jsburbidge (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jsburbidge) wrote2014-06-20 02:06 pm
jsburbidge) wrote2014-06-20 02:06 pm
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SF List
So I got to thinking after looking at some of the "100 best / most important SF books" lists of the past years: what would I put together?
I think it's both contentious and meaningless to try to establish canons which allow a clear selection of "best" independent of personal taste. Even though there are a very few novels which probably can be clearly given laurels, the boundaries are really, really murky. And "most important" and "most influential" won't necessarily line up with "best". (Conan is hugely influential; I don't think any of Howard's work is likely to make a "best" list, even within sword-and-sorcery.)
In addition, on reflection, it's pretty clear that speculative fiction is not one genre, or two, but a connected set of sub-genres, and a representative selection of those sub-genres is another beast again.
Still, I couldn't avoid being tempted to put a list together with some constraints.
1) I'm not including anything that I haven't read. Since I haven't made any systematic attempt to read all of SF, or even all of SF's important works, it will therefore be idiosyncratic. (I should read Butler, Hopkinson, major Delany (I've read only his minor ones and bounced off Dhalgren), Kress, Bruce Sterling, more Gaiman, more Wolfe, Vonnegut, more Pohl ...)
2) I'm trying to cover a variety of subgenres at a fairly fine degree of division. (Urban fantasy isn't one subgenre; it's several, with overlaps).
3) Some works get in because they're historically important; quality therefore will vary.
4) Some books, on the other hand, get in just because I think they're good, even if this may mean clustering in some subgenres.
5) I ran out of important enough / representative enough books to add well before I got to 100. (It was either going to be close to 50 or close to 200).
That being said, the list is below, with annotations.
Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London
There's a tight relationship between urban fantasy (at least, recent urban fantasy) and the crime/thriller genre. In many cases the relationship is with the noir / private eye genre, whether in its original mean streets / Chandlerian form or more recent variations. Aaronovitch is refreshing in that his books play off the police procedural. His principal character is also a PoC, with a noted jazz musician as a father (which plays a significant role in one of the novels), and his contacts are a diverse bunch, with a continuing tension between an "old school" (mainly wiped out at the time of the second world war) and the technological and social changes since then. The writing is tight and competent.
This is also a series about London.
This first novel sets up the overall framework -- a department of the police dealing with magic with Isaac Newton at its origins -- and introduces the gods and goddesses of the various rivers of London -- not just the Thames, but also the less prominent or forgotten ones like the Fleet[1] who provide part of the background tension of the novel and who will continue to be important figures in the later novels. (The gods and goddesses are two groups which don't get along.) Mix in a psychopathic supernatural killer with long roots in London culture, and this first novel of the series works very well.
Subsequent volumes get better. If this one is "about" the rivers of London, then the others are "about" the London jazz scene, the Underground, and 20th Century council housing estates reminiscent of Heygate and other Le Corbusier-derived sites. There is a developing series arc involving a rogue magician with roots in the pre-World War II magical organization.
The series is far more popular in the UK than here: last year when I was in Scotland looking for Broken Homes Blackwell's in Edinburgh had it on a front-and-centre display table.
Figures from Amazon for popularity show the disparity:
UK US Canada
Rivers of London 3,852 36,974 84, 269
Broken Homes 855 56,729 2,246
(figures are for MMPB).
[1] "To where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams / rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames". I would guess that most people now think that Fleet Street once had something to do with the navy.
Isaac Asimov, Foundation
This gets in not because I think that the quality really holds up over time -- it's variable, clever in places and the style has not aged well -- but because it is a major foundation for the whole tradition of all or mainly human galactic polities in later science fiction.
It's a patchup of shorter pieces published relatively close together in time, so the tone is consistent.
It's also one of a subset which I think of as very strongly "the 1940s and 1950s in space": the futuristic societies depicted now look very much of their time, especially when they get into politics (Smith's First Lensman is another example). The municipal politics of La Guardia and similar figures stands visibly behind Salvor Hardin (as the municipal politics of a slightly later period does behind Blish's Cities in Flight). This gives it a certain nostalgia appeal.
I'm not sure I ever actually had this on my shelves -- I may have read it only in library (school library, mainly) editions.
Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games
This is here to represent the whole Culture series, not necessarily because I think it's the best of them. Apart from the high quality of the books at a generally writerly level (which did tend to decline over time -- Adam Roberts' reverse read of the series is instructive) this is important as providing a model of space opera which is not directly derivative of the Smith heritage, combined with a post-scarcity society, and is part of the general turn of British SF in a more politically leftward direction (see also Ken MacLeod, China Miéville and Charles Stross).
John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
This is probably the best of Brunner's set of visions of near-future issues (although I have a certain fondness for The Shockwave Rider), written in a style reminiscent of Dos Passos. Lots of neat ideas thrown off in passing. Very much of its time in its approach to the developing world.
Brunner's books prefigure cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk (Stephenson) near-future fiction.
Steven Brust, Dragon
The novels in the Vlad books are too discrete just to throw the whole series in as a single work, or I would. Brust delights in varying narrative techniques within the self-imposed limitations of 17 chapters per book. Dragon is my selection as one of the better examples -- a flashback within the context of the series as well as within the book itself, a work which answers some questions (especially on the Great Weapons side) while raising others, with some very effective character development.
This is also an example of a good series which has its roots in an RPG.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
Ask a set of Bujold fans to choose the best Bujold and you'll get a range of responses. Mirror Dance certainly has a claim, as do Paladin of Souls, and arguably The Curse of Chalion. Memory is my favourite, though, even though it lacks some of the weightiness and complexity of Mirror Dance, because it's in many ways the payoff for the whole prior series in Miles' character arc. In addition, it sheds extra light on the changes in Barrayar which have occurred since the last time it got a focus in Barrayar, fleshes out Simon Illyan's character, and is a springboard for Komarr and A Civil Campaign, which are highly enjoyable riffs on a mystery story structure and a Regency Romance structure.
By and large, Bujold's books are built around key SFnal ideas which they then explore with character-driven narrative. In Memory, the idea is the use of artificial mechanical intelligence enhancements (Illyan's chips) combined with general bioengineering (the prokaryote).
Bujold's fantasy series may be more mature, but she hasn't carried them through as far as she carried Miles' universe. Personally, I would have liked to see more of the Five Gods universe novels. At a high level they're like her SF, except that in place of an SFnal idea there is the five gods pantheon which she's exploring via character-driven plot.
I found the experiment of the Sharing Knife novels not to my taste (I am not particularly an audience for either romance novels (in the modern sense) or frontier / western novels. Her post-Civil Campaign Vorkosiverse novels have also not been up to her previous level.
James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest
Well, either this or Jurgen. Cabell's Life of Manuel marks a direction fantasy could have taken -- urbane, eclectic (they draw from a mix of existing mythologies rather than constructing a new one), ironic, and highly polished -- but did not: aside from the arguable case of Heinlein's Job (which borrows some elements from Cabell's universe but is utterly unlike it as far as just about everything else goes). Cabell has no successors.
