[Link] The Heart & Soul of 20th Century Science Fiction - Part One

by Stephen Antczak

If someone came to me who had never read science fiction before and expressed an interest in reading ten books as an introduction to SF, what would I recommend? After giving it much thought, I decided that I’d want them to read the books which, I feel, make up the “heart and soul” of science fiction. To expand on this idea, I came up with the following conceit: What if a library decided that it only had room for 100 books to represent science fiction of the 20th Century?

Which 100 books would be chosen? Which 100 books best represent what science fiction was during the 20th Century?

Bear in mind that I am not attempting to list the “best,” nor the “bestselling,” nor the “most important” books in the genre. Rather, this is an attempt to uncover the essence of science fiction in the 20th Century as a genre of literature. Science fiction is a wide field, yet for all its variety it can be argued that SF in the 20th Century maintained a certain cohesiveness. This cohesiveness diminished as the century wore on, primarily due to the increasing number of writers publishing the stuff. It can still be said that SF exists, even in the 21st Century, as a literature with a certain set of “core aspects.”

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