Flying_Monkey
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Clear winner has to be 1984 - not just the best SF (and it is SF), but probably the best and most important novel of the 20th century.
.... But keeping to the tradition of "the best" meaning as many good ones as I see fit, just like with the vintage cars, lets add some Ballard - unusually for SF a genuinely great writer - At the very least will want the Drowned World, and perhaps high Rise, and I think the latter just about qualifies as SF.
Aldiss, perhaps not such a "great writer" as Ballard, but pretty good all the same, and what an imagination. Let's have Non-stop, and hothouse for starters.
Nice post. It was 'favourite' not 'best'... anyway, Nineteen Eight-Four is technically what critics call 'non-genre SF', that is a novel that qualifies as SF but written outside of SF culture.
I have to disagree that Aldiss is not as great as Ballard. Ballard was a great writer but a much better self-publicist too - and that often makes the difference, but I think that Aldiss is technically a better writer and he also had a far more surreal and fertile imagination - there are very few people who have written with his range, from the experimental Barefoot in the Head, to a world as complex and rich as Dune (the Helliconia Trilogy), from exceptional fantasy (The Malacia Tapestry) togrim dystopia (Greybeard - later stolen wholesale by P.D. James for Children of Men). He also wrote what I think is one of the absolute best post-9/11 novels, H.A.R.M. - which hardly anyone seems to have read - and one of the only 'future EU' SF novels I have seen, Superstate. He's a national treasure in my view. But there's no doubt that Ballard was an SF writer despite what some mainstream critics may try to say - he defined what the New Wave of SF was in the 1960s with his editoriship of New Worlds, with the focus on 'inner space' and the social imagination, something he shared with Aldiss, Moorcock, John Brunner and M. John Harrison, but also some of the Americans like Delaney, Spinrad and Disch.