I came across this neat LINK on Facebook (thanks, Deana!) and thought it worth sharing.
It's NPR's Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy survey as nominated by listeners And what's fun is that you can take the survey and see how many of the hundred you've read. It's a real mix of classic and contemporary. -- FRANKENSTEIN to 1984 to THE LORD OF THE RINGS to HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE to GAME OF THRONES -- and all sorts of other goodies in between.
I was once -- back in junior high and high school -- a serious sci-fi fan. Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Norton . . . and many, many more. I had a subscription to the magazine Fantasy and Science Fiction and made little dabs at writing fantasy/sci-fi short stories. And I watched the night sky, waiting for a space ship to materialize and take me to some faraway planet.
By college, I'd quit waiting for the spaceship and had fallen into the fantasy worlds of T.H. White, C. S. Lewis, Mary Stewart's Arthurian books, and J. R. R. Tolkien. I still read some sci-fi -- mainly Heinlein -- but my subscription to F&SF lapsed.
For the past forty years, I've paid little attention to Sci-Fi -- Dune broke a long spell of no Sci-Fi reading --and, with a few notable exceptions, haven't paid much attention to fantasy either. My older son read lots of Piers Anthony and Robert Asprin but they never appealed to me -- only Douglas Adams and, more recently, Neil Gaiman have really captured my loyalty.
So I was surprised to find that I'd read exactly fifty of the 100 books listed -- and found myself thinking of others that I would have added . And finding old friends I'd forgotten as well as enticing titles luring me back into the Fantasy and Sci-Fi fold.What about you? Even if you don't consider yourself a reader of these genres, you might be surprised to find some familiar titles on this list.
