The Best of Speculative Fiction

Or some of them, anyway. Trying to keep lists to a reasonable length is a huge challenge, so I've decided to have lots of small lists, making it a bit easier to list some of my favourites. They aren't here because of importance in the genre, because of the author's personality, because of a generally agreed status as classics but because I think they're great books. That's why you can see Feist + Wurts' Empire series in the same list as GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire.

Epic Fantasy:
1. A Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen - Steven Erikson
2. A Song of Ice and Fire - George RR Martin
3. The Prince of Nothing - R Scott Bakker
4. The Lions of Al-Rassan - Guy Gavriel Kay
5. The Kingdom of Thorn and Bone - Greg Keyes
6. A Sword of Shadows - J. V. Jones
7. Lords of Rainbow - Vera Nazarian
8. The Silmarillion - J. R. R. Tolkien
9. The Empire trilogy - Raymond E. Feist + Janny Wurts
10. Elantris - Brandon Sanderson
11. The Riddlemaster of Hed - Patricia McKillip
12. The King of Elfland's Daughter - Lord Dunsany

(I left off Kearney's Monarchies of God as I've only read the first book of it so far - otherwise, the only major omission is Tolkien's LotR, which I think is inferior to the Silmarillion and I'm only including one book/series per author for epic fantasy).

Swords + Sorcery
1. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser - Fritz Leiber
2. The History of the Runestaff - Michael Moorcock
3. Tales of the Dying Earth - Jack Vance
4. The Broken Sword - Poul Anderson
5. Conan - Robert Howard
6. The Emperor of Dreams - Clark Ashton Smith
7. Elric - Michael Moorcock
8. The Healthy Dead by Steven Erikson

Magical Realism + contemporary fantasy
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
2. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
3. Little Big - John Crowley
4. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
5. Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
6. Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
7. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
8. The Tooth Fairy - Graham Joyce
9. The Onion Girl - Charles de Lint

Urban fantasy and the New Weird
1. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
2. Perdido Street Station - China Mieville
3. City of Saints and Madmen - Jeff Vandermeer
4. The Light Ages - Ian R Macleod
5. The Scar - China Mieville
6. The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick
7. The Anubis Gates - Tim Powers
8. Viriconium - M John Harrison
9. Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
10. The Year of Our War - Steph Swainston

Science Fiction
1. Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
2. A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick
3. The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
4. Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg
5. The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe
6. Dune - Frank Herbert
7. The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester
8. The Dancers at the End of Time - Michael Moorcock
9. Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
10. A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M Miller Jr
11. The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
12. Gateway - Frederik Pohl
13. The Disposessed - Ursula Le Guin
14. Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
15. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

For Children + Young Adults
1. The Borribles Trilogy - Michael de Larrabeiti
2. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
3. The Dark is Rising - Susan Cooper
4. The Owl Service - Alan Garner
5. The Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
6. The Kin - Peter Dickinson
7. Stuck in Neutral - Terry Trueman
8. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
9. The Earthsea Quartet - Ursula Le Guin
10. Redwall - Brian Jacques

Everything else:
1. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
2. Heroes Die - Matthew Stover
3. The Drawing of the Dark - Tim Powers
4. Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny
5. Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
6. Gloriana - Michael Moorcock
7. The Stand - Stephen King
8. The Compleat Enchanter - L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
9. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick
10. Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
11. The Physiognomy - Jeffrey Ford
12. Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett