Now That's Significant

• 25 Mar 2003
• novels

Anybody who knows me (or who’s been bored enough to peruse the archives of obsolescence) knows that I’m a sucker for the book list. Some of those same folks know that I’m teaching a class this semester on science fiction.

You can imagine my excitement, then, to discover this list of the Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years (a moniker then qualified by the years 1953-2002, which is good to know), put together by the good folks at the Science Fiction Book Club. Note that the top ten seem to be, in fact, the Top Ten; 11-50 are in alphabetical order by title, which would be a mighty coincidence, if these were actual rankings.

Of these 50, however, I’ve read very, very few. My interests run a bit more to the cyberpunk, on the one hand, and to the feminist/”minority”/queer, on the other, than do the interests of the SFBC. But I’ve thus far this semester taught 6, 8, 30 and 43, and we just today finished up 20 (whew). I suppose I’ll have to spend some of the summer filling in some of my listy gaps. Any advice about the list from the more knowledgable — which books on the list are vastly overrated; which books have been criminally forgotten — would be greatly appreciated. (Link via defective yeti.)

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