So what ARE the most significant books?

[mindstalk]

What do we mean by significant? I dunno; let's change the question! What's most influential? Well, influential on whom: giving lots of readers some happiness, giving a few readers lots and lots of happiness, changing the lives of lots of readers, changing the way they read books, changing the way people write books, inspiring lots of games, being arbitrarily required for proper geek culture... anything else? That's already plenty of possibilities; how to weight them? I'll ignore that question and zoom ahead, with a revealed bias toward changing lives and influencing authors.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien -- this hits them all except maybe changing lives, and even that somewhat -- people thinking they're hobbits, people being opened to geekdom... superbig in the 1960s, I've heard. "Frodo Lives!" Definitely big on games and changing writers.

Ordering after this point is kind of arbitrary.

2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams -- definitely fun, but I think the mindchanging aspect is more significant for a lot of people; at Caltech it seemed everyone had read it, even those you wouldn't expect it to, and old professors would at least have heard of the jokes. Shares some vague "British humor" with Monty Python and Terry Pratchett but I don't know about direct lines of influence.
3. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling -- allegedly it made a zillion kids read big books, and has spawned some kid's fantasy knockoff genre. Did the Hugos start going to fantasy books with Harry Potter?
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein -- I'm not a fan but it's often described as Heinlein almost starting a religion by accident, and I know someone who'd started a "nest" in college because of it. Definitely big on changing people's lives -- at least it's not Ayn Rand.
5. H. P. Lovecraft in general
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson -- that whole cyberpunk movement. Vinge was there first in some ways but AFAIK Gibson caused the authors and the games.
7, Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice -- see HPL and Gibson; if you spawn your own genre, you're influential.
8. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock -- I think has had a big impact on games, and maybe fantasy, and Gaiman had that autobiographical story "One Life, Furnished in Early Moorcock"
9. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks -- allegedly this catalyzed all those Tolkien imitators and Extruded Fantasy Product.
10. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card -- Is it that influential? Well, Coyu notes that Card has high sales, and seems to be a favorite of English classes dabbling in SF.

There's probably more which could be said, including the Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein thing in setting up the field, or getting lots of people readng and writing SF, plus Doc Smith's space opera -- but I don't want to spend more time on this, let someone else take up the challenge.

Comments

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

The list was limited to post 1950, and Lovecraft doesn't fit the bill. He's far too early.

Harry Potter was tremendously influential in people's attitudes towards kids' lit and fantasy in general. Since so many adults enjoyed HP, it spawned an enormous boom in the YA lit industry, which is absolutely huge right now, as people started to try and write the next 'crossover hit'. It also changed people's reaction to fantasy -- every big fantasy novel that gets published is called "Harry Potter for adults" by some reviewer (even JSMN got called that).

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

The SFBC list was limited -- I think 1953 was when the Hugo awards/Worldcons started? -- but I was making my own list, free of such constraints. Of course, I wasn't thinking of Verne and Wells, who'd probably have some hard-to-rank influence. All of time travel fic for Wells -- oh wait, Twain's Connecticut Yankee.

Speaking of Jonathan Strange, there's stuff like Lud in the Mist, or Lord Dunsany -- rather obscure to the general readership, but having influenced influential writers, such as Gaiman and Lovecraft.

Thanks for the expansion on HP's influence.

[anima-mecanique.livejournal.com]

If you're going to expand the list into all time periods, I would think War of the Worlds, being quite possibly the earliest modern alien invasion story, would top any list below LOTR, as well as the less famous The First Men in the Moon. Also, Frankenstein, for setting up the "What has science wrought????" genre...and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas for any number of "Lone technical mastermind against the world" stories, and possibly also Doyle's The Lost World.

Also, what about pulp sword-and-sorcery? Conan is responsible for nearly as many fantasy cliches as Tolkein.

gee, this gets complicated!

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Odd, the LJ notification e-mail was empty.

You make good points. I don't know that WotW would be #2 but yes, high, especially counting influence on movies (ditto Frankenstein) (though horror movies might be beyond what the SFBC wanted to think about.)

I don't know First Men, barely know Lost World, and wouldn't have thought of Conan. But yeah. Also Burroughs's Mars. In a different line of influence, someone would probably bring up Van Vogt's Slan for the whole fannish superiority thing.

I kind of expect that someone like our SF-oriented English majors has done this properly[1], but I could be wrong. "If not then hey, a paper idea!" At the moment I'm a bit more interested in tracing more recent influence; I mentioned Vernor Vinge in the previous post, Iain Banks might have something going (of course, that brings up all those old utopias -- and they make me think of the post-apocalyptic genre; who started that?) and there seems to be a (welcome) growing trend of slower than light space opera, or wormhole only settings, which surely can be blamed on someone.

[1] Whatever that could be, beyond detailed cataloguing and taxonomy and tracing.

Re: gee, this gets complicated!

[zosimos.livejournal.com]

If we're looking at modern authors, tracing becomes a lot more interesting since you can contrast stylistic/thematic connections with what the authors say they're basing their work off of.

That becomes almost a psychological/sociological look at how authors decide to cite their inspirations and what actually affects them.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

1953 is when the SFBC was started (by someone whose name was never written down, although his or her taste wasn't bad). It is a list from the SFBC's first 50 years.