Comics books have brought joy to millions and millions worldwide. Everyone has the personal favorite hero from comics, but they are all puny compared to the guys on here. This list has been a long time in the making. Thousands of characters had to be considered – but ultimately only ten were chosen. Be sure to mention your own favorites in the comments. Oh – and if you like comics and lists relating to them, be sure to check out the Top 10 Significant Moments in Comic History.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: X Factor vol 1. #5 (June 1986)
Origins: Cairo, Egypt

En Sabah Nur is reputed to be the first mutant on earth and also the most powerful. He scores an impressive 39 out of 42 on Marvel’s official powergrid. Apocalypse has control of his body on the atomic level to go along with tremendous energy absorption and energy projecting abilities. His powers are greatly enhanced due to his mastery of alien technology specifically genetics and biochemistry.

Publisher: DC Comics
Origins: Planet Apokolips
First Appearance: Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen # 134 (November 1970)

Darkseid is worshipped as an “anti-god”. He is a supreme conqueror who is one of the greatest threats to the DC universe as he seeks to control all living beings. Darkseid is capable of unleashing unimaginable amounts of energy through his “Omega Effect” beam. He is also immortal and has displayed immeasureablee levels of strength, stamina, endurance, and mental abilities.

Publisher: DC Comics
First Appearance: Crisis on Infinite Earths #2 (May 1985)
Origins: Qward

Very little has been revealed about this character. What is known is that A-M is the embodiment of all the anti-matter in existence. This makes him a threat to the entire omniverse through his near limitless cosmic powers. It has been alluded that his purpose was to eliminate all matter in the omniverse, leaving only anti-matter behind. This would essentially make him “God”. Anti-Monitor has shown the ability to absorb entire universes, manipulate matter and energy on a cosmic scale and transform the very essence of reality.

Publisher: DC Comics
First Appearance: Superman #153 (February 2000)
Origins: Unknown

Imperiex is the DC Comics version of Galactus. A being whose plan was to hasten the end of the universe by collapsing galaxies into super black holes and create a new, perfect universe with the corresponding release of energy. Imperiex wields near omnipotent power derived from the big bang and has been described as an energy being requiring a material shell. It has shown the ability to project immensely powerful energy blasts and exert its will through a near infinite supply of “probes” which are capable of annihilating entire planets.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: Iron Man #55 (February 1973)
Origins: Titan (Saturn Moon)

Sure, many a villain threatens to destroy the universe but Thanos is the only one who can actually do it. He possesses immeasurable levels of intelligence, strength, endurance, stamina, and durability. Thanos also has exhibited the ability to manipulate enormous amounts of cosmic energy. An obsession with the female embodiment of death, led him to gain control of the infinity gauntlet, ascending him to godhood. Thanos used his power to destroy half the life in our universe by simply snapping his fingers.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: Fantastic Four #48 (1966)
Origins: Planet Taa (Pre- Big Bang)

The only survivor of the universe that existed before the Big Bang, Galactus consumes entire planets for nourishment. He has displayed god like abilities, including manipulation of molecules on a cosmic scale, conversion of matter to energy and vice versa, teleportation across great distances, erecting impenetrable force fields, etc…, all on levels beyond human comprehension. His intelligence, stamina, and endurance are also beyond any known method of calculation. Galactus is also able to scan the thoughts of virtually any known being.

Publisher: DC Comics
First Appearance: More Fun Comics # 52 (February 1940)
Origins: Silver City

The Presence is the DC comics version of the Judeo-Christian God. It is the highest being in their very complex religious cosmology which includes a second tier of “gods” such as the New Gods, Greek Gods, Hindu Gods, etc. Although it has been described as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent; it has also been mentioned as having appeared at some point after the beginning of reality as we know it. This ambiguity lowers The Presence’s ranking as it is generally credited with the creation of only one universe (DC), thus it may or may not be the original creator.

More specifically: The Brothers, Eternity, Death, Infinity, Lord Chaos, Master Order etc.
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Origins: N/A
First Appearance: N/A

They can be considered abstract concepts that have shown the ability to manifest themselves physically in order to reveal themselves or their motives to conscious beings in the omniverse. These entities have at one time or another exhibited “god like” power within their respective realms. It is not clear, however if these entities take action through their own will or if they are controlled by a higher power.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
First Appearance: Strange Tales #157 June 1967
Origins: N/A

The Living Tribunal is a virtually omnipotent and omniscient entity whose purpose is to safeguard the omniverse from imbalance. Tribunal is perfectly impartial and has shown the ability to accomplish anything it sets its will to; including the willingness to sacrifice millions to save billions and sacrifice billions to save trillions. There is absolutely no limit to what The Living Tribunal can accomplish in order to maintain balance or eliminate threats. Nevertheless; Tribunal is second to one.

Publisher: Marvel Comics
Origins: N/A
First Appearance: Doctor Strange Vol 2, #13 (April 1976)

Creator of all realities in all timelines in every single part of the omniverse. TOAA is essentially “God” and therefore nothing can possibly exist without him. This makes TOAA more powerful than all beings or entities combined. His true identity has been alluded to as being Stan Lee, the legendary comic book creator.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by the content of this list, after all, there are ten people that absolutely did not deserve the prize they got. This list looks at ten people who should absolutely have won a nobel prize for their contribution to writing. Be sure to check out the other list after you read this one.

Borges had a good twenty years to be considered for a Nobel, and was hot in the running for one for many years, but the Nobel Committee refused to award it to him because of his support for right-wing dictators like Pinochet. Sounds like someone he shouldn’t have supported, but the Committee routinely awarded the prize to writers who supported left-wing dictators like Joseph Stalin. Pinochet was worse than Stalin?

Borges wrote the finest surreal literature to date, and won the first International Pulitzer Prize. Politics seems a bad subject on which to argue.

One of the greatest non-native writers of English. Nabokov’s most famous novel, and his finest, is Lolita. He wrote many more excellent works of fiction and criticism, translations of poetry. He was nominated in 1974, along with Graham Greene (not the actor), and lost to Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, joint winners. The former was Swedish, and both were members of the Nobel Committee at the time.

One of the greatest 20th Century poets in history. He won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and profoundly influenced all poets, especially English-speaking poets, who have come after him. It is believed that the Committee turned him down because he made errors in a translation of a book by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dag Hammarskjold, and because he suggested that Hammarskjold was homosexual, like Auden.

The greatest 20th Century American Poet, by far. The Bard of the Northeast. He won 4 (FOUR!) Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry, was awarded over 40 honorary doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, and Harvard, among others. The only other winner of four Pulitzers for literature is Eugene O’Neill, who did win a Nobel. Frost’s fourth Pulitzer was awarded 20 years before he died. The Nobel Committee managed to ignore him for those 20 years.

The greatest exemplar of the French school of literary naturalism. He wrote over 30 novels, and any one of them could have gotten a Pulitzer today, without competition. His 2 chances to win were spoiled for the same reason as the next entry.

Norway’s greatest author, and one of the finest modern dramatic writers in history. He had 6 chances to win, since the award was begun in 1901, but he lost due to arguments over Alfred Nobel’s eligibility requirements, as laid out in his will. He intended the winners to exhibit “lofty and sound idealism.” But from 1901 to 1912, the Committee believed that he meant “ideal direction.” Apparently Ibsen, the father of modern drama, was not leading the literary world in the ideal direction.

The author of the most monumental work of 20th-Century fiction, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time. It’s a 7-volume novel which exhibits one of the first, if not the first, example of stream of consciousness writing. And yet, the Committee award the 1920 prize to Knut Hamsun (Norwegian, which is closer to Swedish than French), for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil. Which one do more people read today? Yep, In Search of Lost Time.

The greatest Irish writer besides W. B. Yeats, who did win the prize. Joyce is also the greatest writer of stream of consciousness fiction in history. He practically invented the modern idea of speculative fiction, with his final work, Finnegans Wake, which is almost unreadable. He considered it his finest work, but is more famous for Ulysses, the Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The greatest exemplar of literary realism in history, and possibly the greatest novelist in history. His two most titanic works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, would have been more than sufficient to secure Knut Hamsun an award. If only Tolstoy had been born a little closer to Sweden, the Committee might have overlooked their arguable translation of Nobel’s will. Apparently, the Committee did not consider Tolstoy to be leading the modern literary world in “the ideal direction.”

