The Guardian SF book meme

Via SF Signal: Guardian's Science Fiction & Fantasy Novels Everyone Must Read: The Meme.

I think I have to go back to the original list to understand the selection of works, because it seems a bit odd to me. Definitely different from most compilations of the "most important sf works" and similar. Some of them I also don't understand exactly why they ended up in the SF/F subset, but definitions of genre boundaries is something you can argue about endlessly. Nevertheless, I like these lists, and I like this one because I have actually read not so few of them: 47 out of 149, that's nearly a third!

So, the ones I have read are in bold, and the ones on my reading list (sort of) are marked with an *asterisk.

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)


2. Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)


3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)


4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)


5. *Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)


6. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)


7. J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)


8. J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)


9. J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)


10. *Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)


11. Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)


12. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)


13. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)


14. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)


15. *Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)


16. William Beckford: Vathek (1786)


17. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)


18. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)


19. Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)


20. Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)


21. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)


22. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)


23. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)


24. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)


25. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)


26. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)


27. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)


28. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)


29. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)


30. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)


31. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)


32. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)


33. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)


34. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)


35. Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)


36. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)


37. Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)


38. GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)


39. *Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)


40. Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)


41. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)


42. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)


43. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)


44. Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)


45. Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)


46. Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)


47. Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)


48. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)


49. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)


50. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)


51. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)


52. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)


53. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)


54. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)


55. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)


56. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)


57. M John Harrison: Light (2002)


58. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)


59. Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)


60. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)


61. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)


62. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)


63. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)


64. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)


65. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)


66. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)


67. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)


68. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)


69. PD James: The Children of Men (1992)


70. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)


71. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)


72. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)


73. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)


74. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)


75. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)


76. CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) (Book 1 at least)


77. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)


78. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)


79. Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)


80. Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)


81. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)


82. MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)


83. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)


84. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)


85. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)


86. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)


87. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)


88. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)


89. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)


90. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)


91. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)


92. *China Miéville: The Scar (2002)


93. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)


94. Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)


95. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)


96. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)


97. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)


98. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)


99. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)


100. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)


101. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)


102. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)


103. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)


104. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)


105. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)


106. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)


107. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)


108. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)


109. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)


110. Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)


111. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)


112. Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) (I have only read the first)


113. *Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)


114. Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)


115. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)


116. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)


117. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)


118. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)


119. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)


120. *Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)


121. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)


122. Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)


123. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)


124. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)


125. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)


126. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)


127. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)


128. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)


129. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)


130. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)


131. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)


132. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)


133. JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)


134. JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)


135. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)


136. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)


137. Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)


138. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)


139. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)


140. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)


141. HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)


142. HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)


143. TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)


144. Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)


145. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)


146. Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)


147. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)


148. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)


149. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

“Imagination is at the heart of both artistic and scientific endeavours”

The quote comes from Robert Sawyer, who is going to be writer-in-residence at the Canadian Light Source.

Jeff Cutler, Director of Industrial Science at the Canadian Light Source explains:

"A common thread in Rob’s work – the role that science plays in our humanity and how we understand the universe – is echoed in our focus on discovery, innovation and progress. The residency is an excellent opportunity to have a world-leading author share in the life of a world-leading science facility."

Again, the whole media relase is here.

Reality is interesting

One thing that happened to me when I started reading science fiction at an age of 13 or so, was that I found that the world and society around me got more interesting. At least partly it actually was a result of reading SF. When you take two steps back from the ordinary and imagine other possible worlds, then you find that the world around you is also a world, with a lot of special and curious characteristics. There are all of the wonderful things that people build and do -- and the frightening things. And you live in the middle of it, and have first hand knowledge that would not be obvious to a time traveller from another era, or a visitor from another planet. You can shift your perspective, and see things with new eyes, and suddenly much of what you took for granted and boring is extremely relevant and maybe even exciting.

With this kind of experience, I loved the following, from Coraline by Neil Gaiman. This is when Coraline returns from her adventure. Remember that she goes exploring because she likes exploring, but also because her everyday life does not seem interesting at all.

Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world.
[...]
Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.

Today's exercise: find something interesting! (I know I will.)

Physics silliness

It's well known that physicists like making up extremely contrived acronyms to name their equipment or theories or so. There are also examples like the famous paper by Alpher and Gamow, where Bethe was added as the second author to make the author list similar to the first letters of the greek alphabet (stories like this are told all the time to undergrads). And I will just mention the penguin plot (some of you might know what I'm talking about).

The attitude to these things varies in the community. A quote from Dark Cosmos, by Dan Hooper, mentioned in a previous post (in case you don't remember: MACHO stands for massive compact halo object):

Neutrinos are an example of a dark matter candidate we call a weakly interacting massive particle, or a WIMP. Just like MACHOs, WIMPs are not a single type, but a class of objects. (And just like the name MACHO, the name WIMP is a prime example of the all-too-common physicist's habit of using incredibly childish language to describe their ideas.)

Compare this to how a rather famous physicist describes it, when he mentions the same words as a result of "physicists wonderful sense of whimsy".

When is it funny, when is it "incredibly childish"? Think of it what you want, this is still a part of physics culture that you have to live with. I actually rather like it, usually (although some of the acronyms are a little bit too much).

