Worlds Without End Blog

So there’s been a lot of recent buzz on the internets about the SF Masterworks series from Gollancz including this meme.  Mostly it’s because of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks Reading Project that kicked off a few weeks ago.  The reading project is a "a group blog dedicated to reading and reviewing Gollancz’s series of genre classics in its entirety".  They have several reviews posted already that are worth a read.

As you might have guessed from looking at WWEnd I really love this idea.  The Masterworks collections contain some of the best works in the genre and have some great cover art to boot.  I’ve only read a few from the list but it’s my goal to eventually read them all – though I’ll be taking my time.  These guys will be reading them all within a year.  Sheesh!

Of course, if you’re interested in reading them too, WWEnd’s BookTrackr can help you keep tabs on your progress.  We’ve got the complete lists for the SF Masterworks and the Fantasy Masterworks and you can use BookTrackr to tag the ones you’ve read as you go along.  The color coding will show you how many you’ve read and which ones you still need to read.  Give it a shot.

Anyway, without further ado, here is my SF list so far.  I’ve bolded and linked the ones I’ve read.

1. The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
2. I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
3. Cities in Flight – James Blish
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5. The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
6. Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
7. Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
8. The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
9. Gateway – Frederik Pohl
10. The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith
11. Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
12. Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
13. Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
14. The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
15. Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
16. The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
17. The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
18. The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
19. Emphyrio – Jack Vance
20. A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick
21. Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
22. Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
23. The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
24. The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
25. Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
26. Ubik – Philip K. Dick
27. Timescape – Gregory Benford
28. More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
29. Man Plus – Frederik Pohl
30. A Case of Conscience – James Blish
31. The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
32. Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
33. Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
34. The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke
35. Pavane – Keith Roberts
36. Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
37. Nova – Samuel R. Delany
38. The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
39. The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke
40. Blood Music – Greg Bear
41. Jem – Frederik Pohl
42. Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
43. VALIS – Philip K. Dick
44. The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin
45. The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
46. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
47. The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
48. Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
49. A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke
50. Eon – Greg Bear
51. The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
52. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
53. The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
54. The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
55. Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
56. Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
57. The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
58. The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
59. Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
60. Ringworld – Larry Niven
61. The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
62. Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
63. A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
64. Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
65. Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
66. Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
67. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
68. Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
69. Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
70. Mockingbird – Walter Tevis
71. Dune – Frank Herbert
72. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
73. The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
74. Inverted World – Christopher Priest
75. Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
76. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
77. Childhood’s End – Arthur C. Clarke
78. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
79. Dhalgren (July 2010) – Samuel R. Delany
80. Helliconia (August 2010) – Brian Aldiss
81. Food of the Gods (Sept. 2010) – H.G. Wells
82. The Body Snatchers (Oct. 2010) – Jack Finney
83. The Female Man (Nov. 2010) – Joanna Russ
84. Arslan (Dec. 2010) – M.J. Engh

As you can see, I’ve got my work cut out for me to finish this list.  I own my shame.   So how many have you read?  Are you trying to read them all?

7 Comments | Posted in Novels | Tags: Book Lists, BookTrackr, Science Fiction

In our quest to bring you the best books in Science Fiction and Fantasy we’re expanding our database beyond the confines of the 10 awards we cover. But where else do you go to find great books besides the awards? Well, it turns out that SF/F geeks like to make lists of the great books they read and there are many great lists already out there.

We’ve got seven lists so far including two new ones we just added that you should check out:

• The WWEnd Top Nominated Books of All-Time
• David Pringle’s Best 100 Science Fiction Novels

We’ll continue to bring you new lists from time to time so you’ll never run out of books to read. If you’re already a member you can follow along with BookTrackr™ and see how you match up.  If you’re not, you can join now by signing up in our forum.  You know you want to.

3 Comments | Posted in WWEnd Updates | Tags: Book Lists, BookTrackr

As promised, and a little ahead of schedule, the Fantasy Masterworks series is up.  This is of course a companion series to the SF Masterworks that went in earlier this week.  (Scroll down the page for more on that.)  There are some great books in this series, 50 in all, and again some great cover art to go with them.

Quite a few of these books are omnibus editions like The Conan Chronicles, Volume 1 and Volume 2 which include all of Robert E. Howard‘s Conan stories in chronological order.  You’ll find Gene Wolfe‘s classic Book of the New Sun series in a 2 volume set and omnibus editions of 2 classic Michael Moorcock series: The Chronicles of Corum and The History of the Runestaff.

Some of these books really are old-school fantasy classics.  Two books by Lord Dunsany, Time and the Gods and The King of Elfland’s Daughter, A Voyage to Arcturas by David Lindsay and The Worm Ouroboros by E.R Eddison come to us pre 1930.  Never really thought I’d be adding Rudyard Kipling to WWEnd but now he’s here with The Mark of the Beast, a collection of his strange and ghostly tales.  We’re gettin’ all respectable ’round here.

You know, I thought I had read a lot of fantasy in my time but I can only check off 2 books out of 50.  A rather poor showing.  I guess I was reading the wrong fantasy books.  How do you fare with the Fantasy Masterworks list?  Check it out and let us know what you think.
 

2 Comments | Posted in Recent Additions | Tags: Book Lists, Fantasy

The SF Masterworks is a series of science fiction books published by Orion through its imprints Millennium and Gollancz.  The idea was to bring the best out of print titles back into circulation so they could be enjoyed by new generations of readers.  The series features some excellent books and some really great covers – two factors that make them extremely collectible.