The inventor of the American Novel, with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and one of the all-time greatest novelists, humorists, essayists, critics, and all-around authors. Like Tolstoy, he had 10 chances to win, and ten times was passed over, in favor of the following eleven authors:

Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Bjornstjern Bjornson, Frederic Mistral and Jose Echeragay (both in 1904), Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosue Carducci, Rudyard Kipling, Rudolf Christoph Eucken, Selma Lagerlof, Paul Heyse.

I’m willing to bet you’ve only heard of one of those. I have three English degrees, and I’ve only heard of one of them. I have, however, heard of Mark Twain.

I must confess, as much as I love British writers, the ones that I always come back to are American. America really has dominated modern English literature – not just in the pulp fiction arena but in serious literature as well. From the moment that America found its voice in the world of writing, it has had an incredibly significant presence. This list looks at ten of the masters of the short story genre from the USA.

The author of “Fight Club” is not necessarily known as a “Short Story Writer,” however Palahniuk is a believer in the Ray Bradbury ritual of writing a short story every day. Many of his stories have ended up in his novels without the reader realizing they were originally independent tales. In one novel “haunted” he used a short story about a writers convention to bridge together 23 different short stories. This book features his infamous story “Guts” which has caused several people to faint when read aloud at book signings.

Washington Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He was best known for his short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”, both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra.

Asimov is certainly one of the most prolific writers in the English language. He is known for many different works from his series “Foundation”, and “Fantastic Voyage”, to text books and everything in-between. He is primarily known as a science fiction writer, however he is one of the few people to have their writing span every major category of the Dewy Decimal System except Philosophy. He wrote an estimated 515 books in his lifetime. As far as writing short stories goes, he has 3 well known stories. “I, Robot”, “The Bicentennial Man”, and “The Last Question.” The first two have been turned into movies. He wrote 19 Short Story collections, spanning a total of 284.

Bradbury is a very well known Science Fiction writer. He is famous for writing a short story every day, a ritual that many other writers have attempted to follow. He has written 11 novels, 3 of which are made up of loosely connected stories, and over 40 short story collections, for a grand total of over 400 short stories and novellas. But it’s not just quantity that earns him a place on this list. His best known short story “A Sound of Thunder”, is the origin of a common science fiction theme called “the butterfly effect”, it is also the most republished science fiction story of all time.

King is one of the most popular authors in America, and a very prolific writer as well. He is a huge fan of the short story. “1408″, “The Mist”, and “Hearts in Atlantis” are just a few of the 35 short stories he wrote that have been made into movies, though perhaps the most famous is “Stand By Me”. He has written 8 story collections and a total of 124 short stories and 17 Novellas in his career. He was also selected to be the editor of The Best American Short Stories of 2007, and also won the O. Henry Award in 1996.

Salinger is known for his novel “Catcher in the Rye”, this is actually his only published novel. A very eccentric writer, he has written a great deal of material in his life, but much of it has never been seen by any one but him. He has 3 other books available to the public. “Nine Stories”, “Frannie and Zoey”, and “Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction”. All 3 of these books are short story collections. He also has about 2 dozen other uncollected short stories. Salinger is considered by many to be the greatest American writer of the 20th century.

Real name William Sydney Porter. O. Henry is known for writing flash fiction with wit and a strange twist ending. His most well known story is “The Gift of the Magi” which is a story about a young poor couple who each sells their most precious object in order to buy a Christmas gift for their partner, but in doing so they end up making each others gift worthless. This story has been retold in many different forms over the years. The O. Henry Award was established in his honor, it is a very prestigious award given to outstanding short story writers. Two writers on this list have won this award.

Updike was an extremely gifted short story writer, he published over 150 short stories in his career, his last collection “Tears of my Father” was published in June 2009, about 6 months after his death. He has also won over 30 different awards in his lifetime including: the Pulitzer, the Rea Award, the PEN/Falkner award, and the aforementioned O. Henry Award to name a few.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was an American writer of novels and short stories, whose works are evocative of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the Twenties. He finished four novels, including The Great Gatsby, with another published posthumously, and wrote dozens of short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age. If you want a recommendation for his greatest two short stories, I suggest reading “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” and “The Diamond As Big As The Ritz”. You won’t be disappointed.

Poe is probably the most famous English short story writer of all time. Poe only wrote one complete novel in his lifetime, and it is not very well known, however his short stories are. Most people can tell you the story of “The Tell Tale Heart”, “The Masque of the Red Death,” or “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Poe has over 65 short stories to his name. Poe is also considered to have invented the detective genre.

I love a long book that I can really get into, so I decided to compile a list of the longest novels ever written. As I did more research, I realized that there were many issues I had to take into consideration when deciding what to include on this list. This task ended up being much more complex than one would think a “list of longest books ever” should be. Here are the various parameters I decided on: 1. I included only published works (read: not self-published), 2. I used word count, not number of pages, as the measure of length, and 3. I included only books originally written in English, since it is easier to achieve a high word count in some languages than others, and English is the language I am most familiar with.

David Foster Wallace may have been the most critically acclaimed novelist of the modern era. His novels, The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest, were both well highly acclaimed by literary critics. Infinite Jest was even named one of the best 100 novels from 1923 through present day by Time Magazine. Wallace committed suicide in 2008 at the age of 46, leaving an incomplete novel behind. However, the publishing company responsible for his first two novels announced that it will release the unfinished manuscript sometime in 2010.

Summary: Set in an absurd yet uncanny near-future, with a cast of hundreds and close to 400 footnotes, Wallace’s story weaves between two surprisingly similar locales: Ennet House, a halfway-house in the Boston Suburbs, and the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy. It is the ‘Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’ (each calendar year is now subsidized by retail advertising); the U.S. and Canada have been subsumed by the Organization of North American Nations, unleashing a torrent of anti-O.N.A.N.ist terrorism by Quebecois separatists; drug problems are widespread; the Northeastern continent is a giant toxic waste dump; and CD-like “entertainment cartridges” are the prevalent leisure activity. The novel hinges on the dysfunctional family of E.T.A.’s founder, optical-scientist-turned-cult-filmmaker Dr. James Incandenza (aka Himself), who took his life shortly after producing a mysterious film called Infinite Jest, which is supposedly so addictively entertaining as to bring about a total neural meltdown in its viewer. As Himself’s estranged sons, professional football punter Orin, introverted tennis star Hal and deformed naif Mario, come to terms with his suicide and legacy, they and the residents of Ennet House become enmeshed in the machinations of the wheelchair-bound leader of a Quebecois separatist faction, who hopes to disseminate cartridges of Infinite Jest and thus shred the social fabric of O.N.A.N.

In addition to being a successful novelist, James Clavell was also an immensely talented screenwriter- he was the mind behind The Great Escape and To Sir, With Love. He only began to pen novels during a writer’s strike in Hollywood when his wife recommended that he spend his time recording his experiences as a prisoner of war in Japan during World War II. Clavell’s written memories became his first novel, King Rat. He continued to write about Japan and other areas of Asia in his subsequent novels, including Gai-Jin.

Summary: [Gai-Jin] takes place in 1862 Japan. The gai-jin (foreigners) have arrived, intent on doing business with the Japanese. With laws against the use of the wheel in carriages or carts, the Japanese, their tradition- bound Emperor and competing warlords detest the foreigners, who have ruined the Chinese with the Opium Wars. The mighty Struan shipping empire, Noble House, has built a base in Yokohama, but with the illness (fatal) of Culum Struan, tai-pan (head) of the business empire, 20-year-old Malcolm Struan stands ready to become tai-pan. In the first chapter, however, he’s attacked by samurai assassins on the Tokaido road and lies either bedridden or hobbles about for the rest of the novel. Young Angelique Richaud, 18, Parisienne daughter of a gambler who has lost what money the family had, sets her eye on Malcolm. Angelique is raped by a rogue samurai and now secretly carries his child, unbeknownst to the love- besotted Malcolm. Angelique’s syphilis-stricken fellow Frenchman Andre Poncin wends his way through the plot toward a glorious love- death with his Japanese mistress while Japanese warlords fight each other, samurai endlessly behead samurai, earthquakes shiver, and Yokohama burns.

