George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are two of the books that really define the dystopian fiction. Nineteen Eighty Four is still being used as a scale for dystopian fiction; it's similar to Lord of the Rings in that aspect. While 1984 is pure control, Brave New World is conditioning and training while the same genre they're extremely different; which is why I consider both to be groundbreaking.

There are a couple of other books I could think of, but I really don't read into those genres so I won't put them down.

 

Well, outside of the things that had their origins in the books, I think Superman and Star Trek fit your description. The first one defined a superhero genre and the second set standards for a space travel s-f.

 

I'd suggest James Bond (books and films). It set the bar for any Spy/Thriler series that came later.

 

Dracula. The Vampyre by Polidori was first, but it was Stoker who defined vampires in the fiction.

Also, Twilight. I'm sure there were similar fantasy stories for teenager girls before, but it's the first one to get such recognition and now everyone is coping it. The only thing that changes is what kind of "monster" is the main male character - vampire, werewolf, alien, zombie or dominant.

 

Conan the barbarian and john carter of mars series: they helped pioneer the modern adventure story. :b

 

Slaughterhouse Five and, pretty much, most anything by Kurt Vonnegut.

Sort of pseudo-fiction, I suppose, because Vonnegut starts SH-V with the preface that 'These things happened, more or less'. He was there for the fire bombing of Dresden, and it influenced his entire, bitterly hopeful work.

A few of my favourite Vonnegut quotes:

I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine… Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.

~

You go up to a man, and you say, "How are things going, Joe?" and he says, "Oh fine, fine — couldn't be better." And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.

~

And the city was lovely, highly ornamented, like Paris, and untouched by war. It was supposedly an “open” city, not to be attacked since there were no troop concentrations or war industries there. But high explosives were dropped on Dresden by American and British planes on the night of February 13, 1945, just about twenty-one years ago, as I now write. There were no particular targets for the bombs. The hope was that they would create a lot of kindling and drive firemen underground. And then tens of thousands of tiny incendiaries were scattered over the kindling, like seeds on freshly turned loam. More bombs were dropped to keep firemen in their holes, and all the little fires grew, joined one anther, became one apocalyptic flame. Hey presto: fire storm. It was the largest massacre in European history, by the way. (...) Everything was gone but the cellars where 135'000 Hansels and Gretels had been baked like gingerbread men.

~


If I could ever write one scrap of something as profound or as groundbreaking as Vonnegut...

 

Kinda obvious but Lovecraft's "Chtulhu mythos" is something that to this day retains a large following and had an influence beyond the boundaries of literature.

 

I was going to write that, but this thread is about a groundbreaking fiction and not groundbreaking facts.

 

I would say Dragonball Z set the bar for anime.

 

I think Neon Genesis Evangelion was what you mean't to say Luckylee...

 

I would say Lord Dunsany defined fantasy done right better than Tolkien, especially with The Gods of Pegana and Time and the Gods. Then again I have a hard on for the man.

Neat fact about Lord Dunsany; he almost never rewrote anything, everything he ever published was a first draft.

 

Let me see - in terms of gaming, ELITE is a big stand out for me. The defining space-flight simulator and inter-planetary trading game all wrapped up into one 17KB package.

As far as cinema goes, Un Chien Andalou by Buñuel is just it for surrealist film. No question.

 

Fair but NGE will always be my one and only. It is much better then the filler of DBZ. Always annoyed the shit out of me.

 

Pride and prejudice? It had a huge effect on the romance genre and even now it's retold incredibly commonly.

I vaguely remember one of the twilight novels was meant to have a parallel with it, and it was referenced all the time in the novel, an if twilights ground breaking . . .

Chaucer's tales, purely because of A Knights tale .

Finally, Conrads heart of darkness. The way it looked at the fabric of society and 'the horror' has had a huge influence on modern literature.

 

For reference, The Hobbit was a huge hit with children when it came out. As was LoTR (but also for adults), which had to go straight to reprinting the first book after a few weeks of being out. I knew that watching all 15 discs of my Lord of the Rings collection would help me.

Shakespeare? Did the 'troubled love' angle pretty well, as well as metafiction with Midsummer Night Dream. I haven't heard of any earlier fictions of these, at least. Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest adventure tale, and set a precedent still easily seen in modern fiction.

LoTR and Arthur of Camelot brought a lot of medieval/swords and magic stories.

The Simpson's were the first adult cartoon, while older cartoons were all about bringing horrible violence to innocent viewers.

For a lot of these sorts of stories you could just look through common high school/junior high reading lists. Lord of the Flies was, ultimately, a parody of survival stories, but is one of its most defining examples, and Catcher in the Rye was a stream of conscious story that didn't suck.

 

That's a very odd way to look at this book. Especially when you have better examples without any other undertones in them like Robinson Crusoe.

 

The Odyssey seems like the obvious choice for this list as it is the original epic and defines an entire genre.

Other than that Animal Farm is, in my opinion, one of the cleverest books ever written and for me is the ultimate allegory which has specific meaning as well as more general, philosophical meaning. The biggest triumph of this book though, was the fact that it was written so simply and can be read by children and adults alike.

I would also be remiss to not mention probably my favorite book of all time: Crime and Punishment. In high school I probably read it twenty times after reading it on a whim after finding it but it just seems to be a book that can fundamentally change the way you look at what you do and why you do it.

I also like to think it would be Dumbledore's favorite book too.