Transcription
Number 15 is Dune. This is a lot of people's number one, dude. Is number 15. I read it recently for the first time. I haven't read the sequels, for, you know, sake of full disclosure, just the first one. I really liked it, and I loved it, in fact, at the time. And when you go back and watch the review video of that book, I was beside myself. I was ecstatic. Uh, I was saying, you know, this is gonna be in my top five. And the more time has elapsed since I read it, kind of the, the more that feeling has dwindled of the big, the big thrill. And that happens with a lot of books. The reason it's on this list, as far down as it is, in last place, this beats out a ton of books, to be fair, a ton of really excellent books. The reason it's number 15 is, as excellent as it is, and as much as I like it, I don't, uh, I get this feeling from books that I truly love where it just lingers and lingers and lingers and lingers. And Dune does not quite linger. The things I love about Dune are, of course, the world-building. It's legendarily good. The writing style is really unique. It's written with a weird perspective. I think it's third person omniscient or something like that, where it dips into the POV narration of the principal characters. It has this feeling of this big mythology and lots of vapors and swirling sands and, and mystical weirdness going on.
Number 14 is The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's a big, bad space opera that does a whole lot of things. This is the first book I ever reviewed on this channel, and it has stuck with me ever since. It takes place about a thousand years in the future. It has to do with this big galactic empire that's gone through a couple of iterations, rises and falls, and into the picture of widespread civil strife, civil war, and unrest comes alien spacecraft carrying an alien that disrupts the entire situation. And the human characters launch an expedition to make contact with the aliens, and the story follows them as they try to determine if the aliens are a potential threat or not, coming into contact with them and trying to establish some kind of communication and a relationship. Which sounds like not that special of a plot. There's just something about it that constantly builds on itself in these really, uh, like precise ways. All of these little building blocks that carry you along through the narrative. And even though the book is like that long, it's about five, six hundred pages, it just blasts right by you and through you. I read it in, I think, 72 hours. I couldn't get away from the book. And that's pretty rare. I don't really read all that many books that are truly gripping in that way, that are true page-turners. And this was. The aliens in Mote in God's Eye, I, I think are probably among the very best. I will say among the very best aliens that I've read in any science fiction book.
Number 13 is The Stars My Destination, which is an alternative title for Tiger Tiger by Alfred Bester. The original title is Tiger Tiger. Even though this was written in the '50s, it feels completely contemporary. And it's a short book. This one I actually read in one sitting, which I don't think I've done with any other book except maybe The World Inside by Robert Silverberg. Read it in one sitting. It's this gigantic blockbuster sci-fi fest of a book. It's like five different genres of science fiction smashed into one little, one little thriller, little proto-cyberpunk action story that mixes all of these different tropes from all these different genres into this crazy melange of weirdness. It's just such a weird book. And I said in the previous top 15 videos that if I were to hand one book to someone who didn't read science fiction and interest them in reading science fiction, it would probably be this book because it's not difficult and it packs so much in. It's so thrilling, it's so cool. It follows a guy named Gulliver Foyle, Gully Foyle, who's an anti-hero, space pirate kind of guy, mercenary, who gets left behind on a derelict spacecraft and sees another spacecraft pass by him and leave him to die, stranded without stopping to pick him up. And he survives through a fairly interesting way that I won't spoil. And the story follows him seeking revenge in a bloodthirsty way, tracking down that spacecraft and its crew throughout the universe.
Number 12 is Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. This is considered by a lot of people to be the first true science fiction book. We all know the plot. We think we all know the plot. But when you read the book versus knowing about Frankenstein through cultural osmosis of all the tropes established by the Universal movies, it is a total 180 departure from your expectations. When I read it, I couldn't believe how little of a resemblance it actually bears. The character of Frankenstein's monster is totally different than in the movies. He speaks. He's full of pathos and longing and wounded feelings and has this complicated relationship with Frankenstein. And it's, uh, it's just beautifully written. It is science fiction. It has less to do with the science than with the fiction, really. It's a character-driven story. If it's a Gothic novel, it's about themes, big themes. You know, this is a famous kind of high school required reading book. It feels maybe potentially, if you haven't read it, like homework. I encourage you not to feel that way. It stands toe-to-toe with many other pieces of high literature, high literary fiction that I've read, and it stands still to this day in a superior vantage point to the majority of other later science fiction works that I've read.
