Ligotti examines capitalism and industry as the antithesis of art. Excellent quality stuff as is expected from perhaps the greatest of all modern horror writers.

William Burroughs meets Philip K. Dick by way of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, except that people are made of jelly and our narrator has multiple sheep's hearts inside of him. Also the moon is fake. Extremely entertaining, unequivocally weird. Read it in a single setting if you can.

I honestly do not understand why Ender's Game has been heaped with so much praise in the 40 years since its release. Card's writing is bland, and the novel's through-line is muddy-- I can only see it as an anti-war novel to a certain point, as it always seems to justify Ender's lone-wolf hyper-violence. Is Ender's gory retaliation against his bullies (who are presented as ridiculously psychopathic) a product of the militarized world these literal children inhabit? Ender is never scrutinized to the same degree as his classmates, and for that, I can't really say with certainty what Card was going for in this one, even if I have my thoughts. Card himself is an obnoxious, outspoken right-winger and the novel has been used as required reading for Marines, so who's to say? It felt fascist in its tone from the start.

A befuddling and utterly bizarre story from the strange, one-of-a-kind mind of R.A. Lafferty, SFs weaver of tall-tales. I will need to reread this to get a better understanding of it, but Lafferty's writing is beyond compare and is relentlessly entertaining. Undeniably a better short story writer than novelist.

An extremely harrowing and dazzlingly original take on the Alien Invasion story, completely drenched with anger, paranoia and religious trauma. Probably Disch's most approachable work, given its relative simplicity in comparison to work like Camp Concentration and 334, but transgressive and abrasive all the same, for better or worse. Effectively horror.

Last in the brilliant Viriconium sequence, In Viriconium really settles for me that Harrison is absolutely one of the best stylists in the entirety of the Science Fiction genre, and this one is particularly haunting and so gorgeously written. Weird lit at its best, and conceptually speaking, the conclusion of the most interesting series of novels I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

I think that on a sentence to sentence level, this is arguably the best written fantasy novel of all time. It has everything I look for in genre fiction-- it's not going to resonate with everyone, given its eccentricities with structure and plot, but it's sublime, gorgeous and richly layered and both times I've read it had me crying at the final chapters. A Breathtakingly beautiful book.

“I come with empty hands and the desire to unbuild walls.” -- The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974)

The Dispossessed, Ursula Le Guin's finest novel, explores what a Utopia would actually entail, and how, contrary to the promise of societal perfection, struggle and sacrifice is a necessity for it to function as Utopian. The main protagonist, Shevek, hails from the planet, Anarres, which is environmentally barren, but functions under an Anarcho-Syndicalist structure that has a communal distribution of labor and wealth. No one has great wealth, but basic needs are met, there is no armed conflict, very little crime, and there's no oligarchic concentration of power. Shevek visits Urras, Annares's sister-planet, to seek an ideological bridge-- a vast, capitalistic society that, in contrast to Anarres, has great wealth and luxury, a lush ecosystem and an excess of goods. However, there is a gargantuan class disparity, constant war, high crime and widespread homelessness that the state refuses to address.

Like Le Guin's famous short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", The Dispossessed uses science fiction as a vessel to investigate the moral and ethical problems that consistently plague society and often get swept under the rug, the rights of others that are ignored or forsaken in return for our own comfort. The novel isn't merely Leftist polemic, but one focused on praxis, and feels so prescriptive-- a genuinely life-changing novel that has helped shape my political views more than any other work of fiction.

To me, this is the ideal example of showcasing when science fiction from the 70s can be truly awful, even when it breaches mainstream recognition and influence within its own genre. It's an era I adore, given the authors that blazed that trail-- Le Guin, Delany, Disch, Dick, Wolfe, Lafferty, etc. But Ringworld, despite having some entertaining worldbuilding elements, is unabashedly sexist, stylistically bland and thematically hollow, even for the time and genre in which it was published. An embarrassing novel.

One of the best examples of the over-engineered school of epic fantasy writing in that detail does not equate to complexity. Though I understand that this is only the first in a very long series of novels, it never really felt like the world that Erickson meticulously conjured here was ever in service of something thematically worth the time investment. Stylistically very inconsistent, jumping from genuinely well written passages to extremely clunky fantasy-NPC dialogue. It's abundantly clear this was initially meant to be an RPG setting before it was turned into a series of novels. I can't say I'm completely against trying the sequel, but I was so unimpressed with this one that it just might not ever happen for me.

A highly influential work to science fiction, despite not being written or marketed as part of that genre, Ice is a haunting and disorienting masterwork of tone and style, weaving together a slipstream narrative with a fiercely critical voice around structures of misogyny, abuse and cycles of self-destruction. I think about this novel constantly.

Some of the most brilliant horror short fiction you'll read-- Masquerade of a Dead Sword, The Last Feast of Harlequin, The Sect of the Idiot... Ligotti is consistently a stylistic and creative powerhouse-- refreshingly original and tonally bizarre and uncompromisingly bleak.