NPR Top 100 Science-Fiction & Fantasy
Posted by: Neil Hollands
Over at NPR, genre experts Gary K. Wolfe, Farah Mendelsohn, and John Clute winnowed the history of science fiction and fantasy down to a list of 237 well-loved titles and series. The list was controversial in some quarters, because it excluded short stories (which removed the best work of a good chunk of the classic era authors from consideration) and works marketed to young adults and children (which I suspect they’re saving for a future list). That ballot then went out to the public, and over 60,000 of us voted. So many great choices, and you could only pick ten!
Now the votes are tallied, and the final 100 have been selected. Of course, The Lord of the Rings is at the top, but it’s a list of riches. How can you use this in your book group? If your group doesn’t incline toward genre reading, let your readers make their own choice from the full list or the top 10 for a meeting. If your group is open to science fiction and fantasy, many of the individual titles would make fantastic choices. But science fiction and fantasy are tricky for book groups, particularly fantasy–often too long or too integrated into a larger series to make good group choices.
To that end, I’d like to make suggestions for books groups–filtering the list to 49 titles that can be finished in a month by most people, have themes that would support discussion well, and are either stand-alone books or first books in series that conclude relatively cleanly. These aren’t necessarily the best of the best (I had to exclude many of my favorites from the list because of series or length issues), but for book group purposes, these are most likely to succeed:
SCIENCE FICTION
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Dune by Frank Herbert
1984 by George Orwell
Fahrenheit 451 or ???The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (I’m not sure why Bradbury’s stories were allowed when other authors’ weren’t. I guess because they were mainly issued as well known collections, not as individual stories in magazines that were then anthologized in multiple reprints.)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Snow Crash or The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Childhood’s End or Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
Contact by Carl Sagan
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
World War Z by Max Brooks
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Shards of Honor or The Warrior’s Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Mote in God’s Eye or Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge
The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
FANTASY
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Once and Future King by T. H. White
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Small Gods or Going Postal by Terry Pratchett
Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Sunshine by Robin McKinley
August 15th, 2011 at 3:45 pm
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