The NPR "Top 100 SFF Books" meme

[starlady]

Or basically, how much of your lifetime reading capacity have you wasted reading popular crap by mostly white men?

by way of boundbooks:  NPR Books: Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books
NPR Books: Monkey See: NPR's Top 100 Science Fiction And Fantasy Novels: Parsing The Results

Bold if you've read, italicize ones you fully intend to read, underline if it's a book/series you've read part but not all of. Also added troisroyaumes's strikethrough if you never plan to read.

boundbooks - I'm also adding a * if I'd recommend reading it!

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien*
2. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
3. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
4. The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
5. A Song of Ice and Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
6. 1984, by George Orwell*
7. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
8. The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
9. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley*
10. American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
11. The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
12. The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell*
14. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
15. Watchmen, by Alan Moore
16. I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
17. Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
18. The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley*
22. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
23. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
24. The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
25. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
26. The Stand, by Stephen King
27. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
28. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
29. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
31. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
32. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
34. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
35. A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
36. The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
37. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne*
38. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keys
39. The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
40. The Chronicles of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
41. The Belgariad, by David Eddings
42. The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
43. The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
44. Ringworld, by Larry Niven
45. The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin*
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien*
47. The Once and Future King, by T.H. White
48. Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
49. Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
51. The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
52. Stardust, by Neil Gaiman*
53. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
54. World War Z, by Max Brooks
55. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle*
56. The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
57. Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson
59. The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
60. Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
61. The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
62. The Sword of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
64. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke*
65. I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
66. The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
68. The Conan the Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
69. The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
70. The Time Traveler's Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
71. The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
72. A Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne*
73. The Legend of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
74. Old Man's War, by John Scalzi
75. The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
76. Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
77. The Kushiel's Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin*
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
80. Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
81. The Malazan Book of the Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
82. The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
83. The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
84. The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
85. Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
86. The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
87. The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe*
88. The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn*
89. The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldon
90. The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
92. Sunshine, by Robin McKinley*
93. A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge
94. The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
95. The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
96. Lucifer's Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
97. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis*
98. Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville*
99. The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
100. The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis


I cannot believe there's no…actually, no, I can believe just about anything. I'm glad I didn't waste too much of my life reading all these Clarke and Heinlein and Asimov books, though.

Is The Crystal Cave good?  It's almost the only book on here that I haven't heard of and sounds interesting.

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Comments

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

Or basically, how much of your lifetime reading capacity have you wasted reading popular crap by mostly white men?

Yes, THIS. I'd love to see a bit more critical conversation about this list, because, wow, is it stacked in favor of a certain type of SF/F which itself strictly enforces racial and gender barriers, among others...

I discovered The Crystal Cave when I was 11 and it had a formative effect on my intellectual pursuits for the rest of my life, so it's hard for me to imagine encountering it as an adult. I believe it's a good, absorbing work of fantasy, though not as good as my 11-year-old self thought. It's a central and critical text for 20th-century Anglophone revisions of the Arthurian legend, and its influence on Arthuriana written since, especially in the fantasy genre, is immense.

Mary Stewart basically took the ideas of Rosemary Sutcliff and popularized them by writing a best-seller. The Crystal Cave is the first book of a trilogy that retells the Arthurian legends from the point of view of Merlin, and the first book treats his childhood and coming-of-age. The magic is deeply felt and put into a believable religious context, which I frankly wish more contemporary fantasy would attempt, and Stewart is the only author I've seen who manages to pull off interweaving an ahistorical medievalesque setting with real detail from the fifth century.

As I said, I loved the book as a child and found it very easy to identify with the main character's outsider perspective. As an adult, I think I would have been more struck by the ideas of sexuality in the trilogy, which are often problematic but completely fascinating in cultural context.

The trilogy has a lot of the unexamined and naturalized sexism common in historical fiction of the time--justified to some extent by the fact that it's narrated by a man from a sexist era, whose ideas of gender are somewhat critiqued (usually by Arthur). The narrator and protagonist, Merlin, is a straight man who is consistently misread as gay, or passes as such to appear innocuous, or is coded as such by the narration--which is remarkable in a bestseller in the US during the 1970s--and also clearly linked to Merlin's role as a point of identification for a female reader. You can draw a direct line from this trilogy to contemporary slash culture. The trilogy also strongly links Merlin's magical powers to his refusal to participate in sexual activity, which is also interesting, especially when later on (spoiler alert) it turns out this is not true for everyone with magic. Like I said, not unproblematic but very interesting.

The interesting thing about the book's appearance on this list is that it's a book by a woman which was marketed to women, often with very feminine jackets and copy--so it does stick out on the list gender-wise, though it does nothing to lessen the blinding whiteness...

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm strongly considering picking up the book at some point now, given what you and everyone has said about it.

Stewart is the only author I've seen who manages to pull off interweaving an ahistorical medievalesque setting with real detail from the fifth century.

Have you read The Winter Prince? I thought that one managed a fairly realistic grafting of the story elements into an actual-ish 5thC.

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

Oh, I adore The Winter Prince and the four books that follow it. (Telemakos!)

But I would call Wein's setting clearly fifth-century, even though she's filling in a lot more of the details in Aksum; she isn't wobbling back-and-forth between the subroman and high medieval eras, which many people do, but (I think) Stewart is able to pull off by leaning heavily on the fantasy elements. (Then again, if I had encountered Stewart for the first time as a historically-schooled adult, I might think otherwise.)

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

Obviously, talking about *any* list is meaningless without knowing the purpose and scope and methodology - but even then, I'm actually kind of surprised how few of what I would mentally tag "Classic SF" (1940's-1970's space opera-type novels) there are on this thing!

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

As with just about every list I've seen thrown open to the general public, this one is skewing heavily towards the extremely popular and recent.