Laura Thurston's Top Ten Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels

1. Morality Meat short story by James Tiptree Jr.
   I'll list it by her pen name, but there are people who insist on referring to the author's real name. Back in the 1800s George Eliot was revealed to be a woman and the publishers of the age refused to respect the pseudonym afterwards. Morality Meat is a look at a future that is very dark. It is a disturbing story that has stayed with me for years. In this future, abortion is illegal, boyfriends deliberately sabotage birth control devices, the devices themselves are primitive even by the standards of today, babies are brought in for adoption in a steady stream and few are placed with families. We follow a poor minority woman who wants to keep her daughter, loves her very much, and can't afford to take care of her. the story is not polemic about the abortion debate or population control, it's a story about a desperate woman.

2. Harry Turtledove's alternate history collection of short stories.
   I can't remember what the name of the collection is. All of his alternate histories are good reads, but the stories stand out even from the novels. He has a good eye for detail, the people live, and he has several eras down cold. You don't have to be a history major to understand and enjoy his stories. Some collections, Alternate Generals, Alternate Dictators, and a few others get bogged down in minutiae that is not introduced at the beginning of the stories and I got lost. Without that history degree.... The Harry Turtledove short story that stood out for me is the last one, a light-hearted story with heavier undertones about why curing the common cold is impossible.

3. Whatdunnits/More Whatdunnits edited by Michael Resnick.
   You've seen Michael Resnick on the shelves with novels about colonizing primitive worlds, that read like the colonization of Africa from the Africans point of view. These are also good books, but Michael Resnick has hit on a new formula in these two collections of short stories by various authors. Sci fi/mysteries. He has a number of scenarios written out and the introductions to each story tells you what the authors had to work with. Each author had a few to choose from and some even chose the same scenario with vastly different results. This collection is a quick read, but it's one you'd want to keep coming back to. Michael Resnick keeps threatening a third collection and I hope to see it soon.

4. Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman
   This is her first novel and it deals with a variety of issues, including oppression, sexuality, intelligence, childhood traumas. Humans from the planet Gammadis are the aliens here, they've developed a third gender--people with no gender at all. No male, no female, just nothing. These are also the people at the lowest rung of the social scale and make up the servant class with no hope of ever climbing out of it. We get to follow the life of one such genderless person through childhood full of expectations and goals to an adolescence of abuse and dehumanizing treatment to an adulthood of despair and possibly hope for the future. This novel does make use of the often-used "Big Secret Revealed" convention. Badly used, the revelation is the climax and the ending and leaves me wondering "Well? What next? Is that all?" This novel has the revelation near the end, but not too near. We see some of what is going to come now that the cat is out of the bag. I still want to know what is to come after in more detail, but the ending satisfied me by giving me a taste of life going on now that everybody knows.

5. Jack L. Chalker's Well World series
   Five books make up the original Well World series and three books make up the Return to the Well World series. It's the original series I'm more interested in. The other three seemed like an afterthought. I love alien stories. These novels gave me Aliens! and lots of them. The Well World is a planet that has been subdivided into hexes. Each hex is a selfcontained unit with an environment all its own. Different species live there at a specified technilogical level. You can travel through the hexes and have little difficulty with survival in any hex in the south (provided you're carbon based). Non carbon based life forms live in the hexes in the northern hemisphere and have a wide variety of species as well. We meet several of both general kinds of alien. Humans are also included in the fauna of the Well World. These books are fun to read and are full of action, adventure, and intrigue.

6. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
   I enjoyed the Darkover novels a great deal. Some were good and some were not so good. Mists of Avalon is far and away her best work describing the Arthurian legends. The battle between Christianity and the Celtic religion is a thread that runs through the entire novel. Marion Zimmer Bradley also wrote a novel about the Trojan War (The Firebrand) that is almost as good as Mists.

7. Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels
   A collection of novels about the same world that don't have to read in a specific sequence although she suggests that you read them in order of publication. My favorites is the trilogy kicked off by Dragonflight. I'm not a big fan of dragons and elves and action sequences that have rolling dice noises in the background. I'm burnt out on God vs God battles (which keeps Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar novels off this list). Too much fantasy starts out with interesting characters and degenerates into GvG. The formula goes like this: ordinary people accomplish small goal which informs them that a huge threat is to engult their world. They are the only ones who can stop it. They grow in power to equal the power of the driving force behind it, vanquish it, and retire. The last book is the younger generation striving to accomplish their own goals living in the shadow of the legendary original characters. The Pern novels have dragons who aren't cliches and live harmoniously with humans. The big threat is a natural phenomenon that the characters eventually eradicate. Nobody rises to the level of Legendary, although people are famous. The bad guys aren't evil, they just don't understand the scope of the threat and accuse the good guys of being power hungry. We see almost every corner of Pern and a cross section of the Pernese people, focusing mainly on the ones who have the ability and the opportunity to do something about Thread. Now that All the Weyrs of Pern put closure on the Thread-fighting, Anne McCaffrey is coming out with books that take place earlier in the history of Pern. I'm eagerly waiting for the novel that will show me what becomes of the dragonriders now that Thread is no longer a problem.

8. Larry Niven's bar stories.
   These are anthologized in various collections and I think most of them are in the anthology Limits. They take place in a bar and feature aliens who are truly alien. The Chirpsithra live to be billions of years old, they don't breathe oxygen, and they hang out in bars. They're not too snobbish to talk to humans, but everything they tell the narrator implies two things about their attitude toward humans: 1) Humans are an inferior but amusing upstart race. 2) There is no way that the Chirpsithra would want to take over human-settled worlds even though they could very easily do so. Each story gives a thought-provoking look at a metaphysical concept. There are no answers, but the stories stimulate thought.

9. Dune by Frank Herbert
   This first novel of the series is the best. I read the others and was disappointed by them. This novel is strongly textured and the characters live. It's one of the few sci fi novels with a heavy Islamic flavor--survival in a desert environment, Paul Atreides called Mahdi by the Fremen (which is the Arabic word for "Messiah"), the sandworms referred to as Shaitain (another Arabic word, meaning "Satan"). One of the things I liked about this story that set it apart from the sweeping epics that tend to get overblown and turn into God vs God was an exchange bewtween Paul Atreides and his arms teacher. Paul didn't want to practice because he didn't feel like it. His instructor teld him that an opponent wouldn't wait until he was in the mood to attack him so he'd better be ready any time. It's a little thing that made Paul Atreides more human and less of a Personage.

10. Chicks in Chainmail
    I have to put this one in there. It's a short story collection of fantasy stories with female characters, but these stories are unique in that the stories are mostly humorous. One of my favorites in a short-short in the second book of the anthology series, Yes, We Said Chicks, about a knight having trouble with his armor. Sometimes fantasy can be way too serious and an anthology like this one is a great mood-lightener.