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Oh god, total nerd bait.
I've resisted this long, but.
But. But.
(Note: Actually, I've been holding this post as a draft for months... might as well, finally)
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Okay, I'm sure we can all agree that the survey results are a dilettante's abomination. This is a barely-disguised NPR demographic research survey, not a credible way to judge literary merit.
To be fair, all such lists are going to have their silly elements. They're also irresistible, and often useful to ordering one's own thoughts.
Also to be fair, even a university scholar of SF isn't going to read everything, or to be so wise, as to be able to make a definitive list.
And that's assuming you could define "best" in the first place.
Of course, NPR fronts its cop-out mentality with the even vaguer "top."
But here is a list that entirely omits Silverberg, Delaney, Jack Vance, James Blish, Alfred Bester and Harlan Ellison. How is that possible? That's off the top of my head, and within the genre they are as well known and influential as masters as Heinlein or Asimov.
I don't care what the popularity contest said, you can't call it "Top." Most popular with NPR listeners who don't know almost any stuff published before 1980, sure. But not "Top."
Two of the greatest SF books ever were penned by Marge Piercy, and she's a moderately big literary name otherwise.
Another insult is that Philip Dick should be represented solely by "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" All this tells us is that a lot of people have seen Blade Runner, and that's about it.
As for Heinlein, his pathbreaking work was "The Past Through Tomorrow" story compilation, here nowhere to be seen.
The use of "series" entries is another joke. This makes sense with a single story so long it runs into multiple volumes ("The Lord of the Rings"), but most of these series came to be because the first book was a success and the publisher wanted repeats.
If you're serious, pick the fucking book you mean. "Dune" is not the same as "Chapterhouse: Dune"!
The effort to categorize art works is always going to involve a few sheer impositions, but the combination of "science fiction and fantasy" is also a marketing device that does not reflect what the books actually are. The link between the two genres is in the shared readership. They are not a common corpus within which one can meaningfully give rankings on the same list. As someone says above, SF is often more closely related to spy and politics intrigues - or for that matter to historical novels - than to fantasy and swords-and-sorcery.
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I think few genres are as clearly defined and historically delineable as science fiction. That comes from a dual pressure: for many decades the literary mainstream (itself now obsolete) forced it into a ghetto, even as SF authors themselves were driven to use SF as a platform for exploring philosophy, politics, the human condition and the nature of the universe.
Lethem describes that fantastically well in the long excerpt from his upcoming book, published in Harper's, and linked above by Harvey. It's red-hot reading, had me very jealous of the man's talents and afterward I almost stood up in a doctor's waiting room to applaud a magazine page. (I wanted to put it in the
Hauntology thread.)
While a few sf precursors were published centuries before the genre came to be (like "Gulliver's Travels"), as a genre SF is speculative fiction born of mass industrial society and almost always involves the alternate history or reframing of modernity, whether projecting into the future or the past.
You can trace its history from Wells and Verne to the mid-20th century hard-sf classics and the new wave literature of Delaney et al., before Hollywood finally dissolved it into the present-day zeitgeist altogether, so that now even romantic comedies routinely include sf elements.
"Lord of the Rings" just doesn't fit into that. LoTR, which I read 7 times as a teenager, is not a work of science fiction. It is an inch removed from the Bible or the Odyssey, and on a different continent altogether from the Foundation trilogy.
ALL THAT being said, I am a nerd who enjoys playing these games, and maybe you'll enjoy joining me in the following exercises...
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First, the NPR list. What did I actually read on it, that I should pretend to know?
[NPR Audience Survey's] Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books [Minus the Ones I Have Not Read]
Key
F=Fantasy or otherwise not SF, on the wrong list.
OIMTE=One Is More Than Enough. (Sword of Shannara? Really?)
August 11, 2011
1. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien (F)
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 [When did some marketing heinie pin a group title on the Dune books? Before or after the elder Herbert died?]
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
13. Animal Farm, by George Orwell (F / animal parable)
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
19. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
20. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
21. Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
22. The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
24. 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
25. The Stand, by Stephen King
27. The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
28. Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
29. The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman (F)
30. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
31. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein (the movie was better & more truthful)
33. Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey (OIMTE, are you kidding me?!) (F)
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
45. The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
46. The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien (F)
50. Contact, by Carl Sagan
58. The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever, by Stephen R. Donaldson (OIMTE) (F)
63. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
67. The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks (OIMTE, I despair) (F)
72. A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
78. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
79. Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
91. The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
Hm, I've read 41 out of 100, but 34 out of the top 50 and 15 out of the top 20. I don't really mind that I've only read one book by Neil Gaiman, though it was alright. I do wish to read Banks, Stephenson, Hyperion, Forever War...
Here's a real SF list by the way:
http://blamcast.net/articles/best-science-fiction-books.
Next procedure: Fixing the NPR list.
First, we omit the F's.
We also omit 1984 and Brave New World as books everyone here should have read already, because they made history far more than any of the others, regardless of artistic merit (1984 is the better novel of the two). As we know, they are like handbooks to the modern world - thankfully not exhaustive! (In those terms, Fahrenheit 451 is a very distant third to the those two.)
So here's my list of great SF books that I've actually read and you should read if you haven't, as culled from the NPR list:
Top 20 Actual SF Books On the NPR List That I've Read
Not Including "1984" and "Brave New World" or the "F" Books
1 (4). Dune, by Frank Herbert. (Just fucking Dune. You're going to pretend anyone can top that?! I liked a lot about the first couple of follow-up books, before I'd had enough.)
2 (8). The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
3 (78). The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
4 (35). A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
5 (34). The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
6 (20). Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
7 (19). Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
8 (21). Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
9 (22). The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
10 (28). Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
11 (25). The Stand, by Stephen King
12 (50). Contact, by Carl Sagan
13 (15). Watchmen, by Alan Moore
14 (3). Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
15 (30). A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
16 (14). Neuromancer, by William Gibson
17 (2). The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
18 (27). The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
19 (36). The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
20 (17). Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
Ah, should have omitted the comic, but okay.
Boiled down that way the list, at least, is not a joke.
But if you haven't read Philip Dick (how did you end up at RI without doing so?) you should read the "Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" and "Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said."
Heinlein's best and in his time most influential work was actually a long series of short stories called "The Past Through Tomorrow," tied together by the device of a man who to his surprise gradually discovers he is immortal (Lazarus Long) because, as he finds out, he's the third or fourth generation of a breeding experiment in longevity started by some spooky foundation in the 19th century. It includes "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and "The Green Hills of Earth" among a few dozen other stories and extends from the contemporary 1950s into, I don't know, the year 3000 or so. Feel free to dislike Heinlein, but that's what SF is at its core: alternate history of the present. Physical dragons, not so much.
Now, to hell with the NPR list, and let's try this:
Ten Great SF Books I've Read That Are Not On the NPR List
Off the Top of My Head, So There
Samuel Delaney, Dhalgren
Marge Piercy, Woman On The Edge of Time
Marge Piercy, City of Glass (a.k.a. He, She and It)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Robert Silverberg, The Masks of Time
Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination
Thomas Disch, Camp Concentration
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Jack Vance, The Best of Jack Vance (story collection)
James Blish, Cities in Flight
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