Number 11 is The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The Time Machine used to be my favorite Wells novel. The War of the Worlds has supplanted it. This is another one where you may have a little bit of a bias about it or against it, thinking that it'll be campy or boring. You might associate it with old shitty sci-fi movies from, you know, with a theremin playing and laser guns and etc. Don't feel that way about it. Of that period, of the early period of the people that I've read, Wells is by far my favorite. There's something about his sensibility that I just really resonate with. He wrote with a kind of modern cynicism that is almost startling when you read it in its original context because it does feel so modern. And it feels so prescient. And a lot of science fiction wins points in retrospect because it gets certain details of technology projections correct. And much more impressive to me is something like Wells that can capture a feeling, uh, or an archetype or some kind of a paradigm in a way that is timeless or that foresees the future. And I think that this is a good example. The book does this weird thing where it's this dispassionate, removed, almost non-judgmental condemnation of, of, uh, imperialism and human folly and humanity's inability to cope with crisis. The aliens invade and humanity is unable to cope with the looming threat of the invasion. Even when the dominoes start to topple and the aliens are proved to be hostile and start killing people, the social institutions do not react. Individuals refuse to react, refuse to confront the danger that's right in front of them and work to delude themselves into a sense of security until they are forced to flee in a panic or are killed. This feels especially deeply relevant given the past couple of years. There's this great scene in the book that I wish was a famous scene. I don't hear it quoted ever. It's one of my favorite scenes of any book that I've read. It's in the middle of the war, we're losing, and there's a blackout in London, middle of the night. And this band of people gets together to illegally start a generator so that they can have light to have a party and drink in the middle of the street despite the intense danger that they're putting everyone and themselves in in the midst of this invasion. The party lasts until dawn. And as dawn breaks and the sun crests over the horizon, it illuminates one of the alien tripods standing watching the party happen right beneath it. And it kills everybody. It's also beautifully written. There are great characters and there are scenes like I described that are vivid, vividly memorable. And, uh, there's also a bunch of like weird body horror stuff like the aliens are gross. And, um, it's just great. I really love it. And I, I hope, I hope you've read it already. If you haven't, you should read it.
Number 10 is The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Which I read forever ago. I think it's been at least 10 years since I read it. And most books that I read 10 plus years ago did not make it on this list. But this one did because, as I said in reference to Dune, certain books just stick in your, in your spinal column, you know, almost like an acid trip. Like it, it lingers in your spinal fluid and then occasionally it just pops back out. That happens all the time with The Dispossessed with me, way above and beyond most other books. For some reason, I think because it affected me quite profoundly, it influenced my personality, my politics when I read it. It's a little bit of a broadly drawn, kind of on the nose political allegory, although done subtly and deftly in the way that Le Guin was best at. Out of all the political SF writers that I have read, including ones that I really respect, people like Kim Stanley Robinson, Norman Spinrad, Le Guin's the best. She did it the best. It's about two sister planets that orbit one another that ceased communication something like 100 years before the action of the book takes place. One of them is organized around a capitalist economical system. Economical. It's economic. It annoys me when people say economical. I don't think that that's right. It's an economic system. And Anarres, which is the sister planet, which is a desert. It's like Urras. It's a desert planet that is, um, peopled by anarchists, syndicates. And there's a scientist on the anarchist planet who has developed the means to create the first ansible, which is an ongoing trope in a lot of science fiction books, which is a device that allows you to instantaneously communicate regardless of, of the distance between the two people communicating. And he needs to travel back to the capitalist planet to establish cultural contact with them for some reason, I don't recall. He travels there and has a culture shock experience of meeting, uh, encountering this alien culture and its strange ways and seeing where their society operates in a way that's superior to the one on Anarres and vice versa. It is a masterpiece. And it's actually climbed up higher on the list since the last one because I just find myself thinking about it all the time. And it's the details of life on Anarres that resonated with me so profoundly. Like there's a part where there's a character who needs to find a place to live, needs to find an apartment. And it describes the scenario of finding an apartment where you just sign a ledger and then you get an apartment. And this is a great, it's maybe, it's like a cheap stupid escapism, but this is a place I find myself constantly escaping to. So it's nice to have this alternative vision of what an imperfect but superior future might look like.
