"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was a minor work of Philip K Dick. The movie inspired by it, "Blade Runner" (the original version, not the director's cuts) was far, far better.
"Minority Report" was also a pretty forgettable short story, and this time the movie made of it was mediocre.
"A Scanner Darkly" was yet another minor PKD work that was made in to yet another movie. It seems this list of scifi books if partial towards books made in to movies. But just because they've been made in to movies doesn't make the original book good, much less great.
As far as PKD books go (which is quite far, as he is one of my favorite authors), I would recommend "Ubik", "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", and "Martian Time Slip".
And of his short stories, I'd recommend "Beyond Lies the Wub" and "Woof".
Gibson's "Neuromancer" is alright, but "Count Zero" is better. Avoid the rest of his work.
"Brave New World" is an incredibly overrated, heavy-handed propaganda novel, written without a shred of talent. Avoid.
"Dune" is great, though I prefer the last few books of the original (Frank Herbert) series: "God Emperor", "Heretics", and "Chapterhouse". Definitely skip "Children" and "Messiah".
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is utterly brilliant, and is deserving of a place on a top-10 scifi novels list.
I enjoyed "Foundation" and "I Robot" as a kid. Not sure if I'd still like them now, decades later. Likewise for "Farenheit 451" and "Ender's Game".
I haven't read "Atlas Shrugged", but I did read "The Fountainhead", which amounted to a very long-winded statement of Ayn Rand's philosophy with two-dimentional characters serving as mouthpieces for it. It could have easily been stated in 30 pages, but instead was stretched out over 600.
Books can be worth reading without being good books, especially sci-fi. Brave New World is absurdly heavy-handed, but it's worth reading because it describes an important type of social dystopia. Honestly, I think 1984 is just as over-done, but the ideas are more significant (and relevant) than the stories or characters.
There's nothing wrong with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. You're probably right that it receives outsized attention because of the movie, but it's a fine book in its own right. It's probably one of the easier PKD books to get into if you're not used to him in particular or sci-fi in general, which is reason enough to recommend it to someone.
Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle is definitely worth a read. Valis [or is it VALIS?] is also an interesting read...in the psychotropic sense of "interesting".
I found Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep worth a read for the way in which it differs from the movie...the importance as status symbols of synthetic animals in the novella and its implications in regard to synthetic human lives a more compelling theme than the straightforward human rights theme of Blade Runner [or Alien from the same period in film].
What's funny is that I consider God Emperor and beyond to be the Dune series books worth skipping, but that's probably because they came out after I had read the first three...at the time, trilogies were the thing due to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Assimov's Foundation series [later to also be extended like Herbert's epic opus].
Yeah, "VALIS" was alright. I'd definitely put it ahead of "Minority Report" and "A Scanner Darkly", but far behind "Ubik", "The Three Stigmata", and "Martian Time Slip"; and even behind some other lesser works like "Maze of Death" and "Eye in the Sky".
Of the "VALIS" trilogy, I enjoyed "Divine Invasion" much more.
I did enjoy "DADoES", but just found it to pale in comparison to the movie and to Dick's best works. Dick's evocation of compassion for animals in that novel was quite compelling. Compassion for the underdog (literally and figuratively) is a strong, ongoing theme in his work.
I've been meaning to read "The Man in the High Castle", but have kind of shied away from it because I've found that Dick is best when he writes straight scifi rather than books set in the "real world", as it were. Though TMitHC being set in an alternate history does make it somewhat more attractive for me.
What makes Man In the High Castle a classic is that the idea of an alternate history was a novel concept as the basis of a science fiction story...one that Roddenberry recycled unrepentantly a few years later.
What is interesting is that VALIS [I've only read the first one] extends that notion in a Faulknerian ["The past is never dead. It's not even past."] way: "The Empire never ended." Though the triumph of the Axis is still more disconcerting than the persistence of the Romans.
Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"[0] could also be taken as an alternate history novel. It was written in 1889.
According to Wikipedia, the genre goes back to about 27 BC, when "the earliest example of an alternate (or counterfactual) history is found in Livy's Ab Urbe condita (book IX, sections 17–19). Livy contemplated an alternative 4th century BC in which Alexander the Great expanded his empire westward instead of eastward; he asked, "What would have been the results for Rome if she had been engaged in war with Alexander?""[1]
Another classic take on the past not being dead is Lovecraft's, such as in "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"[2] and "The Rats in the Walls"[3].
"Minority Report" was also a pretty forgettable short story, and this time the movie made of it was mediocre.
"A Scanner Darkly" was yet another minor PKD work that was made in to yet another movie. It seems this list of scifi books if partial towards books made in to movies. But just because they've been made in to movies doesn't make the original book good, much less great.
As far as PKD books go (which is quite far, as he is one of my favorite authors), I would recommend "Ubik", "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch", and "Martian Time Slip".
And of his short stories, I'd recommend "Beyond Lies the Wub" and "Woof".
Gibson's "Neuromancer" is alright, but "Count Zero" is better. Avoid the rest of his work.
"Brave New World" is an incredibly overrated, heavy-handed propaganda novel, written without a shred of talent. Avoid.
"Dune" is great, though I prefer the last few books of the original (Frank Herbert) series: "God Emperor", "Heretics", and "Chapterhouse". Definitely skip "Children" and "Messiah".
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is utterly brilliant, and is deserving of a place on a top-10 scifi novels list.
I enjoyed "Foundation" and "I Robot" as a kid. Not sure if I'd still like them now, decades later. Likewise for "Farenheit 451" and "Ender's Game".
I haven't read "Atlas Shrugged", but I did read "The Fountainhead", which amounted to a very long-winded statement of Ayn Rand's philosophy with two-dimentional characters serving as mouthpieces for it. It could have easily been stated in 30 pages, but instead was stretched out over 600.