The 50 most significant SF/F novels from 1953-2002 according to the Science Fiction Book Club.

( random edits )

Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien [1]
The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
Dune, Frank Herbert *
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin *
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett *
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams *
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
Little, Big, John Crowley
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny [2]
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson * [3]
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

[1] The first two parts of the trilogy were published in ‘51 and ‘52 so including this in the specified time period is a bit of a cheat.

[2] I think I’ve read this but I’m not sure. I’ve, many, many years ago, read something with what seems to be the same plot but it didn’t seem in any way special enough to warrant the reputation this book has.

[3] Except for the Harry Potter, is this the most recent book on the list? That makes the last decade and a half rather under represented.

Via Jack comes a meme with a point. From The Stacks Winter Reading Challenge. Reduce the pile of books sitting beside the bed. Pick five books that you’ve bought but haven’t read yet, and read them, between now and January 30th. Simple.

1. A Deepness in the Sky - Vernor Vinge (been on the stack for five and half years)
2. The Clerkenwell Tales - Peter Ackroyd (two years)
3. Collapse - Jared Diamond (six months)
4. The Algebraist - Iain M Banks (one year)
5. Who On Earth Is Tom Baker - Tom Baker (four years)

Hello, pointless calendar inspired posting time…

1. A friend phoned up and asked of I knew of any late night scart lead emporiums. Clearly a gap in the market.

2. Horatio Caine in love is creepy. Very creepy.

3. Last night was the last ever meeting of the Idle Speculators investment club. We’ve voted to wind the club up due to lack of active participation. Still we outperformed a ftse tracker for six years so I’d call it a success.

4. Grrrr. Need to start the search for a web developer all over again.

5. I actually quite enjoyed Robin Hood. Though I found myself saying “oh dear” every few minutes (and really should have saved them all for the throwing the sword bit).

6. Same friend as in 1 was pleased with himself as a “non-trekkie” (sic) for working out what Torchwood on a side of a bus meant.

7. The Turing Test is a very, very good book.

8. YouTube getting bought by Google at long last answers this question. And means that I’ll have to stop referring to YouTube as the Underpants Gnomes of the web.

9. There must be at least ten mildly interesting things in my life over the last few days, right? Yes, this one is cheating.

10. Logging onto a forum, seeing that new user from yesterday with the suspect user name is online and has just added a link to a site selling drugs, sending him a PM saying “You do know that you’re 30 seconds away from being banned?”, ah, the simple pleasures.

Very True Mood:  sleepy

Via Chris Brooke’s Virtual Stoa

Which Jane Austen Character Are You?

You’re Mariane Dashwood from Sense & Sensibility! You are the romantic youngster, also found in Jane Austen’s work as Catherine of Northanger Abbey and possibly Georgiana Darcy of Pride and Prejudice. You wander through life like Red Riding Hood in the forest, picking wildflowers and humming a happy song… and you can’t see the wolf right in front of you! Ruled by heart and not by head, you are best advised to to learn a little caution, before you are forced into a better acquaintance with the ways of the world.

Take this quiz!

Um. Not sure about that really.

Very True Mood:  tired

On Saturday I bought a song from iTunes by Drill Queen, one of whose members I know in real life.

On Monday a package from Amazon arrived for me, I didn’t remember ordering anything but thought that I might have done when I set up work as a delivery address (Amazon’s courier company is totally incapable of delivering to home). Today I checked the delivery note and discovered that someone else had bought it for me off my wishlist.

I didn’t recognise the name and so checked my Gmail archive to see if it was anyone who had ever spoken to me. It was, a little while ago he had sent me this e-mail:

Hi there, you responded to one of my messages on Usenet, full details here.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets/msg/…

I was wondering if you could please remove it from Google’s archives (you can do this by creating a Google Groups Account, looging in, finding the message and pressing remove).

I’m just not keen on having that URL on the Internet now that it’s used for something different.

Thank in advance,

Used for something different means not used for an escort site anymore. (I’d answered a technical question about the site coding not anything related to the content.) Anyway, today I sent back the message

Bribery worked.