Number 9 is Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith. Smith was a Christian and I think a conservative. Placate those of you who were upset by the last one. That's not why it's here on the list, but I guess that's a good little serendipity. It's not even like a relevant detail to the book, really. Although later in the book, there's some fairly, uh, heavy-handed Christian spice added on top. Not necessarily a bad thing. It's a bizarre book. It's a really weird book. It's a fix-up of two novellas that were spliced mostly effectively into one novel. And it's Cordwainer Smith's only novel. Smith was a really weird, interesting guy. I can't go into too much biographical detail, A, because I don't remember most of it now that I've said that, and B, because there's so much of it and his life was such a weird saga that it would take up too much of the video time. He was involved in espionage and international policy formation and diplomacy, especially with China. And in his spare time, he wrote these science fiction stories that were totally wild, bizarre, both in content and in form. The plot is almost indescribable. It, there's a desert again, a desert planet that has this form of agriculture where they farm these gigantic sheep, these building-sized sheep that have a bacteria or a fungus or something that grows in their fur and they harvest it and turn it into this powder that grants virtual immortality to the people that ingest it. And because this is the only planet where this commodity is produced, every single citizen of Australia, which is the nickname for Old North Australia, the former, the formal name of the planet, is wildly wealthy, commands the wealth. If they chose to capitalize upon it to travel the universe and live like kings, but they don't. They operate in voluntary poverty where they choose to live as kind of subsistence farmers. And they have this ritual where in order to keep the population down, they have this sort of a sweepstakes where children are put to the test and many of them die. And the protagonist has failed this test a couple of times, is on death's doorstep, has to undergo the trial once more and fears death because he's the only member of his community on this planet that is not psychic. This is merely a foretaste of the strange places that this book goes. Wonderful book, written experimentally. The prose is as weird in a lot of places as the actual world-building and and characters.
Book number 8 is City by Clifford Simak. Another fix-up novel. This time fixed up from stories that means short stories that were edited together with some, uh, interstitial material shoved in there to make it one contiguous plot. It follows the descendants of this one human family that lives at first on a near-future Earth and then more and more as the book progresses on a farther and farther distant future Earth where the Earth becomes less and less recognizable, occupied mostly by robots, servant robots, and colonies of mutated humans, and also intelligent dogs. It's a beautiful novel. Simak is considered a pastoralist science fiction author, so everything is rural, slow, gentle, and kind of sentimental, soft and sad. You find out early in the book that the human species has been replaced or supplanted by dogs as the, uh, the most intelligent and predominant species on the planet. And each little short story is punctuated by a piece of fictionalized anthropology written by dog scholars in the far future in reference to the action of, of the stories. And the dog archaeologists and anthropologists are arguing with themselves and each other over whether or not these human characters ever actually existed because the idea of a human being is such a, a weird, alien notion to them. It's a great book. I found out after the fact, after reading it, that Michel Houellebecq considers this a very formative book in his life, which is pretty interesting if you know Houellebecq.
