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onewheelwizzard:
I fully expect my child to read Ender's Game for class in middle school. I really hope so, anyway. But aside from that one book I don't think Orson Scott Card is going to have much of a lasting legacy.
Keep in mind that Ender's Game is not quite at the same difficulty level as either of the others mentioned. I'd expect a teenager to be ready to read it at least a year or two before being ready to read Huxley or Bradbury.
I really hope Terry Pratchett stays at least as popular as he is now, but he doesn't really have a big splashy masterwork, just a constantly evolving and improving fantasy universe of wondrous proportions.
Maybe Snow Crash will give Neal Stephenson a posthumous following, but I'm not holding my breath for it.
Dimmukane:
I imagine Pratchett will probably be remembered in the same way that Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft are remembered. Even though Good Omens IS a masterwork....
KharBevNor:
I'd go for Mort or Guards! Guards! before Good Omens, probably.
Are Huxley and Bradbury difficult? I read Brave New World and The Illustrated Man when I was 11, Fahrenheit 451 maybe a year later. The only author I remember finding too difficult and putting off for a while was Mervyn Peake, and then only 'Titus Alone', which is fucking batshit.
Mervyn Peake deserves to be remembered, actually. Gormenghast is utterly fantastic. I suspect the fantasy trappings put a lot of people off (though really, it's not fantasy at all), and also, they are quite difficult works. I don't know many people of my age who have read them.
Dimmukane:
My favorite so far was Night Watch, actually, followed by Sourcery and The Last Hero, then Good Omens.
Fahrenheit 451 was basically a more abstract version of The Giver (or vice versa), which I think everyone in Maryland had to read for sixth grade (11 years old). I know not all of his books are like that, but dystopia is kinda easy to pull off, when you look at the sheer number of books/movies/video games that use it as the center element of the story. And as far as I know, The Giver is the easiest to read. Theoretically, once you've read that, you've read all of them. But a lot of people seem to get a kick out of dystopia. I wonder what that says about us?
KharBevNor:
I wouldn't particularly hold The Giver up as a great example of dystopian fiction. Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and Brave New World are what I would call the canonical 'trilogy' of dystopian fiction. The reason the dystopia is so popular, and done so often (though not that often), is that it is of course a way to comment on present politics and social conditions
Also, on the subject of genre fiction, raised earlier, I would like to enquire why someone who only (or mainly) reads genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, horror, historical, war, detective, thriller) is so easy to criticise, but someone who never reads genre fiction is alright.
Science fiction, I would argue, has been the most important literary genre in the second half of the twentieth century, for many reasons. This is not just my own geekery talking. It has shaped our cultural discourse and attitudes to technology and its social and personal ramifications in ways no other genre has. Information technology, the internet, surveillance, conspicuous consumption, the war on drugs, the war on terror: science fiction wrote about them first and best.
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