The City & the City
Hugo (tied), World Fantasy, Clarke and BSFA winner — a near-sweep — and the book that carried Miéville furthest into the literary mainstream; its 'unseeing' entered critical vocabulary as shorthand for trained urban blindness.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Fahrenheit 451 about?
Guy Montag is a fireman: he burns books, in a future where they are banned less by tyranny than by a population that voted for wall-sized televisions, sport and serenity over difficulty. A chance meeting with the curious Clarisse cracks his certainty; possession of a stolen Bible breaks it; and Montag ends among the book-people of the railway lines, each one a walking memorised text. Written in a library basement on coin-operated typewriters, it is Bradbury's angriest and most prophetic book — he insisted the real villain was not censorship but distraction.
Why it matters
One of the most-taught novels in the English-speaking world and a perennially renewable warning. Truffaut filmed it in 1966; the title became shorthand for censorship itself.
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Dhalgren
The genre's most famous avant-garde novel and an enduring proof that SF readers will follow real difficulty if the sentences earn it.
The Lathe of Heaven
Locus Award winner, twice filmed for television, and her tribute-in-kind to Philip K.