Carl Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes during his lifetime, one for a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and the other for a book of poetry. Remembrance Rock was Sandburg’s only novel, and it clearly meant a lot to him personally. Upon his death in 1967, Sandburg’s ashes were placed beneath a red granite boulder named Remembrance Rock.

Summary: …Remembrance Rock follows the growth of the American dream through more than three centuries of our nation’s history. The narrative stretches from the founding of Plymouth Colony through the Revolution and Civil War to World War II, and includes a cast of characters as vast as the landscape itself – Puritans and heretics, revolutionaries and Tory loyalists, abolitionists and slaveholders, even a Supreme Court Justice. Thematic unity to this sprawling epic surfaces in the symbolic reappearance of a bronze plaque that bears an inscription of Roger Bacon’s ‘Four Stumbling Blocks to Truth,’ each of which is relevant to a particular period of our past.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand presented her philosophy of Objectivism, which maintains that reason is the only way for man to gain knowledge. Rand was a champion of laissez-faire capitalism, likely in part due to her negative experience with communism in her homeland of Russia.

Summary: In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, heroine Dagny Taggart fights to save her transcontinental railroad from collapse. Dagny’s efforts prompt her to seek out the man who stopped the motor of the world and to hunt down the destroyer who’s leading a strike of the great minds. She finds both in the person of John Galt, who asserts that the first right of human beings is the freedom to think and act independently.

Vikram Seth was born in India and was educated in the United States, The United Kingdom, and China. His international life is reflected in his literary works, which are set in the United States, England, and India. He has also written a travel guide to China.

Summary: Set in the post-colonial India of the 1950s, this sprawling saga involves four families–the Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis and the Khans–whose domestic crises illuminate the historical and social events of the era…The multi-charactered plot pits mothers against daughters, fathers against sons, Hindus against Muslims and small farmers against greedy landowners facing government-ordered dispossession. The story revolves around independent-minded Lata Mehra: Will she defy the stern order of her widowed upper-caste Hindu mother by marrying the Muslim youth she loves? The search for Lata’s husband expands into a richly detailed and exotically vivid narrative that crisscrosses the fabric of India.

While Miss MacIntosh, My Darling met with some acclaim, Marguerite Young’s earlier work, Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias, won multiple literary awards. It was a study of the foundation of New Harmony, Indiana, a utopian commune where Young lived for seven years.

Summary: … [A] young woman embarks on a dreamlike voyage through time and memory in search of her darling childhood nursemaid, Miss Macintosh from What Cheer, Iowa, who has disappeared into the ocean, never to be seen again. Finding herself adrift on a sea of delusion and fantasy, the young woman fervently searches for reality only to discover herself drowning in illusion.

This novel is also unfortunately out of print, although used copies seem to be available on amazon.com and eBay. Poor Fellow My Country is the only Australian novel to appear on this list. While Xavier Herbert was a controversial figure, both by today and his own time’s standards, he was known for being a champion for the Australian Aboriginal people; this commitment appears in Poor Fellow My Country.

Summary: Ranging over a period of some six years, the story is set during the late 1930s and early 1940s; but it is not so much a tale of this period as Herbert’s analysis (and indictment) of the steps by which we came to the Australia of today. Capturing the Spirit Of The Land, Herbert has paralleled an intimate personal narrative with a tale of approaching war. Prindy, the young quarter-caste Aborigine identifies with Bob Wirridirridi the witch-doctor and the Rainbow Snake Cult. He grows from adolescence to manhood through a series of events, some of which are hilariously comic and others tragically violent, but he does not lose sight of his final goal: that of initiation into full manhood in the Cult of the Rainbow Snake. His natural grandfather Jeremy Delacy, The Scrub Bull, infuriates people with his attitudes, especially that of his apparent lack of interest in influencing Prindy. At times he is harsh and brutal, but he is also shown to love with rare compassion. Rifkah, the Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who eventually identifies with the Aborigines and becomes Prindy’s tribal mother, is brought into conflict with Aelfreda Candlemas the reformer and writer who tries to make a superman of Jeremy and in her failure turns from scorching love to violent rejection.

The word count of 969,000 words is true for the first edition of Clarissa, but later editions seem to have climbed to above 1,000,000 words. However, it was not possible to find an estimate more accurate than “above 1,000,000 words” for these later editions. However, even when using the lower number of the first edition, Clarissa still easily comes in third on this list. Though Clarissa is well-known for its length, it is also noted for being an example of an epistolary narrative.

Summary: Richardson first presents the heroine, Clarissa Harlowe, when she is discovering the barely masked motives of her family, who wants to force her into a loveless marriage to improve its fortunes. When Lovelace, a romantic who holds the code of the Harlowes in contempt, offers her protection, she runs off with him. She is physically attracted by if not actually in love with Lovelace, but she is to discover that he wants her only on his own terms and she refuses to marry him. In Lovelace’s letters to his friend Belford, Richardson shows that what is driving [Lovelace] to conquest and finally to rape is really revenge for her family’s insults and his sense of Clarissa’s moral superiority. For Clarissa, however, accepting marriage as a convenience is no better than accepting the opportunistic moral code of her family. As the novel comes to its long-drawn-out close, she is removed from the world of both the Harlowes and the Lovelaces, and she dies true to herself to the end.

Unfortunately, this novel is out of print and rather difficult to come by. The novel’s setting, the town of Sironia, is based on the author’s hometown of Waco, Texas. The extent to which the book is autobiographical is not known, as Cooper had all of his files destroyed, though a few of the characters from his work have been identified with their likely counterparts in real life.

Summary: Sironia, Texas describes life in the titular town during the first twenty years of the 20th century. “…to judge from Sironia, Texas in those days must have been … wilder than even now. In the lives of Cooper’s 30-odd major characters, there occur a flood, several murders and suicides, and a castration party. One whorehouse burns down, one Negro is burned alive, one changeling is introduced into a childbed. Girls are seduced and others are beaten; at times it seems as though the streets of Sironia must be paved with female teeth. Crowbars are swung in labor strife, horsewhips in political campaigns. Sex-crazed old women corner fresh-faced youths in locked bedrooms. Blackmail is a commonplace, miscegenation comes almost as natural as breathing, and the highest ambition of mankind, it would seem, is to own a real, live, spangly N’awlins ‘hoah’.

Some people might argue that Mission Earth is in fact a series of novels and should be excluded from this list, but it appears that it was the author’s intent for the work to be a single novel published in ten volumes. Despite being authored by L. Ron Hubbard, this novel in fact has little to do with Scientologist beliefs, though like the Scientologist mythology, Mission Earth’s plot is based on an alien race coming to Earth and the chaos that ensues.

Summary: Mission Earth has an entire galaxy for its backdrop, though the main action occurs on Earth and the planet Voltar. The Voltarian Grand Council has become convinced that it must send a mission to prevent Earth from destroying itself–thus allowing the Voltar Confederacy to proceed on its long-standing invasion plan and timetable to conquer a planet they regard as an important future way-stop on the main invasion route toward the center of the galaxy. The mission is assigned to a clandestine agent, Fleet Combat Engineer Jettero Heller. Soon after arriving on Earth, he heads to New York City where he is determined to get to the bottom of what is causing Earth to self-destruct, unaware that his every move is being tracked and that powerful forces on Voltar want his mission to fail.

This is the third installment of our “books that changed the world” series. Be sure to read the previous two so that you don’t think we have missed important books off the list. If you can think of books that are not on any of the three lists that deserve a mention in future, be sure to tell us about it in the comments. Here are the original two lists: Top 10 Books That Changed The World, and 10 More Books That Changed The World. These are in no particular order.

Why it changed the world: This book (though not the first dictionary) was the first to use literary quotations to illustrate the meanings of words. It set the stage for the scholarly study of language.

Published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson’s Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language. There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas, equivalent to about £220,000 as of 2009.

