Top Ten Tuesday is a blog hop created by the book loving crew at The Broke and The Bookish. Every Tuesday is a different topic and everyone is invited to join in the fun by creating their own top ten list.
I consider myself well-read in science fiction and fantasy. Certainly I’m no stranger to the punk genres. So I’m ashamed to admit a few of the major classics, particularly in the early cyberpunk movement have slipped through the cracks. A few others on my list today are books I’ve avoided due to being a fan of the movie adaptations, something that can spoil reading the original story.
These are all books of significance within the sci-fi/fantasy canon, and someday I will make time to read them.
(all book blurbs are from Goodreads)
1. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner #1)
by Philip K. Dick,
A final, apocalyptic, world war has killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending the majority of mankind off-planet. Those who remain venerate all remaining examples of life, and owning an animal of your own is both a symbol of status and a necessity. For those who can’t afford an authentic animal, companies build incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep . . . even humans.
2. Snow Crash
by Neal Stephenson
In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous…you’ll recognize it immediately.
3. Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs #1) 
by Richard K. Morgan
It’s the twenty-fifth century, and advances in technology have redefined life itself. A person’s consciousness can now be stored in the brain and downloaded into a new body [or “sleeve”], making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen. Onetime U.N. Envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Resleeved into a body in Bay City [formerly San Francisco], Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats existence as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning.
4. Neuromancer (Sprawl #1)
by William Gibson
The Matrix is a world within the world, a global consensus- hallucination, the representation of every byte of data in cyberspace . . .
Case had been the sharpest data-thief in the business, until vengeful former employers crippled his nervous system. But now a new and very mysterious employer recruits him for a last-chance run. The target: an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence orbiting Earth in service of the sinister Tessier-Ashpool business clan. With a dead man riding shotgun and Molly, mirror-eyed street-samurai, to watch his back, Case embarks on an adventure that ups the ante on an entire genre of fiction.
5. Galápagos 
by Kurt Vonnegut
Galápagos takes the reader back one million years, to A.D. 1986. A simple vacation cruise suddenly becomes an evolutionary journey. Thanks to an apocalypse, a small group of survivors stranded on the Galápagos Islands are about to become the progenitors of a brave, new, and totally different human race. In this inimitable novel, America’s master satirist looks at our world and shows us all that is sadly, madly awry–and all that is worth saving.
6. Somewhere in Time
by Richard Matheson
Somewhere in Time is the powerful story of a love that transcends time and space, written by one of the Grand Masters of modern fantasy. Matheson’s classic novel tells the moving, romantic story of a modern man whose love for a woman he has never met draws him back in time to a luxury hotel in San Diego in 1896, where he finds his soul mate in the form of a celebrated actress of the previous century. Somewhere in Time won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the 1979 movie version, starring Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, remains a cult classic whose fans continue to hold yearly conventions to this day.
7. The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next #1)
by Jasper Fforde
Welcome to a surreal version of Great Britain, circa 1985, where time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem, militant Baconians heckle performances of Hamlet, and forging Byronic verse is a punishable offense. All this is business as usual for Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, until someone begins kidnapping characters from works of literature. When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Brontë’s novel, Thursday must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.
8. The Stars My Destination
by Alfred Bester, and Neil Gaiman (Introduction)
Gully Foyle, has managed to survive for 170 days in the airless purgatory of deep space after the wreck of his ship, and has escaped to Earth carrying a murderous grudge and a secret that could change the course of history.
In this pulse-quickening novel, Alfred Bester imagines a future in which people “jaunte” a thousand miles with a single thought, where the rich barricade themselves in labyrinths and protect themselves with radioactive hit men – and where an inarticulate outcast is the most valuable and dangerous man alive. The novel which in large part inspired both the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s and the science fiction New Wave of the 1960s, THE STARS MY DESTINATION has an unrivaled claim as one of the most influential sci-fi books of all time.
9. Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel #1) 
by Connie Willis
In the year 2054, students research the past by living in it. So when Kivrin Engle, a history student at Oxford, enters Brasenose College’s time machine for transport back to 1320s England, no one anticipates any problems. But her two-week project takes a frightening turn. A mutant virus has been spreading through Oxford, and Kivrin arrives in the past delirious with fever. She is found and taken to a manor house, and when she recovers, she can no longer locate the time machine rendezvous point. Will Kivrin ever find her way back to the future? Or has she become a permanent exile in a deadly time?
10. Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos #1)
by Dan Simmons
On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all. On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives. Each carries a desperate hope—and a terrible secret. And one may hold the fate of humanity in his hands.
Have you missed any Sci-Fi classics. I’d love to hear about your favorites, and if you’ve read and would like to share any thoughts on the ones from my list.
It might be a while Corina, I’m deeply committed to finishing the Read Harder Challenge and that has me limited to one Sci-Fi book. Which of course I’ve already read it. : ( However, I will get to these someday. Thanks for stopping by.
This isn’t my genre but I have read Neuromancer. It’s excellent. I read it on the recommendation of a freind some years ago and I truly enjoyed it. That and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.
I hope you get to read some of these titles on your list soon!