What does “top” mean, as in NPR’s “Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books“? It clearly doesn’t mean “best.” The only Philip K. Dick title on the list is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a book much inferior to The Man in the High Castle, Martian Timeslip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch ((Can you devise a more portentious title?)) or even Ubik. Gene Wolfe, the best science fiction and fantasy writer currently active and perhaps the best writer of any kind alive, period, barely makes the list at #87. Ray Bradbury makes the list four times; he’s good, but he’s not that good. Ditto Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson. Isaac Asimov is in it three times, which is three times too many. Missing entirely: R.A. Lafferty, Joanna Russ, Thomas Disch, Italo Calvino, Cordwainer Smith, Lord Dunsany, Henry Kuttner (and C.L. Moore), Poul Anderson, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges, Tim Powers, John Bellairs, Algis Budrys and many more I’ll think of later.
2 thoughts on “Query”
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Can you devise a more portentious title?
Having just seen the fourth episode of Dantalian, “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”.
Actually, when it comes to Delany novellas, “We, In Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move On A Rigorous Line” is probably more pretentious. Although “…Semi-Precious Stones” was a better story, as a story.
And having read the list… yeah, about two too many Gaiman listings, they keep wobbling between “series” listings and individual books, and there at least a half-dozen utterly forgettable mayfly fantasy series on that list. R. A. Salvatore, really? And as much as I’ve re-read the Belgariad over the years, it belongs on nobody’s list of “best fantasy and SF” – it was stereotypical, disposable pulp.
Why did NPR even try to do something like that? They aren’t exactly brimming over with geek cred, which is probably why this list reads like a drunkard’s amble through a used bookstore’s F&SF section.