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I don’t know how many short stories I’ve read in my life. It’s well over the number of books, so, using 8-years-old as a starting point, figure 2-5 books a month for 60 years, time off for good behavior, maybe … 2-4 thousand. But I read a lot more stories than books, as have you, because stories are how we started. We had Dick and Jane, Dr. Seuss, fairy tales, and on and on from there. Especially because my Dad built a room over the garage which became my bedroom. It was also the place that Dad kept his bootleg muscadine wine and his Playboys. I never had any trouble going to bed. Because of the stories of course. Playboy published a lot of excellent stories and I read them. No, really.

Out of all those stories over all these decades, some of them remain with me. Either a scene or a theme or something that makes me remember them these years later, as follows:

10. The Lonesome Place- August Derleth, 1962. Derleth was a prodigious writer and editor, starting Arkham House Publishing and coining the term “Cthulhu mythos” to categorize the work of his friend, H P Lovecraft. Two boys imagine a monster living in an abandoned silo near their home, scaring each other delightfully. After they grow up, a young boy is mauled near the silo and the two are convinced their imagination created the monster.

9. The Great Nebraska Sea- Allan Danzig, 1963. I can’t find a lot on Danzig. He appears to be an infrequent contributor to Galaxy and wrote a lot more reviews than stories. I believe I read this in Galaxy but not in 1963 because I was too young, so possibly in a later anthology. A series of faults in the Midwest drops the west coast of the US into the ocean. Reading more like a history article, I remember the closing scene of sailors strolling the seaports of Wyoming and Missouri.

8. Passengers, Robert Silverberg, 1970. Silverberg is, of course, writer and editor extraordinaire, even wrote soft porn at one time. This is a brutal story of an alien presence that randomly seizes the minds of people and makes them do unspeakable things. The ending is chilling. 

7. Inconstant Moon, Larry Niven, 1971. Niven wrote Ringworld and, with Jerry Pournelle, has turned out a goodly collection of scifi novels, like The Mote in God’s Eye. People are amazed by how bright the full moon goes one night, until somebody realizes the sun has gone nova and we’ve only got until the earth turns to survive.

6. The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke, 1953. The grandmaster.  An eastern religious sect believes that if they transcribe the 9 billion names for God, then the universe will end. They purchase a computer to assist them in this, and the two installers scoff at the whole concept. Until …

5. Examination Day, Henry Slezar, 1958. I definitely read this in Playboy. Slezar was a prolific story writer and copywriter who used dozens of pseudonyms. He supposedly coined the term, “coffee break.” In some bleak dystopian future, a kid is getting ready to take mandatory state examinations and is urged by his mother not to study so hard. You’ll soon see why.

4. The Crooked Man, Charles Beaumont, 1955. Beaumont
dropped out of school in tenth grade and joined the Army during the closing days of WW2. He wrote short stories and television episodes and full-length movies and had a lot of influence on other writers like Ray Bradbury and William Nolan. In the future, heterosexuality has been outlawed and those attracted to the opposite sex have to meet furtively or risk internment in a concentration camp, where they will make a new man out of you. Yes, indeed.

3. All Summer in a Day, Ray Bradbury, 1954. I have dozens and dozens of favorite Bradbury stories because he was my favorite author growing up, but this one stands out. It constantly rains on Venus but, once every 7 years, the sun appears for two hours, and a class of elementary students are preparing to go outside and see this. The cruelty of children.

2. A Pail of Air, Fritz Leiber, 1951. I read this in a Science Fiction Book Club anthology. Yeah, I was a member. Sue me. The world has frozen and the only way to breathe is fetch a pail of air and dissolve it slowly over a fire. 

1. It’s a Good Life, Jerome Bixby, 1953. Known more for his script writing, like four episodes of Star Trek, this is Bixby’s best remembered short story, one that was turned into a Twilight Zone episode starring Billy Mumy, and even into a Treehouse of Horror episode. When Little Anthony was born, the doctor screamed and tried to kill him, but Anthony whisked the town away somewhere, don’t know where, and all the townspeople are now his playmates. Even if they don’t want to be.

There is another one but, for the life of me, I cannot remember its title. Set in a dystopia, people are going back and forth to work when an old man starts reminiscing about the better days in the past, causing the workers to stop and listen. So a SWAT unit is sent out to find and arrest him because nostalgia is against the law.

UPDATE: The story is called To the Chicago Abyss, in Ray Bradbury’s The Machineries of Joy. Kudos to @JohnMustReadMore on Youtube for spotting it.