Johnson took nearly nine years to complete the work, although he had claimed he could finish it in three. Remarkably, he did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy out the illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson wrote several revised editions during his life. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary, 150 years later, Johnson’s was viewed as the pre-eminent English dictionary.

Why it changed the world: It virtually created modern economics – the free market and competition. In it, Smith proposes the invisible hand of the market: the pursuit of self-interest can be beneficial to society at large: for example, the Butcher, the Baker, and the Brewer provide goods and services to each other out of self-interest; the unplanned result of this division of labor is a better standard of living for all three.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist Adam Smith. It is a clearly written account of economics at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, as well as a rhetorical piece written for the generally educated individual of the 18th century – advocating a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society.

The work is credited as a watershed in history and economics due to its comprehensive, largely accurate characterization of economic mechanisms that survive in modern economics; and also for its effective use of rhetorical technique, including structuring the work to contrast real world examples of free and fettered markets.

Why it changed the world: This book on Levi’s time in Auschwitz changed man’s understanding for suffering and gave us an awareness of our unlimited ability to work for good or evil.

If This Is a Man (United States title: Survival in Auschwitz) is a work of witness by the Italian author Primo Levi. It was influenced by his experiences in the concentration camp at Auschwitz during the Second World War. It can be described as a memoir or a personal narrative, but it goes beyond mere recollection by seeking to consider the human condition in all its extremes through the narrative form.

The first manuscript for If This Is a Man was completed by Levi in December 1946. However, in January 1947, the manuscript was refused by Einaudi. Despite this, Levi managed to find another, smaller publisher who printed 2,500 copies of the book. 1,500 of these were sold, mostly in his home town, Turin. It was not until 1956 that Einaudi published the work in a revised form. On this occasion, the book had major worldwide success, being translated into English by Stuart Woolf in 1958, and into German by Heinz Reidt in 1959.

Why it changed the world: Achebe was the first African to writer to show the world that Africa had suffered brutally under colonialism. He finally gave a voice to the millions of oppressed and misunderstood Africans and for the first time, the world listened.

Things Fall Apart is a milestone in African literature. It has achieved the status of the archetypal modern African novel in English, and is read in Nigeria and throughout Africa. It is studied widely in Europe and North America, where it has spawned numerous tertiary analytical works. It has achieved similar repute in India and Australia. Considered Achebe’s magnum opus, it has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide. Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Achebe’s writing about African society is intended to extinguish the misconception that African culture had been savage and primitive by telling the story of the colonization of the Igbo from an African point of view. In Things Fall Apart, western culture is portrayed as being “arrogant and ethnocentric,” insisting that the African culture needed a leader. As it had no kings or chiefs, Umofian culture was vulnerable to invasion by western civilization. It is felt that the repression of the Igbo language at the end of the novel contributes greatly to the destruction of the culture.

Why it changed the world: The historical hatred of the Jews in Europe was re-ignited by this anonymous book (believed to have been produced by the Russian Secret Police) and in time it formed the core of Hitler’s plan for their extermination.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a tract alleging a Jewish and Masonic plot to achieve world domination. Purportedly written by a secret group of Jews known as the Elders of Zion, the document underlies 24 protocols that are supposedly followed by the Jewish people. The Protocols has been proven to be a literary forgery and hoax as well as a clear case of plagiarism.

The Protocols became a part of the Nazi propaganda effort to justify persecution of the Jews. It was made required reading for German students. In The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 1933–1945, Nora Levin states that “Hitler used the Protocols as a manual in his war to exterminate the Jews”:

Despite conclusive proof that the Protocols were a gross forgery, they had sensational popularity and large sales in the 1920s and 1930s. They were translated into every language of Europe and sold widely in Arab lands, the United States, and England. But it was in Germany after World War I that they had their greatest success. There they were used to explain all of the disasters that had befallen the country: the defeat in the war, the hunger, the destructive inflation.

Why it changed the world: Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems was the book that sparked off the centuries-long debate of science versus religion. It was the cause of Galileo’s imprisonment and the end of his writing career (with the exception of his Discourses). It was not the science of this book which was problematic – it was Galileo’s mocking of the Pope which caused him to come before the Inquisition.

The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was a 1632 book by Galileo, comparing the Copernican system with the traditional Ptolemaic system. In the Copernican system the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun, while in the Ptolemaic system everything in the Universe circles around the Earth. The Dialogue was published in Florence under a formal license from the Inquisition.

In 1633, Galileo was convicted of “grave suspicion of heresy” based on the book, which was then placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, from which it was not removed until 1835 (after the theories it discussed had been permitted in print in 1822.) In an action that was not announced at the time, the publication of anything else he had written or ever might write was also banned.

Why it changed the world: There is no doubt that the invention of the telephone is one of the most significant and world changing inventions in the history of man. But without the telephone directory, it would never have succeeded. The popularity of the phone relied on the ability of subscribers to know who else was subscribed so they could telephone them.

The first telephone directory, consisting of a single page, was issued on February 21, 1878. It covered 50 subscribers in New Haven, Connecticut. The Reuben H. Donnelly company asserts that it published the first classified directory, or yellow pages, for Chicago, Illinois, in 1886. The first British telephone directory was published in 1880.

In the US, under current rules and practices, mobile phone and Voice over IP listings are not included in telephone directories. Efforts to create cellular directories have met stiff opposition from several fronts, including a significant percentage of subscribers who seek to avoid telemarketers.

Why it changed the world: The frequent calls for this book to be banned due to teenaged sexuality and vulgar language have kept the concept of censorship clearly in the public eye. This novel is the archetype of the teenage novel – now a very popular genre in literature.

The Catcher in the Rye is a 1951 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking world; it has also been translated into almost all of the world’s major languages. Around 250,000 copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than sixty-five million. The novel’s antihero, Holden Caulfield, has become an icon for teenage rebellion and defiance.

The novel was chosen by Time among the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005, and by Modern Library and its readers as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It has been frequently challenged in the United States for its liberal use of profanity and portrayal of sexuality and teenage angst.

Why it changed the world: This landmark epic novel proved to the world that America had a unique voice in the world of literature – a voice worth hearing. There is no doubt that America now dominates the world of modern literature.

Moby-Dick is an 1851 novel by Herman Melville. The story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby Dick, a white whale of tremendous size and ferocity. Comparatively few whaleships know of Moby Dick, and fewer yet have encountered him. In a previous encounter, the whale destroyed Ahab’s boat and bit off his leg. Ahab intends to take revenge.

In Moby-Dick, Melville employs stylized language, symbolism, and metaphor to explore numerous complex themes. Through the main character’s journey, the concepts of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of gods are all examined as Ishmael speculates upon his personal beliefs and his place in the universe.

Why it changed the world: The first “Sherlock Holmes novel” created the detective genre which has enthralled readers and filmgoers for well over a century. It can be said that Holmes changed the face of entertainment.

A Study in Scarlet is a detective mystery novel written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which was first published in 1887. It is the first story to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes, who would later become one of the most famous and iconic literary detective characters, with long-lasting interest and appeal. The book’s title derives from a speech given by Holmes to his companion Doctor Watson on the nature of his work, in which he describes the story’s murder investigation as his “study in scarlet”: “There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”

The story, and its main character, attracted little public interest when it first appeared. Although Doyle wrote fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, A Study in Scarlet is one of only four full-length novels in the original canon. The novel was followed by The Sign of Four, published in 1890.

This article is licensed under the GFDL because it contains quotations from Wikipedia.

Earlier this year, List Universe published a fine list of 10 great post-apocalyptic novels. The list below is along the same vein, but examines ONLY works published between 1805 and the start of the nuclear age in 1945. Quite possibly only three or four of these works will be familiar to anyone who is not an aficionado of this wide-ranging genre, though people may recognize many of the authors.

Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature involves any of the following: alien invasions, pandemics, severe natural disasters, the fall of civilization, the end of the world (“dying earth”) and massive wars. Most of the following works were influential to some degree, whether they influenced other authors or the wider genre in general. Most of these works can be found in most public libraries and at online literature sites such as Project Gutenberg.