Cabell is unjustly neglected. Many of his books are now available on Gutenberg, however.
C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen
This is one of those books which really should be qualified as an "SF masterwork": it combines a murder mystery (unsolved except in the sequel), a bildungsroman, an inquiry into what it means to be human, lots of future technology, and an examination of the boundaries of what constitutes slavery.
I bounce off a lot of Cherryh; this one was an exception.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night
These are shorter pieces published together; the latter is an earlier version of The City and the Stars. I think these are tighter and thus better-written than the better-known novel.
Clarke's more typical SF was in-system relatively near-future SF (A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama, Imperial Earth). Childhood's End starts out that way and then shoots off at another angle. These works, in contrast are very far future (though still in-system). They also involve post-scarcity societies and try to imagine human response to that situation. As such, they can be considered precursor's of Iain Banks' Culture novels.
Clarke's best work is a fairly small subset of his whole output, distinguished (as is usual with Golden Age writers) by interesting ideas; in his near-future books he also tried to remain close to known scientific laws, resulting in a fairly hard style of SF. It's ironic, therefore, that many his best-known works (The City and The Stars, Childhood's End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and "The Nine Billion Names of God") depend on ultra-advanced handwaved technology (alien, human, or literally divine (invoking Clarke's Law in reverse)).
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
This opened up a whole new domain in fantasy. It is a tour-de-force which has no (current) successors or predecessors (other than some stories by Clarke in the same milieu).
That's because it's very difficult territory stylistically. (The closest comparison I can find is the "glamour" books by Mary Robinette Kowal, which are more in the form of Jane Austen homages with rather more melodramatic plots; Kowal tries to stay within the general ambit of Austen's diction.) It also grapples with the problem of faerie (How do you depict beings that are consistently referred to as being very much like us and utterly unlike us? Tolkien made one stab via mythology; Clarke makes another via the Victorian novel; the third major contender in this area is John Crowley.)
John Crowley, Little, Big
If quality were the only criterion and "urban fantasy" were a single subgenre, this would be the book for other works of urban fantasy to try to match.
As it is, of course, other criteria apply, and Crowley's book defines and is the single member of a separate subclass of urban fantasy. (The fact that it's actually rural doesn't distinguish it nearly so much as the oblique character of its handling of the fae.) This may be the best 20th century treatment of the little people from a perspective similar to that of traditional fairy stories: both Tolkien and Clarke have narratives which know too much about elves and elfland.
The prose and characterization are both first-rate.
Pamela Dean, The Secret Country
This (with its two successors) is the canonical grown-up reworking of the Narnia trope of children finding their way into another magic world. It takes all the difficulties which would pop up seriously, and the plot of the three books is intricately designed.
David Drake, Hammer's Slammers
I'm letting this stand in for the whole MilSF subgenre in so far as that differs from space opera. Drake is a veteran who knows the costs of war and he doesn't let his stories go for easy glory or simple black and white values.
This set of stories also displays Drake's other signature trait: the use of stories from classical history as a framework onto which to build his own future stories.
This is a subgenre with a lot of very pedestrian work. Drake's stories stand out among, and well above, them.
Lord Dunsany, Beyond the Fields We Know
Speculative fiction's own peer, even if only from the Irish peerage.
Dunsany's work was sui generis, ranging from the Jorkens tall tales - ancestors of Clarke's Tales From The White Hart - through thoroughly Irish stories like The Curse of the Wise-Woman and novels in a traditional fairy-tale mode (The King of Elfland's Daughter). The short stories set beyond the fields we know are, however, his most original and memorable works. This collection was in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, and draws from several of his short story collections.
Some of his work has a successor in some of Neil Gaiman's work, so he's not completely without a following tradition.
Much of his best work is available on Gutenberg.
Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice
I could easily have chosen almost any other novel from The Malazan Book of the Fallen, but this is one of his best.
Erikson's books do not mark any different subgenre - they are firmly within the bounds of a tradition including The Black Company and stretching back to the military components in heroic fantasy influenced by The Lord of the Rings (e.g. Kay's Fionavar books, Jordan, and much EFP). They do, however, stand out for their complexity on a moral level - no blacks and whites or simple answers - and for their use of a deep and layered past (concerning which even information we have turns out later on to be mistaken). Erikson's background as an archaeologist undoubtedly contributes to this. He manages to balance the scope of a series over ten long novels with enough narrative resolution at volume ends to avoid Wheel of Time type longeurs.
Kate Griffin, The Midnight Mayor
Along with the Aaronovich, this is the other urban fantasy series where London is almost another character. This is darker than the Aaronovictch, though, and it sits a little to the side of the standard noir-derived urban fantasies which are its closest relatives. (though it retains the hard-boiled detective trait that the protagonist usually get beaten up at least once per novel).
This is better than the first novel in the series, A Madness of Angels, even if it is a little less original.
Robert A. Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow
Aside from the juveniles, this is most of the "good" Heinlein, before he started to slide into being too famous to edit and a cranky old man with some odd obsessions into the bargain. In the stories from the forties and the early fifties you can see why Heinlein got to the place he held for a long time in the SF pantheon -- the settings and plots were varied, characterisation rounded compared to most of his Golden Age contemporaries; there were lots of interesting tech ideas, and it all showed a broadly optimistic future (even "if This Goes On-" is about the overthrow of a dictatorship, not the establishment of one) and an enthusiastic attitude.
Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock
This stands in for a whole set of modern retelling of old tales:this one sets Tam Lin in a modern setting, although it's not clear what's happening until well into the book. A highly unreliable narratorial point of view -- the narrator cannot see until the end how badly she is being treated -- combined with an unravelling of the story. I like this better than the Chrestomanci books.
Guy Gavriel Kay, The Sarantine Mosaic
I could easily have chosen The Lions of Al-Rassan, from the same world, for its treatment of an alternate Reconquista from three divided points of view representing three cultures, or Tigana, which is not the same world but still takes a slightly adjusted version of Renaissance Italy (except with more magic) to explore questions of identity and memory.
The Sarantium duology, though, seems to me to be the most typical of Kay's form of alternate history, with the time of a slightly adjusted Justinian painted in bright brushstrokes, ending up in a close parallel to Ravenna with its mosaics.
Kay is not entirely unique in this kind of rotated history -- Bujold's Chalion books also fit into this slot -- but he's made it his own.
Elen Kushner, Swordspoint
Fantasy with a light edge descended from The Three Musketeers. Bright, witty, aggressively not mediaeval.
Laumer, Galactic Diplomat
It's remarkable how little Science Fiction is really comic. There are a lot of comedies in the formal sense, with an ending looking better than the beginning, but a sense of humour, while not unknown, is remarkably rare. (There are more often funny fantasy novels -- Discworld being the obvious example -- which get mileage out of the disjunction between the fantasy world and our own.)
