NPR's Top 100 SF/Fantasy Books

You mean it was not a completely open voting system and they gave an approved list to vote from?

How big was the selection of books you could vote on?

In any case such a voting system mean that their list is worthless at least in my eyes.

He sounds interesting (won an award for best SF writer in 2005). I put his Watch series on my Amazon wish list. Anything else you'd recommend by him?

I believe at one time before the list vote, they did ask for nominations awhile back. The list wasn't merely a randomly generated one.

The list to vote from was about 300 titles. However, tsarstepan mentioned that the list came from nominations by listeners.

On second thought, did the nominations come from listeners or from science fiction "experts"? Do you know, tsar?

Just out of curiosity, it's a list like any other list that's ever been put out of this type. Why does everyone care that it's NPR's list rather than, say, Fox's list, or CNN's list, or 'some obscure reading club's list'? It gives some good titles, I agree with several in the top 10 (although I'm with Set that Adams is a hack).

The majority of the books in that list are books that I've read, own, and love. It'd be hard to pick a better one, though there are some titles I would insert here and there that have been left off. The ones I haven't heard I'm going to look into because I'm always looking for a good read.

Well said. I recently reread The Stand and it's probably one of my all time favorite SF books, but it barely made it in the top 25. If the list was compiled and ranked by vote, a lot of people disagree with me, but I don't care LOL. I know what I like.

Listeners if memory serves me correctly.

I don't agree with the top 5. I tried to read Hitch hikers and found it boring not top 5 material. Dune should be higher then Enders game sage. The later books of each series were crap. Dune should have ended with God Emperor of Dune, and Ender should have stopped after Speaker for the Dead (this does not include the Shadow series). The Foundation Trilogy should have been in the top 5 if not in 1st place. Starship Troopers should have been in the top 20.

Agree about Hitchhiker's guide. Agree about Dune. The series has lost it's appeal once little Brian got a hold of it and started hacking out sequels.

Ender's game was unique, and I would have preferred that it just have been left at that one story. Even the shadow series pales next to it, and doesn't keep my interest long.

First, I wouldn't allow series and novels to compete against each other.

Second, Wheel of Time? Really?

That series is nothing but a monument to greed and arrogance.

Enders Game was a good short story/novella. It shouldn't have been expanded to a novel.

I've read it. Before I did, I never thought of a 1 cent stamp as being a one cent promissary note. The only way I wouldn't recommend it is if you have read some of Pratchett's other work and didn't care for it. His stuff is full of interesting insights, and Going Postal is one of the better ones.

The more I look at that list, the more I come to the conclusion that it's a listing of best-sellers rather than of quality literature (whatever one's definition of "quality" might be). Hitchhiker's Guide, for example, has been panned by everyone on this thread who's commented on it. But when NPR broadcast it as a "radio drama", the book instantly became a runaway best-seller and has pretty well remained up there. It's the darling of 20- and 30- somethings who desperately want to seem hip but have no basis for making literate comparisons.

I'm not familiar with what you refer to, but a postage stamp is not a promisory note, it's a receipt showing that the requisite fee has already been paid. It msut have been a novel, because the author is making things up.

I liked Hitchhiker's Guide, but the rest of the series was tedious. It's also not likely to draw me back to read it again.

True...in that sense, the list is more than 100 books. I think LOTR was meant to be just one novel, though, no?

There's the Elric series as well, that's about six books.

No ****. Nothing by Olaf Stapledon, whose Last and First Men and Star Maker were seminal works in the gere that contributed scores of ideas later fleshed out by subsequent authors. Nor any work by the man Robert Heinlein (who has 3 books listed in the top 34) stated was the best writer in the world, let alone gere, Ted Sturgeon.

No, because all I've read of his are the books in the Watch series.

I highly recommend them.

At least two very good movies were made based his work.

And how about Alfred Bester?

I just realized that he's also not on the list.

No William Burroughs