(Definitely not) the 100 greatest science fiction or fantasy novels of all time

Top 10 or top 100 hundred lists are always interesting, and via io9 I came across a new list claiming to be the 100 greatest science fiction or fantasy novels of all time.

Former io9 boffin Alex Carnevale posts his selections for the top 100 science fiction and fantasy books, and it's a pretty compelling list. What do you think? Does he capture the canon? [This Recording]

As Carnevale's list features the cover art for all 100 (a nice touch) it is difficult to reproduce the list, so follow the link above to have a look at it.

How do we assess greatness? Critical response, influence on future writers, commercial success, skill as a writer, or general popularity within the reading community. Top X lists are always good fodder for argument, as subjective choices often replace the harder work of collating and assessing the quantitative criteria I have just mentioned.

Carnevale's list, in my opinion, is a classic example of an utterly subjective and badly flawed list. It might accurately represent his favorite 100 books, or 100 of the books he owns, but its idiosyncrasies, omissions and biases render it useless as an attempt to compile the best 100 speculative fiction books of all time.

What is so wrong with it?

Lets start with the omissions of historical greats. It is supposedly a list of the best science fiction of all time, remember?

There is no Jules Verne (a major influence on the field, and who wrote many great book: Journey to the Center of the Earth; From the Earth to the Moon; 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, etc etc).

How about Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World)? Not in the list. Yet Carnevale includes Crighton's "Jurassic Park" in his top 100, which was hardly original and only famous thanks to the special effects of the movie version.

Robert Howard not on the list. You know, the guy who created that obscure and unpopular character Conan the Barbarian.

H.G. Wells at least gets a single mention, for the "War of the Worlds". Certainly a great book, and very influential, but one might also mention "The Invisible Man"; "The Island of Dr Moreau"; "The Shape of Things to Come"; and "The Time Machine".

I might not mind a single mention per author if Carnevale stuck to single mentions per author, but he doesn't. His list is full of multiple Jack Vance, Gene Wolfe, George R.R. Martin and Heinlein mentions, quite a few Haldeman, Stephenson and Crighton books at separate rankings. Yet other good or influential authors, such as Niven or A.C. Clarke get only a single mention. (OK, Clarke was not a good writer in general, but Childhood's End was decent and if we're putting Crighton in because his stuff got turned into movies then 2001: A Space Odyssey counts too).

Speaking of the exercrable Michael Crighton, he gets mentioned for Jurassic Park and Sphere, but not The Andromeda Strain. WTF? Crighton was a terrible writer, despite his commercial success, and his characterizations (especially of scientists) were the crummy 1-dimensional cardboard cut-outs that are typical of bad SciFi (and form a valid if stereotypical criticism of the genre by outsiders). Here is Carnevale's description of Sphere (at position 85):

The slightly better book, Sphere had a really strange Barry Levinson movie. It's basically a sub movie recast as a alien movie recast as a psychological fantasy. I have always found its claustrophobic environment enhancing. Crichton's remaking of adventure novels with science fiction was prescient.

OK, I see he liked it. I think it was one of the worst pieces of dross I've had the misfortune to read: terrible characters with typical Crighton anti-scientist bigotry at full display, terrible plot, total trash.

And don't get me started on discussing why Carnevale thought to include Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" at number 49.

Guy Gavriel Kay makes the list twice: once for the Fionavar Tapestry (17th best in Carnevale's list!) and once for Tigana (5th!). I must admit I haven't read Tigana, but that was because I heroically read the entire Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, and it was the worst piece of stale, turgid, boring, badly-written Tolkien emulation I've had the misfortune to suffer through.

Another major problem with Carnevale's list, and strong evidence of its flawed subjectivism is the obscurity of many of the books. I don't claim to have everything ever written in the genre, but it is my favorite book genre, and I've read a lot of it over the last 25+ years. Yet I've never heard of half of the book on this list. In other top 100 or top 50 lists (e.g. this one) I've at least heard of the vast majority of the books, even when I may not have read them all.

Top 100 lists tend to be weighted toward the last few decades, and yet there are glaring omissions from this list of recent authors that are famous, popular and have positive critical reception. There is not a single Iain M. Banks book in the list (seriously, WTF!), not a single William Gibson (Neuromancer is without doubt one of the top 100 speculative fiction books of all time), not a single Greg Bear (Eon, Anvil of Stars, Queen of Angels, Infinity Concerto). Carnevale seems unaware of great or influential fantasy authors such as Keith Roberts (Pavane, admittedly semi-obscure) or David Gemmel (George R.R. Martin's recent fantasy work is refreshing gritty, but Gemmel did inspiring and gritty fantasy decades ago and certainly deserves credit for helping reinvent the field from the cheap Tolkien imitation that plagued it, ala Guy Gavriel Kay and Terry Brooks).