Number 7 is "Hot House" by Brian Aldiss. In the first video, in the previous top 15 video, uh, there was a book called Mid-World by Alan Dean Foster that was the first book on the list, number 15. This is the book that Aldiss must have lifted a bunch of or borrowed or been inspired by, whatever euphemism you want to use. Uh, I do still like that book. I like Foster, but it is highly derivative of this book, which is way, way better. It's a dying Earth book, so it takes place way far in the future when the Earth has stopped rotating. So one hemisphere of the Earth that faces the sun is covered in this gigantic forest, rainforest. And the half that is facing away from the sun is plunged into eternal darkness. And it follows a tribe of Aboriginal humans who have descended to a technological, like a Stone Age level of technology, we're just trying to survive in a completely hostile environment where they're besieged by killer insects and also plants that have evolved into the ecological niche that is left by the vacant mammals that have mostly gone extinct. This is another one that packs probably three books worth of world-building and cool ideas into just one slim, sleek little action story. It never really slows down. It gets more and more interesting and better and better and better as you go through the book until it explodes in this conclusion that's far-reaching and huge and cool. Has to do with the nature of life in the universe. I don't want to give away too many details because every little piece of zoology and world-building in the book is so delicious, it's so good.
Number 6 is Neuromancer by William Gibson. It has to do with a hacker who lives in, uh, this kind of rundown industrial district of Tokyo and is down on his luck, gets called up for one last big job. That's a very, very broad strokes outline of the plot. The plot is complicated at times, confusing at times, a little bit convoluted to the point where it's a little bit incomprehensible towards the end of the book. I think people struggle, struggle a lot with that point. I expect it to be more confused through more of the book than I was. If you only read the first little slice of it that takes place in Tokyo and then you abandon the rest, please at least do that. It has the best prose, I think, of any book, any science fiction book that I've read. It's, it's the most distinct, I'll say that. It's so sharp, it's so hard. Everything that you associate with cyberpunk, the wet streets, darkness, neon, drugs, guns, this is the best example. It's like all of that just distilled. I'm completely in awe of Gibson's prose talent. And this is the only Gibson that I have read. I definitely intend to read more.
Number 5 is Blood Music by Greg Bear. This is also considered a cyberpunk novel. It doesn't feel like one to me, really. It's about a geneticist working in a private lab in San Diego who develops microbes that are self-aware and intelligent. And he uses unorthodox and frowned upon means to cultivate a small culture of these microbes in a, in a Petri dish, I think. And gets found out by his bosses and shut down and fired. And before he leaves, he injects himself with the microbes in order to preserve them because they were going to be destroyed otherwise. And the microbes take on a life of their own and crazy things happen. It's considered a science fiction horror by a lot of people. That's how it's marketed or perceived. I don't think that it is a horror. It has elements. It feels like a horror movie in a lot of places. And there's a lot of that kind of body horror or body grossness. It goes to places that I didn't see coming. And it was one of those books where I just, I read it with this expression like this, like it just got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and weirder and cooler. Its ending as rivals only maybe by the number one book in terms of its impact and, and its scope. It's maybe the biggest, most far-reaching ending that I've read in a book. This, I guess, bears another, uh, comparison with the number one book, which I'm not going to spoil here, which is the description of the psychology of the aliens, essentially the microorganisms. Feels like encountering something that's genuinely new, that, um, you've not encountered, you've not seen before in other books or in movies. And it feels like coming into contact with a truly alternative form of consciousness. I didn't expect to consider this a total masterpiece, but I do. And I did.
