Top 100 Sci-Fi Books - This link via Fark is an interesting read. It’s interesting (to me) that I haven’t read several of the to rated ones like Neuromancer, Hyperion, and Snowcrash
Yeah, I’ve read about 70% of them, but nearly all of the top rated ones (not counted the H.G. Wells, who I haven’t read enough of).
For what its worth, I can heartily recommend Hyperion and Snowcrash. Snowcrash is just awesome. Hyperion probably changed the way I think a little.
-FrL-
I was reading through that list, slightly puzzled at some of their selections, when I came across Battlefield Earth at number 57… obviously their standards of judging the top 100 are vastly different than anything I would come up with.
Truly. In what alternate dimension is Jurassic Park a superior book to UBIK? And Pattern Recognition doesn’t even belong on that list. Its not a SF novel. Its a thriller about Market Research, mostly.
But you know how these lists go. They just give geeks something to argue about. 
I agree with Astroboy. They seem to give a lot of weight to books that have had influence on the culture outside the SF community. There’s “1984,” “Brave New World” Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” and LeGuin’s “The Dispossessed.” None of them exactly hardcore SF, all of them included I suspect because some elements of mainstream culture found them important.
And yet, none of Norman’s Gor novels are included, even though they spawned a subculture as surely as some of the others did.
There’s some great hardcore SF on that list: The Diamond Age, A Fire Upon the Deep, Use of Weapons, but the overall selection process seems very, um, problematical to me.
How can The Shadow of the Torturer be halfway up the list, and the rest of the tetralogy nowhere to be seen? I’d be inclined to let The Book of the New Sun count as a single book, myself.
Was this list affected by voting? Battlefield Earth may have gotten on due to Scientologists flooding the poll.
Weird list. Too weighted towards popularity, and some of the choices were baffling. Valis and Cryptonomicon aren’t really SF. Three Ender books? So much Crichton?
I think you’d have better luck asking for SF recs on the SDMB.
I rarely take lists like that even remotely seriously, as they are compiled by morons. Or rabble-rousers. 
Alas, Babylon? Sci-fi? In whose universe?
I actually liked Battlefield Earth the book. I read it in my teens without any Scientology baggage. As a pure sort of pulp adventure it was great. Each time I’ve read it I was sad when it ended because I wanted more.
The rest of the list has some hits and misses.
Dune at #1 I think you could argue for. It’s certainly one of the top contenders.
Ender’s Game at #2? I like most of Card’s stuff, sure. But that’s way too high.
Does Slaughterhouse Five count as SF?
The Mote in God’s Eye at 27? Too low!
Varley’s ‘Titan’ made the top 100? I just finished that and REALLY had to work to do it.
I’d agree that this list is a little skew whiff. Whilst I’m happy to see Dune at no 1 I fail to see how Ender’s Game is above 1984, given that the latter practically created the totalitirian distopian future genre and the former isn’t widely known outside of sci-fi circles. As much as I love Cryptonomicon (and indeed anything written by Neal Stephenson) I’m also not clear that it’s sci-fi.
I’d agree that this list is a little skew whiff. Whilst I’m happy to see Dune at no 1 I fail to see how Ender’s Game is above 1984, given that the latter practically created the totalitarian distopian future genre and the former isn’t widely known outside of sci-fi circles. As much as I love Cryptonomicon (and indeed anything written by Neal Stephenson) I’m also not clear that it’s sci-fi.
A reasonable list BUT, to even include genuine classics of literature such as 1984 and Brave New World is like including Buckingham Palace and Versailles on a list of the world’s nicest houses (and not even be #1, mind you!). Or, having a $500K Saleen in a list of best best Matchbox Cars. It’s not a matter of apples and oranges. No, more like apples and diamonds.
Ehhh… so they’re not SciFi, then? Or SciFi isn’t literature?
And BTW, If I could pick any house in the world to live in, Versailles or Buckingham Palace wouldn’t make it to the top 100.
Well, any list compiled as the result of fan polling on line is gong to be suspect. I notice that the list is affected significatly by marketing; certain books are on the list that are marketed quite a bit even today, while others that you don’t see much at bookstores are missing, despite being quite good.
As an example, you will notice that Heinlein’s *Have Space Suit, Will Travel * is on the list (that was juve fiction), but no where to be found is Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh, a quite good book that was a Hugo and Nebula award winner. I think that, if you were to ask “experts” (such as the Science Fiction Writer’s Association) about such a list, you would see some differences.
Please do not EVER equate any John Norman effort with something “good.” The Gor books are trash, trash, trash.
Three people. Three widely disperate viewpoints. And yet all three make the case in their own ways that “if it’s good, it’s not sf.”
A plague on all your houses.
A subculture with a reputation for misogyny and brutality. BDSM for fun is one thing; turning it to an ideology is another. And it’s a fan based poll, and plenty of sci-fi fans hate those books.
You mean when it was written in 1959 we had already had a nuclear war with the Soviet Union? If not, then it would qualify as an alternate history, which is usually considered SF. I know I considered it that the first time I read it in the early 70s.
Alas, Babylon offered nothing new. No new ideas, no new technology. It also dealt with the time it was written. I would consider it no more science fiction than I would Wuthering Heights or Bleak House. It was just fiction, not science fiction.
At the time, story lines which dealt with alternate realities in which nuclear war had occurred were usually considered part and parcel to science fiction. The “science” involved was the relatively new science of nuclear technology.
You can verify this by looking at any of dozens of anthologies, magazines, etc. from the 40’s and 50’s.