Roundtable on All-Centuries Novel Polling

Russell Letson

OK, I’ll play, with some caveats–but not ’til later, when I’ve finished my year-end wrap-up piece for Locus. Meanwhile, here’s a note I wrote to myself the other day while looking at the comment threads on the Roundtable and Tor.com posts about the lists:

What exactly makes a book worth putting on a “best” list? To be more precise, what kind of “best” would we be talking about? It would necessarily be tied to some value system that may or may not be shared with others–for example, it might be “books that made the greatest impression on me when I first read them,” or “books that even on reflection or re-reading decades later I still find moving or inspiring or informative.” And note that the last clause incorporates at least three sets of possible values. Maybe a real “best” would have to score on all three axes.

Or I might prefer to compile a kind of canon appropriate for an introductory course in Anglophone SF. Or I might want to make a list of the most morally improving works. Or the ones with giraffes in ’em, or naked ladies playing football. (Cue Marty Feldman ticket-office sketch.) But a wide-open name-the-best poll is always going to reflect the N-dimensional subjectivity of its respondents. A poll of Locus staffers or Roundtable regulars will likely have a different bias than the All-Time poll, but that doesn’t mean that our “best” is going to be any less N-dimensional. We might skew slightly older (I know I do), and I suspect that our collective reading history might be a bit broader even than that of the population that found its way to the All-Time Best Poll, which in turn means that some items might score higher. I, for example, would certainly include Last and First Men and Star Maker on a top twenty, along with The Stars My Destination, for rather different reasons. Those are personal touchstones. And Stapledon and Bester would both be on my required-reading list for a less personal Classics of SF course, along with Le Guin, Knight, Pohl with and without Kornbluth, Aldiss, Anderson, Heinlein, Leiber, Arnason, Goonan, Delany. . . . It would be a five-year program.

Paul Graham Raven

Gonna politely decline to play this one, I think; a little like Russell, I find the word “best” to be so hollow (or, in some cases, so loaded) that I don’t know how to even start, so I’d rather leave the field to those willing to fight upon it. 🙂

Jeffrey Ford

For what it’s worth … I didn’t bother to number them and they’re not in any hierarchical order. There are so many others that could easily take the place of these on any given day. I gave up early on trying to determine “the best” because it froze my memory. Instead I just tried to think of ones I really enjoyed. One of the things that I got a kick out of about the Locus list is that Dune was at the top of the SF pile for the 20th century. I never read it, but I’m going to give it a go this year. I’ve read enough about it and a lot of writing that dissed it unrelentingly. So much for the critics. Dune ain’t goin’ nowhere. I couldn’t come up with enough 21st Century SF to make a list, but I did add my own Dark Fantasy/Horror category. Why not?
20th Century SF
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Phillip K. Dick
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Eden – Stanislaw Lem
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet – Eleanor Cameron

20th Century Fantasy
Arabian Nights and Days – Naguib Mahfouz
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts – Amos Tutuola
The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffmann – Angela Carter
The Baron in the Trees – Italo Calvino
The Woman in the Dunes – Kobo Abe

20th Century Dark Fantasy/ Horror
The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
Falling Angel – William Hjortsberg
Flicker – Theodore Roszak
I am Legend – Richard Matheson
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

21st Century Science Fiction
I don’t know enough about science fiction in the 21st century to even take a stab at this. If I made a list it would definitely include a work from China Mieville (Perdido Street Station or The Scar) and probably Light by M. John Harrison. It would include these, though, as they were two of the only science fiction novels I can recall reading. Sorry.

21st Century Fantasy
The Golden Compass – Phillip Pullman
The Prince – Ib Michael
The Melancholy of Anatomy – Shelley Jackson
Madeleine Is Sleeping – Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum
City of Glass – Paul Auster

21st Century Dark Fantasy/Horror
The House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
Arabian Nightmare – Robert Irwin
Strangers – Taichi Yamata
The Ring – Koji Suzuki
Beyond Black – Hilary Mantel