The original pre-stroke Retief stories are comic gems reflecting Laumer's real life experience with the diplomatic service, and Jame Retief (like all other Laumer heroes) is an omnicompetent player who is simply fun to watch. The stories are marked by the attitudes of the time (sexism, implicit racism of the transferred-to-other-species form), but remain lively and readable.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
One of the first really good treatment of aliens as aliens, where the treatment also shines a spotlight back on human gender roles. Combined with good characterization and an engrossing narrative, this is a deserved classic of SF, and tremendously influential both within SF writing and in society as a whole.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Only a few authors combine being major enough and diverse enough to get two items in the list, but LeGuin is one, along with Stephenson and Tolkien. The Dispossessed is one of the few good SF novels with politics as a topic (among the many bad SF novels with usually libertarian politics as a monomania). Aside from being a fine work from a purely novelistic perspective, this uses an SFnal context to explore differing political systems from a personal point of view and is at least as much a classic as TLHoD.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
This is by far the best piece of Lewis' fiction. Unlike the space trilogy and the Narnia books it's free of an extraneous didactic message, has a serious female protagonist (actually, two), and is far more subtle than anything else of Lewis'. It belongs very roughly to that version of history-with-magic which some of Mary Reynolds slips into (The King Must Die), being set in an unidentified barbarian kingdom somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean ambit (though inland) sometime post Aristotle (an MS in the book, if you catch it, is the Nichomachaean Ethics), and is a retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche.
Thomas Malory, Works
Most of my list is 20th century, but I couldn't bring myself to exclude Malory. He lies at the root not only of most of the 20th century Arthurian retellings, but also of much of the plate-armour mediaevaloid fantasy which succeeds LOTR. (None of Tolkien's fighters have any armour heavier than mail, and the Rohirrim are a pre-feudal society. Many of Tolkien's successors go full-out feudal with plate mail.) He's also the key link, for English readers, between the quest-oriented romance of the high middle ages and later narrative forms, and he's just late enough to be readable in the original without the study needed to, say, read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
I've put down the Works, not Caxton's version, which is available in the Vinaver edition in print (preferable) although various Caxton-derived versions are available on-line.
Seanan McGuire, One Salt Sea
There are many, many urban fantasy series taking their inspiration from Chandler and Hammett's hard-boiled detectives: Anita Blake and Harry Dresden are probably the best known. I've taken McGuire's Toby Daye as my representative, though: better than either Butcher or Hamilton overall. (Like many others, I was disappointed in the series arc of the Anita Blake novels, and while I enjoy Jim Butcher the Harry Dresden books feel as though they're edging into the same guilty pleasure territory that a good deal of space opera and EFP resides in.) The individual books are good in themselves -- I think One Salt Sea is better than most -- and the series arc as it is developing is also very promising. In addition, the narratorial perspective -- half-human but mainly within the verges of faerie -- is comparatively unusual. Although I think that McGuire runs the risk of making her elves too human in order to allow for reader engagement, this series, as yet unfinished, is a substantial accomplishment.
China Miéville, The City and the City
More political SF.
Like Cryptonomicon, this hovers on the edge of being SF at all; in some ways it's a Ruritanian location but shifted to the Balkans of today's world rather than the Germany (pre-Unification) of the Nineteenth Century. However, we can shoehorn it in either as alternate history or by treating the extreme form of focus of the citizens as fantastic.
This is a brilliant exploration of both political contrasts and the human ability to blank out unwelcome perceptions (in the way that beggars slide out of people's awareness).
Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
Another sui generis book with nothing like it from the pre-Tolkien era in fantasy. It embodies elements of both social critique and fairy-tale, and (like only a few other fantasies -- Point of Hopes comes to mind) it is set among bourgeois characters rather than aristocrats. Brilliantly written, and influential on a number of following authors (Susanna Clarke being one), although there really are no other books like it.
Elizabeth Moon, The Deed of Paksennarion
Probably the canonical example of a clearly RPG-influenced fantasy, although there's lots of evidence that (unlike, say, Brust's Vlad Taltos series) it was not based on an actual campaign. Still, no D&D, no Paksennarrion, and this is better than most if not all of the others.
This is at its best in the early parts, where Moon's military experience influences a convincing narrative of an entry-level soldier's life as a mercenary in a quasi-mediaeval world.
Moon seems to have a need to have really black villains. This shows up in some of her science fiction as well (ref. the evil Space Texans in her Emily Suiza series). It works better in fantasy because you can, conventionally, posit absolutely evil gods and goddesses where experience shows this to be relatively rare among humans. (The may be issues with this affecting some of her views in real life as well.) So this gets a pass in the Paksennarion books, although I'd prefer a bit more nuance (to be fair she does have some grey characters, particularly in the second series, and the conventions of D&D-derived fantasy practically require Lawful Good paladins and Chaotic Evil villains).
Larry Niven, Neutron Star
Known Space was best in the short stories (and everything after The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton should probably be skipped). This is the classic collection.
There was an optimistic tone to some of the SF in the 1970s which Known Space seems to exemplify -- humans would have our problems, but we'd get over them and end up heading out to colonize the stars.
Tim Powers, Declare
John LeCarre meets Charles Williams. Powers manages to pull off an extremely difficult task with panache.
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
This is the pivotal Watch novel with a focus on Carrot and ending with Vimes promotion into the nobility.
It's impossible to choose just one representative Discworld novel (partly because of the split between Ankh-Morpork/Watch/Vetinari/von Lipwig and Ramtops/Weatherwax/Aching, but this one is the foundation for all the later Watch/Vimes novels.
Like most of Pratchett's novels, this is funny with a serious theme (two, in this case: gun control and civic governance); in this case, there's also a subversion of the fantasy trope of the King returning.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
One of the major novels of the late 20th century, and with enough weirdness to count as speculative fiction. The prose is wonderful, the characters bizarre and varied, the satiric elements funny. Pynchon is a clear influence on Stephenson, but he himself comes out of Joyce, Swift, possibly Sterne.
Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas & Electric
Ruff is an oddity -- pretty well everything he writes is worth reading and at 90% to everything else that's out there. The Fool on the Hill is sui generis, The Mirage is a brilliant piece of alt-hist (of an unusual sort) with genies (not of the Tim Powers kind), and so on. S, G & E is at once a very funny book, a response to Ayn Rand, a weird semi-parallel to Illuminatus! written without its influence, and utterly unlike anything else out there. I don't think you could make a subgenre based on it, except maybe a generally absurdist SF with only loose ties.
Clifford D. Simak, Way Station
Simak wrote what I can only describe as pastoral SF. I might have put City or The Goblin Reservation on the list as easily, but I think that Way Station is probably the best and most distilled, as it were, of his works.
