Kevin's Watch

This is probably as meaningless a top 50 list as any posted in Flicks, but what the heck.

SFBC.com wrote:The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years, 1953-2002 link

(Comments: SRD beats JKR! Yay for Sammy Delaney (who beats both)! And: I read 28 of these, 7 of the top 10.)

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys

41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

How did three books of short stories get in there? I would have rated the Chrons #4.-I've read 38 of these.---not that bad a list, as these things go...

any list that ranks Anne McCaffrey ahead of SRD renders itself rather meaningless to me.

True, that and The Mists of Avalon...Children of the Atom? Wow, looks intriguing, never heard of it!

They probably put Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in there to look all "Blade Runner" saavy--it's a short story, barely a novelette--yes it's a damm fine collection...

Heh, I think the list needs more Dick.

I'd have ranked the 1st Chrons higher, included the 2nd Chrons & The Gap, and included all of the Riverworld books (and ranked TYSBG much higher than 50). On the Beach would be in the top 5 on my list, probably the top 3.

No 2001 or 2010?

There's no explanation of what "significant" means is there?

But I imagine, from the results, is that it is a combination of quality, breaking ground, impact on readers, influences on other writers, etc. McCaffrey probably beats Donaldson because it's way more popular; The Second Chronicles is probably not considered ground-breaking; PKD is not pervasive because it is not quality alone; Eddings is not present because he sucks in all categories, etc. etc.

danlo wrote:How did three books of short stories get in there?

Short stories are as legitimate a form of literature as novels. Why shouldn't short stories be included?

Wayfriend wrote:But I imagine, from the results, is that it is a combination of quality, breaking ground, impact on readers, influences on other writers, etc. McCaffrey probably beats Donaldson because it's way more popular; The Second Chronicles is probably not considered ground-breaking; PKD is not pervasive because it is not quality alone; Eddings is not present because he sucks in all categories, etc. etc.

Good point.

Murrin wrote:Short stories are as legitimate a form of literature as novels. Why shouldn't short stories be included?

true but I consider them "collections" vs full lenght novels and feel they should have their own list (I'm guess I'm just anal that way! )-heck, if you want to consider short stories Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man should be listed there too as should Reave the Just and Other Tales.

Hmmmm, I wonder what SRD would have to say about this.

I'll email him right now! (but first you'll have to state that in the form of a question, Alex )

BTW, the title of the list indicates that this is a list of Books, not a list of Novels. So collections of short stories were expressly included IMO.

Which is odd, now that you mention it. The 1st Chrons are included as a trilogy, but there are other books that are on the list that are parts of a series (like TYSBG).

Dangerous Visions certianly had an impact, I'm not denying that...but to list that and not The Martian Chronicles *shakes head*.

Read 27 of them. Would also have ranked the Chrons higher, but nice to see the real old favourites in the top 10.

--A

any list that ranks Anne McCaffrey ahead of SRD renders itself rather meaningless to me.

I agree...

I think they nailed the first three...but that would be difficult to mess up.

The list has Brooks on it, though, and Brooks is hardly good, groundbreaking, or influential. If I were teaching a class on Fantasy/Sci-Fi Creative Writing, I would hold up The Sword of Shannara as a classic example of "What Not to Do Under Any Circumstances".

Interesting that Card bested Donaldson for the John W. Campbell award with Ender's game, and he edged him out again here by a hair.

Peven wrote:any list that ranks Anne McCaffrey ahead of SRD renders itself rather meaningless to me.

That was my first thought. But it is nice to see SRD get some props of ANY kind too.

The neat thing about blogs is that everyone seems to fill their blogs with stuff they pilfer out of other peoples blogs. So there's a lot of bloggage about this list.

So if you think YOU got compaints about this list ...

Here's some juice.

And as for Stranger in Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein, all I can say is: why? The same goes for The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson (I didn’t even make it through the first book), and, to a lesser extent, the Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks books (I never got into Anne McCaffrey, and while I have enjoyed some of Terry Brooks’ books, I don’t really think of them as “significant”).
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I am not all that surprised by how many of these I've read, just as I'm not surprised by the ones I have not. Sword of Shanana is one of the worst books ever typed. Thomas Covenant is a leper of the soul as well as the body and as such was totally unreadible for me.
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Have to agree, somewhat, with Graham Douglas on the Thomas Covenant ones. The first series wasn't horrible, but it wasn't spectacular either. The second one... Got absurdly religious in theme. Like Covenant was sort of a messiah or something, only he dies and his "ring" gets passed on to some woman that was taking care of him. Real Narnia like BS, with the world remade through his death and her taking over into some new paradise of some nonsense. Read the second series while grinding my teeth the whole time and hoping they where not going the direction they seemed to be and it was just my imagination.
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It may be significant, but I loathed the Thomas Covenant series, one of the few novels where I had absolutely no empathy with the main character - indeed, I spent most of the book hoping that he'd get squashed or eaten or meet some suitably bloody end. Plus, I'd say it was even more derivative of Tolkien than Brooks.
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I also second the call for Dan Simmons "Hyperion" series which is wonderful. It could replace the Thomas Covenant stuff for my money.
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Vomit-worthy: I tried reading Covenant the Unbeliever, but I got annoyed at how stupid the main character seemed in the first chapter, dully refusing to believe what was happening to him, and then there was this chicky who kept insisting "But it is hurtloam!" My lip curled at the very word. Hurtloam! Hurtloam! Hurtloam! Argh. The crowing of brain-damaged roosters. Threw the book down and lived my life happily without either Steven R. Donaldson or regrets.
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And let me thank K. Signal for admitting to not having finished Thomas Covenant. How can somebody stomach reading three books with such a detestable and unlikeable protagonist?
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Thomas Covenant: The man is a self-important whiner. He also has serious medical problems. Though I suspect they have far more to do with some form of schizophrenia than they do with leprosy.
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The standard criticism of the Covenant series always perplexes me. Of *course* he's an annoying jerk. He's *supposed* to be an annoying jerk. The brilliance of those books is that Donaldson had the balls (and the skill) to create such an unlikable character as Thomas Covenant; and yet he still navigates him into doing the right thing in the end.
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No one likes Covenant -- not even Covenant. The main complaint I've heard of the series is that Donaldson creates beautiful noble characters that you adore and then cruelly slaughters them.
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Donaldson's Covenant - quite the opposite. Here and in other discussions I've seen, people divide up on whether they didn't like it because they hated TC, or liked it because the author was sophisticated enough to have a complex and unlikeable central character. Nobody seems to mention that the writing was crap, and apparently a lot of people just can't tell the difference (crap in a quite different way from classic early SF like some Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein when that was the style). I find the clunkiness of the sentences, the repetitious malapropism of the adjectives quite distracting; but the first trilogy reliably gave me nightmares on each reading, so the story itself is powerful. I went to a lecture in about '83 where Donaldson discussed his 'Ring' obsession and said he was going to leave the story there for a while because he wasn't (yet) a good enough writer to do it justice. Did he get better, anybody know?
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etc
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etc

Thanks for sharing that, Wayfriend. This is the only discussion forum I read, so I never get to see the negative comments about TC or SRD. Very enlightening.