PLEASE NOTE: This list goes in chronological order. Also, my cutoff date is technically July 1945, when the nuclear age began; therefore, novels such as 1949’s Earth Abides don’t belong on a pre-nuclear age list. So, please check publication dates before you say, “What about X, Y and Z?”

The Earth of the far future is dying, and men are sterile. The last few men are found in Brazil, where one of their number attempts a horrific experiment. Grainville’s novel is generally considered the first work of fiction in the “last man on earth” genre.

Despite a similar title to Grainville’s novel and a similar “last man” theme, Shelley’s The Last Man is quite different. She tells the tale of the last man to survive a plague in the late 21st century. Shelley based many of the characters on her contemporaries who had passed away; her protagonist, Lionel, is supposedly Shelley’s autobiographical image of herself. Critics verbally demolished the 3-volume novel when first published and it didn’t see daylight again until the 1960s. Nowadays The Last man is considered a true classic of the genre.

In After London, or, Wild England, an unstated cataclysm kills most people in England. In the first part, a historian looks back on the fall of civilization. The descriptions of things returning to nature are echoed in 1949’s “Earth Abides” by George Stewart, the current competing History Channel and National Geographic Channel programs “Life After People” (HC) and “Aftermath: Population Zero” (NGC), and Alan Weisman’s intriguing speculative work, The World Without Us. In the less popular part 2, Jeffries explores the return of feudalism in England.

This intriguing, politically motivated novel is classified many ways; it is sometimes considered apocalyptic because of the massive destruction in one scene. Donnelley was an agrarian populist, and his novel is a utopian/dystopian critique of the then-modern world. His farmer hero travels to New York and beholds many wonders, such as broadcast newspapers, illumination powered by the Northern Lights (figure that one out), transparent sidewalks, airships, etc. But the city of wonders hides dark secrets of massive oppression.

No “best-of…” science fiction list can fail to include at least one work by H.G. Wells, one of the most critical authors in Western civilization. Wells makes his first appearance on this list with The Time Machine. The tale is long-since familiar: A man in Victorian London builds a time machine and travels hundreds of thousands of years into the future, where he meets up with both the docile and the savage descendants of humanity. The Time Machine was twice translated to the big screen. (Because of its various components, The Time Machine fits into the genres of general sci-fi, time travel, apocalyptic and dying earth.)

People will most likely be more familiar with this seminal work than any other. Indeed, rare is the list of “great works” of apocalyptic literature (or alien attack or great sci-fi in general) that fails to mention this fantastic tale of alien invasion. It’s been retold on radio (which caused a panic in 1938), on the big screen and TV, and in numerous books. It’s been re-imagined in even more books and influenced such movies as Independence Day (which is really just a fancy retelling of War of the Worlds).

A highly praised novella (a type that’s longer than a short story but shorter than a novel), The Machine Stops should seem familiar to latter-day readers. Echoes of this gem can be found in The Matrix, the Internet, video-conferencing and more. Forster wrote about a post-apocalyptic humanity that lives underground and is fully connected to The Machine for all their needs. Unlike The Matrix, humans are fully aware of their situation and can freely leave, but are discouraged because of the toxic conditions on the surface. The Machine eventually becomes an object of worship. It’s a nice, early entry in the man-vs.- machine concept.

This horror fantasy novel is one of the first of the “dying earth” subgenre. Millions of years in the future, the sun has done dark and the descendants of humanity (“abhumans”) struggle to survive in massive pyramid redoubts against both the darkness and powers on the outside. The only natural light comes from Earth’s remaining volcanism. H.P Lovecraft described the novel as “one of the potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”

Jack London was famous for his novels of the great north (The Call of the Wild, etc.). He also wrote this apocalyptic tale, which takes places in 2072, 60 years after the “scarlet plague” killed most everyone on earth. One of the survivors realizes that he needs to pass on humanity’s knowledge or it will be lost forever. Interesting note: Six years after London published his novel, a terrible plague did in fact grip the world. The Spanish flu killed at least 50 million people in 1918-1920 (some sources say as high as 100 million people, which would make the death toll more than both world wars combined).

This Czech play is famous for having introduced the world to the term “robots.” With a plot that would ring familiar to any Terminator or Battlestar Galactica fan, R.U.R. features robots who were initially created to serve humans but who rebel and destroy humanity instead. Fun fact: A 1938 BBC production of R.U.R. is credited with being the first-ever science fiction television program.

Our humanity (homo sapiens) is the first and most primitive of 19 subsequent human species on earth in Stapledon’s massive work. Many civilizations rise and fall throughout the 2 billion-year scope of the novel. Stapledon anticipated such things as genetic manipulation and nuclear holocaust in Last and First Men. He deeply influenced the works of many people, including C.S. Lewis, Brian Aldiss and Arthur C. Clark.

Wells’ final entry on my list pretty much accurately foretold the aerial destruction of cities in the next world war, and the eventual development of ballistic missiles launched from subs. Wells was mainly concerned with pushing his utopia of a secular, one-world government where science reigns supreme and dissenters are given the chance to kill themselves a la Socrates. Sci-fi aficionados might be more familiar with the 1933 movie version starring Raymond Massey, which diverts from the novel considerably (if not thematically); Wells himself wrote the screenplay.

This intriguing tale and its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1934), had tremendous influence on sci-fi and fantasy. Echoes of When Worlds Collide can be seen in the comic strips Flash Gordon (started in 1934) and Superman (who first flew in 1938). Although the science in these two apocalyptic tales is sketchy, they’re still fun (if a bit turgid in places). The story: Two “rogue planets” are heading to our solar system. “Alpha” will cause much destruction when it passes near Earth before it swings around the sun to come back and annihilate the planet, while “Beta” will assume a stable orbit. A group builds spaceships to travel to Beta and escape the holocaust. The 1951 George Pal movie version, which changes some of the characters, is my favorite flick from the golden age of popcorn sci-fi. It’s supposed to be remade for the 2010 movie season.

In many ways (though perhaps not intentionally), this novella is an answer to Wells’ Shape of Things to Come. The oppressive, centralized government is the villain here, which attempts to wipe out all individuality. (It’s a recurring theme of dystopian fiction.) In the story, Equality 7-2521 excels at math and science, but the government decrees that he will be a street sweeper. He escapes from the city through an old subway and discovers the world apart from the oppressive government. He and his love learn of the past thanks to a preserved library of books. Fascinating note: Rand once suggested to Walt Disney that he make a movie of Anthem, because animation could tell the story better than live action.

Nightfall is the only one of these works that doesn’t take place on (or near) Earth, but it’s definitely apocalyptic. Six stars continually illuminate a civilization far away. Scientists discover that every 2,049 years, the most visible sun is eclipsed, causing temporary darkness. But because the civilization only experiences light, past eclipses led immediate to the fall of civilization—which is, of course, what happens. A highly influential story (Asimov later expanded it to a novel with Robert Silverberg), Nightfall has been anthologized at least 48 times!

Notable Extras: By The Waters of Babylon, Zothique, Rescue Party, The Moon Maid

Frequently throughout the history of writing, people have invented their own languages – whether it be to conceal something’s true meaning, or to add depth to a story (as in the case of the Lord of the Rings). This list looks at some of the fascinating (and fun) fictional languages.

Alienese is a set fictional languages that often appear, usually as graffiti, in the background of the show Futurama. The transliterates directly into English, but the second is much more complex; the alphabet is described as one in which “next letter is given by the summation of all previous letters plus the current letter.” Fans have spent their time translating these messages and revealing additional, hidden humor on the show.

In the Harry Potter books, Parseltongue is the language of snakes, and can be understood by human Parselmouths, which are very rare. It can be spoken by Salazar Slytherin and his descendants, including Voldemort, who passed the ability unto Harry when he tried to kill him. J.K. Rowling has stated that she named the language after “an old word for someone who has a problem with the mouth.” To non-speakers, it sounds like a series of hisses, but Parselmouths hear it in their native language.

