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Flowchart Guides Readers Through the 100 Best SF Books
Hugh Pickens writes writes "T. N. Tobias writes that over the summer, over 60,000 people voted at NPR to select the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books of all time. The result? A list of 100 books with a wide range of styles, little context, and absolutely no pithy commentary to help readers actually choose something to read from it. Now SF Signal has come to the rescue with a 3800 x 2300 flowchart with over 325 decision points to help you find the perfect SF or Fantasy book to meet your tastes. Don't like to scroll? There's an interactive version that let's you answer a series of questions to find the perfect SF book."
You should try looking at the list - there are plenty of contemporary Sci Fi and Fantasy authors on it.
Culture is more than commerce
Not just the Silmarillion, two Stephan King books.
Good to know the middle school (and middle school reading level) was represented in this poll.
Also the red/green mars drek. At least that was low on the list. Stephan King was in the top half for fucks sake.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The lack of PKD on this list should be considered an embarrassment to the NPR marketing staff.
I realize that clicking links in the submission is considered bad form here, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is in the upper right corner of the flowchart.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It's been pointed out many times that SF&F actually outsells many of the books listed on say the NYT list of bestsellers. It's just that the editors of those lists exclude certain genres from what they will list. Harlequin romances for example.
Three Squirrels
I see a lot of complaining about the lack of newer Sci-Fi and Fantasy books in the list. This can be easily explained. It's not specifically because the older authors and series are more well known, though that is definitely part of it. The reason is simply that this was a NPR poll. If you stop for a second, you would realize that NPR's audience trends towards an older demographic. As such, they are more likely to select authors that they have enjoyed over the years. When you get older, you tend to have less time to read (unless you are and avid reader and make time) and are more likely to select books based on proven authors.
Personally, I read a lot of Sci-Fi and fantasy when in university. I went to the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, NB, Canada and they had one of the largest Sci-Fi collections in Canada, if not the Northeast (ranked 10th in the world in 2009). I even got to read the special collection books as I worked as a temp in the library to make some money. It was cool having access and it is only recently, with the development of the kindle and the amazon bookstore, that I've gotten back into reading Sci-Fi and Fantasy as I now have access to more interesting stories than the popular Vampire/Magic/Star (Trek/Wars) that lined the shelves in most book stores.
1) They are the two main ways of doing "imagine if the world was different" fiction.
2) Because of this, there is a large amount of very good fiction (less so in literature perhaps, which seems to attract the purer forms of each, but certainly in media generally) which combines the two. Drawing a line between them would be impossible.
3) And combining the two is actually a quite good idea, because each counters the weaknesses of the other. Science fiction which gets too hard can lose drama by becoming unrelateable and missing dramatic opportunities which don't seem plausible enough, and fantasy which gets too soft can lose drama by making cause and effect too arbitrary, which undermines narrative.
Well of course. Otherwise we would have nothing to talk about, friend. :)
I think you're treading dangerously close to a definition that's going to give you a nasty conclusion: that it's all fantasy and no work of hard SF has ever been written.
For example: got space colonies? Then you must have some magical economic force in your story.
Got highly-accurate genetic predictions? Oh please, your characters have magically accurate embryology models and magically powerful computers to run simulations of those models in better-than-real-time.
My point being, you're going to always be drawing a line somewhere, saying that isn't believable enough to be anything other than magic, whereas this is believable enough so that it doesn't need to be explained in detail. And yet ultimately, that lack of detail is what makes it fiction rather than a patent application. Somewhere within those glossed-over details, there is very likely a Devil. The position of the line is subjectively intuitive.
Let's say we have a 600-page story with apparent telekinesis in it.
In one version of the story, on the last page, the "telekinetic" character finally confesses his fraud to another character and shows the gullible fool the electromagnet under the table and the control switches under the toes of his shoe. The gullible character exclaims, "Damn, you sure fooled me! I'm a little angry, but since the same trick bluffed the spacebugs and ultimately saves all our lives, I guess I ought to be glad." You'd agree this story could be hard SF, right? (Could be, as long as I don't mention the spacebugs are actually dragons and that one of them was slain with a "laser sword.")
In another version of the story, everything is the same, except the fraud is never revealed. The gullible character, and the reader, never find out about the electromagnet. It's left unexplained. Not hard SF? It's the same story!
In a third version of the story, the author is a total bastard. He doesn't reveal the fraud or leave it unexplained. Instead, he lies! And not just to the character, but to you the reader. "Oligonicella looked under the table, and to his surprise, there was no electromagnet. 'It was real magic all along!' he exclaimed with amazement." Damn, what a fucking lie. Fortunately, you the reader don't believe it (even if the gullible character did), because you know there's no such thing as telekinesis. Does the author's damn lie make his story not hard SF? Well, maybe. That's a tough one. What if he sprinkles in a clue or two, such as somebody noticing on page 532 that the table had a scratch mark, as though possibly from the end of a wire?
Shit. That scratch mark could have been left by anything.
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