Call them really long short stories or too-short novels, there’s some good reading in them even as they defy an exact category. Novellete? Yeah, yeah, there’s agreed-upon definitions but who gets to decide that? So I will: if you can finish it before the evening’s out, then it’s probably a novella. Or novellete. Or long short story. Whatever.

10. Beggars in Spain. This is a story about a group of people who, through genetic modification, no longer need to sleep, which makes them vastly more talented and intelligent than everyone else because, well, you’ve got more time to learn things like nuclear physics. And you’d think forgoing sleep would be a good thing but, oh no, it’s not. The title comes from a philosophical stance along the lines of what do productive and talented people owe the beggars in Spain.

9. The Mist

Written back when Stephen King still wrote horror, this is one of his best, although it’s not really horror so much as it’s scifi. Scary scifi, to be sure. An Army experiment breaches a dimension where terrifying monsters live and they pour into the small town of Bridgton, Maine and, actually, the entire world. A really good movie was made out of this which has a completely different ending than the novella, so you can enjoy both.

8. A Boy and his Dog- Harlan Ellison’s brutal post-apocalyptic classic, this has also been turned into a fairly decent movie starring Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame when he was little more than a teenager. The nuclear wars have created a series of mutations allowing an orphan to telepathically connect with his dog so the two of them can survive a truly horrendous world.

7. The Third Man- Graham Greene is an old master of the suspense thriller detective police – you name it – story that rarely has a happy ending. Hack writer Buck Dexter is invited to visit his old friend Harry Lime in post war Vienna, only to arrive just in time for Lime’s funeral. Apparently, he died in an accident. Or was it? Also turned into a decent film with Orson Wells.

6. The Horla- Guy de Maupassant’s best known story in English, I’m guessing, is about a man who waves at a passing ship and, next thing you know, something is living in his house, drinking his water, and driving him slowly insane. Rather creepy 1960s movie made from this called Diary of a Madman.

5. A River Runs Through It- by Norman Maclean and, yes, the first thing you think of is the extraordinary film with Brad Pitt and, yes, the film is rather true to the story. But the story itself is a lyric, an ode to a self-destructive man as seen through the eyes of the brother who loved him.

4. Notes From the Underground- this is, as far as I am concerned. Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece. It is the ruminations of a very bitter retired civil servant who rejects every convention and standard of society. Parts of this just soar into almost psychedelia and is sheer unadulterated genius. 

3. Siddhartha- like any teenager of the 1970s, I read everything by Herman Hesse because, you know, metaphysics. Of all his novels, this is the one I remember best, primarily because of the river metaphor. The last part, where Siddhartha sits on the banks and watches his life flow by is perfect summary.

2. The Halloween Tree- anything by Ray Bradbury is going to get my vote although mostly those are disconnected short stories, as in R is for Rocket. This one, though, is a series of stories following the attempts of eight friends to save a ninth who has been spirited away into the Land of the Dead. Juvenile, yes, but compelling. 

1. The Dragon Masters- this is the first Jack Vance I ever read, and it remains my favorite. Set in a future so far away that people can actually wield magic, it is the story of a human band that has genetically altered their alien enemies, turning them into war beasts. Typical Vance with crazy dialogue and wild battle scenes.

The criteria for this is very simple: someone from a book that I still remember to this day, no matter how long, or short, ago I came across them. They are memorable. Every once in awhile, I’ll recall something about them while doing something else or I’ll make a reference to them or simply take inspiration. Such as:

10. Tom Sawyer. He was my first literary hero, the character that spurred my lifelong love of fiction and reading. Tom was everything I was not: brave and defiant and ever willing to break the rules and try something new and a great friend and fearless protector. And he tormented his little brother, Sid, with an almost genius capacity for mayhem, some of which I tried on my own little brother.

9. Scout. She was the center of To Kill a Mockingbird, the one who watched the world and all its currents and storms flowing hard and fast right through the center of her life. She met everything with a calm and thoughtful gaze, learning from it, enduring it. And showed us how to take everyone, from the different to the wounded, on their own terms.

8. Breq. The ancillary in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy, she was human then AI and a battleship then human again, or partially human, but, whatever the form, she was loyal to her friends and family, so to speak, and fought for her commander and her empire, even when she knew it was wrong. Indeed, she was responsible for correcting a lot of those wrongs; well, as best as they could be. Just considering all of the devastating and traumatic changes she went through as she changed form and purpose is mind blowing.

7. Mai. The bride of an arranged marriage to the Qin commander, Anji, she is, at first, docile and subservient, but she turns into a tiger. As she adjusts to the very dangerous world of the Hundred, she rises from a simple household member to admired confidant and a fighter in her own right. Half the fun of the Crossroads Trilogy is watching her development.

