Ringworld - Larry Niven Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke Neuromancer - William Gibson Earth Abides - George R Stewart Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein I, Robot - Isaac Asimov Roadside Picnic - the Strugatsky Brothers Solaris - Stanislaw Lem Blood Music - Greg Bear Clockwork Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi In my opinion, people could go their entire lifetimes without reading any Frank Herbert, 99% of Asimov, 99% of Heinlein, 95% of Clarke, any Ian Banks, any Neal Stephenson or any Philip K Dick. These are the books that make people who don't like sci fi hate sci fi.
These are also the most famous names in science fiction, so I think what you're saying isn't fair. Tautology -- people who don't really like scifi also don't like the most famous scifi authors. Unsurprising, but not what you should use to guide a list of recommendations to someone who's going in blind.In my opinion, people could go their entire lifetimes without reading any Frank Herbert, 99% of Asimov, 99% of Heinlein, 95% of Clarke, any Ian Banks, any Neal Stephenson or any Philip K Dick. These are the books that make people who don't like sci fi hate sci fi.
I've got a Heinlein, a Clarke and an Asimov in my list. Dune? Dune is the least shit book of a shit series. Stephenson? Yeah, Snow Crash is Neuromancer with puns. Stick to William Gibson. Sorry about your cat, but "essential" sci fi doesn't have to include stuff that only nerds like.
I think non-nerds would enjoy Dune more than Ringworld, for instance. Yeah, it's a shit series, and by far not the best written sci-fi book ever, but it is a purely enjoyable and epic story. I think a large part of it's value is that the sci-fi components tend to act more as an accompaniment to the plot rather than as major devices themselves.
I finished Dune a while back, but I just started reading Dune Messiah. I'm about 2 or 3 chapters in... should I stop now?
I loved Cryptonomicon. It's really fun as an affectionate parody of the tinfoil hatty corners of computer culture, if you've spent a lot of time around them. I can't imagine enjoying it without being part of the community it was parodying, and I've never gotten more than a hundred pages into anything else he wrote, but Cryptonomicon is still the only scifi novel I know not written by Charles Stross that involves computing without being cringeworthy. Not enough to make it "essential", but I'm glad it exists.
I just read the wikipedia page. I'd give it a shot on your recommendation, but it sounds like one of those cyberpunk things that really suffer from William Gibson's example, because William Gibson is awesome enough that he can get away with cowboys jacking in to their decks, and not everyone is William Gibson.
Before you devote 30 seconds to Daemon, know that it is the most cringe-worthy treatment of technology or plotting in the history of the English language. It is truly "make a gui in visual basic to track the killers" grade dreck. If Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown set out to co-author a novelization of Threat Level Midnight, the results would be eerily similar to Daemon. But only if both Stephanie Meyer and Dan Brown were repressed tech support nerds.“This had all the earmarks of an SQL-injection attack, and he had a favorite one. In the logon and password boxes he entered: ‘or 1=1--”
I think Neal Stephenson had just two really good sci-fi books in him, "Snow Crash", and "The Diamond Age". After that he seemed to produce mostly straight fiction. He's a good writer, but not so good at winding up to a satisfying ending.
Thanks for nominating another Lem book! Solaris is a hell of a thing. I've only ever read the older English edition, which was translated from Polish to French, and then to English. Apparently there's a new ebook edition that's translated directly from Polish to English. I haven't read it yet, but I'm dead keen to see what they've done with it. A second-hand translation has to be better than a third-hand translation.