{"id":5930,"date":"2011-08-12T18:12:22","date_gmt":"2011-08-12T23:12:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shuffly.net\/wp\/?p=5930"},"modified":"2011-08-12T18:12:22","modified_gmt":"2011-08-12T23:12:22","slug":"query-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/query-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Query"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>What does &#8220;top&#8221; mean, as in NPR&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/2011\/08\/11\/139085843\/your-picks-top-100-science-fiction-fantasy-books?ft=1&#038;f=1008\" target=\"_blank\">Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books<\/a>&#8220;? It clearly doesn&#8217;t mean &#8220;best.&#8221; The only Philip K. Dick title on the list is <i><b>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep<\/b><\/i>, a book much inferior to <i><b>The Man in the High Castle<\/b><\/i>, <i><b>Martian Timeslip<\/b><\/i>, <i><b>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch<\/b><\/i> ((Can you devise a more portentious title?)) or even <i><b>Ubik<\/b><\/i>. 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&#8217;s good, but he&#8217;s not <em>that<\/em> 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&#8217;ll think of later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What does &#8220;top&#8221; mean, as in NPR&#8217;s &#8220;Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books&#8220;? It clearly doesn&#8217;t mean &#8220;best.&#8221; 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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/query-4\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Query&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,20,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-and-anti-culture","category-not-anime","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4xam3-1xE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shuffly.net\/zoop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}