6. Maris. While out searching for her dog, Maris finds the stone that transports her to the Great Land, where she teams up with talking bugs and squirrels and a particularly brave ant to defeat the evil creatures taking over. I first read Shelia Moon’s Knee Deep in Thunder when I was 12 or 13, and it’s stayed with me, especially the last scene of the book, where Maris watches the boy walk away.

5. Chrisjen Avasarala. The foul mouthed, ruthless, downright murderous UN Secretary of Earth, she gave no quarter nor asked for any in her single-minded devotion to protecting Earth from Belters and Martians and revolutionaries and the proto-molecule. Constantly exasperated by James Holden and his optimistic humanism, she often found her plans undone and was often in serious danger, but you don’t mess with her. You just don’t.

4. Bob Lee ‘the Nailer’ Swagger. The protagonist of practically every single Stephen Hunter book, he is a former Vietnam-era sniper who earned his nickname from his mutant-like accuracy, the able to drive nails with a bullet. After amassing a rather astonishing kill record, he leaves the Army for an Arkansas farm and just wants to be left alone. But, of course, people just gotta bother him. To their detriment.

3. Schaffa Guardian. The Guardian responsible for Damaya’s training in NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and introduced in the first book, The First Season, Schaffa is a cruel and demanding task master. But, it soon becomes clear that Schaffa is a compassionate and empathic trainer, forced to extreme methods because the Fifth Season is rapidly approaching and Damaya has to be ready. Reminds me very much of the character Patrick Foley in the Australian movie The Earthling.

2. Chad Buford. He is the main character of a book I loved since I was 13, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come by John Fox, Jr, published in 1903.  Yes, execrable title, but it was the first book to sell a million copies in the United States. Orphaned in the hills of Kentucky shortly before the Civil War, Chad is adopted by a mountain family and then, through an odd series of events, ends up the protege of a wealthy Kentucky planter. When the Civil War starts, Chad makes a decision that goes against his family and friends and culture, and is the main reason I admire him. Very racist novel, though. Very racist.

1. Half-cocked Jack. So named because of an unfortunate childhood accident, he is a pirate and adventurer and a mercenary and a reaver and thief, and exactly the guy you want on your side in a fight. He is one of many unforgettable characters in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, appearing in the first novel, Quicksilver, and remaining alive through the rest of them, although I have no idea how. I guess Stephenson liked him, too.

I love trilogies, stories so big they need three novels to complete. Which is the big difference between a series and a trilogy- the story ends. Or, at least, ends one thing to start another. A series goes on and on, usually centered around a couple of characters. And while some series start out as trilogies and can be safely so regarded until the fourth or so book shows up, I make the distinction thusly: the story ends with the third book. That particular story, anyway. Thus:

10. The Tripods trilogy, by John Christopher. The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, The Pool of Fire. I read this when I was a kid because, well, it’s a kid’s story. Intrepid Will Parker and his friends defy their Capping Ceremony, mandatory at age 13, and escape to the White Mountains, ahead of the alien Tripods. Sort of pre-Hunger Games, but with aliens.

9. The Arthurian Saga, by Mary Stewart. The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment. I have mentioned The Crystal Cave at other locations, but the entire trilogy is a masterpiece. The story of Arthur as told through Merlin’s eyes, this is the best modernization of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King that I’ve seen. I think this was the base for that extraordinary Excalibur movie, but don’t quote me. And, yes, Stewart has written a few other novels on the theme, making this more series than trilogy, but the original three are complete in themselves.

8. The Crossroads Trilogy, by Kate Elliott. Spirit Gate, Shadow Gate, Traitor’s Gate. I’ve mentioned this trilogy in other locations because it remains one of my favorites. In the world of the Hundreds, the Guardian gods have withdrawn, leaving the eagle-riding reeves as the only authority as an unknown, murderous horde begins its march through the lands. The bride-to be, Mai, remains one of my favorite literary characters 

7. The Karla Trilogy, by John le Carre. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People. Yes, the character George Smiley makes this more series than anything except these three books are considered a separate story and you do not need to read any of the other Smiley books to understand it, although you should. George Smiley in battle with his main KGB nemesis, Karla, and it took three dedicated books to resolve it. 

6. The Maddaddam Trilogy, by Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake; The Year of the Flood; MaddAddam. Yes, it’s Atwood, and everybody’s all agog with The Handmaid’s Tale, but this is superior. In the wake of a pandemic, environmental disaster, and mad scientist bioengineering, Toby, one of the last humans, must convey an oral history of the world to the Crakers, human offshoots that are taking our place.

