Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

Hello Richard, and welcome to WWEnd!  Congrats on your upcoming retirement and your new found freedom to indulge in some great books. 

There are so many great awards and lists that you can pick from you might want to review them all and see which ones you like the look of.  Each has it's own philosophy and method for selection and several of them are quite specialized like the Baen Military SF list.  If you ask 10 people you'll likely get 10 different answers but I'll make a few suggestions for your consideration.

On the awards side of the house you can't really go wrong with the Hugo Award.  It's the biggie when it comes to awards and has been around the longest.  It's also the one most people are familiar with so you'll have some conversation material if you decide to try and read all the winners.  Of course, you shouldn't eschew the nominees either.  Many fine books in their ranks that are worth a read.

For the lists I would recommend your look seriously at the SF Masteroworks list.  It's an extremely popular list to follow and you'll find plenty of variety and it's a list that keeps on growing.  We just added another couple dozen this year and the publisher, Gollancz, is determined that nobody ever finishes the list so you'll always have more books to lust after every year.  If you like collecting at all these books will help you scratch that itch too.  They have wonderful cover art and can be addictive - once you get a handful on your shelf you'll want to keep getting more.

The other list I would suggest you investigate is The Classics of Science Fiction.  This list is the result of much number crunching across a whole range of awards to arrive at a "definitive" list that is pretty impressive.  There's a link on the list page that takes you to an explanation of how the list was created that's worth a read.  These guys got pretty serious about their methods.  There is a lot of crossover between this one and the SF Masterworks list but there are many books here that Gollancz did not have rights to publish.

You may also want to look at our own list of Top Nominated works.  This is derived from our data for the the 13 awards we cover.  Every book on the list has at least 4 nominations so you'll find some great stuff there.

Those are pretty safe suggestions for someone ready to dive into SF and cover the traditional SF cannon.  You'll get more opinions from others I'm sure.  My guess is that Rico will be along shortly to tell you that I'm wrong and that if you want to read the best books you need to look to the Guardian list for a real challenge.

Oh, before I forget, pay attention to the read and black numbers on the book covers throughout the site.  Red indicates number of award noms while the black indicates the number of "best" list inclusions.  If the number is high for both you might look a little closer.  Chances are it's a worthwhile read.

Hope that helps and happy reading!

You are most welcome!  I think people around these parts are truly interested in sharing info about great books and I see you've been getting lots of advice as I expected you would.  Do let us all know what strategy you adopt in your reading whether you go for the awards or lists or come up with another plan.