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Top 20 Geek Novels
Malacca writes "The Guardian's computer editor Jack Schofield has posted a list of the Top 20 Geek Novels in English since 1932. The polling method is unscientific, but it throws up some interesting choices. Definitions of 'Geek Novels' aside, the usual suspects like Neal Stephenson and William Gibson feature, but Terry Pratchett's 'The Colour of Magic' at #9? Neil Gaiman's "American Gods" at #17?" What would you put on that list?
It should be Small Gods, and it should be higher.
You would have thought The Guardian could have sprung for the $19.95/month to get a thousand responses a month for a few months. Posting anything about 100 responses is weak. Anyone a subscriber to Surveymoney (or similar) and willing to post a more realistic survey?
E. Abbot's Flatland
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"I, Robot" was not a novel. It was a collection of short stories.
Tolkien? Jules Verne? (I'm not a devotee, but she has a huge geek following -- Ayn Rand?) That other woman who writes those coma-inducing books the sci-fi buffs drool over, ummm, Ursula LeGuin?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I just started Cryptonomicon recently and was persuaded to do so after reading this Wikipedia article. It's incredible. Bruce Schneier invented a crypto system based on playing cards for the novel. It's this depth that I find so fascinating with Stephenson. It may be fiction but there's a great deal of fact/truth underneath.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
The Amber Chronicles. That is all. If you haven't read it, do so.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
I've read 8 of the first 10 but only two of 11 - 20. Since I've been reading S.F. for 25 years I find that a little odd.
What would I add? Off the top of my head:
- Utopia - Thomas More
- News From Nowhere - William Morris
- Startide Rising - David Brin
- A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
- Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
- Little Fuzzy - H. Beam Piper
- The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Leguin
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Robert A. Heinlein
- Ringworld - Larry Niven
- To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer
- Inherit the Stars - James P. Hogan
And what about Tolkien? Can't have a geek list without a Hobbit or an Elf getting in the way!XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I must respectfully comment on a few of your claims. While I agree with you that Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a wonderful book, I find that your comments about it being "better" than Stranger in a Strange Land, and that Stranger is "a less mature work" to be a little bit...let's say highbrow. First - what are your qualifications in judging one work "less mature" than another? Second, you say Heinlein "succumbs" to the authorial mouthpiece temptation. Whether it is something that one "succumbs" to is, I feel, debatable, but let's consider this from a different angle:
If Jubal is an "authorial mouthpiece", and this is bad, then please elaborate on the roles of Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love (and almost any other novel he's in), Lt. Col Dubois in Starship Troopers, Prof. De La Paz in Moon is a Harsh Mistress, The Boss in Friday, the main character's friend (can't remember his name, he eventually becomes a major) in Revolt in 2100. The list goes on. In almost every serious book that Heinlein wrote (and many of the less-serious, pure fun ones), there is an older/mentor type character that is, effectively, the author's voice. Sometimes this function is distributed (consider Number of the Beast - which almost explicitly switches the authorial mouthpiece), it is sometimes absent initially, but then comes out at the end (e.g. Job: A Comedy of Justice, with the Devil being the mouthpiece). If you feel the "authorial mouthpiece" is a failing, I wonder how you regard the rest of Heinlein's work. And I emphasize - Prof. De La Paz is yet another "mouthpiece".
Finally, I believe your thesis is confused. MIAHM is primarily a political work - it examines the moral and practical questions of political and ruling structures. SIASL is primarily a work on individual morality - one's relationship to oneself, his surroundings, and humanity in general. Likewise, Time Enough For Love examines aspects of morality in love and sexuality, and Starship Troopers examines an individual's responsibility to his country. I feel that they can not be compared in terms of which is a "better" book. I can acknowledge that we can discuss how polished, complete, or "mature" if you will, a work is. And in some sense, I do agree that Stranger is a bit rougher than Moon is a Harsh Mistress. But I hope you will agree that in discussing the works of such a great master, we should exhibit a bit more circumspection in our speech, rather than postulating blithely that A is a "much better book" than B.
Also, while Heinlein clearly had non-geeky characters, others pretty clearly were geeks by almost any definition -- Andrew Libby was the most obvious, but when Lazarus Long meets Andrew (in Methusalah's Children) and they start talking about Lazarus' modifications to Andrew's design for a ship's computer ("Integrator" IIRC) it becomes pretty clear that Lazarus is at least a part-time geek as well (then again, live long enough and you'll do almost everything at least part of the time). It is sad that one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time is represented only by one he openly stated was one of his worst (IIRC, in one of his later books, he has one of his characters comment on it saying something like "it's sad how far some authors stoop when they're desparate for money" (anybody remember that, or is my memory playing tricks on me?)
