Appendix N

This year I've seen a number of people posting their version of Appendix N, the list of fictional inspirations mentioned in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Here's my take on that, but naturally I'm looking at science fiction rather than fantasy, and out of the numerous works I've read, I'm focussing on those that have had the most impact on my gaming.

• Poul Anderson: The Polesotechnic League and Flandry stories, covering trade pioneers (civilian scouts) and Imperial intelligence respectively. Together, these form the bulk of Anderson's Future History, and are notable for the focus on solving puzzles; they had more influence on my earliest Traveller campaigns than anything else. Also consider The Star Fox, a yarn of interstellar privateering.
• Christopher Anvil: Mind Partner, a short story which was one of the original inspirations for Arion's strange meta-narrative; the others were Nick Bostrum's Simulation Hypothesis and my periodic dreams of other worlds, when on waking I briefly wonder which is the dream and which is reality.
• Isaac Asimov: The original Foundation series (the collapse of an interstellar empire) and Robot stories (the Three Laws of Robotics and how to circumvent them), which were not originally connected. I'm not as fond of the later sequels.
• Iain M. Banks: The Culture novels; space hippies with really big guns, meddling with other civilisations - it's for their own good, honestly. Megastructures, AI, strange weapons, weird aliens; start with Consider Phlebas. Also consider the stand-alone novel Against a Dark Background; mind-linked combat teams and the Lazy Gun, a super-weapon right out of Looney Tunes.
• James Blish: The Cities in Flight quartet, of which my favourite is Earthman, Come Home. Gives a good feel for the scale of the galaxy; follows the adventures of a flying New York City as a migrant worker among the stars, providing industrial and research services to backward planets. My copy includes an appendix offering a handy guide to Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, in which Cities in Flight was rooted and which I used to sketch out the timelines for my own campaigns, back in the day.
• Lois McMaster Bujold: The Vorkosigan Saga. This one has a bit of everything; soldiers, spies, weird societies, clone doppelgangers, interstellar politics, even a Regency-style comedy romance involving a sex change operation at one point. Can be read in any order, but start with Shards of Honour, although it's not the first, nor does it have the hero of the saga in it. Bujold is very good at writing from a male viewpoint, and the main protagonist - a crippled dwarf tactical genius - is unique.
• John Brunner: Interstellar Empire (explaining how you could have a galaxy of planets at wildly differing tech levels), The Shockwave Rider (cyberpunk before it was cool), Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation, TVs that use CGI to insert the viewer into the story, a US-China war, mind-programmed assassins before they were cool, and lots of other plausible near-future stuff).
• C.J. Cherryh: The Alliance/Union universe, especially Merchanter's Luck (in which various factions help the protagonist for their own purposes), Downbelow Station (warfare among colonies), and The Pride of Chanur (the closest thing to Traveller aslan in fiction). To my mind this is the fictional universe most like 2300AD.
• James S.A. Corey: The Expanse novels and short stories. Hard SF with interesting takes on building an interstellar empire, vanished precursor aliens, and FTL travel using jump gates.
• David Drake: The Hammer's Slammers and RCN stories, dealing with mercenaries and naval personnel respectively. The protagonists of the RCN novels are definitely PCs. Drake's writing is also a masterclass in taking older stories - such as the Odyssey - and reskinning them for SF.
• William Gibson: The Sprawl Trilogy; Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive. Cyberpunk done right.
• Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (powered armour troopers and the rise of a relativistic civilisation), All My Sins Remembered (high-tech espionage).
• Robert A Heinlein: Starship Troopers (powered armour troopers vs arachnids, and a militaristic society); Citizen of the Galaxy (free traders among strange cultures); The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (revolt in a lunar prison colony, and AI before it was cool).
• Frank Herbert: Dune (political machinations and factions in an interstellar empire); The Dragon in the Sea (SF submarines); Hellstrom's Hive (a very strange human society). I'm not as fond of the sequels to Dune, and having read one of the prequels, I wouldn't touch the rest with a laser rangefinder.
• Murray Leinster: The Med Ship stories (an unusual take on scoutships, their lone pilots, and the societies they encounter).
• Linda Nagata: The Red: First Light (corporate armies and the most credible take on a friendly AI I've yet read).
• Larry Niven: The Known Space stories, most famously Ringworld. Megastructures, weird aliens, strange human cultures. Chaosium's Ringworld RPG was such a good implementation of this setting that authors writing stories in the universe were given it as a "series bible".
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye. The definitive story of first contact with aliens, with lots of detail about interstellar navy life.
• H Beam Piper: The Future History, including the short story collections Federation and Empire. Best known for Little Fuzzy (first contact with creatures like ewoks) though my personal favourite is Star Viking (I suspect the inspiration for Traveller's feudal technocracy government type and the Sword Worlds in the Spinward Marches).
• Jerry Pournelle: The Future History stories, especially the ones about Falkenburg's Mercenary Legion. The History covers a thousand years of warfare, politics and sociology, and has multiple spinoffs written by others.
• Christopher Rowley: The Vang Trilogy - Starhammer, The Military Form, The Battlemaster. If you've played the Halo games or read/watched The Expanse, you might wonder whether the creators had read the Vang books.
• Eric Frank Russell: Next of Kin (lone scout taken prisoner schemes against his captors), Wasp (interstellar saboteur).
• James H Schmitz: The short stories about Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee, all set in the Federation of the Hub; they are periodically collected, and there's also a short novel, The Lion Game. These are about psionics, espionage, and strange societies; Schmitz is unusual for the era (1960s) in having strong female leads.
• Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash. Cyberpunk done right again, arguably even better than William Gibson. Interesting take on a balkanised planet, and a very memorable supersonic cyborg dog.
• E.C. Tubb: The Dumarest of Terra novels. This is as close to Traveller as fiction gets, at least the pre-Third Imperium Traveller of the late 1970s. Often criticised because it takes Dumarest 30+ novels to find Earth, but that's missing the point; his quest is simply a reason for him to move on to the next planet and the next story, much like Star Trek's five year mission.
• Jack Vance: The Demon Princes quintet (a saga of revenge against crimelords lurking beyond civilised space), the Planet of Adventure quartet (marooned scout wanders across a multi-species planet to find a way home). Adam Reith of the latter series is the quintessential interstellar scout.
• Peter Watts: Blindsight. A first contact story which asks some big questions about intelligence and consciousness, and comes up with some disturbing answers. Also the ship's captain is a vampire. This was a major influence on my Dark Nebula campaigns.
• David Weber: The Honor Harrington novels, at least the first dozen or so; I lost interest eventually. Interstellar navy, marines and politics; unusual in that the titular heroine begins as a navy Captain and rises into the nobility, Hornblower-style narratives usually start the protagonist as an Ensign and follow his climb to Admiral. Many, many spinoffs.

I've only scratched the surface of the vast clade of genres which is science fiction, but these are the ones which have influenced my games the most. What would you add to the list?