E.E. Smith, The Lensman series
The prose is best descibed as adequate and the characters are flat, but Smith's Lensman books -- along with the Skylark series -- are the grandparents of space opera, tremendously influential, and a great read if you can get yourself into the right frame of mind.
This is in a sense SF which substitutes handwaves for science (and it's followed in that respect by much space opera as well): the whole point is big events and a massive narrative sweep, and if relativity and conservation of energy get in its way, too bad for them.
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
This may be the best book to come out of the dotcom boom, capturing its spirit while keeping up a parallel plot during World War 2; certainly it's the most exhilarating. Heavily influenced by Pynchon, post-cyberpunk,and the technothriller, this dances on the edge between SF and the non-SF novel (I was about to write "conventional", but it's anything but). The succeeding Baroque Cycle makes it clear that this is indeed speculative fiction, raising in prominence the use of the Philosopher's Stone and Root's immortality, but that wasn't as visible when it was published. (Even in the short time since it's appeared, it's now firmly alternate history, no longer a possible future, as governments have reacted to the net in ways which now make it far more implausible than it felt in 1999.
I'd actually bundle up this and the Baroque Cycle together as a single masterwork exploring modernity itself.
Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Stephenson is one of the three authors to get two works in here. Anathem gets a look-in because not only is it a virtuoso performance, but it's a completely different kind of alternate-world SF, a subgenre in itself (and, I would guess, unlikely to be extended by other authors). It's SF where the speculation is about platonic philosophy, as well as about how it would be if the world were configured to give the life of the mind a full-scale status of its own.
Mary Stewart, The Hollow Hills
20th century Arthurian retellings are, by now, legion. (Oddly, Arthur wasn't all that big between MAlory and the 20th Century, although Milton abandoned an Arthurian project.) Stewart's retelling is mainly based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, plus historical research, with a large chunk of invention regarding Merlin thrown in; as she moves to cover Arhur as King, themes from Malory become more important.
The two best novels are this and its predecessor, The Crystal Cave; this one has a young Arthur as well as Merlin; the prior has Ambrosius and more backcountry Britain in the relative chaos before Ambrosius. The obvious novels to compare to these are Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers and The Sword at Sunset, which are, however, pretty purely historical novels with no fantasy admixture.
Charles Stross, Halting State
Hard SF -- no FTL, no psi powers -- seems to be becoming rarer in the 21st Century. Good near future SF is even rarer. Halting State and it's successor, Rule 34 are among the very few good recent examples. He also throws in stimulating perspectives on society and fully rounded characters.
It's distressing that Charlie has deferred adding another novel (originally projected) to this set for the foreseeable future, citing both the difficulty of composition and the uncertainty in the political realm as barriers to doing so. We're left with ongoing Laundry and world-walker books, which are also good, but not (so far) as good.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
The book that founded modern fantasy.
I've noted before that the modern fantasy tradition extracted a subset of LOTR as its basis, omitting the complexity of the background, and the elegiac tone which is a dominant theme of the book; Tolkien's style, influenced by Anglo-Saxon models and immersion in the older English classics in its high form, and by Edwardian, pre-Joycean models in its lower form, is also unique to him. (For that matter, his use of different linguistic registers, completely normal in, say, the 18th Century, had become out of place by the time he was writing.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
...And the third case of two books by one author on the list.
The Silmarillion is utterly unlike LOTR, and unlike anything else in recent writing, being fiction as myth. (The 20th Century has seen lots of retellings of "myths" -- Greek, Norse -- using novelistic techniques, but not new myths using the compressed form of, say, The Metamorphoses.) It is a major achievement, even if it is dense and relatively difficult to approach.
Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
Another really difficult book to pigeonhole: "urban fantasy" with a twist, the city itself as a character, with visiting rights conveyed by sex. Valente makes the book an exploration of human isolation, with sensitive prose.
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
I'll claim this as Vinge's best book, and one of the best SF novels of the past 20 years. It has interesting technology, deep background, good characterization, lots of ideas: if anything in the last couple of decades can be said to be "classically" Science Fiction, this is it. It's even (almost) hard SF: it's set in the zones universe, but the characters don't know it and the non-standard science effects of the star, related to that unknown background, remain unexplained and peripheral to most of the plot.
Jo Walton, Among Others
I've put links to Walton's excellent reviews of some of the books above; this book showed just how good she could be as an author -- not that her previous books were bad (the Small Change trilogy is badly underrated, her quasi-Arthurian duology is very good, and tooth and Claw is a remarkable one-off), but this is a head above them. Bildungsroman, love song to reading science fiction while growing up, exploration of what you do after you've saved the world, with a finely imagined unreliable narrator, and a highly subtle magic system, this richly deserved its Hugo.
Peter Watts, Blindsight
The most depressing book on the list, but brilliant and thought-provoking. (Why don't Kay, Walton and Watts get mentioned in Can. Lit. contexts more often?)
Martha Wells, Death of the Necromancer
Wells' initial novel of Ile-Rien neatly dodged fake mediaevalism for an Elizabethan setting. Her later books (this is the next) move it forward in time.
I've put this on the list not only because it's a good novel, but because it represents a more modern, more urban take on fantasy which is not capital-letter Urban Fantasy (i.e. not our world, or contemporary) but reflects on urban and more middle-class topics than most fantasy. There's a slight similarity at this level between this and Lud-in-the-Mist, but the tone and concerns are very different.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
A brilliant retelling of Arthur based closely on Malory but using the techniques of the modern novel.
Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell
Williams was sui generis in all the areas he wrote in; his "supernatural thrillers" are what he is best known for (he would have preferred to be remembered for his poetry, and he has a claim on attention for his criticism and his apologetics). They reflect eruptions of the supernatural (frequently with an element of Secret History behind them) into ordinary life, with subsequent suppression by the central characters: the Grail, Solomon's diadem, an archetypal Tarot deck, the eidola of the mediaeval philosophers, a practitioner of goetia who aims at control of the world...
Descent Into Hell is a quieter novel, taking place just on the edge of a change in the world which might be the apocalypse beginning, or might not. I like it best of Williams' novels.
Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog
This is science fiction as comedy of manners.
Some people bounce off this, or have such problems with the idiot plot issues of all of Willis' time travel novels that they can't get beyond them. In her more serious books, I think there are issues; but in what is just a few steps away from being a slapstick farce, a few more implausibilities don't matter very much.
Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber
Another example of fantasy with a humorous edge, slightly black in Zelazny's case.
Nobody could call the Amber Chronicles weighty, but they are filled with invention, deft characterization, sparkling prose, and twisty plotlines. They've aged a bit, though probably less than Lord of Light, but are still very readable.
When I was at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s there were still a few Amberites around (the originals of the nine princes).
There are probably better Zelazny works, especially among the short stories, but Amber is what he's now best known for, and probably his most influential work.
