In my columns over the years, I've sometimes referred to the "Nerd Canon" (which has amused my editors no end). These are the books that the fanboys and fangirls in my generation sought out as the seminal works we needed to have read to have nerd cred.
Now, the Nerd Canon isn't static (nor should it be). It varies from generation to generation. But we all get the idea.
Then again, some books in the Nerd Canon aren't negotiable. I mean, a compleat comics fans knows Asimov's "Laws of Robotics" by heart.
My reading of the Nerd Canon started in elementary school library, where I instinctively began searching out anything that wasn't "normie." I'm pretty sure that's when I got the mythology bug. By junor high I was reading Edgar Allan Poe for sure -- my school library had a complete Poe, which I devoured -- all the Tarzan novels, lots of sword & sorcery (Conan, Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, etc.), "classic" SF writers like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, the Universal monter ouevre (Dracula, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, etc.) and others. By the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read the Foundation trilogy, the Dune trilogy, Lord of the Rings, best of Robert Heinlein, best of Ray Bradbury (or possibly all available, as I really loved Bradbury), Michael Moorcock's Elric (and some of his other Eternal Champion stuff), some A.E. Van Vogt, some Philip K. Dick, a smattering of Harlan Ellison, Phillip Jose Farmer, E.E. "Doc" Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, and others. I also read every Star Trek novel through the early '90s, but what started as a trickle in the late 1970s became a flood and I dropped them.
I eventually gave up on trying to be comprehensive on prose when cyberpunk came along. I read Neuromancer and didn't care for it, and discovered that I was completely out of step with SF fans. So I gave that up and stuck with comics.
If you're still reading at this point then I have some questions:
1) What was YOUR Nerd Canon? How does it differ or overlap with what I said above?
2) When I bought all those stories years ago, I bought them in paperback. That was in the '60s and early '70s. In the '80s, I sold my whole hoard to local bookstores for a couple of bucks -- less than a penny on the dollar. They simply weren't holding up. My Conan books, for example, were literally sticking to each other, and when you pried them apart, parts of the cover would be torn off. I don't know why that was, but it was. There was no point keeping them. So I got rid of them, to make room for stuff that would last.
And that brings us to the point of this thread. (At least for me.) I'm going to go ahead and buy some nice replacements for those old books. I've ordered some nice HC versions of the first four Tarzan books. I've got a gilt-edge Complete Sherlock Holmes collection, and will soon have similar for Conan.
So what else should I have for the library I will build and totter about in my dotage? What is my Endgame Nerd Canon?
Sound off, Legionnaires!
Replies
I only read the first three Foundation novels in high school -- because at that point, that's all there were!
And now that Richard's mentioned Ray Bradbury, let's add him to the conversation. Looking at his bibliography, I know for sure I've read:
There are others whose titles seem familiar, but I don't specifically remember reading them (although I probably did). I really loved Bradbury.
Also, it probably goes without saying that I read all the Bradbury adaptations in EC Comics!
Ah yes, Ray Bradbury the most poetic writer of genre fiction. I have probably read all of the books you listed with R is for Rocket being my peronal favorite. That particular book was so special to me that it survived garage sales, location moves and every other terrible fate that befalls our paperbacks, comic books and magazines.I finally bequeathed my well read copy to my youngest daughter when she expressed an interest in science fiction and fantasy as she started high school .
Raising her right!
Needless to say, we were required to read Fahrenheit 451 in ninth or tenth grade, but I think I'd already read it. It should remain required reading. I remember loving Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes, but being vaguely disappointed in The Illustrated Man. It's been 50 years, so that's all I can remember. I vaguely remember putting off "R" and "S" until the end of my SF sojourn, thinking they were for kids! But I could only read what was on sale -- school libraries didn't carry much SF in those days, and zero sword & sorcery. Bookstores generally had a limited selection, too, what was currently in print. I bought all the other Bradbury available until, finally, I got R and S which remained stubbornly available when other books I'd heard of weren't. I can't tell you a thing about Body Electric, because that was also towards the end, when it was getting harder for Bradbury to surprise me, and I was beginning to move on (to, as it turned out, Russian literature).
Speaking of bookstores, the SF sections in the '70s were always at least half-filled with fantasy series that I avoided like the plague. Even though I loved Lord of the Rings. But they always seemed derivative, and aimed more at girls than at me, with unicorns and winged horses on the cover. Also, the blurbs always nattered on about star-crossed love. Fairly or not, I thought all those dragon-riders and unicorn commanders were of the same genre as the Wycaro series on Pluribus, romance books with some sword-fights thrown in, or what is known as romantasy these days. It didn't help that when I picked one up it was always "No. 15 in a series" or something. I stuck with hard science fiction where I could, especially Bradbury, Asimov and Clarke.
Oh, and ERB and REH! I read all the Tarzan books one summer, and the first few Barsoom and Pellucidar books. Burroughs tended to be repetitive, and it was easy to lose interest. I had to force my way through the last half dozen or so Tarzan books. I had all the Robert E. Howard I could find, which was mostly Conan, with those magnificent covers. I didn't care much for the pastisches by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp, and other sword-and-sorcery series (Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, etc.) didn't grab me like Conan did. I read a few of each.
I loved Michael Moorcock's Elric, and grabbed all of those I could find. His other Eternal Champions were practically boring by comparison. I worked my way through Dorian Hawkmoon (six books) and Corum/Count Brass (seven), but wasn't as thrilled. Elric was the really inventive Champion, and the rest kinda blur together.
But all of this was a very long time ago, and I'm willing to be re-educated!