Commenters on Carnevale's highlight other authors worthy of mention: Terry Pratchett, Phillip Jose Farmer among them.

This is not meant as a comprehensive analysis and critique of Carnevale's list - I don't believe it worthy of more effort - but it should give you an idea of the major shortcomings of this list.

Items of note

I've been busy starting up a new research project that I intend to present results from at the end of May, so I haven't had time to blog much, but here are a variety of small things that attracted my attention.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the awesome doxygen source code documentation tool is now even more awesome: starting from version 1.5.5 it can now be used with Fortran! WRITE(6,'(A)') 'Praise the Parser!'

Speaking of programming: Intelligent Design Sort - it never gets old - praise the Sorter!

Pascal Boyer admits he has a problem: he is really interested in crackpots. Admittedly crackpots are a fascinating, if understudied, from a sociological point, but Boyer attempts to remedy this with his analysis of the group. He reproduces the well-known finding that a large fraction of crackpots have engineering backgrounds, but he does make some valid points (that appear obvious in hindsight, as all good analyses should), in particular: "the crackpot alternative is, almost universally, less mathematically challenging than the standard account" and "The crackpot theory is based on textbooks" with no exposure or understanding of actual research literature.

While we're on the subject of cranks, I must admit that I view most flavors of libertarianism with scorn, so I have a soft spot for those uncivil bloggers who ridicule it: Gavin M. over at Sadly, No! dissects Glenn Reynolds's libertarian conservatism and finds feudalism.

Still on the subject of cranks, PFAW dissect Orson Scott Card's absurdist bigotry using the scalpel of sarcasm.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/does-national-organization-marriage-want-overthrow-government
I still do not understand why people think "Ender's Game" was great.

Finally dispensing with the crank theme, and moving onto more serious stuff (although with a Speculative Fiction flavor), I could not agree more with the following argument (hat tip io9):

"But the one—the most absolutely key, the rock star green technology—that I champion over all others is birth control: vasectomies, IUDs, the pill, condoms. I don't care which kind you or your family prefers or finds most appropriate, I love them all. Any technology that reduces the absolute number of consumers (and particularly Americans and Europeans who consume the most) now that's a TECHNOLOGY!" — Pump Six And Other Stories author Paolo Bacigalupi, interviewed at EcoGeek.org.

If you, like me, had not previously heard of this Stanley Fish guy the NYT has added to their Opinion section, this (rather old) Slate article "The Indefensible Stanley Fish" by Judith Shulevitz will provide you with some useful background information. (Note clever segue from Speculative Fiction to tedious postmodernist analysis of Fiction.)

Finally some science! Evidence of forethought in Chimpanzees: Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science nicely summarizes the story of Santino the Chimp's premeditated ammunition collection for later attacks on Zoo visitors.

Michael Crichton has died.

Michael Crichton has died at age 66, after a struggle with cancer. I loathed his writing, but I commiserate with his family over this sad news.

Anathem. You either get it or you don't.

If you know what this figure is, then I think you might like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. If you don't know what this is, or worse, know but don't think its cool, then you're not going to understand Anathem. Sadly PZ Myers is in the "I don't get it" camp.

The figure is of course Euclid's famous but overly complicated geometrical proof of the Pythagorean Theorem (the image from the Wolfram web page on this subject, which is worth reading).

Forget the later half of Anathem - its just an extended action scene - the real meat is in the first half and if you're not hooked by the dialectical discourse between Theors by half way through then you're not going to get it.

Anathem is a exploration of math, physics, and metaphysics, OK? Square root of two demonstrated by cutting cakes. Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Platonic forms. Etc.

If you don't know much math, physics or metaphysics, you might not be able of appreciating it. The same way Cryptonomicon is best appreciated by people with *nix experience (and OSX doesn't count, apple dweebs!), Anathem is best appreciated by people similar to the Theors it describes.

Anathem's ending?

I finished reading Anathem last night.

For the first 400 pages I thought this was the most intellectually interesting and stimulating book that Neal Stephenson has written to date, although I wonder whether someone not in the physical or mathematical sciences would find it so interesting. As a venue for a discussion on metaphysics its brilliantly written.

The ending? I'm a little confused by the last 100 pages, in particular the last 20 or so pages. Stephenson's endings to his book have always been the weakest part of his writing, so in perspective this is better than most of his endings. Maybe I'll have to read it again...