Nice to know that after all these years of giving free advice on Usenet I’m finally getting some reward.

Very True Mood:  pensive

Ahoy me hearties, pull up a seat, pour yerself a tot o’ rum and listen as yer captain tells ye what he has been about of late.

Last Thursday ’twas my birthday and me landlubbing brother sent me gifts (arrr, I know what ye be thinking, he not be wanting me to plunder his scurvy souled town, and I be thinking that ye ‘ave a point). He sent me the latest collection of shanties by a fine lusty lass and a tall tale of a comedian in the arms trade. I be liking both gifts, though I must confess the whole idea of selling arms perplexes me. Why sell them when ye can use them to plunder more booty instead?

Over the weekend, the ship needed some repairs - the mass of booty plundered was becoming too great and so with much ingenuity on the part of our swedish carpenters we now be having a fine set of bookshelves to be a berth to it all.

This week I pressgang’d me first mate into helping me plunder the vaults o’ London. Arrrrrr! I also be on the look out for a new hand and been holding interviews for a suitable seadog.

Avast, I must be to sea. Fair seas to ye all and see ye at the appointed hour next year. Harrrrrrr!

Very True Mood:  silly

Last night Lettice and I started sorting out the book mountains and have produced several bags full of books to go to eBay or charity shops. Some of the books I’m getting rid of are amongst those that I’ve entered into LibraryThing. What should I do about them?

Delete them from LT? Add a new tag saying that I’ve disposed of them? If I do the latter, I could also start adding, with a relevant tag, books I borrow from friends or libraries. This (without the tags) is what Lettice is doing, adding books on a read rather than owned basis, but up to now I’ve been cataloguing everything I own and adding ratings as I read them.

So, should a virtual library be just a catalogue of a real library, or should it be something more? I’m leaning towards the something more.

Very True Mood:  thoughtful

Nothing in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ was as scary as the bald Mark Gatiss in Confidential afterwards.

So Cliff Richard gets name checked in Doctor Who, which will make pink_weasel very happy. But who’s a Cliff fan? That won’t make her so happy.

And bless the weasel, she phone this afternoon to say that she was in a bookshop where they were selling DW novels for £1.99 and did I want any? And she read out all the titles so I could yea or nay them. So that’s cheap copies of Last of the Gaderene, Eater of Wasps and Casualties of War on their way home to me.

Very True Mood:  cheerful

Some confusion at work as to whether a book on cookery and one on household cleaning products should have been bought with the company credit card.

It did cross my mind on Saturday whether VL had a contingency plan for the unlikely event of the UK winning Eurovision. Sure most of the burden would fall on the BBC (and more importantly the last two times we hosted it we did so in Harrogate and Birmingham) but if it did come to London we’d be involved to some degree. There wasn’t any chance of that this year though.

Really looking foward to a week off work next week. At the moment I’m perpetually tired, grouchy and making all sorts of cock ups with just about everything I touch.

Very True Mood:  cranky

There’s not really much to say about the new Sharpe story that started on telly last night. It seems to be a mash up of the three India books (Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph and Sharpe’s Fortress). The prologue was straight from Triumph and even set in the right year -1803, whilst the rest was bits and pieces from all over mixed up and moved to 1817 (to keep the episodes in their own chronological order; to excuse the older looking Sean Bean; and to get Harper in there somehow). Killing Lucille off screen presumably to free Sharpe up for a tumble with the generals’ daughter (who was displaying some gratuitous naked breasts on ITV1 at 9:30pm on a Sunday). Sean Bean doesn’t really need to act to play this part does he? And Toby Stephens makes a very good posh villain, possibly better here than in Die Another Day.

In other words, business as usual - good low brain escapism.

I wonder if they’ll do Sharpe’s Devil at some point? It’s the one full length story actually set after Waterloo and as the remaining novels are all tied to historical events set much earlier (Trafalger, Copenhagen, Torres Vedras) that would be difficult to muck about with as was done here.

Very True Mood:  tired