I think it's both contentious and meaningless to try to establish canons which allow a clear selection of "best" independent of personal taste. Even though there are a very few novels which probably can be clearly given laurels, the boundaries are really, really murky. And "most important" and "most influential" won't necessarily line up with "best". (Conan is hugely influential; I don't think any of Howard's work is likely to make a "best" list, even within sword-and-sorcery.)
In addition, on reflection, it's pretty clear that speculative fiction is not one genre, or two, but a connected set of sub-genres, and a representative selection of those sub-genres is another beast again.
Still, I couldn't avoid being tempted to put a list together with some constraints.
1) I'm not including anything that I haven't read. Since I haven't made any systematic attempt to read all of SF, or even all of SF's important works, it will therefore be idiosyncratic. (I should read Butler, Hopkinson, major Delany (I've read only his minor ones and bounced off Dhalgren), Kress, Bruce Sterling, more Gaiman, more Wolfe, Vonnegut, more Pohl ...)
2) I'm trying to cover a variety of subgenres at a fairly fine degree of division. (Urban fantasy isn't one subgenre; it's several, with overlaps).
3) Some works get in because they're historically important; quality therefore will vary.
4) Some books, on the other hand, get in just because I think they're good, even if this may mean clustering in some subgenres.
5) I ran out of important enough / representative enough books to add well before I got to 100. (It was either going to be close to 50 or close to 200).
That being said, the list is below, with annotations.
Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London
There's a tight relationship between urban fantasy (at least, recent urban fantasy) and the crime/thriller genre. In many cases the relationship is with the noir / private eye genre, whether in its original mean streets / Chandlerian form or more recent variations. Aaronovitch is refreshing in that his books play off the police procedural. His principal character is also a PoC, with a noted jazz musician as a father (which plays a significant role in one of the novels), and his contacts are a diverse bunch, with a continuing tension between an "old school" (mainly wiped out at the time of the second world war) and the technological and social changes since then. The writing is tight and competent.
This is also a series about London.
This first novel sets up the overall framework -- a department of the police dealing with magic with Isaac Newton at its origins -- and introduces the gods and goddesses of the various rivers of London -- not just the Thames, but also the less prominent or forgotten ones like the Fleet[1] who provide part of the background tension of the novel and who will continue to be important figures in the later novels. (The gods and goddesses are two groups which don't get along.) Mix in a psychopathic supernatural killer with long roots in London culture, and this first novel of the series works very well.
Subsequent volumes get better. If this one is "about" the rivers of London, then the others are "about" the London jazz scene, the Underground, and 20th Century council housing estates reminiscent of Heygate and other Le Corbusier-derived sites. There is a developing series arc involving a rogue magician with roots in the pre-World War II magical organization.
The series is far more popular in the UK than here: last year when I was in Scotland looking for Broken Homes Blackwell's in Edinburgh had it on a front-and-centre display table.
Figures from Amazon for popularity show the disparity:
UK US Canada
Rivers of London 3,852 36,974 84, 269
Broken Homes 855 56,729 2,246
(figures are for MMPB).
[1] "To where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams / rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames". I would guess that most people now think that Fleet Street once had something to do with the navy.
Isaac Asimov, Foundation
This gets in not because I think that the quality really holds up over time -- it's variable, clever in places and the style has not aged well -- but because it is a major foundation for the whole tradition of all or mainly human galactic polities in later science fiction.
It's a patchup of shorter pieces published relatively close together in time, so the tone is consistent.
It's also one of a subset which I think of as very strongly "the 1940s and 1950s in space": the futuristic societies depicted now look very much of their time, especially when they get into politics (Smith's First Lensman is another example). The municipal politics of La Guardia and similar figures stands visibly behind Salvor Hardin (as the municipal politics of a slightly later period does behind Blish's Cities in Flight). This gives it a certain nostalgia appeal.
I'm not sure I ever actually had this on my shelves -- I may have read it only in library (school library, mainly) editions.
Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games
This is here to represent the whole Culture series, not necessarily because I think it's the best of them. Apart from the high quality of the books at a generally writerly level (which did tend to decline over time -- Adam Roberts' reverse read of the series is instructive) this is important as providing a model of space opera which is not directly derivative of the Smith heritage, combined with a post-scarcity society, and is part of the general turn of British SF in a more politically leftward direction (see also Ken MacLeod, China Miéville and Charles Stross).
John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
This is probably the best of Brunner's set of visions of near-future issues (although I have a certain fondness for The Shockwave Rider), written in a style reminiscent of Dos Passos. Lots of neat ideas thrown off in passing. Very much of its time in its approach to the developing world.
Brunner's books prefigure cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk (Stephenson) near-future fiction.
Steven Brust, Dragon
The novels in the Vlad books are too discrete just to throw the whole series in as a single work, or I would. Brust delights in varying narrative techniques within the self-imposed limitations of 17 chapters per book. Dragon is my selection as one of the better examples -- a flashback within the context of the series as well as within the book itself, a work which answers some questions (especially on the Great Weapons side) while raising others, with some very effective character development.
This is also an example of a good series which has its roots in an RPG.
Lois McMaster Bujold, Memory
Ask a set of Bujold fans to choose the best Bujold and you'll get a range of responses. Mirror Dance certainly has a claim, as do Paladin of Souls, and arguably The Curse of Chalion. Memory is my favourite, though, even though it lacks some of the weightiness and complexity of Mirror Dance, because it's in many ways the payoff for the whole prior series in Miles' character arc. In addition, it sheds extra light on the changes in Barrayar which have occurred since the last time it got a focus in Barrayar, fleshes out Simon Illyan's character, and is a springboard for Komarr and A Civil Campaign, which are highly enjoyable riffs on a mystery story structure and a Regency Romance structure.
By and large, Bujold's books are built around key SFnal ideas which they then explore with character-driven narrative. In Memory, the idea is the use of artificial mechanical intelligence enhancements (Illyan's chips) combined with general bioengineering (the prokaryote).
Bujold's fantasy series may be more mature, but she hasn't carried them through as far as she carried Miles' universe. Personally, I would have liked to see more of the Five Gods universe novels. At a high level they're like her SF, except that in place of an SFnal idea there is the five gods pantheon which she's exploring via character-driven plot.
I found the experiment of the Sharing Knife novels not to my taste (I am not particularly an audience for either romance novels (in the modern sense) or frontier / western novels. Her post-Civil Campaign Vorkosiverse novels have also not been up to her previous level.
James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest
Well, either this or Jurgen. Cabell's Life of Manuel marks a direction fantasy could have taken -- urbane, eclectic (they draw from a mix of existing mythologies rather than constructing a new one), ironic, and highly polished -- but did not: aside from the arguable case of Heinlein's Job (which borrows some elements from Cabell's universe but is utterly unlike it as far as just about everything else goes). Cabell has no successors.
