Crap, no one mentioned Stanislaw Lem. I love me some Cyberiad.
i adore fritz leiber and have found ebay to be the best way to find his stuff.
you can’t really go wrong with much of his stuff, though Our Lady of Darkness may be too referential unless you’re familiar with the source works.
A good list, especially Andre Norton for YA, though I don’t think her stuff holds up so well otherwise – but I read everything she wrote when I was a kid. Not so sure about Bova. PJF is unfortunately a bit weak I think if you were to reread it today, but some of his books are undoubtedly still quite good.
Niven and Pournelle – again a mixed bag I think. Some of their older SF (whether done together or singly) will seem very dated. Other books will still be good.
But Leiber, Vance, definitely – their complete works remain superb.
Moorcock has written so much stuff, much is very good, but others not so much, and since he changes style radically from his adventure fantasy to his angsty semi-fantasy stuff, it can be a bit of a shock to go from say Elric to Jerry Cornelius. It does generally hold up, though.
How about adding:
Alfred Bester – some of his better books still hold up. A few others aren’t so hot, but then they are the ones that were never that good anyway.
Ursula K Leguin – discussed briefly in November books thread. But lots of good works, continuing to the present.
Cordwainer Smith – everything he’s done is pretty cool.
Roger Zelazny – I love everything he’s written, and even though there are a couple of throwaway works that may not be absolutely top-notch (his collaborations are admittedly weak), his style is such that I love it all anyway. But Lord of Light, Creatures of Light and Darkness, the first Amber series, and many others, all great. It felt like a terrible loss when he died so young.
Many others are no doubt equally worth noting, but these happen to come to mind offhand.
Oh, if you really want retro, consider James Branch Cabell (early 20th century). Very witty and clever work. Also, Robert Chambers and Lord Dunsany, likewise from the early 20th.
Bothering to read some other entries in the thread…
Yeah, R. A. Lafferty is very good too. Quirky, but very good.
To enjoy Doc Smith, you just have to throw your normal sensibilities out the window. Some of it is great stuff, but much is so dated you just have to want to love it. Galactic Patrol was the first science fiction novel I actually purchased myself, though, so there’s a special place in my heart for the ravening vortices of pure force of a q-type helix piercing the impenetrable wall shields of a pirate cruiser!
I never liked Sheckley myself. Nor Lem. Just found it unreadable. But so many people like them.
Silverberg has some good stuff, but much of his older work is dated (with a few great exceptions), and his last few books left me flat. The earlier books in the Valentine series are certainly very good.
Much as I’d like to, I can’t support most Asimov and Heinlein SF. I mean, if you loved it on first reading, you still will, but it’s mostly not all that strong. Asimov has a great deal of very good writing, but it’s mostly not SF. Heinlein has some great books, especially his YA stuff, but I think much of his adult work doesn’t really hold up. A couple of his later books I like better than most people, though, but I think it’s because I read so much of his stuff when I was a kid.
If you read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, follow immediately with Haldeman’s response: Forever War.
Gene Wolfe’s Torturer series.
For Moorcock, I think the early Von Bek stuff is his best (The War Hound and the World’s Pain, The Brothel in Rosenstrasse, The City in the Autumn Stars) - Elric was fun, but I remember Corum being very tedious.
After Clarke died I re-read Childhood’s End and two short-story collections (Expedition to Earth and Tales from the White Hart), all of which were as good as I remembered them to be.
Gene Wolfe for sure is very good, but I don’t think of his stuff as “classic” as it was mostly written in the last 20 years, and he’s still going strong today.
Tales from the White Hart is actually my favorite Clarke fiction, silly and light-hearted as it may be.
JACK VANCE IS A SUPER GENIUS AND YOU MUST READ ALL HIS BOOKS
However, don’t start with Big Planet, which is not up to par, or with the Chasch/Wankh/Dirdir/Pnume books, which are an attempt at pulp spaceman adventure, and avoid the relatively recent Ports of Call and Lurulu or whatever the sequel was, which are products of Vance’s dotage.
[edit]Actually, I guess I’d better get specific: for sci-fi, try Emphyrio or To Live Forever; for picaresque fantasy, try The Eyes of Overworld; for high fantasy, try Lyonesse.
Philip Jose Farmer - He is, as others have said, a bit hit and miss. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is tons of fun and introduces one of my favorite SF protagonists (Sir Richard Francis Burton… IN SPAAAAAAACE!) The next book in the series, The Fabulous Riverboat, is complete and utter trash (I gave up on the series after reading it, so maybe it gets better.)
Larry Niven - My impression of Niven is that he’s a guy with big ideas, a knack for punchy dialog and no time for the little stuff like, say, characters with depth ( although Ringworld is still worth a read)
Good call.
I vote for reading Gene Wolfe’s Torturer Series right after/before Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth omnibus.
Actually, all his books are great. But yeah, those you mentioned may not be quite as good as some others. Of course everyone likes the Dying Earth series and Lyonesse is very good – but I like the Demon Prince series a lot, too.
Vance, as is commonly said, is one of the best stylists in SF. Characteristically wonderful descriptions of colors throughout his work, and he also has a tendency to write about characters with what I think of as a sort of Celtic dissociation of their sensual and intellectual nature. Not sure why I think of it as Celtic, but imagine some beautiful Irish girl who has no idea she is beautiful standing alone on a pier gazing into the sea as various colors play across the sky as the sun sets… that’s a Jack Vance kind of scene.
+1
EE Doc Smith is amazing in that he wrote these in the 30’s and 40’s.
Anything by Zelazny is also very good, although it’s more fantasy than sci-fi. I’ve worked the past 10 years in replacing all my paperbacks with hard-backs. Only got a few more to go!
Vance’s stuff will also be much easier reading for the unprepared. The Book(s) of the New Sun are some of the best sci-fi ever written, but they are very, very dense.
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson.
I’ll admit that I only read it because I liked the movie, but I absolutely loved the book, one of my favorite books of all time.
Philip K. Dick really holds up.
Nearly half the original list is still going strong. Niven just released a prequel to Ringworld. So, we just disagree on what classic means. I think having books written about your books is just one measure tipping the scales in his favor.
Good call on Le Guin and Farmer. Even though it was weaker, Day World is still fun (not as fun To Your Scattered Bodies Go of course), because it was well executed. Farmer’s other stuff, not so much.
I liked Jack L. Chalker’s 1977 Well World books (I think the first two are the best). My favorite pre-70’s classic science fiction writer would probably be Philip K. Dick. Dune and A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) are pretty great too.
Edit: Whoops, that was definitely not pre-70’s fantasy.
Since most of the classic stuff has been mentioned, I’ll throw in one that was missed: Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement. One of the best hard sci-fi novels of all time IMO.
My personal favorite of the classic authors is Heinlein. I highly reccommend giving The Moon is a Harsh Mistress a try. Also, although this book presages some of his later weirdness, I truly love Glory Road. Starship Troopers is another iconic classic although its been so influential I think its lost a bit of luster.
For Asimov, I highly recommend trying a book of his short stories.
Agreed, also the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov rocks!