I gotta go catch up. About 80 to go… 
Hmmmmm…I seem to be about 95 short!
I’ve only read 15/100.
But that’s okay, because I ignore any “best of” list that has Frankenstein at #7.
Several of those are on my to read list already. Some are by authors I have read and enjoyed, but never got around to reading the others.
I think I should get to reading.
81 to go…
I must be slowing down. I’ve only read 58 of them. But I get to over 75 if I count the books I’ve bought and really mean to read some day soon…
I am pleasantly surprised to see The War with the Newts on the list, although it is a personal favourite. And I think Alas, Babylon is a better post-apocalypse than Earth Abides, but I don’t want to get into a “my list is better than yours” pissing contest.
Bullcrap. Not a single Iain M. Banks book on that list? It’s rubbish.
66 to go. I wonder doesn’t “Slaughterhouse 5” qualify as a science fiction book. If that is the case there is a serious omision in that list. Anyone else thinks an important book is missing?
That’s a really interesting list - some lesser-known works of big authors there, but why “In Conquest Born” and not “The Madness Season” instead? I’ve read about 47 or so, but a lot of those that I haven’t read are already on my “to be read” list - I’ve been trying to hit those classics of sci-fi that I somehow missed before now.
I give credit to any list that puts “The Stars My Destination” before “The Demolished Man”. The funny thing is that the top of the list is only okay, but the really, really good stuff is farther on down. I’m sorry guys, I liked “Starship Troopers” too, but are you honestly going to stand there and say to my face that it was a better book (which seems to be at least part of the criteria) than “A Canticle for Leibowitz”? This sort of thing always gripes me about these lists - granted, it’s hard to take the “most influential” thing out of your best of sci fi list, but it would be nice to see a list based solely on literary merit for once. A lot of those books that are always somewhere in the middle of the list would shoot up in a hurry, I think.
Hm. I’ve read 72 out of those 100.
I wonder what that means, if anything.
Well, I’ve read 68 of them.
My main beef with the list is that there is nobody on this planet who has read all of** Dhalgren**. Nobody. Its presence on the list is a trap. Anyone who says they managed to read every word of that waste of paper is lying.
60 /100
Too high or too low?
I’ve read thirty-three of those books. Maybe thirty-four. Can’t remember if I read The Andromeda Strain or just saw the movie. About a third of them, at least, which is better than I’ve ever done with one of these “Top 100” lists before.
I could’ve made forty, but six of the books on the list I gave up on. Including Dhalgren.
I’ll second that. Although I’ll admit I’ve only read 23 of the books on the list (plus two in the pipeline).
I’ve read four of them in full and another five only partially. Quite a few of them are on my to-read list though. Does that count for anything?
Of course I read Dhalgren all the way through. And I have a friend who loved the book so much she read it at least three times. Probably more by now since I’ve lost touch with her. Delany doesn’t get unreadable until Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
The problem with the list is that I can’t understand it. Is it supposed to be classics that you need to know, like a canon? Is it supposed to be good reads? Did they stop reading in, oh, 1975 and start picking books at random? They have almost all the early Hugo Award winning novels, and then hardly any. Is it weighted by age? By in print status?
I guess it’s not bad as such lists go. It gets in all the absolutely necessary names, and there aren’t many must books that they leave off. I just hate meaningless lists: I’d rather see smaller, more focused lists that you can do something with.
Who the heck is Keith Olexa?
I’ll have to find that list Ben Bova drew up that I found in some anthology ages ago.
I didn’t see anything on the list that was out of print (except maybe Deathbird Stories?) The introduction seemed like a total copout - they started off saying “good reads” but couldn’t help saying “genre influence” by the end of their spiel. It did seem very unfocused, but I think it was a more successful “good reads” list than most - the ranking seems to be based more on influence, with Frankenstein thrown in as some wild and crazy mishap, but the list itself hits more good books from less “Influential in the Field” authors.
I think it’s interesting that you often see CJ Cherryh’s “Cuckoo’s Egg” on these lists than anything else she’s written in the same theme. Is that because most of her books that center on the “going native” theme, many of which are better books, come in trilogies? I’d argue for the Faded Sun books for excellence or the Foreigner ones for fun reads, personally. I did like it that they had “Downbelow Station”, not because it’s better or worse than some of the other books in that group of her works, but that it kind of stands for all of them in a kind of shorthand. If you liked that, you’re going to probably read Cyteen on your own.
Er, I just noticed that the Upanishads appear on the list… you know, if my religious texts showed up on somebody’s Best of Sci Fi list, I might be pretty pissed. (Or flattered - maybe the list is just suggesting that they’re way better than the literature of other faiths.)
That reminds me, I recall reading in some ancient astronaut book (I had a phase as a kid, gimme a break) that the Upanishads, or some part of it, supposedly documented an ancient nuclear war.
Too high, just like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.
Though to be fair, that list does have a few of my favorite books.