist immediate critical or commercial success, but the long-run importance that eventually causes his work to hang in major museums and makes his contribution the subject of study by scholars of art. These two types of success have often coincided, but in many cases they have not. {Galenson "Masters"@2}

There are many possible values a work of art can have, of course, and Galenson is only making clear the set he most plans to consider in his work. Nonetheless, I find his argument intriguing, and I also wonder how many of the works listed in the OP contain some major innovation or innovations then used by other science fiction writers.

On a totally unrelated note, it'd be nice to have HN hyperlinks so one doesn't have to put URLs in parentheses.

Definitely true, though I think we may see increasing Japanification over the next 30 - 40 years as the education and health of the average American decrease.

This happens with more writers (and other artists) than many people think. I read Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel's Game and loved both: they're incredibly rich and detailed yet driven by plot; they have the action that a lot of unsophisticated readers crave and content that can still satisfy someone who's read 10,000 novels. Oh, and it made me laugh out loud.

U.S. publishers are now releasing his young adult novels. Two so far, two more to come. And they're terrible. Almost unreadable bad. No plot, cardboard characters, wild improbability poorly embedded in a paranormal universe. You can see flashes of his later skill, but his early stuff is lousy.

I said this in another comment, but I'll say it again here: I just started reading David W. Galenson's Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity, (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691133808/sr=8-1/qid=13150...), which is where Malcolm Gladwell stole / sourced his New Yorker article "Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity?" (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_...). Galenson says that there are two basic modes for artists to follow: the experimentalists who try many things over long periods of time and eventually reach fullness, and the "conceptual innovators" whose sudden insight into a field fuels their work, which is often done at a young age. Under your reading, Stephenson would be the "experimentalist."

http://thedaemon.com/

These books are very well written and billed as a 'techno-thriller'. I think they are also near-term science fiction, and have a lot of very interesting ideas.

The books chronicle the rise of a very digital culture and a revolution driven by technology. The technology is amazingly well researched and believable, and the writing is entertaining and fun. At the moment they are quite recent and the technologies aren't there yet, but I wouldn't be at all surprised for some of the technology to fall into that 'oddly prescient' category within the decade.