Big Planet

Big Planet is BIG. Really big, but with a surface gravity about equal to that of Earth. It was colonized by a whole bunch of colorful characters, ranging from rebels, misfits and criminals to weird cultists. Over the centuries they lost their technology, mainly because the planet provides few metals, and that kind-of puts a damper on the construction of WMDs and stuff like that. So, what we have is a vast array of miniature nations, some ruled by all kinds of odd social arrangements, while the majority ended up in the forms of the usual common-garden warlord-doms. With his ship sabotaged and crash-landing on the planet, Claude Glystra - who has come to fix up some of the chaos here and take care of the worst of the tyrants - is forced to start on a 40,000-mile trip to a safe Earth-enclave, pursued by agents of the very tyrant he's meant to bring to justice. And just in case you're wondering: 40,000 miles on this planet is just a skip and a hop. Why it's on the list: It's a story of a journey, with intrigues and murder along the way, as Claude Glystra's team is decimated by the enemy. Along the way, Vance invents a giddy array of landscapes, means of transport, plus a few societies that have found strange alternative ways of creating as 'society'. Arguably, the novel is a model for a plethora of other 'planet' novels, including Arrakis (Dune, #2 in this list) and Majipoor (Lord Valentine's Castle, #21 on this list). Read if you like: Jack Vance, his imagination, exquisite use of language, mordant wit and observation of human nature and its myriad quirks as expressed in the societies we create. And Big Planet is a fascinating character, who swallows up all the colonists like the insignificant gnats they are.