Cabell is unjustly neglected. Many of his books are now available on Gutenberg, however.
C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen
This is one of those books which really should be qualified as an "SF masterwork": it combines a murder mystery (unsolved except in the sequel), a bildungsroman, an inquiry into what it means to be human, lots of future technology, and an examination of the boundaries of what constitutes slavery.
I bounce off a lot of Cherryh; this one was an exception.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Lion of Comarre and Against the Fall of Night
These are shorter pieces published together; the latter is an earlier version of The City and the Stars. I think these are tighter and thus better-written than the better-known novel.
Clarke's more typical SF was in-system relatively near-future SF (A Fall of Moondust, Rendezvous with Rama, Imperial Earth). Childhood's End starts out that way and then shoots off at another angle. These works, in contrast are very far future (though still in-system). They also involve post-scarcity societies and try to imagine human response to that situation. As such, they can be considered precursor's of Iain Banks' Culture novels.
Clarke's best work is a fairly small subset of his whole output, distinguished (as is usual with Golden Age writers) by interesting ideas; in his near-future books he also tried to remain close to known scientific laws, resulting in a fairly hard style of SF. It's ironic, therefore, that many his best-known works (The City and The Stars, Childhood's End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and "The Nine Billion Names of God") depend on ultra-advanced handwaved technology (alien, human, or literally divine (invoking Clarke's Law in reverse)).
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
This opened up a whole new domain in fantasy. It is a tour-de-force which has no (current) successors or predecessors (other than some stories by Clarke in the same milieu).
That's because it's very difficult territory stylistically. (The closest comparison I can find is the "glamour" books by Mary Robinette Kowal, which are more in the form of Jane Austen homages with rather more melodramatic plots; Kowal tries to stay within the general ambit of Austen's diction.) It also grapples with the problem of faerie (How do you depict beings that are consistently referred to as being very much like us and utterly unlike us? Tolkien made one stab via mythology; Clarke makes another via the Victorian novel; the third major contender in this area is John Crowley.)
John Crowley, Little, Big
If quality were the only criterion and "urban fantasy" were a single subgenre, this would be the book for other works of urban fantasy to try to match.
As it is, of course, other criteria apply, and Crowley's book defines and is the single member of a separate subclass of urban fantasy. (The fact that it's actually rural doesn't distinguish it nearly so much as the oblique character of its handling of the fae.) This may be the best 20th century treatment of the little people from a perspective similar to that of traditional fairy stories: both Tolkien and Clarke have narratives which know too much about elves and elfland.
The prose and characterization are both first-rate.
Pamela Dean, The Secret Country
This (with its two successors) is the canonical grown-up reworking of the Narnia trope of children finding their way into another magic world. It takes all the difficulties which would pop up seriously, and the plot of the three books is intricately designed.
David Drake, Hammer's Slammers
I'm letting this stand in for the whole MilSF subgenre in so far as that differs from space opera. Drake is a veteran who knows the costs of war and he doesn't let his stories go for easy glory or simple black and white values.
This set of stories also displays Drake's other signature trait: the use of stories from classical history as a framework onto which to build his own future stories.
This is a subgenre with a lot of very pedestrian work. Drake's stories stand out among, and well above, them.
Lord Dunsany, Beyond the Fields We Know
Speculative fiction's own peer, even if only from the Irish peerage.
Dunsany's work was sui generis, ranging from the Jorkens tall tales - ancestors of Clarke's Tales From The White Hart - through thoroughly Irish stories like The Curse of the Wise-Woman and novels in a traditional fairy-tale mode (The King of Elfland's Daughter). The short stories set beyond the fields we know are, however, his most original and memorable works. This collection was in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, and draws from several of his short story collections.
Some of his work has a successor in some of Neil Gaiman's work, so he's not completely without a following tradition.
Much of his best work is available on Gutenberg.
Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice
I could easily have chosen almost any other novel from The Malazan Book of the Fallen, but this is one of his best.
Erikson's books do not mark any different subgenre - they are firmly within the bounds of a tradition including The Black Company and stretching back to the military components in heroic fantasy influenced by The Lord of the Rings (e.g. Kay's Fionavar books, Jordan, and much EFP). They do, however, stand out for their complexity on a moral level - no blacks and whites or simple answers - and for their use of a deep and layered past (concerning which even information we have turns out later on to be mistaken). Erikson's background as an archaeologist undoubtedly contributes to this. He manages to balance the scope of a series over ten long novels with enough narrative resolution at volume ends to avoid Wheel of Time type longeurs.
Kate Griffin, The Midnight Mayor
Along with the Aaronovich, this is the other urban fantasy series where London is almost another character. This is darker than the Aaronovictch, though, and it sits a little to the side of the standard noir-derived urban fantasies which are its closest relatives. (though it retains the hard-boiled detective trait that the protagonist usually get beaten up at least once per novel).
This is better than the first novel in the series, A Madness of Angels, even if it is a little less original.
Robert A. Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow
Aside from the juveniles, this is most of the "good" Heinlein, before he started to slide into being too famous to edit and a cranky old man with some odd obsessions into the bargain. In the stories from the forties and the early fifties you can see why Heinlein got to the place he held for a long time in the SF pantheon -- the settings and plots were varied, characterisation rounded compared to most of his Golden Age contemporaries; there were lots of interesting tech ideas, and it all showed a broadly optimistic future (even "if This Goes On-" is about the overthrow of a dictatorship, not the establishment of one) and an enthusiastic attitude.
Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock
This stands in for a whole set of modern retelling of old tales:this one sets Tam Lin in a modern setting, although it's not clear what's happening until well into the book. A highly unreliable narratorial point of view -- the narrator cannot see until the end how badly she is being treated -- combined with an unravelling of the story. I like this better than the Chrestomanci books.
Guy Gavriel Kay, The Sarantine Mosaic
I could easily have chosen The Lions of Al-Rassan, from the same world, for its treatment of an alternate Reconquista from three divided points of view representing three cultures, or Tigana, which is not the same world but still takes a slightly adjusted version of Renaissance Italy (except with more magic) to explore questions of identity and memory.
The Sarantium duology, though, seems to me to be the most typical of Kay's form of alternate history, with the time of a slightly adjusted Justinian painted in bright brushstrokes, ending up in a close parallel to Ravenna with its mosaics.
Kay is not entirely unique in this kind of rotated history -- Bujold's Chalion books also fit into this slot -- but he's made it his own.
Elen Kushner, Swordspoint
Fantasy with a light edge descended from The Three Musketeers. Bright, witty, aggressively not mediaeval.
Laumer, Galactic Diplomat
It's remarkable how little Science Fiction is really comic. There are a lot of comedies in the formal sense, with an ending looking better than the beginning, but a sense of humour, while not unknown, is remarkably rare. (There are more often funny fantasy novels -- Discworld being the obvious example -- which get mileage out of the disjunction between the fantasy world and our own.)