Reading popular science

I'm reading Dark Cosmos: In Search of Our Universe's Missing Mass and Energy by Dan Hooper. In the preface the author writes about reading popular science:

/.../I still read popular physics books. I don't read them to learn new things about physics anymore, however. I read them for inspiration. It is easy to forget how exciting and incredible modern science truly is. Scientific articles found in academic journals very rarely capture the sense of wonder and awe that originally motivated me to become a physicist.

This made me think. Why do I read popular science books? Of course, if it's not about physics I'm still reading them to learn new things. I'm curious about the world, as much as ever, and I don't want to limit myself to only knowing one field.

If I read popular physics books, it's usually to remind myself of things that I would not otherwise often think about, or to see things I once learned from a different angle. Sometimes it's not mostly for the physics itself, but for the context -- I read The Physics of Star Trek not to learn about physics, but actually to learn about how physics is treated in Star Trek. I read Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics for the anecdotes about how physics is treated by Hollywood.

This particular book, Dark Cosmos is of course exactly about the field I work in, and that I'm reading the academic journal articles from. Still, I didn't buy it to hold on to some sense of wonder, but specifically for inspiration of how to explain the topic. I already know the data, and I know most of the anecdotes, but I want to get better at explaining it and telling others about it. By reading and listening to how my colleagues do it, I hope to catch some tricks of the trade. (The sense of wonder is also a good thing, of course!)

The quote above also made me think about what it was that motivated me to become a physicist. What was it, really? Sometimes it feels mostly like a series of coincidences, but I think I definitely was heading in this general direction from a relatively early age. Still, it's fun to think about what actually inspired me in science when I was still in school. I hope to return to this in later blog posts!

The happy postdoc

You are a doctor of philosopy. You have defended your thesis, you have got your degree. Now what do you do?

If you would like to cling to the academic world at least a little bit longer, perhaps with the goal of eventually becoming a professor or something like that, you are normally expected to go to another university or institute for a period (or two, or more) as a postdoc.

On our travel expense forms I'm a PDF. Not a portable document format, but a postdoctoral fellow. Usually I forget that this is the official title. In my experience people in general don't know what a postdoc is. It's something at the university. "So do you teach or something?" they ask. Or: "what classes are you taking then?" Nowadays, if I'm among normal people or even undergraduate students, I just say that I'm an apprentice researcher. That makes sense to most.

The postdoctoral years often seem to have a romantic shimmer around them in retrospect. Professors talk about it as the happiest time in their careers. It really is good in many ways. You are free from the pressures of thesis writing, you have few if any teaching responsibilities, and you can spend almost all of your time doing research. You also get to go to new places, learn new things, maybe experience a different culture. You try your wings and your initiative.

On the other hand it's a very insecure position. The job is temporary, and you will have to move one or more times within the next few years but you probably don't know where you will end up. You know that in front of you is The Bottleneck, the competition for faculty positions, and you need to produce results and publish now to prove that you are good enough to come into consideration. If you choose to go to industry instead, you will have to make new contacts and learn to navigate a new world.

I talked to two other postdocs the other day, telling them how I'm planning to go back to Sweden to resume my life: family, friends and all of that. They both shook their heads, and said that this connection to a certain place and social circle is something they haven't had for a long time. That's one of the drawbacks of this kind of career. Janna Levin depicted the problems of moving around as a postdoc in her book How the Universe Got Its Spots, a book I enjoyed very much for exactly those personal (and in extension sociological) aspects.

For me personally I have to say that this is really a happy time. I enjoy my job, I have no real financial problems at the moment, and having my family with me cures most of the attacks of homesickness. Still, I really have no idea what the future will bring. I'm not worrying, but sometimes I think about the future. I'm hopeful, but I have questions.

I want to move back to Uppsala and stay at least relatively close to there. But what kind of job will I find? Will I be able to live a mostly unstressful life with relatively mild and few depressions? Will I have at least enough money not to worry about it? (I've been through some of that, and with kids it's worse.)

Yes, I am a physicist. Now, what do I do with my life?

Cyclotron kids

I'm always impressed by people who are doing things. I like it. I really loved this report about the "cyclotron kids", with the goal of being the first teenagers to produce and detect antimatter. It's fascinating what people can do, especially with the right connections and the right support. I hope they will succeed! Experimental physics is sometimes very exhausting, when you are in the middle of setting things up and nothing works. Just trying is worth a lot anyway, but it would be fun if they can actually make some antiparticles.

Another view of science and science fiction

Those of you who liked my little series of interviews about science and science fiction might be interested in the following little note from the latest Ansible:

As Science Sees Us. In a profile of the life-extension researcher Mark Roth, Tom Junod notes that Roth has 'got a lot of ideas, for a scientist, and some of them come from unusual sources, like tabloidy news reports and science fiction.' He continues: 'It's a weird thing about scientists -- you would think that they would love science fiction. But they don't. To admit that you get your ideas from science fiction, if you're a scientist, that's like, career-threatening, man.' (Esquire, December) [MMW]