Top 20 geek novels

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I linked to a reader voted list of twenty best geek novels sometime ago, after spotting it on either Anshul’s or Ashwin’s del.icio.us bookmarks. Here’s the list with the books that I’ve read in bold.

  1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
  2. 1984 – George Orwell
  3. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
  4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip Dick
  5. Neuromancer – William Gibson
  6. Dune – Frank Herbert
  7. I, Robot – Isaac Asimov
  8. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
  9. The Colour of Magic – Terry Pratchett
  10. Microserfs – Douglas Coupland
  11. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
  12. Watchmen – Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
  13. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
  14. Consider Phlebas – Iain M Banks
  15. Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
  16. The Man in the High Castle – Philip K Dick
  17. American Gods – Neil Gaiman
  18. The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
  19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy – Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
  20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham

My favourite of the lot is Cryptonomicon and I am surprised none of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle novels are in the list. I suspect only a few men alive have finished reading the trilogy ;-) Anyway, I intend to read every single one of his books. Yeah, fanboy. :) Update: Now that I’ve finished reading Quicksilver, it occurs to me that the Baroque Cycle books aren’t really geeky which sort of explains their absence from the list. In any case, 3/20 is enough!

My least favourite are the Asimov books. The man had vision and influenced the SF genre to an extent few others can claim to have; but his books are severely two-dimensonal: his robots have more depth to them than the humans!

Everyone should read Dune, if only for the dialogues which are crafted with subtlety rarely seen elsewhere. And by elsewhere, I mean everywhere else, not just in the SF genre.

I’ve never heard of Alan Moore, Iain Banks, Robert Heinlein or John Wyndham. Terry Pratchett I’ve heard of through Bala, who appears to be a voracious reader of his, going by his reading list.

Anyways, that seems to be a good list to pick up my next book from. Oh, next is Someone comes… After that, then :-)

☙