"Show me an alien that thinks as WELL as a human, but not LIKE a human."

This was John W. Campbell's challenge to aspiring Science Fiction authors. Campbell was the editor of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction - later Analog. And so the first paragraph of Eric Raymond's post What I have learned from Science Fiction caught my eye:

I began reading science fiction almost exactly 40 years ago, when my family was passing through Orly airport in Paris while moving from London to Rome. My parents liked to encourage all five of their kids to read; we were told we could have one magazine of our choice from the newsstand. I picked a copy of Analog, a magazine I’d never seen before. It had a gorgeous Kelly Freas cover featuring a man being menaced by a dinosaur-like creature with gorgeous polychrome scales. I have it still.

You see, I also started reading Analog almost exactly 40 years ago (in 1971 or 1972), and because I saw a cover illustration that captivated me.

I've read enough Science Fiction to understand that Campbell's challenge is really, really hard. Most Science Fiction is "regular" fiction transplanted to Outer Space. Sometimes this works brilliantly, as in Asimov's Foundation trilogy (basically the fall of the Roman Empire, on spaceships), or terribly - Outland was derisively (and correctly) referred to as "The Shootout at the Io Corral."

Here are the books that had the biggest impact on me:

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein greatest work, and arguably the greatest Science Fiction novel ever. Memorable characters, great hard science (water recycling, "throwing rocks" as inter-planitary weapons), all wrapped up in a hard-edged libertarian perspective. TANSTAAFL.

Ringworld. Larry Niven's greatest work, although I will always have a soft spot in my heart for The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton. It's a shipwreck-on-a-desert-isle tale in outer space, but what a desert isle! And what a crew - what happens if you start selectively breeding humans to make them luckier?

The Foundation. The Fall of the Roman Empire, painted on a galactic scale canvas. You can learn a lot about politics and economics from this if you're 12 years old. Or older.

Lucifer's Hammer. Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's definitive end-of-the-world (and what to do after) story. People joke today about laying up stocks of whiskey and ammo - here's a detailed blueprint. I missed the chance to have Dr. Pournelle sign my first edition when I installed a firewall at Chaos Manner, but he and Mrs. Pournelle were very gracious anyway.

Honorable mention have to go to Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg (how could life evolve on a Neutron star, and how could people interact with creatures that live a million times faster than we?) and James P. Hogan's The Genesis Machine (the ultimate doomsday machine; the ending is unconvincing but the ideas are cool). These are some of the hardest of the hard science fiction - you don't read these for the characterization, but for the cracking of the nut-hard concepts.

Honorable mention also to Spider Robinson, for Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. Not hard science, but memorable characters. And dialog: here (from memory, after 30 years) is the line that stands out:

Son, you'll hurt him with a .38. But he'll kill you with that .45.

I'm not sure what it says about me, that it made such an impression.

And so I have to agree with Raymond:

Science fiction has given me entertainment and escapism, for sure - but it has given me ever so much more than just that. It has given me puzzles to chew on, examples to admire, philosophical questions to mull over. By thinking about fictional worlds, I learned a perhaps surprising amount about the real one - not so much facts as useful habits of thought, perspectives, fruitful ways of asking questions.

RTWT, if you're a science fiction fan. Or even if you're not.