A personal view from Simon Spanton, Deputy Publishing Director, Gollancz
I came across a lot of the books on this list before I worked at Gollancz. Some of them long before I left school. And it’s often those books that leave the deepest impression. So I want to talk about Conan and The Forever War.
I read the Conan books when I was fourteen (back then they were published by Sphere and had fantastic full-blooded artwork by the amazing Frank Frazetta on the covers). I was in the first throes of my love affair with fantasy and Robert E. Howard’s muscular, supremely confident prose and vivid creation was perfect fuel for the fire. Hyboria wasn’t the most realistic fantasy world but boy, could you feel the heat and the cold, get lost in its teeming cities and wander on its plains. And Conan was some sort of hero for the young imagination: he was just so . . . IN. YOUR. FACE. The Conan books were over the top, pulpy and almost painfully macho but they were also uniquely alive. And only the best books live in your imagination and stay alive.
I came across Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War a couple of years later. I’d read Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and loved its gung-ho account of high-tech warfare so when I picked up Haldeman’s novel and read the blurb I was sold at ‘power armour’. If I thought I was getting Starship Troopers II with The Forever War I had a serious other think coming. I knew hardly anything about the Vietnam War then, certainly not enough to realize that Haldeman’s book is not just one of the great SF novels but is also one of the greatest Vietnam War novels. But the hallucinatory horror of the war (those gentle floating, but oh so lethal, bubbles *shudder*), the aching sense of strangeness and dislocation felt by Haldeman’s returning soldiers, has stayed with me ever since.
You can’t always go back to books you read when you were younger, but having read Howard and Haldeman again since having been at Gollancz it's been a delight to rediscover why they were two of my favourite discoveries then and remain two of my favourite writers now.
To celebrate our 50th anniversary you can vote for your favourite Gollancz Science Fiction and Fantasy title here. We'll announce the winning titles in September and then publish the top 5 Science Fiction and top 5 Fantasy books in a stunning collectable retro-look edition.
