There is no way to overstate how radical Gibson's first and best novel was when it first appeared. He combined a shattered, neon-chased, postmodern cityscape—its inhabitants rendered demi-human by designer drugs, tattoos and rampant surgical body modifications—with his vision of a three-dimensional virtual landscape created by networked computers, through which bad-ass bandit hackers roam like high plains drifters. When one such hacker, Case, gets banned from this "cyberspace"—Gibson was among the first to use the word—he'll do anything to get back in, including embarking on a near-suicidal cyber-assault on an all but unhackable artificial intelligence. Violent, visceral and visionary (there's no other word for it), Neuromancer proved, not for the first or last time, that science fiction is more than a mass-market paperback genre, it's a crucial tool by which an age shaped by and obsessed with technology can understand itself.—L.G.

An heir to the Burroughs adding machine fortune, Burroughs the novelist hated the despots of Squaresville and the whole world where money makes its fist. This is his greatest book and the template for all the ones that followed. With its fractured account of junkies and assorted urban desperadoes, its fang-baring humor and its sudden excursions into sheer hallucination, it instantly made him the depraved scoutmaster for generations of would-be hipsters. He once said, "My purpose in writing has always been to express human potentials and purposes relevant to the Space Age"—by which he meant addiction and willful extremity, both of which of course have turned out to be virtues in the modern market economy. Like Jean Genet, Burroughs trafficks in the utmost degradations, but he doesn't go to them looking for unsuspected sources of radiance. He likes them for what they are. His conversations in hell with the Marquis de Sade must be very entertaining

The time is 13 o'clock; the date doesn't matter; the year goes without saying. Winston Smith, a bureaucrat at the Ministry of Truth, toils day and night in the service of Big Brother, the remote, faux-benign ruler of this eerily familiar dystopia. Orwell's novel is a study of every possible way a nation can be beaten down by its government: spiritually, physically, intellectually, by the media, torture, surveillance, and censorship, to the point where the state can manipulate reality at will. When Smith is tempted by a beautiful resistance fighter into an act of rebellion, 1984 becomes something more: a strange, tragic, deeply sad love story. It is Orwell's triumph, and the century's misfortune, that 1984 is as prescient as it is pessimistic.—L.G.

Marquis de Sade must be very entertaining.—R.L.

John Self, the extravagantly wretched man at the heart of this wonderfully funny book, is no ordinary pig. A slave to his countless vices, a monster of lustrous indulgence, he's the kind of sleazeball who puts the id back in idiot. Naturally, he's in the movie business. To be precise, he's a director of TV commercials who is making his first feature while perfecting his gift for self-destruction. (And, by the way, offering what is frequently an astute take on this profane world of ours.) Self's spectacular lusts, his raw craving for money, sex and stimulants, his low cunning, his sheer, bewitching awfulness—somehow it all makes him perfectly irresistible.—R.L.