Then again, any list that has science fiction but no Frederik Pohl, Stanislaw Lem, David Weber, Niven/Pournelle or Theodore Sturgeon clearly has some pretty large holes, to say the least (and that's still far from an exhaustive list...)
--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
.. by Dan Simmons. As with Dune, Enders Game (also missing), etc, the rest of the serie could not be as good as the 1st book, but still, is one of the best sci-fi books i had read so far.
Especially since this is "geek novels". SIASL is a geek fantasy -- grow muscles by thinking them, beautiful women falling over themselves to have sex with you -- where TMIAHM's leading character is, well, a grown-up geek. I would be reluctant to lose either of my real arms but there have certainly been times when jobs would have been easier if I could just pop on the old "number three arm". Besides, the ending of SIASL was obvious and no one really dies. Two of the central characters don't make it in TMIAHM, a much more grown-up treatment.
Stephenson is great because he writes about technology in a way that doesn't shatter the illusion for anyone who knows anything about technology. Unfortunately, most writers do this, because they don't know beans about technology. Stephenson is an ex-hacker (though since he is now in the business of propagating memes, and he described this in his first book as "neurolinguistic hacking", maybe he still considers himself a hacker).
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I don't know if it rates as a geek novel, but I like it.
... and every time some British magazine publishes one of these lists, Americans basically go, "wha...?"
Try and view this list through, uhm... Britishness, and it makes slightly more sense.
Smart, funny, sexy, violent and with one of the greatest heros around, this book deserves to be on that list.
He's since written 2 more Kovac novels (and another non-Kovac book that I think was an adaptation of an old short story). They are excellent but Altered Carbon stands out as a truely excellent story
What's *really* geeky is that your username is a factorization of your uid. The only geekier thing would have been to wait until the next UID was prime. You'd have only had to wait until 900139!
Aha, but the film did not answer such questions as: WHAT is Tom Bombadil http://tolkien.slimy.com/essays/Bombadil.html#Summ ary, and WE can feel really smug knowing what REALLY happened to Aragorn.
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Tired he is, thirsty he is, and he guides them and he searches for paths, and they say sneak sneak.
A guy who writes FIVE seperate languages just for a book is a hardcore geek. I mean he invented Elvish (including Quenya and Sindarin), Dwarvish (Khuzdul), Entish, and Black Speech. He might not have been a technology geek but he was definitly a geek.
Yep, a linguist geek. From his biography:
Even as a young boy, Tolkien loved languages. He invented his own, but his mother viewed them as a waste of his time. "As a child, I was always inventing languages. But that was naughty," Tolkien recalled wryly. "Poor boys must concentrate on getting scholarships. When I was supposed to be studying Latin and Greek, I studied Welsh and English. When I was supposed to be concentrating on English, I took up Finnish."
Through the door of language Tolkien entered the world of myth. "The seed [of the myth] is linguistic, of course. I'm a linguist and everything is linguistic--that's why I take such pains with names." A language, he believed, could not remain abstract. It must arise within a history and a culture--or, if lacking that, a mythology. Soon he would create for his own languages a most elaborate world indeed.
How many authors write stories like that? It's almost as if the story was an afterthought created by the linguistics. I.e. the linguistics were so rich that a story grew around them.
Most authors write like this: Story(as a rough outline) -> Characters(including setting) -> Details(such as language, customs, etc.)
as opposed to Tolkien who did the opposite:
Tolkien: Language -> Culture -> Characters -> Story
Robert E. Howard is the only other fantasy author I can think of who wrote like that, except Howard built his stories (Conan) over a predetermined geography rather than a predermined language. Interestingly, both J.R.R. Tolkein and Robert E. Howard wrote fantasy in the 1930s, and are considered pillars of the genre.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I agree that Vinge should be represented, but I'd favor A Deepenss in the Sky over A Fire Upon the Deep. I thought the pacing in Fire was a bit slow at times, but Deepness was better in that respect. I also thought Focus was really interesting and the society around it really well done.
Checking the list and it seems almost all the books are more scifi than fantasy. Tolkein, Narnia are fantasies so maybe that's why they didn't make the list.