Aklo is a fictional language often associated with the writing of forbidden or occult texts. It was first invented by Arthur Machen in his 1899 short story “The White People,” in which two men discussing the nature of Evil consult a diary of a young girl, written with Aklo words. It is notable for its widespread use in other fiction; H.P. Lovecraft used it in two stories from his Cthulhu Mythos (pictured above), “The Dunwich Horror” and “The Haunter of the Dark.” Alan Moore used the language in his story The Courtyard, in which Aklo is not only an alien language, but also a key that opens the human mind. Since it is only used fleetingly and by a wide range of authors, there is no set grammar or vocabulary, and it is unclear just what languages from which it draws its most influences.

Mangani is the language of the apes from Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan novels, and also the word by which the apes refer to themselves. It is described as being composed of guttural sounds that represent nouns and basic concepts. However, the written lexicon as provided by Burroughs is much more complex and made of real words similar in pronunciation to many African languages from the area in which the books take place. The recently discovered Bili Ape has been retroactively compared to the Mangani, both in size and habitat.

Yes, the language that is the bane of high school seniors everywhere. Invented by George Orwell for his dystopian novel 1984, Newspeak was designed by fictional totalitarian regime the Party to enforce its rule on people. Closely based on English, its vocabulary constantly shrinks to preclude any words that convey the ideas of freedom, rebellion, or free thought. Its main goal is to remove any ambiguity from language, giving one word total meaning; this is commonly done by making one word (such as “think”) both a noun and a verb. Opposite words were replaced by a pre- or suffixed version of a word; for example, “bad” became “ungood.” This is thought to have been influenced by Esperanto, which frequently creates new words through a complicated system of adding prefixes and suffixes. As I can’t find a good clip of someone speaking Newspeak, I have included the national anthem of Oceania taken from the film version. The anthem is sung in English.

Invented by author Anthony Burgess, Nadsat is the idiomatic language spoken by the teenagers in A Clockwork Orange. The word itself comes from a transliteration of the Russian word for “teen.” It is a vernacular speech, composed by the youth counterculture; it is basically English, with some transliterated words from Russian, patterns from Cockney rhyming slang, the King James bible, and words invented by Burgess himself. All nadsat words are concrete, lacking the complexity to discuss a subject such as philosophy. The author intended this to show the shallow nature of the juveniles’ minds. In the video above you can hear the main character (Alex) speaking in Nadsat.

Simlish is the spoken language of the Sims, first heard in SimCopter, but most prominently featured in The Sims, Sims 2, and Sims 3. In order to avoid the cost of recording repetitive dialogue and translating it, the project director had the voice actors improvise a gibberish language. The end result was that players were able to fill in their own dialogue, and imagine the character interactions more realistically than a computer could simulate. Soon, the games had songs sung in Simlish, and many famous recording artists have since re-recorded some of their tracks for various Sims games and expansions. Written Simlish, glimpsed in reading materials and on television, is a combination of the Wingdings font and Zodiac symbols, but have no grounding in real grammar. All other games made by Sims genre creator Will Wright employ Simlish as a language. The video above is Lily Allen singing her song Smile in Simlish. You can spend hours on youtube looking up some of the many famous singers who have made a simlish version of their songs – such as Kajagoogoo – Too Shy. The Ting-tings even recorded a song in simlish for their album “We started nothing”.

The only actual language on this list, Esperanto is noteworthy for being one of the most successful constructed languages in history. It was first detailed by L.L. Zamenhof in his book Unua Libro, in 1887, published under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto. The word “esperanto” means “one who hopes” in the language. Today, it is estimated that there are between one hundred thousand and two million fluent Esperanto speakers, and between 200-2000 native speakers. Both Google and Wikipedia provide services in Esperanto. It is the language of instruction at the Akademio Internacia de la Sciencoj in San Marino. Its structure is heavily influenced by the Indo-European languages, and its vocabulary is mostly derived from the Romance and, to a lesser extent, the Germanic languages.

Qapla’! The language of Star Trek’s Klingons is today a nearly fully-developed language. It was first heard in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and its sound was devised by actor James Doohan (Scotty). Paramount Pictures subsequently hired linguist Marc Okrand to fully flesh out the language, which he deliberately designed to be “alien.” The first Klingon dictionary was published in 1985, and other books such as Klingon phrasebooks have supplemented the language. The Shakespeare plays Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet have been famously translated into Klingonese, after a famous line in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: “Shakespeare is best read in the original Klingon.” It is said that Okrand was heavily influenced by Native American languages, and the tendency of the language to develop long chains of nouns (ex: “gun and sword and spear”) comes from Sanskrit. As of 2006, it held the world record for the fictional language spoken by the most people.

The above term is used to describe the many fictional languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien for The Lord of the Rings and other works taking place in Middle-Earth. This was done out of a desire to give real linguistic depth to names and places that Tolkien felt was lacking in fantasy and science fiction. The two most mature of these languages are Quenya (High-Elvish – heard in the video clip above) and Sindarin. Quenya is comparable to Latin in that it is an old language used contemporarily (in Middle-Earth) as an official language. When written in English, the words contain many accents, which are usually on every vowel (they also employ the dieresis, the two little dots above a letter). These two languages were heavily influenced by Finnish and Welsh, though as they developed further, the influence became less and less apparent. The depth and complexity of these two languages are incredible, as demonstrated by their influence on Middle-Earth culture and other Middle-Earth languages. What is even more amazing is the sheer number of languages Tolkien created for his world, with each race having dozens of offshoots and dialects. His work with the many tongues of Middle-Earth truly exemplified the potential of fictional language, and demonstrates the importance that language plays in creating a society.

Contributor: antmansbigxmas

Early on in the life of the site we did a list of books that changed the world. It is such a broad topic that we are finally revisiting it to produce a second list. Before complaining about books that you think are missing from here, be sure to check the original list as you may find it listed there instead. Feel free to tell us what books you think deserve a place on the next list of books that changed the world. This list is in no particular order – it is impossible to order such diverse books.

Why it changed the world: Newton’s Principia, published in 1687, laid the foundation for much of modern physics and mathematics.

The Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (mathematical principles of natural philosophy) is a three-volume work by Isaac Newton published on 5 July 1687. It contains the statement of Newton’s laws of motion forming the foundation of classical mechanics, as well as his law of universal gravitation and a derivation of Kepler’s laws for the motion of the planets (which were first obtained empirically). The Principia is widely regarded as one of the most important scientific works ever written. It is in a supplement to the Principia, entitled General Scholium, that Newton expressed his famous Hypotheses non fingo (“I feign no hypotheses” or “I make no guesses”).

Why it changed the world: A truly radical text in its time, the Analects have been the dominant influence on Chinese thought and culture.

The Analects, also known as the Analects of Confucius, are a record of the words and acts of the central Chinese thinker and philosopher Confucius and his disciples, as well as the discussions they held. The Chinese title literally means “discussion over [Confucius'] words.” Written during the Spring and Autumn Period through the Warring States Period (ca. 479 BCE – 221 BCE), the Analects is the representative work of Confucianism and continues to have a tremendous influence on Chinese and East Asian thought and values today. The Analects were almost certainly penned and compiled by disciples and second-generation disciples of Confucius, albeit being mostly about Confucius himself and his thought.

Why it changed the world: While many of Freud’s theories have now been dismissed by modern specialists, his concept that the unconscious retains much that the conscious mind appears to have forgotten has changed and influenced the way that people think about themselves.

The Interpretation Of Dreams introduces the Ego, and describes Freud’s theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Dreams, in Freud’s view, were all forms of “wish-fulfillment” — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort, whether something recent or something from the recessess of the past. The initial print run of the book was very low — it took many years to sell out the first 600 copies. Freud revised the book at least eight times, and in the third edition added an extensive section which treated dream symbolism very literally. Later psychoanalysts have expressed frustration with this section, as it encouraged the notion that dream interpretation was a straightforward hunt for symbols of sex, penises, etc.

Why it changed the world: It brought together the knowledge and theories of Ancient Greek, Persian, and Indian medicine (largely forgotten otherwise) and combined it with contemporary 11th century understanding. It laid the foundations of modern medical science.

