Edgar Rice Burroughs
The father of planetary romance.
Planetary Romance
Sword-swinging adventure on exotic worlds, in the tradition of Burroughs's Barsoom: more romance than rocket science.
The authors (5)
C. S. Lewis
Narnia is one of fantasy's two great gateway drugs (the other being The Hobbit) and the model for every portal fantasy since; with Tolkien, Lewis made Oxford the unlikely engine room of the modern fantastic.
Anne McCaffrey
The bridge between SF and fantasy readerships and the genre's great gateway author for young readers — particularly girls, whom the field had largely ignored.
Andre Norton
Quietly one of the most influential figures in the field: she trained the readership.
Jack Vance
The genre's supreme stylist and a double founder: of the Dying Earth subgenre (Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is its godchild) and of anthropological planetary adventure.
Essential books, oldest first (10)
A Princess of Mars
The founding text of planetary romance.
The Gods of Mars
Widely rated the best Barsoom novel, and a startlingly savage satire of organised religion for 1913 pulp fiction.
At the Earth's Core
The keystone hollow-earth adventure, launching a seven-book series (Tarzan eventually visits).
Out of the Silent Planet
The great theological riposte within early SF — proof the genre could argue with itself at planetary scale — and the seed of the Ransom trilogy, whose finale That Hideous Strength fed directly…
The Martian Chronicles
The book that carried science fiction into the literary mainstream in 1950, reviewed rapturously by Christopher Isherwood.
The Beast Master
A pioneering Indigenous SF protagonist and the source of the 'bonded animal team' tradition that runs straight to McCaffrey's dragons and modern companion-animal fantasy.
The Dragon Masters
Hugo winner for short fiction (1963), and a perfect single-sitting introduction to Vance's mirrored-civilisations mode.
Dragonflight
Built from the Hugo-winning 'Weyr Search' (the first fiction Hugo awarded a woman) and the Nebula-winning 'Dragonrider'; the founding novel of one of SF's best-loved series and the modern…
The White Dragon
One of the first SF hardcovers ever to reach the New York Times bestseller list, announcing that the genre's readership had become a mass market — with a woman at the front of it.
Lord Valentine's Castle
Locus Award winner and Silverberg's triumphant return from retirement; Majipoor became one of the genre's great long-running settings, the bridge between planetary romance and big-canvas fantasy.