And in the vein of different strokes and folks, I thought MtH was one of the worst science fiction books I’ve ever read. Would have worked a lot better as a fantasy 'cause I kept thinking “Dammit, mutations don’t work like that, dammit!”
Sounds to me like it is fantasy, then.
I got in a huge argument with a guy at a science fiction reading club about this book… he was amazed that I thought it horrible science and that the bad science kept me from enjoying the book. He got so upset that he never came back, and he was a founding member!
Came in to mention the fact that Vance wasn’t on the list; it’s just not a serious list without him represented.
The fact that Sturgeon flipped our knowledge of “science” on its head is probably why I think it’s such a unique concept. The reader would find many a sci-fi/fantasy book displeasing if he couldn’t help from thinking, “that’s not how things work!”
ETA: Also consider that MtH was written in the 50s, I believe.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure they had enough ideas about how mutations work in the 50s for people back then to say “This is science fiction?” in regards to the muties in MtH.
I’m curious, does the genre classification of a book really contribute to your enjoyment of it? If MtH were labelled “Fantasy” would you like it more?
Naw, the book was boring. And it was bad science. But the bad science part of my argument was what drove the group guy crazy.
As a reader of the genre I expect a certain amount of hand-waving in regards to liberties taken with science - The FTL drive was invented by Robert Thomason as he was investigating quantum fluxes… - stuff like that, I don’t have a problem with. I don’t even have a problem if future discoveries make the science out of date, no big deal. But to get concepts so unbelievably wrong as Sturgeon does in MtH… yeah, that bothers me. Why even make it a science fiction book if you’re not even going to attempt to have the science work in any realistic fashion?
IMHO, if he wanted to write a story about outsiders and cultural changes and didn’t give a shiite about scientific accuracy, he should have written a book called More than Black or More than Asian or More than a Cancer Survivor.
The Princess Bride- seriously?
It’s funny and cute and all, but hardly a great work of literature.
Pterry first makes 57 with Small Gods- are you kidding me? Discworld should be considered in its entirety like the other series, and ranked much higher.
Terry " Let me just throw in a big passage of BDSM in here for no good reason" Goodkind is 62. Which is … better than he deserves.
No really, I’m just annoyed about Pterry.
The Belgariad, ASOIAF, Sandman, Dune, Foundation, Wheel of Time are all considered as series, and for some of them the latter books have a serious drop-off in quality. Discworld is one of the most richly developed worlds in fantasy, and the quality of the series improved as the texture and depth increases- but no, they choose to assess each book separately. Boo.
Two possible arguments:
- Discworld isn’t as much of a series as those listed as such, more a collection of many stories in a more-or-less self-consistent universe with direct ties only between some of them.
- The Discworld volumes are of highly variable quality. Looking at them all together would bring the average ranking down.
Now, I’ve only read three or so of them, so I don’t know, but this is what I’ve gathered. I did like Small Gods very much.
Discworld isn’t really a series, though. The Watch books are a series, the Death books are a series, the Tiffany Aching books are a series, and so on, but those series are, for the most part, only barely connected to each other. A lot of the Discworld books, it’s almost as though Pratchett just wrote a completely stand-alone novel, and did a find-and-replace of “disc” for “world”.
No Earthsea? No Gormenghast? Tish and pish!
Yes, but at least Le Guin is on the list twice (*The Left Hand of Darkness * at 45 and The Dispossessed at 78).
Right, and those are both volumes of the Hainish universe but not a series as such.
I’m only good for 32 of these. There’s a lot of crap on there that I would never read. Most of it is fantasy.
Earthsea falls victim to the YA label.
I think Asimov was treated way too kindly; I expect people may have voted for I, Robot and the Foundation trilogy because they’re famous, or because you remember them positively from when you were a kid and had had no sense of good writing versus bad at the time. Asimov eventually learned to write characters that weren’t totally wooden, but that was clearly well after both of these works. I didn’t notice that when I was 15, but sure did when I revisited these books a couple of decades later. Ouch.
I think a number of other titles that I bet almost nobody re-reads more than once wound up with high rankings because they’re famous and people read them in school, from 1984 to Flowers for Algernon. I can see these books garnering a lot of votes from people who don’t actually read much fantasy or SF.
Other than deserving YA books, David Brin was the omission that bothered me most. Both Earth and the first Uplift trilogy deserved to be well up this list.
I was less surprised by the absence of Joe Haldeman’s Worlds and Worlds Apart, which IMHO is right up there with The Forever War in quality, but for whatever reason has never attracted nearly as much attention. The motif of potentially unbridgeable separation between star-crossed lovers that drives the later parts of both stories is, again IMHO, much better done and more integral to the story in Worlds/Worlds Apart.
I disagree - whatever might’ve been let in that shouldn’t have been, IMHO, doesn’t justify the artificial exclusion of Potter, Narnia, A Wrinkle In Time, and other YA books that can duke it out at this level.
I agree - and the Watch series especially should have been in as a series, and pretty high up at that.
Dr. Susan Calvin, wooden? Would you prefer swords at dawn, or pistols at noon, sir?
Does Tad Williams ever make these lists? Because I really like his work.
I thought Memory Sorrow and Thorn was pretty good by Williams, but not read anything else from him since. Not top drawer tbh but worth finishing. Didn’t it have the same character-based chapter structure as aSoIaF?
Julian May is a suprising omission from these sort of lists I think. Not that she’s awesome or anything but she’s readable and I think the Pliocene exile series was a big seller in SF terms. It was early 80s though.