Number 4 is The Dying Earth by Jack Vance. The first book in the Dying Earth quad trilogy. There's four of them. A lot of people consider this a fantasy book or a science fantasy book. I think that that's fair. It is, as you can guess from the title, a dying Earth book. The Dying Earth book. This is a hugely influential work. Had a direct profound influence on The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's another fix-up novel. It's a series of vignettes taking place on, uh, an Earth millions of years in the future where the sun has gone Red Giant. In reality, when this, the sun goes Red Giant, it will consume the Earth. The radius will expand to the point where we will, the Earth will be literally inside the sun. But for the sake of the story, the sun is just bigger, slightly bigger, and this deep shade of red. The majority of the Earth's former human occupants have traveled to the stars and abandoned the Earth. And the relic population of humans are few, and they live in conditions that appear to be medieval, although they command magic, which might be forms of high technology that are not described specifically. And it's this big, giant, rich, luscious world where there is a lot of mystery and there's a lot that is left unexplained. And it follows various characters on their adventures through this very dangerous landscape where there are aliens and demons roaming around. Jack Vance writes with this flourish that's hard to describe if you haven't read him. Incredible writer. One of the best science fiction writers I've read. A couple other books from him since and was a total master. People like to call science fiction writers Grand Masters, which I think is a little pompous, but if there is such a thing as a Grand Master, Jack Vance is one of them. The two books that followed it, I've also read, "The Eyes of the Overworld" and "Cugel's Saga." Both are wonderful, especially "Eyes of the Overworld," which pivots into being just straight fantasy. I still like the first one. I still like "The Dying Earth" the best because it does mix science fiction and fantasy in a way that feels really unique to it. And because it pays way more attention to the world and all the weird creepy crawlies that cohabitate it with the human characters than the, the later books do, although they are also wonderful.
Okay, we're down to the top three. Number 3 is Solaris by Stanisław Lem, who is a Polish writer. The book is about a planet that is covered in this ocean, this kind of gelatinous, viscous ocean that is one alien that has a remarkable potential intelligence, although it's an intelligence that's totally impenetrable to the human scientists that research it and that live on an orbiting space station who have been, uh, conducting research and scholarship on the alien for for many decades, maybe it was like 100 years or something. So there's this whole long body of of scholarship that's been published about the planet Solaris, all of these competing theories about what and why and how the alien operates. And there is a new researcher that is thrust into this position of living on the space station with two other researchers and finding that somehow the planet is manifesting people from their past. These, not, they're not hallucinations, they're not holograms, they're tangible physical manifestations mimicking people from, uh, the, the human researchers' past who are self-aware and can communicate and have some amount of memory and follow them everywhere they go. There is simply something about this book that is completely special to it that can't fully be described. It's a little bit like a ghost story. It feels like a horror. It's heavy on ambiance and this sense of amazing dread. Most of the books on this list are greater than the sum of their parts. They just have this feel, they have this character. Solaris has more of a feel and more of a character than arguably even the two books that follow this. It is the most itself out of any of the books. It's the most unique and distinct out of any of the books on this list. I felt when I read it that I was out of my league, and I still feel that way. And I would like to go back and reread it, maybe a couple of times even, because it is brushing up against real greatness, real artistic greatness. It is a true masterpiece, not just of science fiction, but of fiction. I've not read many other books that make me feel quite so small in comparison to the artistic achievement.
Number 2 is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, which was number one. And I really, uh, struggled with this one of whether it should remain number one. It's a big, gigantic space opera in every sense of the word. It's around, I think, 600 pages, maybe 700 pages long. It has dozens of characters in it. It's so complicated that I, I struggle to know how to put it into a nutshell. It roughly has to do with AI. And it has to do with this conceit of how physics and physics in relation to space travel and artificial intelligence works, where the farther away you get from the galactic core of the Milky Way, the stranger physics becomes. So as you go farther out into the fringes of the galaxy, you can travel faster and faster, and higher orders of intelligence become possible. Until when you get to the far reaches, the far periphery, you encounter beings that are indistinguishable from gods. And there is a human colony right on the fringe of that outermost layer who unleash an artificial intelligence god accidentally called the Blight, that goes on a genocidal rampage through the lower, closer circles of the Milky Way in an attempt to wipe out all biological life that exists in the entire galaxy. And all of these thousands of alien species are all linked in a kind of proto-internet digital communication that's text-based, so it looks a little bit like Usenet, and it's slightly dated in that way. And there's a, a cast of of human and alien characters who are battling against the Blight. It also has to do with a planet stuck at a medieval level of technological development that is peopled by psychic weasels who form into hive mind colony animals. And this is really again, like just the beginning of describing the, the level of detail and strangeness. This is one of the earlier books that I read when I got really interested in science fiction, and I don't think I could have picked a better one to read early because it gave me this thrill that maybe I've gotten close to a few times, but the experience of picking that thing up and being transported, as cliché as it is, to truly like a different world of, I just could not get enough. Solaris is definitely, it's superior in terms of the prose and its merits as a piece of literature, but as a piece of science fiction, a piece of world-building, I don't think Fire Upon the Deep has really been topped. It's the equivalent of one guy building an Eiffel Tower or something. I'd struggle to understand how one author could have come up with all of this, this huge raft of ideas and made it fit cohesively into one story in one book. There's a prequel called "A Deepness in the Sky" that is also excellent, but this is the real, the real stroke of genius. It's almost more of like an engineering marvel, like I said, than a great piece of literature, although arguably it is. It is good enough to count as a good piece of literature, which maybe is damning it by faint praise, but it's still one of my absolute favorites. It's, and I don't think it will ever not be one of my favorites. And it's not just because of nostalgia or because of the role that it played in, in my development as a reader, it's because it really is that good.
