Cosmic Puppets, final thoughts and future of the blog

This book was certainly not what I was expecting. Certain aspects of it (the reality questions and interest in religious themes) are pretty standard Dick stuff, but the way that the book was marketed as “Galactic Invaders have taken over a small town!” is incredibly misleading. The book feels more like a Neil Gaiman fantasy novel than a sci-fi piece. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I wonder as I read more in this genre if I’ll find more instances where the two (sci-fi and fantasy) blend together.

Speaking of reading more sci-fi! I enjoyed doing this enough that I’m going to hope to make a project out of it! I realized about midway through that not only have I not read much of Philip K. Dick, but I haven’t read much of sci-fi at all. I’ll be reading more sci-fi from here on, and potentially watching some as well.

Some projects that I’ve listed for my reading:
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Dune – Frank Herbert
The Foundation Trilogy – Isaac Asimov
Solaris – Stanislav Lem
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’engle
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur Clarke
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula LeGuin
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
American Gods – Neil Gaiman (I know it’s more fantasy, but I like Gaiman and haven’t read it)
Y: The Last Man – Brian K. Vaughan
Ghost in the Shell, 2nd gig
Ergo Proxy
AND MUCH MORE

Truly I just went to various blogs where people made lists of “notable or required sci-fi” and picked the ones that I’d heard about before. I’m always willing to take suggestions, especially if people want to point me in the direction of sci-fi authors who aren’t white cis dudes, I’d appreciate it. All suggestions are welcome, however!

I do think I’m mostly going to do this in chronological order. It seems that a lot of these sci-fi authors knew each other and some of their pieces were written almost in conversation with one another. So to that end, I want to start far back and move forward. I know that theoretically I could really stretch the bounds of sci-fi, but I want to get to some of those big names sooner rather than later, so there are a few books that might be considered parts of the genre that I won't be including.