5. The Imperial Radch Trilogy, by Ann Leckie. Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy. This has gone on to be a series, but the first three books stand alone. Breq, now a common soldier who was once the starship Justice of Toren, seeks revenge against the Lord of the Radch, who betrayed her. A soldier who was once a starship: mindblowing.

4. The Riverworld Trilogy, by  Philip Jose Farmer. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design. Yes, I know, I know, this is no longer a trilogy but a series but, as far as I am concerned, it stopped with the third book, in which it feels very much like Farmer had grown tired of the story and simply wished to dispense with it. Despite that, this remains among my favorites. All of humanity wakes up one day alongside a world-girdling river and must figure out why. They woke up, I mean, not why the river girdles the world.

3. The Inheritance Trilogy, by NK Jemisin. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms; The Broken Kingdoms; The Kingdom of Gods. Stunning. Just stunning. A world where the gods are slaves. 

2. The Inhibitor Trilogy, by Alastair Reynolds. Revelation Space; Redemption Ark; Absolution Gap. About page 75, you’ll be going, “WTF?” But, stick with it, because this is another mind-blowing saga. Dan Sylveste teams up with the cyborg crew of the starship Nostalgia for Infinity to discover what happened to the Amarantin civilization. Before it happens again.

1. The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson. Quicksilver; The Confusion; The System of the World. What an epic, jaw-dropping story. From the Stuart Restoration through 1714 London, Daniel Waterhouse pursues the rational in a world transforming from the superstitious to the scientific. Everyone is in this story, from Isaac Newton to Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, as well as the seemingly immortal Enoch Root. And let’s not forget Half-Cocked Jack, who manages to save the world from time to time without realizing it.

There you go. Odd that most of these trilogies are speculative fiction. I’m guessing that’s due to all the time necessary to world-build before you can get into the story itself, which tends to make the first book of a trilogy somewhat pedestrian. But stay with it; you’ll be rewarded.

I have a rather broad definition of a thriller. It’s any exciting, violent, conflictive combative story that doesn’t involve the supernatural or science fiction. In other words, pretty much everything that isn’t romance or a mystery or literary fiction. It includes police procedurals and serial killer stories and spy stories. Techno thrillers and war stories are subgenres but still thrillers. So yes, this means I have a wide-ranging selection to choose from. Such as these:

10. Fail-Safe, by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. The ultimate nuclear thriller written in 1962, an arming code transmission accidentally jams and ends up sending a B-52 to drop nukes on Moscow. Every attempt to stop the bombing fails, and the President of the United States has to make a series of terrifying decisions. The flayed bull metaphor throughout the book is an apt description. This was made into a very decent, and quite stark, movie with Henry Fonda.

9. The Comedians, by Graham Greene. Mr. Brown inherits his mother’s hotel in Port-au-Prince and takes a ship there, meeting a few characters on board who will all figure prominently in the upcoming events.  The story of ex-pats in Haiti is overwhelmed by the horror of the Duvalier regime and the actions of its secret police, the Ton Ton Macoutes. Prepare to have your hair curled.

8. The Little Drummer Girl, by John le Carre. A Mossad agent recruits a young English actress to infiltrate a terrorist group and find out the leader’s identity. Then things get out of hand. Classic le Carre, where nothing is what it seems.

7. The Fifth Horseman, by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre. Libyan terrorists plant a hydrogen bomb in New York City and demand Israel vacate all Arab lands or they’ll detonate it. Published in 1980, it feels very current.

6. Child 44, by Tom Robb Smith. The first book in a series, it’s the only one I have read. This is supposedly about a Russian police officer’s search for a serial killer who preys on children, but it isn’t. It’s about something far more terrifying: the Russian justice system, which does not believe in fact or logic but in its own infallibility.

5. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow. The first of his Kindle County novels, Turow weaves a police and courtroom procedural into one story. Rusty Sabich, deputy prosecutor of Kindle County, becomes the lead attorney investigating the murder of his colleague and former lover, Carolyn. Until he becomes the lead suspect.

4. The Odessa File, by Frederick Forsyth. A German journalist investigating the suicide of a Holocaust survivor stumbles across a secret organization providing new identities and protection to former SS officers. It’s The Boys From Brazil without the science fiction aspects.

3. The Charm School, by Nelson DeMIlle. What really happened to the MIAs of the Vietnam War? Well, they’re in Russia, helping a new generation of KGB agents to perfect their Americanisms. So they can blend in better. Because they have things to do here.

2. The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth. French intelligence must stop an assassination plot directed at Charles de Gaulle. Problem is, no one has any idea who the assassin, nicknamed the Jackal, is. This was turned into a very decent movie starring Edward Fox in 1973. Please don’t confuse it with that awful Bruce Willis movie called The Jackal.

