While I was doinking around on the internet yesterday I followed a link to someone’s blog where I found a list of the science fiction novels considered “masterworks” by the publishing house Orion Publishing Group. They consider these novels so important that they “deserve to be in print and kept there, rather than languishing as OP [out of print] titles,” so Orion has done the deserving thing and begun reprinting them.

And good on them … but bad on me. I haven’t read much science fiction lately but when I did, I devoured the stuff. Actually, I read virtually nothing but science fiction for the better part of a decade. I had a closet filled with science fiction paperbacks, and yet, to my great shame, I hardly put a dent in the list of novels considered masterworks by Orion.

For instance, I knew about Phillip K. Dick but, even this late in my life, I’ve read just one of his books, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? because, as any science fiction geek can tell you, it was the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner. Yet dozens, nay hundreds, perhaps even zillions of his books (how did that man find time to sleep?) are on this list. (Somebody at Orion really likes Phillip K. Dick.) (I almost wrote, “Somebody at Orion really likes Dick.” I’ve often wondered why everyone refers to him in print by his full name. Now I know.)

I have to confess, I didn’t like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I’ve read critical reviews that claim it’s a ground-breaking thought experiment that shakes the very foundations of what it means to be human, but stories about robots who act human have never managed to sway me from the very self-evident fact that they’re not human. They’re robots. Science fiction authors have dressed them up in skin, made them talk like people, gotten them to seduce other characters in the novel, but no matter how many times the author posed the question in every different way he could think of, it never left my mind that robots are just machines, and always will be. Now if somebody wrote a novel proving that humans were just robots, that would settle the whole thing for me.

But away from this distressing digression and back to the list: As I said, I scanned the titles considered “masterworks” by Orion and found myself wanting. How’s it possible that, in all the years of collecting science fiction novels, I haven’t read as many as half of all the books on this list? Worse than that, I haven’t heard of some of them! A Fall of Moondust is “the story of a lunar sightseeing cruiser which winds up trapped when a shift in the regolith sucks it into the Sea of Thirst.” That sounds like it would be right up my alley, yet I can’t say that I’ve ever seen it anywhere. And it was written by Arthur C. Clark! I loved Arthur C. Clark! How’d I miss that?

I’m not sure what I can do about this now. I suppose I can haunt the thrift stores or, when I’m desperate, visit Half-Price books, but I won’t be able to pick up any of the Orion reprints until they start showing up on the shelves of the aforementioned used-book stores because my cheapskate gene just won’t allow me to pay more than five bucks for a book, so I haven’t bought anything new since about 1990. What’s the retail price of a new paperback book these days? About twenty bucks, isn’t it? I’ve got books in my collection that sold for seventy-five cents when they were new. And back in my day we didn’t have hot water, either! Hey! Get off my lawn, you damn kids!