As the year draws to a close, many English speakers turn to the pursuit of making lists. Since it was inevitable that at least a few of those lists -- notable moments of the year, the decade, the century, the millennium -- would revolve around "the best science fiction," here is a list of one fan's favorites of the 20th century.

Other lists will undoubtedly differ.

Of the early U.S. science fiction writers, three stand out in this author's mind: Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov.

Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, a good story and the inspiration of at least one good movie. The book about the power of books and the seductive joy of reading is itself a sublime fusion of a compelling vision of the future with good storytelling -- the best of both "science" and "fiction."

As for Heinlein, I recommend his short stories over the famous Stranger in a Strange Land. While Stranger added the word "grok" to the dictionary, I find the book fun, but not terribly interesting.

The stories, collected into several editions over the decades, are a different matter. One of these collection in particular, The Man Who Sold the Moon, contains two of his most interesting short stories: the eponymous Man... and The Roads Must Roll.

Each story expands the traditional scope of science fiction to include economics, simultaneously buttressing and criticizing the SF utopian dream by filling out the business side of the future.

The Man Who Sold the Moon concerns a scheme that involves the idea that every nation owns all territory over it, and therefore that if one person could buy the rights to the moon, he would own the satellite itself. The latter story is about a vital infrastructure and the people who keep it running: I wonder what would happen if there were problems with the Internet backbone....

Isaac Asimov was a very prolific author, but although he wrote many stories and essays, one of his works -- the Foundation Trilogy stands out. With associated material written later, the Foundation saga is immense, a breathtakingly detailed panorama of the history of an entire galaxy.

Many of Asimov's short stories were equally good. Perhaps the most famous of these shorter works is Nightfall, the tale of what might happen if humanity lived on a world where darkness had been abolished.

In the wake of the old SF masters, the best books in the genre include Frank Herbert's Dune series. In its six-book sprawl, Dune is a 4,800-page epic political drama, one of the most complex sociological studies science fiction has ever produced. Originating as an allegory of the West's dependence on overseas oil supplies, the series eventually drew from all major Earthly cultures for its rich setting.

One example of Herbert's evolving cultural fluency can be found in the mentats, which begin as mere human computers in early books and gradually become incredibly complex characters. I believe that Herbert borrowed the concept of the "Hall of Mirrors" used in mentat training from both Chinese and Sufi thought, but the idea is also interesting to contemporary Western philosophers of consciousness.