The original pre-stroke Retief stories are comic gems reflecting Laumer's real life experience with the diplomatic service, and Jame Retief (like all other Laumer heroes) is an omnicompetent player who is simply fun to watch. The stories are marked by the attitudes of the time (sexism, implicit racism of the transferred-to-other-species form), but remain lively and readable.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
One of the first really good treatment of aliens as aliens, where the treatment also shines a spotlight back on human gender roles. Combined with good characterization and an engrossing narrative, this is a deserved classic of SF, and tremendously influential both within SF writing and in society as a whole.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Only a few authors combine being major enough and diverse enough to get two items in the list, but LeGuin is one, along with Stephenson and Tolkien. The Dispossessed is one of the few good SF novels with politics as a topic (among the many bad SF novels with usually libertarian politics as a monomania). Aside from being a fine work from a purely novelistic perspective, this uses an SFnal context to explore differing political systems from a personal point of view and is at least as much a classic as TLHoD.
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
This is by far the best piece of Lewis' fiction. Unlike the space trilogy and the Narnia books it's free of an extraneous didactic message, has a serious female protagonist (actually, two), and is far more subtle than anything else of Lewis'. It belongs very roughly to that version of history-with-magic which some of Mary Reynolds slips into (The King Must Die), being set in an unidentified barbarian kingdom somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean ambit (though inland) sometime post Aristotle (an MS in the book, if you catch it, is the Nichomachaean Ethics), and is a retelling of the myth of Eros and Psyche.
Thomas Malory, Works
Most of my list is 20th century, but I couldn't bring myself to exclude Malory. He lies at the root not only of most of the 20th century Arthurian retellings, but also of much of the plate-armour mediaevaloid fantasy which succeeds LOTR. (None of Tolkien's fighters have any armour heavier than mail, and the Rohirrim are a pre-feudal society. Many of Tolkien's successors go full-out feudal with plate mail.) He's also the key link, for English readers, between the quest-oriented romance of the high middle ages and later narrative forms, and he's just late enough to be readable in the original without the study needed to, say, read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
I've put down the Works, not Caxton's version, which is available in the Vinaver edition in print (preferable) although various Caxton-derived versions are available on-line.
Seanan McGuire, One Salt Sea
There are many, many urban fantasy series taking their inspiration from Chandler and Hammett's hard-boiled detectives: Anita Blake and Harry Dresden are probably the best known. I've taken McGuire's Toby Daye as my representative, though: better than either Butcher or Hamilton overall. (Like many others, I was disappointed in the series arc of the Anita Blake novels, and while I enjoy Jim Butcher the Harry Dresden books feel as though they're edging into the same guilty pleasure territory that a good deal of space opera and EFP resides in.) The individual books are good in themselves -- I think One Salt Sea is better than most -- and the series arc as it is developing is also very promising. In addition, the narratorial perspective -- half-human but mainly within the verges of faerie -- is comparatively unusual. Although I think that McGuire runs the risk of making her elves too human in order to allow for reader engagement, this series, as yet unfinished, is a substantial accomplishment.
China Miéville, The City and the City
More political SF.
Like Cryptonomicon, this hovers on the edge of being SF at all; in some ways it's a Ruritanian location but shifted to the Balkans of today's world rather than the Germany (pre-Unification) of the Nineteenth Century. However, we can shoehorn it in either as alternate history or by treating the extreme form of focus of the citizens as fantastic.
This is a brilliant exploration of both political contrasts and the human ability to blank out unwelcome perceptions (in the way that beggars slide out of people's awareness).
Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist
Another sui generis book with nothing like it from the pre-Tolkien era in fantasy. It embodies elements of both social critique and fairy-tale, and (like only a few other fantasies -- Point of Hopes comes to mind) it is set among bourgeois characters rather than aristocrats. Brilliantly written, and influential on a number of following authors (Susanna Clarke being one), although there really are no other books like it.
Elizabeth Moon, The Deed of Paksennarion
Probably the canonical example of a clearly RPG-influenced fantasy, although there's lots of evidence that (unlike, say, Brust's Vlad Taltos series) it was not based on an actual campaign. Still, no D&D, no Paksennarrion, and this is better than most if not all of the others.
This is at its best in the early parts, where Moon's military experience influences a convincing narrative of an entry-level soldier's life as a mercenary in a quasi-mediaeval world.
Moon seems to have a need to have really black villains. This shows up in some of her science fiction as well (ref. the evil Space Texans in her Emily Suiza series). It works better in fantasy because you can, conventionally, posit absolutely evil gods and goddesses where experience shows this to be relatively rare among humans. (The may be issues with this affecting some of her views in real life as well.) So this gets a pass in the Paksennarion books, although I'd prefer a bit more nuance (to be fair she does have some grey characters, particularly in the second series, and the conventions of D&D-derived fantasy practically require Lawful Good paladins and Chaotic Evil villains).
Larry Niven, Neutron Star
Known Space was best in the short stories (and everything after The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton should probably be skipped). This is the classic collection.
There was an optimistic tone to some of the SF in the 1970s which Known Space seems to exemplify -- humans would have our problems, but we'd get over them and end up heading out to colonize the stars.
Tim Powers, Declare
John LeCarre meets Charles Williams. Powers manages to pull off an extremely difficult task with panache.
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
This is the pivotal Watch novel with a focus on Carrot and ending with Vimes promotion into the nobility.
It's impossible to choose just one representative Discworld novel (partly because of the split between Ankh-Morpork/Watch/Vetinari/von Lipwig and Ramtops/Weatherwax/Aching, but this one is the foundation for all the later Watch/Vimes novels.
Like most of Pratchett's novels, this is funny with a serious theme (two, in this case: gun control and civic governance); in this case, there's also a subversion of the fantasy trope of the King returning.
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
One of the major novels of the late 20th century, and with enough weirdness to count as speculative fiction. The prose is wonderful, the characters bizarre and varied, the satiric elements funny. Pynchon is a clear influence on Stephenson, but he himself comes out of Joyce, Swift, possibly Sterne.
Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas & Electric
Ruff is an oddity -- pretty well everything he writes is worth reading and at 90% to everything else that's out there. The Fool on the Hill is sui generis, The Mirage is a brilliant piece of alt-hist (of an unusual sort) with genies (not of the Tim Powers kind), and so on. S, G & E is at once a very funny book, a response to Ayn Rand, a weird semi-parallel to Illuminatus! written without its influence, and utterly unlike anything else out there. I don't think you could make a subgenre based on it, except maybe a generally absurdist SF with only loose ties.
Clifford D. Simak, Way Station
Simak wrote what I can only describe as pastoral SF. I might have put City or The Goblin Reservation on the list as easily, but I think that Way Station is probably the best and most distilled, as it were, of his works.