The Canon of Medicine is a 14-volume Arabic medical encyclopedia written by a Persian scientist and physician Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) and completed in 1025. It is considered the first pharmacopoeia, and among other things, the book is known for the introduction of systematic experimentation and quantification into the study of physiology, the discovery of the contagious nature of infectious diseases, the introduction of quarantine to limit the spread of contagious diseases, and the introduction of evidence-based medicine, experimental medicine, clinical trials, randomized controlled trials, efficacy tests, clinical pharmacology, neuropsychiatry, physiological psychology, risk factor analysis, and the idea of a syndrome in the diagnosis of specific diseases.

Why it changed the world: They are the source of much of our knowledge of the ancient world and the foundation of history in Western literature.

The Histories of Herodotus of Halicarnassus is considered the first work of history in Western literature. Written about 440 BC in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, The Histories tells the story of the Greco-Persian Wars between the Achaemenid Empire and the Greek city-states in the 5th century BC. Herodotus travelled extensively around the ancient world, conducting interviews and collecting stories for his book.

Why it changed the world: Most of Mill’s theories are now full integrated into modern democracies – particularly the need to protect the rights of the individual.

On Liberty is a philosophical work by 19th century English philosopher John Stuart Mill, first published in 1859. To the Victorian readers of the time it was a radical work, advocating moral and economic freedom of individuals from the state. Perhaps the most memorable point made by Mill in this work, and his basis for liberty, is that “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”. Mill is compelled to say this in opposition to what he calls the “tyranny of the majority”, wherein through control of etiquette and morality, society is an unelected power that can do horrific things.

Why it changed the world: Plato’s contrast between the imperfect world of mortals and the perfect forms of immortal souls had a great deal of influence over Christianity and Islam and Western philosophy in general.

The Republic is a Socratic dialogue by Plato, written in approximately 380 BC. It is one of the most influential works of philosophy and political theory, and Plato’s best known work. In Plato’s fictional dialogues the characters of Socrates as well as various Athenians and foreigners discuss the meaning of justice and examine whether the just man is happier than the unjust man by constructing an imaginary city ruled by philosopher-kings.

Why it changed the world: It brought the concept of book censorship to a head and eventually helped to overturn it.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence written in 1928. Printed privately in Florence, Italy in 1928, it was not printed in the United Kingdom until 1960 (other than in an underground edition issued by Inky Stephensen’s Mandrake Press in 1929). Lawrence considered calling this book Tenderness at one time and made significant alterations to the original manuscript in order to make it palatable to readers. It has been published in three different versions. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four-letter words and perhaps because the lovers were a working-class male and an aristocratic female.

Why it changed the world: Popularized the use of vernacular English as the dominant language in English literature (rather than Latin or French commonly used at the time) – the Canterbury Tales set the standard for future works of English literature.

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century (two of them in prose, the rest in verse). The tales, some of which are originals and others not, are contained inside a frame tale and told by a collection of pilgrims on a pilgrimage from London Borough of Southwark to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. The Canterbury Tales are written in Middle English. Although the tales are considered to be his magnum opus, some believe the structure of the tales is indebted to the works of The Decameron, which Chaucer is said to have read on an earlier visit to Italy.

Why it changed the world: It set practical standards in geography which lasted 1500 years, and is our best record of the state of geographic knowledge in the 2nd century.

The Geographia or Geography is Ptolemy’s main work besides the Almagest. It is a compilation of what was known about the world’s geography in the Roman Empire of the 2nd century. Ptolemy relied mainly on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, and on gazetteers of the Roman and ancient Persian empire, but most of his sources beyond the perimeter of the Empire were unreliable. The original work included maps, but due to the difficulties involved in copying them by hand, they have fallen out of the manuscript transmission. The work has been discovered and used through the ages by several noted people around the world. Ptolemy also devised and provided instructions on how to create maps both of the whole inhabited world and of the Roman provinces. Ptolemy was well aware that he knew about only a quarter of the globe.

This article is licensed under the GFDL because it contains quotations from Wikipedia.

Contributor: JFrater

Postmodernism has become widely recognized as a movement consisting of an epic scope, innovative techniques and wide ranges of psychological and intellectual impact. The beginning of postmodernism is uncertain, but for the sake of continuity, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has been chosen as the chronological starting point for this list. Books have been decided upon by overall excellence rather than impact.

A triple-whammy from the master abstract minimalist, whose technique of viewing objectively the subjective world was taken to its zenith in this trilogy of meta-fictional neurosis, in which characters lives and situations seem to splice together until it becomes apparent they were the fictions of one person all along. A formidable work of Joycean density.

A labyrinth of ergodic structure, Danielewski’s novel has become a recent cult classic and by simply opening its pages its conspicuous that there’s no other book like it: encoded typography, color-word associations and the meticulous inclusion of mythological and metaphysical references turn this roaring institution of a novel into a rorschach test on a Minsa scale.

Though Slaughterhouse Five may be his best-known work, this is the one that should be included in the pantheon of solipsistic narration. Often overlooked as self-indulgent and uneven, Breakfast is a personalized account of the phrase “perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.” Pontiac salesman Dwayne Hoover becomes obsessed with the work of sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout, eventually spiraling into acute eruptions of anxiety when he believes that he is the sole human combating a world of reificated humanoids. Black satire at the peak of its powers.

The works of Borges are impossible to describe without a depth of analysis, since he has the power to include in five pages a universe of infinite captivation. Even today, many of the short stories in this collection are open to interpretation.

The Gonzo journalist epic is included here for its superior attempts to splice fact and fiction through surrealist imagery to construct the greatest drug and political satire of its epoch.

No other book of its kind is as gruesome, funny, polemical or disturbing as the story of Wall Street yuppie Patrick Bateman as he calmly iterates the details of his homicidal life, all in an apathetic tone that combines magical realism with minimalism in a way no other book can. Its swift change from comedy to horror happens in such breakneck speed that its stream of consciousness takes on a new level of apprehension.

The most paradoxic war novel ever written, Heller’s novel is widely recognized as one of the greatest novels ever written, its structure centering on irony and repetition that would grow irritating in lesser hands. Cemented Heller’s mastery in the literary world.

To faithfully describe this novel is to end in failure: a pastiche of paranoia, pop culture, sex and politics that turns narration on its head with subtle metaphorical discipline, as the lives of several people center around the parabolic venture of the rocket “0000.” Comparisons of the novel and its symbols to Ulysses and Moby-Dick do not do justice to its singularity.

So much has already been written about this book’s impact that to go further would seem superfluous. Arguably the novel that put postmodernism on its contemporary path, filtering paranoia, drugs and influences from erotica to detective fiction to science fiction comprises one of the most influential and unforgettable works in modern literature. [JFrater: This is one of my all-time favorite books - if you haven't read it - do it!]

The recently-departed Wallace left behind the most intriguing, in-depth, comedic, sorrowful, apprehensive and overall sagaciously maximalistic read in the postmodern canon. The parallelism between the Enfield Tennis Academy and the Ennet Drug and Alcohol Recovery House using alternating esoteric and colloquial words (and his trademark endnotes) creates the most epic and exhausting novel of modern times.

Honorary Mentions: Finnegans Wake, Fight Club, The Unfortunates, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Godel Escher Bach

Contributor: F. McClure

It’s a classic theme of science fiction: something really, really bad happens, and mankind is knocked back to the Stone Age. Of course, with the dropping of atomic bombs by the U.S. to end World War II, people came to realize that for the first time Man himself possessed the power to bring about a global cataclysm. And science fiction wasted no time in examining the possible effects (there were speculative stories in print well before the Manhattan Project was even conceived).

But nuclear holocaust isn’t the only way Man’s thin veneer of civilization can be stripped by catastrophe. It may have even already happened in our past (the vast majority of cultures have a Great Flood in their mythos). Regardless, what is perhaps amazing is that within the time frame of verifiable history, to include more than 60 years of nuclear capability, no such calamity has occurred.

Shouldn’t stop us from thinking about the possibilities, however. Here then are 10 science fiction novels dealing with humanity’s response to overwhelming devastation. They are in no particular order. The list is not at all a “top ten” nor does it even remotely presume to be comprehensive. If your favorite isn’t represented, by all means comment on that fact. This is simply a list bound by a common theme.