Many of the books in the series were already in our database, as winners and nominees for the awards we cover, and the remainder has now been added to bring us to a total of 73.  I’ve also gone in and replaced all the existing book covers with the Masterwork covers to complete the set.  We’ve built a SF Masterworks page to display them all together so you can easily see how many you’ve read.  Sounds like a good reading challenge to me.  I’ve only read 11 from the list so far but I found that I already had 7 more on my reading list.

The folks at Orion really like Philip K. Dick.  There are 14 PKD books in the series – far more than any other author – but you’ll find many other greats in the list like Alfred Bester, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Silverberg to name a few.  I’m also excited to be adding many new authors including H.G. Wells to our database.  The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon and The Invisible Man all pre-date the awards by many years but remain among the most familiar classics of the genre.

Take a look at the list and let us know what you think.  How does this list compare to the awards?  How many have you read?  I’ll be adding more lists going forward to complement and fill in some of the gaps from our awards coverage.  For next week I’m already working on the companion Fantasy Masterworks list – to cover both sides of the SF/F aisle.  What other lists should we consider?
 

10 Comments | Posted in Recent Additions | Tags: Book Lists, Science Fiction

This week I took a break from the usual series updates to do a major addition to WWEnd, namely the Locus Magazine 2009 Recommended Reading List.  We’ve now got all the novels on the Locus list for you to review – 61 new books and over 40 new authors!

In case you’re not familiar with the list, it’s Locus’ annual run down of the books that they think merit your attention from the previous year – and this year’s list is a doozy!  You’ll be seeing many of these books on the short lists for the big awards this year, in fact several are already on the BSFA Short List, so add ’em to your reading list now before awards season starts in earnest.

And speaking of awards, now is the time for you to vote in the Locus Poll.  Anyone can vote but subscriber votes count double so if you’ve been thinking about subscribing, now is a great time to do it.  So now, without further ado, the list: 

Novels – Science Fiction

• The Empress of Mars, Kage Baker (Subterranean Press; Tor)
• Transition, Iain M. Banks (Little Brown UK; Orbit)
• Ark, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz)
• The Devil’s Alphabet, Daryl Gregory (Ballantine Del Rey)
• Buyout, Alexander C. Irvine (Ballantine Del Rey)
• Under the Dome, Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton; Scribner)
• Steal Across the Sky, Nancy Kress (Tor)
• Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday)
• Gardens of the Sun, Paul McAuley (Gollancz; Pyr 2010)
• The Walls of the Universe, Paul Melko (Tor)
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
• Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts (Gollancz)
• Galileo’s Dream, Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperVoyager; Ballantine Spectra 2010)
• The Sunless Countries, Karl Schroeder (Tor)
• This Is Not a Game, Walter Jon Williams (Orbit UK, Orbit US)
• Julian Comstock, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

Novels – Fantasy

• The Price of Spring, Daniel Abraham (Tor)
• Last Days, Brian Evenson (Underland Press)
• Dragon in Chains, Daniel Fox (Ballantine Del Rey)
• Gears of the City, Felix Gilman (Bantam Spectra)
• Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales, Greer Gilman (Small Beer Press)
• Avilion, Robert Holdstock (Gollancz)
• The High City, Cecelia Holland (Forge)
• The Red Tree, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Roc)
• Green, Jay Lake (Tor)
• Madness of Flowers, Jay Lake (Night Shade Books)
• Audrey’s Door, Sarah Langan (Harper)
• The City & The City, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Ballantine Del Rey)
• Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; Harper)
• Spell Games, T.A. Pratt (Bantam Spectra)
• Canticle, Ken Scholes (Tor)
• Drood, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
• The Revolution Business, Charles Stross (Tor)
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press)
• Lifelode, Jo Walton (NESFA Press)
• The Painting and the City, Robert Freeman Wexler (PS Publishing)
• In Great Waters, Kit Whitfield (Jonathan Cape; Del Rey)

Young Adult Books

• The Hotel Under the Sand, Kage Baker (Tachyon Publications)
• Going Bovine, Libba Bray (Delacorte)
• Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press)
• Sacred Scars, Kathleen Duey (Atheneum)
• The Lost Conspiracy (HarperCollins)
• Liar, Justine Larbalestier (Bloomsbury)
• The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness (Walker UK; Candlewick Press)
• Heroes of the Valley, Jonathan Stroud (Hyperion; Doubleday UK)
• Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse)

First Novels

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books)
• The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry (Penguin)
• Soulless, Gail Carriger (Orbit)
• The Adamantine Palace, Stephen Deas (Gollancz; Roc 2010)
• Total Oblivion, More or Less, Alan DeNiro (Ballantine Spectra)
• Blood of Ambrose, James Enge (Pyr)
• Ash, Malinda Lo (Little, Brown)
• Rosemary and Rue, Seanan McGuire (DAW)
• Lamentation, Ken Scholes (Tor)
• Harbinger, Jack Skillingstead (Fairwood Press)
• Spellbent, Lucy A. Snyder (Ballantine Del Rey)
• Living with Ghosts, Kari Sperring (DAW)
• Lightbreaker, Mark Teppo (Night Shade Books)
• Norse Code, Greg van Eekhout (Ballantine Spectra)

1 Comment | Posted in Recent Additions | Tags: Book Lists