E.E. Smith, The Lensman series
The prose is best descibed as adequate and the characters are flat, but Smith's Lensman books -- along with the Skylark series -- are the grandparents of space opera, tremendously influential, and a great read if you can get yourself into the right frame of mind.
This is in a sense SF which substitutes handwaves for science (and it's followed in that respect by much space opera as well): the whole point is big events and a massive narrative sweep, and if relativity and conservation of energy get in its way, too bad for them.
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
This may be the best book to come out of the dotcom boom, capturing its spirit while keeping up a parallel plot during World War 2; certainly it's the most exhilarating. Heavily influenced by Pynchon, post-cyberpunk,and the technothriller, this dances on the edge between SF and the non-SF novel (I was about to write "conventional", but it's anything but). The succeeding Baroque Cycle makes it clear that this is indeed speculative fiction, raising in prominence the use of the Philosopher's Stone and Root's immortality, but that wasn't as visible when it was published. (Even in the short time since it's appeared, it's now firmly alternate history, no longer a possible future, as governments have reacted to the net in ways which now make it far more implausible than it felt in 1999.
I'd actually bundle up this and the Baroque Cycle together as a single masterwork exploring modernity itself.
Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Stephenson is one of the three authors to get two works in here. Anathem gets a look-in because not only is it a virtuoso performance, but it's a completely different kind of alternate-world SF, a subgenre in itself (and, I would guess, unlikely to be extended by other authors). It's SF where the speculation is about platonic philosophy, as well as about how it would be if the world were configured to give the life of the mind a full-scale status of its own.
Mary Stewart, The Hollow Hills
20th century Arthurian retellings are, by now, legion. (Oddly, Arthur wasn't all that big between MAlory and the 20th Century, although Milton abandoned an Arthurian project.) Stewart's retelling is mainly based on Geoffrey of Monmouth, plus historical research, with a large chunk of invention regarding Merlin thrown in; as she moves to cover Arhur as King, themes from Malory become more important.
The two best novels are this and its predecessor, The Crystal Cave; this one has a young Arthur as well as Merlin; the prior has Ambrosius and more backcountry Britain in the relative chaos before Ambrosius. The obvious novels to compare to these are Sutcliff's The Lantern Bearers and The Sword at Sunset, which are, however, pretty purely historical novels with no fantasy admixture.
Charles Stross, Halting State
Hard SF -- no FTL, no psi powers -- seems to be becoming rarer in the 21st Century. Good near future SF is even rarer. Halting State and it's successor, Rule 34 are among the very few good recent examples. He also throws in stimulating perspectives on society and fully rounded characters.
It's distressing that Charlie has deferred adding another novel (originally projected) to this set for the foreseeable future, citing both the difficulty of composition and the uncertainty in the political realm as barriers to doing so. We're left with ongoing Laundry and world-walker books, which are also good, but not (so far) as good.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
The book that founded modern fantasy.
I've noted before that the modern fantasy tradition extracted a subset of LOTR as its basis, omitting the complexity of the background, and the elegiac tone which is a dominant theme of the book; Tolkien's style, influenced by Anglo-Saxon models and immersion in the older English classics in its high form, and by Edwardian, pre-Joycean models in its lower form, is also unique to him. (For that matter, his use of different linguistic registers, completely normal in, say, the 18th Century, had become out of place by the time he was writing.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
...And the third case of two books by one author on the list.
The Silmarillion is utterly unlike LOTR, and unlike anything else in recent writing, being fiction as myth. (The 20th Century has seen lots of retellings of "myths" -- Greek, Norse -- using novelistic techniques, but not new myths using the compressed form of, say, The Metamorphoses.) It is a major achievement, even if it is dense and relatively difficult to approach.
Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest
Another really difficult book to pigeonhole: "urban fantasy" with a twist, the city itself as a character, with visiting rights conveyed by sex. Valente makes the book an exploration of human isolation, with sensitive prose.
Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky
I'll claim this as Vinge's best book, and one of the best SF novels of the past 20 years. It has interesting technology, deep background, good characterization, lots of ideas: if anything in the last couple of decades can be said to be "classically" Science Fiction, this is it. It's even (almost) hard SF: it's set in the zones universe, but the characters don't know it and the non-standard science effects of the star, related to that unknown background, remain unexplained and peripheral to most of the plot.
Jo Walton, Among Others
I've put links to Walton's excellent reviews of some of the books above; this book showed just how good she could be as an author -- not that her previous books were bad (the Small Change trilogy is badly underrated, her quasi-Arthurian duology is very good, and tooth and Claw is a remarkable one-off), but this is a head above them. Bildungsroman, love song to reading science fiction while growing up, exploration of what you do after you've saved the world, with a finely imagined unreliable narrator, and a highly subtle magic system, this richly deserved its Hugo.
Peter Watts, Blindsight
The most depressing book on the list, but brilliant and thought-provoking. (Why don't Kay, Walton and Watts get mentioned in Can. Lit. contexts more often?)
Martha Wells, Death of the Necromancer
Wells' initial novel of Ile-Rien neatly dodged fake mediaevalism for an Elizabethan setting. Her later books (this is the next) move it forward in time.
I've put this on the list not only because it's a good novel, but because it represents a more modern, more urban take on fantasy which is not capital-letter Urban Fantasy (i.e. not our world, or contemporary) but reflects on urban and more middle-class topics than most fantasy. There's a slight similarity at this level between this and Lud-in-the-Mist, but the tone and concerns are very different.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
A brilliant retelling of Arthur based closely on Malory but using the techniques of the modern novel.
Charles Williams, Descent Into Hell
Williams was sui generis in all the areas he wrote in; his "supernatural thrillers" are what he is best known for (he would have preferred to be remembered for his poetry, and he has a claim on attention for his criticism and his apologetics). They reflect eruptions of the supernatural (frequently with an element of Secret History behind them) into ordinary life, with subsequent suppression by the central characters: the Grail, Solomon's diadem, an archetypal Tarot deck, the eidola of the mediaeval philosophers, a practitioner of goetia who aims at control of the world...
Descent Into Hell is a quieter novel, taking place just on the edge of a change in the world which might be the apocalypse beginning, or might not. I like it best of Williams' novels.
Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog
This is science fiction as comedy of manners.
Some people bounce off this, or have such problems with the idiot plot issues of all of Willis' time travel novels that they can't get beyond them. In her more serious books, I think there are issues; but in what is just a few steps away from being a slapstick farce, a few more implausibilities don't matter very much.
Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes in Amber
Another example of fantasy with a humorous edge, slightly black in Zelazny's case.
Nobody could call the Amber Chronicles weighty, but they are filled with invention, deft characterization, sparkling prose, and twisty plotlines. They've aged a bit, though probably less than Lord of Light, but are still very readable.
When I was at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s there were still a few Amberites around (the originals of the nine princes).
There are probably better Zelazny works, especially among the short stories, but Amber is what he's now best known for, and probably his most influential work.