Here are the Guardian’s Top 20 geek novels. I am not of the geeky persuasion, but I have read the boldfaced ones.
1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer — William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune — Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot — Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation — Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic — Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs — Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash — Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas — Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle — Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods — Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age — Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen – John Wyndham 21% (19)
Not many of them, really. How about you?
I must not be as geeky as I thought; there are two books on that list I haven’t even heard of. I’ve read ten of the twenty.
I’ve read 8 of the 20…now I need to go read the rest…great another booklist for me to fill up! 🙂
I’ve read thirteen of them.
I’ve only read 7 out of the twenty. I tend to keep reading stuff by the same authors after I “discover” a new one. I do think that The Diamond Age and the Cryptonomicon should have their order flipped. The Illuminatus! Trilogy is something else… but I’m not sure what yet.
6 of the 20, with number 20 being one of my alltime favourite books – a discussion on the sociological implications of increasing the human life span to centuries rather than decades. ‘I Robot’ and ‘Foundation’ hooked me into starting to study artificial intelligence. One of the lecturers at work, who specialised in human vision (and who used to do little dances in front of a couple of hundred undergraduate students to illustrate points in her lectures) told me that Asimov’s robot books were what set her on her career path – she wanted to build a truly intelligent robot and she figured that she could learn everything she needs to know about how the mind worked by studying vision (we disagreed on that – I reckon we will find out how to develop true AI by studying the cognition software of the brain – but of course I may be slightly biased…) She was a little crazed of course, being a psychophysicist and all- when she was explaining to us how to teach the theory of signal detection to the students, her explanations became so mathematically esoteric we used to end up standing there with eyes totally glazed over, immobilised by our total ignorance of anything remotely resembling the level of maths that she found so easy to understand.
I’ve only read Dune and Hitchhiker’s Guide…so I guess that makes me a mini geek?
All except 10, 13, 14, and 17. Dang, I must be super geeky! 😀