And a little bit of discussion about what the results were and how they were tabulated.
Now, some questions on how to complete the challenge.
1. Should I read from the end to the beginning, saving the "best" for last?
2. If a book is part of a series, but is not listed as such (i.e. Ender's Game is listed alone, but The Wheel of Time is listed as a series) do I have to read all of them?
Edit: Here's a nice flowchart for you, too.
3 comments:
I was going to say Top to Bottom but then if you do it bottom to top you get space trilogy and caves of steel before the Foundation series.
Also I think certain books you need the whole series and others you can get by with just 1 book. Enders Game series part 1 (Ender 3000 years later) is so far away from the original novel that I agree with the listmakers. But then again I can't see how all of the whopping Wheel of time books are on that list. Granted its one of 2 fiction books I've started and then stopped and never picked them back up again.
Keep that "best" in scare quotes and pick the ones you like to read ;)
The results are moderately ridiculous. They included a great number of books by Isaac Asimov, including some extremely mediocre ones like The Caves of Steel. Asimov comes up with clever plot ideas, but very few of his characters have personalities.
The use of "series" is also problematic. The first half of the first Hitchhiker book is hilarious. The second half is not as good. Each successive book in the series is less impressive than the ones before it... because they are sequels, designed to milk his audience for more money. The Dune series is also uneven in quality, although it's more erratic (book 4 is terrible).
The message of Ender's Game and Snow Crash is that the most important people in the world are those who spend all their lives in an online virtual reality. And guess what? These books always do well in polls of online nerds. They are both very good books, but not that good. If you write a book that portrays plumbers as the saviors of the world, it will win polls at the annual Plumbers' Convention.
Finally, the list ignores pre-Golden Age space opera. Edgar Rice Burroughs and E.E. Smith aren't even on this list. And yet they -- much more than Verne and Wells -- are what inspired most of the writers who did make the list.
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