This best-selling 1997 novel details the approach and aftermath of a comet striking earth with disastrous results. A large number of disparate characters are well-drawn and the book essentially focuses on the changes in their lives. In fact, much of the novel takes place before the comet actually strikes. But when the “Hammer” falls, civilization as we know it crumbles and the very survival of the characters is certainly in doubt. New social mores are developed through necessity, as humans are put in the catch-22 of having to band together while being able to trust no one. The book is noteworthy for making us actually care about the characters we come to know, even though there are dozens of them.

Buy the book at Amazon: Lucifer’s Hammer

Probably the earliest (1957) post-apocalyptic science fiction novel to truly achieve mass distribution. The mechanism of destruction is atomic war. Though widely taught in high schools around the world during the 1960s and 70s, when concerns about the Cold War were as rampant as they were in the 50’s, the book is not a treatise on the triumph of the human spirit. In fact, stoic acceptance and even government-sponsored euthanasia figure prominently. But the characters, for the most part, do not wallow in self-pity… they just go about their business. The main story is that of a United States submarine being placed under the command of Australian authorities (the northern latitudes become uninhabitable first). Although it certainly made an impression on millions of young adult readers back in the day, and is widely considered a classic, the list author views it as the weakest science fiction novel on the list.

Buy the book at Amazon: On the Beach

Published before On The Beach in 1949, what is posited here is a global epidemic that makes the Black Death look like last year’s winter cold. One gets the feeling that 99.9%+ of the entire human race is wiped out. The novel did win some awards, and has never been truly unavailable, but it never got the “buzz” of On The Beach. And although it can be powerful on first reading, it really doesn’t hold up. You see, our protagonist is essentially alone for a god-awful number of pages. He was up in the mountains and got bit by a rattlesnake, almost dying, so he “missed” the huge turmoil that mass death imposed on society. A lot of that part is very interesting, in detailing why and where power either stays on or fails, what happens to critters and plants, that sort of stuff. But it does tend to drag, and when the protagonist finally hooks up with a woman, that part starts to drag as well. It all builds towards what sort of society the progeny of the few survivors will create.

Buy the book at Amazon: Earth Abides

This novel won the 1961 Hugo award and is widely considered an outright classic, even outside the science fiction genre. That said, for anyone who is not Catholic or interested in that religion, it can be an extremely difficult read. Centuries after your standard nuclear holocaust, we have a monastery in the U.S. dedicated to preserving scientific knowledge until the time comes to rebuild a technology-based civilization. It was founded by one Leibowitz, who had converted from Judaism (this is an extremely religious-themed novel). Anyway, the book’s nominal main character comes across a cache of writings and stuff that appears to have belonged to Leibowitz himself. Enter the Church for verification. There’s a long section on whether Leibowitz will be canonized or not. Then, we have another Renaissance and the rise of a new technological age. All with the usual politics and backstabbing you would expect in such a cycle involving the Church, of course. The novel could be considered an allegory of the role of the Church from the Dark Ages to the Industrial Revolution.

Buy the book at Amazon: A Canticle for Leibowitz

Huge numbers of people were disappointed with the movie starring Kevin Costner. And no wonder, for the movie failed to emotionally capture the central theme of the novel: that people, faced with a holocaust, will cling to anything that strikes of normalcy. In the movie, Costner’s character was presented pretty much as a standard cinematic hero, whereas in the book he is extremely uncomfortable with his “role” and becomes amazed at the trust people place in him just because he is wearing the clothing of a postman. So he “becomes” one, agreeing to try and deliver mail — at first with no real intention of doing so. What makes this book excellent is that the protagonist gradually morphs into a real version of the facade he adopts. This in turn serves as the foreground of humanity in very trying times desperately attempting to rebuild communication and a sense of community. Of course, there are those who opt to go in the other direction and take what they can — and the Postman becomes a critical player in that essentially good-vs-evil conflict.

Buy the book at Amazon: The Postman (Bantam Classics)

This is the only “quest” novel on the list. About a thousand years from now, after a huge plague, humanity exists in isolated pockets with essentially Amish-type technology (and a concurrent insular social structure). However, ruins and trashed roads remain — the Roadmakers, as the ancients are called, have plenty of visible reminders of their existence. Many believe that there is a place known as Haven where the secrets of their technology remain to be discovered. But as we get started, one previous expedition to find Haven has been wiped out — to all but the very last man. There’s a lot of stuff about how rare and valued actual books of the Roadmakers are esteemed, but eventually a new quest sets out on the path of the one that met with disaster. Adventures along the way, as you might expect. Very craftsman-like in its construction, with believable characters. The ending tends to leave some people wanting something different, but that was no problem for this list author.

Buy the book at Amazon: Eternity Road

We start with nuclear war in the recent past, but this novel is quite different from most such. It is set on the coast of California. A passable existence is being eked out by a small community. Some farm and some run nets for fish. A group of teenagers do their work, but also take jaunts to places they probably should not go. There is a very fascinating depiction of folks from various lifestyles and communities coming together for a combination of trade and carnival. But the crux of the book is that the Japanese are the world’s foremost power now, not the U.S. — but they are leaving the state pretty much to its own, as long as rebuilding does not occur. Folks try to rebuild bridges and railroads, but those keep getting hit from the sky. Ultimately, this novel is about relationships. One particularly cantankerous relationship is between our protagonist and his father, a cold, stern man of importance to the community who oversees the fishing operation. This ambitious book represents a truly unique take on the post-apocalyptic theme. And then the author went ahead and wrote two more books of two completely different possible futures of Orange County.

Buy the book at Amazon: The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych)

Here we have to talk movies and television as well as books. Taking care of the movies first, the best adaptation of this 1954 novel was 1971’s The Omega Man. Lesser films were The Last Man on Earth (1964) and I Am Legend (2007). As for TV, well, chances are that every single Twilight Zone episode you ever loved was written either by Richard Matheson or Rod Serling himself — with Matheson getting the nod most often. It would be fair to say that Matheson’s foremost work was in his insanely extensive television credits. But he could write for print, as well — his short story “Born Of Man And Woman” is twice as freaky as Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” As far as I Am Legend goes, it is the opinion of the list author that the ending of The Omega Man is superior to the ending in the novel… something that is quite rare. Anyway, we have another plague-story (biological weapons rather than nature, this time around). Our hero has an experimental vaccine, and injects himself just in time. Well, there are also naturally-resistant folks, but who can’t stand light as a result, and they form a cult. So every day, the protagonist goes out for supplies and what-not, but must return before dark for his daily battles with these weird “vampires” who are out to get him. Subplots which actually help (for once!) get woven in, and we end up with a fine example of the absolute mastery that was cranked out continually by Matheson over a long and storied career.

Buy the book at Amazon: I Am Legend

Who doesn’t know this classic story? It’s as pop-culture as it comes. But while the movies maintained many of the core concepts of the novel (time-dilation, division of ape culture into military, judiciary and science based on race, degradation of humans, etc), most folks will be surprised that the book is quite different from what we normally think of as the Planet of the Apes saga. In fact, an argument could be made that this book does not fit within the title of the list at all! That’s all that will be said about that so as not to spoil it. Ultimately, fudging had to occur to include POTA, because otherwise the comments would have been overwhelming regarding its absence.

Buy the book at Amazon: Planet of the Apes

Sadly, this once-popular 1959 novel has been fading into obscurity for a long time. It is without doubt one of the best-imagined depictions of the aftermath of nuclear war for a small community that gets somewhat lucky regarding the fallout pattern. It is set in Florida. The protagonist gets a little bit of warning, due to the fact that his brother works for SAC. Then folks start figuring out what to do. It becomes almost a treatise on surviving once everything we accept as normal fails. Of particular interest is how race relations are treated… the reader must understand that this was written in the late 50’s, right before the civil rights movement, and many of today’s readers will come away with Malachai as their favorite character. Alas, Babylon must have been quite an eye-opener when it first hit the stands. Depictions such as a little girl figuring out out how to put fish on the table when they aren’t biting due to oppressive heat, and folks realizing that an actual expedition to find salt (of all things!) is critical to survival, combined with superb characterizations, make this one the best of all. An utter classic, and worth putting in your bomb shelter should you ever build one.

Buy the book at Amazon: Alas, Babylon

Contributor: grubthrower