On the Eleventh Day of Geekmas . . .

I have a confession to make. It’s got absolutely nothing to do with Christmas or this series of Geekmas posts, but they say it’s good for the soul, so I’m forging on regardless (I might as well do something that doesn’t shunt me another few feet towards eternal damnation).

So, my confession is this: I cannot see the world ‘eleven’ without mentally editing out the second ‘e’. I blame Tolkien . . .

See? Told you – absolute non sequitur.  Anyway, to the topic at hand: on the eleventh day of Christmas/Geekmas (delete according to preference), we celebrate the SF Masterworks.

We have elven (dammit!) eleven Masterworks to add to our bundle of Christmas awesomeness and 11 (I give up) is, as everyone knows, a prime number. And prime numbers are, as  everyone also knows, cool. So what’s in this bundle that’s so cool? I’m glad you asked.

As you can see from the pile above – closely guarded by Middle Earth and Gotham City’s finest – we have two Arthur C. Clarke Award-winners (another prime number) in George Turner’s The Sea and Summer and Pat Cadigan’s Synners; three (yet another prime number) Nebula Award-winners in Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Frank Herbert’s Dune; one (neither prime nor composite) James Tiptree Memorial Award-winner in Ammonite by Nicola Griffith; and four Hugo-winners (not a prime number – I think my ill-considered secondary theme may be falling apart, here) in Dune, Robert A. Heinlein’s Double Star, The Dispossessed and Doomsday Book. Also present – and no less awesome for having been criminally overlooked when the awards were being handed out are: Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, Douglas Adams’ hilarious The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The War of the Worlds by the father of science fiction, the great H. G. Wells.

And if that doesn’t make your inner geek want to down tools, warm up some mulled wine and settle in for a nice long read, I don’t know what will!

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