1. The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. The grand poobah of the serial killer novel, this is probably the best book of the type, although Red Dragon, the forerunner to this novel, gives it quite the run for its money. FBI Agent Clarissa Starling seeks the assistance of convicted serial killer Hannibal Lector to identify another serial killer called Buffalo Bill, because he skins his humps. 

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I consider post-apocalyptic books as a subgenre of science fiction. After all, some fairly science fiction things have to happen before the world goes apocalyptic: meteor strikes, nuclear war, zombies. But it’s such a specific category that I see it as a stand-alone so I usually don’t include them in a listing of favorite science fiction books. If I did, it’s all post-apoc all the time because, man, do I love ‘em. They appeal to my anarchist heart.

I don’t include dystopian novels because they are standard scifi. Face it, just about every scifi novel is dystopian to some degree, benign or no. I suppose that’s enough of a separate category to warrant its own list … we’ll see.

Without further ado, and in order of my regard:

10. Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. This is the grandaddy of the post-apoc genre, the one that more or less started it all, if you ignore anything Wells and Verne did. Published in 1949 which is, wow, even before I was born, it is the virus-destroys-the-world type, and still holds up extremely well. It has one of the best endings of any novel in the genre, heck, of any novel in any genre.

9. On the Beach, by Nevil Shute. Published in 1957, this is the first Australian contribution to this list. The American Navy submarine, Scorpion, which has survived a nuclear war joins the Australian Navy because Australia is about the last untouched place on earth. But not for long. This has one of the bleakest endings in all of literature, so be warned.

8. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I don’t know if this is post-apocalypse or straight up horror because this is one terrifying novel, far more than the terrifying movie made from it. The world-ending event appears to be some kind of environmental issue but McCarthy doesn’t dwell on it; he’d rather spend his time scaring the bejesus out of you.

7. I am Legend, by Richard Matheson. Forget the silly Will Smith movie, this is a classic and rather stark vampire apocalypse novel published in 1954 that turns out downright poetic. Well, vampire-like apocalypse : these vampires are created by a virus, not a bite on the neck, but they certainly take on most of the characteristics such as sunlight avoidance and the need for human blood. Until they become something else. Incidentally, there is actually a pretty good movie version of this. No, not Omega Man, which is good in itself, but the Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth. Vampires as beatniks. Too cool.  

6, Tomorrow, When the War Began, by John Marsden. The second Aussie contribution to this list, it is essentially Red Dawn in the outback. A kids’ book, to be sure, but one brutally written with no punches pulled and quite hair- raising in places. It is the first book of a series that becomes increasingly more hair-raising. Wolverines! … er, Dingos?

5. Damnation Alley, by Roger Zelazny. Probably more scifi than post-apoc, this is Balto after WW3. The world is a radioactive wasteland and Hell Tanner – yep, that’s his name- is given a choice: spend the rest of his life in prison or run a plague serum from LA to Boston. Easy peasey, right? Well, no, not with giant sandworms infesting the deserts … wait a minute, giant sandworms infesting the desert? A rather dreadful movie was made from this, but don’t watch it. Just don’t.

4. A Boy and His Dog, by Harlan Ellison. A rather excellent movie was made from this more novella-than-novel, but the source material is simply superior. Another post-WW3 radioactive hellhole, with ESP dogs. 

3. The Stand, by Stephen King. Yeah, I know, I frequently rail against the master but give him his due, this is a masterpiece. It gets a bit odd towards the end and it is obvious King has no clue about religion, or maybe he does, but you expect a flaw or two in so massive a tome. And Randall Flagg, man, what a villain. Ignore all the film/TV adaptations, which actually aren’t that bad, and stay with the novel.

2. Full Circle, by Bruce Ariss. Very little known and almost impossible to find, this is a stunning take on the world after nukes. I snagged it out of a Bookmobile in 1968 or 1969 and it has remained with me. After the War of the Poisoned Lightning, American Indians reclaim the land and restore it. Then the white people show back up, from under a lake, as the T.O.A.D. people. I forgot what the acronym stands for, but it doesn’t bode well. Incidentally I lived in Monterey at the same time that Ariss was managing Cannery Row and I wished I had known that because I would have loved to talk to him about this.

1. Alas, Babylon, by Pat Frank. The best post-apoc novel, hands down, and one I still remember scenes from quite vividly. It is, as best as I can figure, the first novel that shows the effects of nuclear war on the average schlub. Safety tip, don’t loot gold and silver from your local jewelry store. They could be radioactive.