My reading interests-- and viewing interests too, for movies and television-- center around what used to be called "fantastic fiction." These days this branch of literature is largely divided into science fiction and fantasy (horror would also qualify, I think) and except on the shelves of bookstores these categories are treated by many fans and writers as if they were two completely different things (see for example some of the essays in Isaac Asimov's Asimov on Science Fiction for his account of the fundamental difference between fantasy and science fiction).

It's true there is a difference-- I generally like science fiction more than fantasy, so I see the difference-- but it is much less important than what science fiction and fantasy have in common in comparison with other literature. For that reason, and because my own tastes usually run near the border instead of deep in "hard sf" territory, I prefer the term "fantastic fiction," covering science fiction and fantasy both in one convenient term.

So what is it that they have in common? Science fiction and fantasy are not genres -- in the sense that "mystery" or "adventure" or "romance" are genres. A fantastic fictional work can be a mystery or adventure or a romance and still be science fiction or fantasy. Fantastic fiction can also be tragedy or comedy, political satire, social commentary, allegory, morality play-- so the term isn't a category like any of these, either. Fantastic fiction is distinguished from the rest of literature by the setting in which the story takes place. In other fiction, the characters are invented by author, but the world is essentially our own, at the present time or (for a historical novel) some well-known place and time of the past. In fantastic fiction, however, the author also creates a fictional world in which the story moves.

In his essay On Fairy Stories, J.R.R. Tolkien dubbed this kind of invention "sub-creation," i.e. the creation of a reality subordinate to our own. Tolkien's Middle-earth is a masterwork in the field. The phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" is often invoked by critics describing a successful work of fantastic fiction; for Tolkien, this was a misinterpretation of what takes place between writer and reader. The truth is that the secondary world, the sub-creation, has its own properties, its own rules and internally consistent logic, so the reader never has any disbelief to suspend. However impossible or implausible an event might be in our real world, the reader of a successful fantastic fiction sees that it is perfectly logical and realistic given the rules of the secondary world.

It is the chance to explore such a well-realized world that most attracts me to any book (or movie, or television show, or just about anything else).

So you will find my top-ten list of favorite fiction leans heavily (though not exclusively) toward works that have done a particularly good job on the task of sub-creation. Edgar Rice Burroughs was an early master of the art, devising maps, histories, and languages for each of the numerous worlds into which he sent his charatcers. Tolkien took the task of sculpting a fictional world to perhaps its ultimate degree in his vast mythical world of Middle-earth (and his son's series of books describing that process of sub-creation is on my top-ten list for non-fiction). C.S. Lewis' Narnia is more whimsical but still has an internal logic that gives it the feel of reality, an exciting reality other than our own and waiting to be explored. Anne McCaffrey's Pern gives the reader a world threatened by a danger unlike anything in our own, and the unique and fascinating culture that developed to respond to it-- and then takes us into everything from its high politics to its everyday life with such vividness that when you put down the book you feel like you've been there.

So with that introduction to what I like (and, I hope, why) I'll go on to present my recommendations.

My top-ten favorite fictional works are given here only in roughly from very best on down, but the order is not really all that certain-- there are a lot of ties in the standings. Very recent favorites aren't on the list; a book has to stay high in my esteem for a long enough time to be sure it's not just the novelty...

I usually read a series as if it was a single book: I read all the books in a series whenever I read any one of them. So I list them in the top-ten the same way. If I think only a portion of a series deserves top-ten mention, I say so in the list.

Top Ten Favorite Fictional Works:

1.The Lord of the Rings + The Silmarillion	J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Stand	Stephen King
3. The Chronicles of Narnia	C.S. Lewis
4. The Mars Series	Edgar Rice Burroughs
5. The Land that Time Forgot	Edgar Rice Burroughs
6. The Dragonriders of Pern (original trilogy only)	Anne McCaffrey
7. The Tarzan Series (first 13 only)	Edgar Rice Burroughs
8. The Foundation Trilogy (original trilogy only)	Isaac Asimov
9. The War of the Worlds	H.G. Wells
10. The Shining	Stephen King

Honorable mention:

It, Stephen King; The Pellucidar Series, Edgar Rice Burroughs; Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne; The Moon Series, Edgar Rice Burroughs; Patriot Games, Tom Clancy; The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis; The Lensman Series, E.E. "Doc" Smith; The Known Space Series, Larry Niven

I've probably left books off this list which I would have included if they hadn't slipped my mind, but the fact that they slipped my mind is probably significant anyway.

My choice of top ten favorite non-fiction is not based on how significant a particular book is to its field, or how thoroughly it covers its subject, or anything else that might be considered a criterion of usefulness.

The list is, instead, based on how enjoyable they are to read. I rarely re-read non-fiction, but sometimes a book is so engagingly and clearly written, and its reasoning so enjoyably insightful, that I can go back to it again and again, as I would a favorite novel, just for the enjoyment of reading it-- even when I already know all the information it has to present. The best of these books (that I have encountered) are the ones that made the top ten below.

And when you come down to the bottom line, that's a quality not unconnected to a book's usefulness as a source of information about its field. So although it's not the reason I picked them, I can say that all the books below are, also, excellent sources on their subjects.

There's no attempt here to rank books within the top ten, they're just alphabetical by author.

Top Ten Favorite Non-fiction works:

1. The Selfish Gene	Richard Dawkins
2. The Extended Phenotype	Richard Dawkins
3. The Civil War	Shelby Foote
4. Science on Trial: The Case Against Creationism	Philip Kitcher
5. The Discarded Image	C.S. Lewis
6. An Experiment in Criticism	C.S. Lewis
7. The Screwtape Letters.	C.S. Lewis
8. Mere Christianity	C.S. Lewis
9. The Language Instinct	Steven Pinker
10. The History of Middle-Earth	Christopher Tolkien

So there's my list of books that I think will add to the life of anyone who reads them. A final note on my love of "sub-creation" as an art form: I have my own sub-created Universe, a "History of the Galaxy" that I've been working on since I was fourteen, and which (if you're interested) you can find out more about on my "Galaxy" pages...

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