At some point I picked up the entire 24 book run of the Tarzan series for my Kindle and I committed to reading/re-reading the entire series. I agree the second half of the series becomes very formulaic with plots including some combination of a Tarzan look-a-like, Jane or another major character mistakenly believed dead, lost civilizations etc.The low point has to be Tarzan and the Leopard Men and Tarzan and the Lion Man - back to back duds. I've read up through Tarzans Quest #19 so I have 5 more books to go.
In many cases the books ERB produced outside of his four main series are the more enjoyable reads. The Moon trilogy, the Land That Time Forgot trilogy, The Lost Continent along with his western novels are worth reading if you are in an ERB mood.
Back when I was buying paperbacks, which were 50 cents apiece, I usually got them from spinner racks designed for their size. IIRC, these spinners were in grocery stores.
Okay, so somehow, I deleted my lengthy post from the other day, so I'll recreate some bits. John Scalzi has a column about the problematic nature of the SF canon, suggesting that (duh!) you read the people who interest you. Okay, he goes deeper than that, but it's an obvious caveat.
The posts have been focussing on some foundational people, of course, which include: Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C, Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, H.P. Lovecraft, Larry Niven.....Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1984 and Brave New World are foundational, obviously, to SF and literature, and pretty damn relevant now. And earlier in history, Shelley, Verne, Wells. I also recommend reading at least one Ace Double (I have a small collection of these). Margaret St. Clair and her pseudonyms often get overlooked. She championed stories about "ordinary people of the future, surrounded by gadgetry of super-science, but who, I feel sure, know no more about how the machinery works than a present-day motorist knows of the laws of thermodynamics." Her Sign of the Labrys crosses SF and fantasy elements. I wasn't overwhelmed by it, but it's one of the novels listed by the creators of D&D as an influence.
Avram Davidson is another overlooked author of the 1960s. I strongly recommend Masters of the Maze. It's short.
I still haven't read Peake's Gormenghast, but the copy is behind me right now on the shelf. I'm told by some people that the trilogy is also a case of diminishing returns.
Joe Haldeman, Frank Herbert (Dune, definitely. I found the sequels to be a game of diminishing returns) Octavia Butler, J.G Ballard.... We start getting into genre crossing literary novels, like Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which was, in fact, nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, but didn't win. It was recommended for a Pulitizer by the people selecting books, but the board turned it down.... So it goes. Right, I mentioned Vonnegut already.
I think every SF fan should either read the first two books of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or hear the original radio series on which it was based.
The Illuminatus! Trilogy-- more diminishing returns, but it has an excellent start, IMO. YMMV. OMFG, I'm writing in acronyms.
Some of the writers who later got me back into SF include, obviously, William Gibson (the original cyberpunk trilogy) and later, Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars trilogy). If you're really into steampunk, you'd want to read The Difference Engine (Gibson and Sterling). Yes, we already had Victorian SF, but this book, arguably mainstreamed steampunk as a genre, and led to the endless "-punk" spinoffs of cyberpunk. Margaret Atwood rejected the "SF" label for The Handmaid's Tale but it holds up and seems more plausible than it did at the time. Gilead, it's worth noting, has come and gone, if we follow the novel's implied timeline. It's also a more complicated process than we see in the TV series. We don't know how large Gilead actually is, because (until the end) we only have the perspective of one woman living under a government that propagates lies. It is clear that North America is more divided than the government of Gilead allows its subjects to believe.
And so many now.... I don't know will be canonical. I read who I like, which has included works by people I'll put in my next post.
And I've missed many writers.
My final advice will always also be, find a few lesser-known and/or indie writers. There's some very good stuff out there!
Okay my next-but-one post:
I was thinking of how John Wyndham's The Chrysalids came in and out of favour (as I experienced it. I recognize that the plural of anecdote is not data) over the course of my life. I read it in high school, and we saw it as a novel of the Cold War and the oppression of outsiders, with racial and religious prejudices coming to mind.
It wasn't really being read when I first started teaching. At some point in the mid-1990s, it experienced a revival, but it was queer kids who latched onto it as a kind of metaphor for their experiences and the attitudes they faced. They really identified with the telepaths, persecuted minorities with no visible difference from the general population.
By the end of my career, I didn't know anyone who was teaching or recommending the book.
I recognize that the plural of anecdote is not data
I like that!
Not mine, but thanks.
(there is some debate over who said it first)
More recently.
Ah.... More recent and contemporary writers who have written things I liked or that others really liked include David Brin, Lauren Beukes, Liu Cixin, Neil Gaiman (yeah, I know. I know), Kameron Hurley (read The Light Brigade) N.K. Jemisin, Kaoru Kurimoto, China Miéville, Nnedi Okorafor, Charles Stross, Vernor Vinge (RIP) Robert Charles Wilson.
Ruth Ozeki's Tale for the Time Being is one of the best cross-genre novels I've read.
I find Corey Doctorow's writing to be uneven, but, conceptually, his stuff is excellent, and in terms of success, he's one of the major genre writers of today.
Kim Fu's short fiction. I read one of her novels (not SF/F) and liked it, but her SF/F short fiction is excellent. Other writers of some solid short fiction include Derwin Mak and Sally McBride.
Neal Stephenson. Cryptonomicon is, arguably, one of the great nerd novels.
Dan Simmons.... can be problematic. I liked the Olympos / Illium duology, however.
Oh, and going back in time a bit, I think we have to include Walter M. Miller, Jr's A Canticle for Leibowitz in a list of Nerd Canon books.
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