Which leaves us with number one. And if you have watched this channel for any length of time, you probably know what it is. Of course, it has to be the master of Pax Wax. Number 1 is Blindsight by Peter Watts. I've talked a few times about staying power, a book lingering with you. Nothing has actually subjectively changed my own experience of life and of myself as much as Blindsight, or no novel, I should say. It truly altered the way I look at myself and other people and animals and my place in the universe. This probably sounds a little cringe or overreaching or pat, like, oh wow, it changed how you see the world, good for you, that's so great. I've only heard that 500 million times. People talking about books. When it happens to you, it'll happen to you. Blindsight poses such a profound philosophical question that it, it's almost like in this, this conversation of the big questions, the great questions of why are we here, is there a god, why do we suffer, it adds this additional profound great question to the conversation that you had never considered before. I hadn't. That's why it is number one. Despite the fact that, uh, there are, there are books on here that are higher works of, of literature at heart. It's just kind of a fun book. Not just kind of a fun book, but that was clearly the, the attitude that was had when he wrote it. It's a little campy. It has to do with space vampires. It's a first contact story. It's a haunted house in space story. It's a sci-fi horror book. It has the feel of an alien. It actually has the feel of a Solaris. I think Solaris shares the most DNA with this book, or vice versa, than any other on the list. It's full of dense, hard SF, generally grim, hard-edged characters who aren't always sympathetic. It's austere, it's hard, it's hardcore, it's violent, it's tense. It also has a sense of humor. And it all builds towards the best ending of any book that I've ever read. You know, when you walk out of a movie that really hit you hard, it changed, it, you just can feel the movie in you for a couple days afterwards. I felt Blindsight for about two weeks immediately, like all the time, like Blindsight lived, lived in me. And ever since, it's just, uh, it's like, again, it's like stored in my kidney somewhere or something. It's just, it has become part of my fabric as a reader. And also, it is added this extra room to the house of of my, you know, the operative ideas that I go through the world with. There's this whole other wing of the house that I'd never considered opening the door to before. And once you read it and see it, it can't be unseen. Blindsight is assigned reading in a lot of high-level, uh, neuroscience and philosophy courses. The book is that good. And it is also accessible to you as a non-specialist. I'm a dumb guy at heart, and I don't know anything about these things or didn't before reading it. And I struggled through a lot of the passages of really hard SF and exposition, and there was a lot of it, but it is worth the dig. The reason it's number one is no other novel that I've ever read, not just science fiction novel, but novel period, has moved me as far over the course of reading it, has affected quite as much of a change of leaving me different than when I started it, than Blindsight. That is my top 15. I decided to keep it to a strict top 15. No honorable mentions because I think that preserves the fidelity of the exercise. I want it to be strict. These are the ones that I truly feel deserve it. And I agonized over the order. There are a lot that fell off the list or changed positions on the list since the last one, and those were hard, painful cuts to make. There are plenty of other books that I consider great books, not just good, but great books. Thank you for watching. If you want to go into the comments to scold me, I'm sure you will regardless of what I say, so see you there.