I have been asked by a friend to name 10 books – no more, no less – I will take with me should I go to live in outer space and not getting back to the Earth any time soon (and no kindle either). I hope to have that opportunity, but certainly enough it would be a very difficult choice. Yet, I found the exercise useful, because by choosing my beloved stories, I also make a precise statement about the kind of sci-fi I love the most (and obviously my unspoken references when I express some kind of judgement on other authors). After a lot of thinking, I would say these are the ten texts I won’t leave behind (not necessarily in this order of preference):
Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land; Alfred Bester, The Stars, my Destination; Dan Simmons, Hyperion; Arthur Clarke, Childhood’s End; Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; William Gibson, Neuromancer; Stephen Baxter, Xeelee; Peter Hamilton, The Reality Dysfunction; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World; Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles.
And if I were left with just one choice…well, that would be an easy one: Heinlein’s for sure. Yes, I have read almost everything, and he is one of my preferred authors. But this book is different: it was my first book of sci-fi ever, when I was still a child. The start of an everlasting love.
Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
