Top 100 SF and Fantasy Picks?

Children’s books were excluded.

Also no Guy Gavriel Kay here. Tigana is probably the best stand alone fantasy book I’ve ever read (and I’ve rea d alot). The Empire trilogy by RE Feist and Janny Wurts is also brilliant.

I suppose I deserved that. But to dig the hole deeper, it seems to me that any popular contest of this sort is going to turn up just this sort of mix of seminal (and thus widely known) but quite bad work mixed with things that have been wildly popular over the last 10-20 years. Of course there are some good things mixed in, but that, I think, is because being good and being popular are not mutually exclusive.

So I wouldn’t say that the whole thing is useless, but bemoaning the things you like not being more popular is not something that I try to allow myself to do anymore (most of the time).

That said, I am human: No Reynolds, no Ian McDonald, no Ian McLeod, no Ken MacLeod? One day there will be a Joss Whedon movie of The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, and it will propel that book onto a list like this one.

Slightly over 10% women authors! Not sure if I should celebrate or …

“Children’s books were excluded.”

Then wherefore “Watership Down?”

This list is not even wrong.

gosh, it’s almost like this list mostly reflects the tastes of a rather limited demographic!

Are you referring to NPR listeners (46% women, according to NPR) or American SF readers (45% women according to the ABA)?
Top tip; women buy more books than men; women read more books than men; women are a majority of the population; unsurprisingly, women are in the majority of the readership for pretty much every genre. SF is an exception but, as you can see, 45% is a pretty huge minority.

So assuming that SF is only for lonely male nerds just won’t do…

One of the best reasons for NPR to create a list like this is so that we can all enjoy ourselves by getting outraged about what’s been left off.
It usually goes like
– Hey, I made a 100 best X list
– Yeah, those are the best 100. Perhaps switch 79 and 78 around?
– Right, fixed it. We still need something to publish, before 5 o’clock.
-Why not publish your list?
– We’re not wikipedia?! Who’s going to pay for a list?
– Let’s just print some jokes. We don’t have time for better.

ajay: assuming that SF is only for lonely male nerds just won’t do

Maybe it’s just lists of SF that are for lonely male nerds?

Plus, it’s not an assumption that 87 out of 100 on the list are male-authored. And, just to live the contradiction for a moment, not one of them is John Wyndham when it clearly should be.

I am very surprised to see Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera Series and not the Dresden Files on the list.

It would also appear that being named Neil (or Neal) is an advantage as a science fiction writer. Perhaps when I enter the field, I will assume the pen name ‘Neil Nealsburg’ or ‘Neal McNeilly’. Well, I’ll work on it.

Should have …

Stanislaw Lem
More of Gibson
Jules Verne
EE ‘Doc’ Smith

Hey, the Amber books made it! Only the first half of them (the ones narrated by Corwin) are actually very good, and Lord of Light is probably a better book by the same author anyway, but I’m tickled nonetheless. I like the Platonic riffing making up their universe.

My main complaint is that Ender’s Game is way overrated.

(1) My first reaction when I saw this elsewhere was: Where’s Earthsea? I guess no-children’s-books may be the explanation. But the last three books aren’t that.

(2) Where-are-the-women? is not high on my list of reflexes, but my No. 2 is Left Hand of Darkness and my No. 3 is Strange/Norrell, and I have to wonder why the masses take a different view.

(3) I did finish A Fire on the Deep, which puts it in the top five or ten percent (pick your version of Sturgeon’s Law), but Banks is a far, far better writer, and his output suffices to meet my minimum yearly requirement of Gigantic Space Opera, so I don’t see myself reading any more Vinge.

(4) I am not against stretching genre boundaries, but Animal Farm is not fantasy, it’s a beast fable, which is a totally separate entity.

bq. No Eleanor Arnason.

An occasional CT commenter, I’m happy to say (as is Ken MacLeod of course).

No John Brunner?

Really lame list.

C

My congratulations to roac at 31 for putting down in words what I’ve often thought for 52-odd years: “I have to wonder why the masses take a different view.”

I’m sorry not to see my favorite Alternate Histories anywhere – Pavane by Keith Roberts, Bring The Jubilee by Ward Moore, and The Man In The High Castle by Phillip K Dick.

I’ve always regarded Animal Farm as most definitely a children’s book.

It wasn’t written for children, it wasn’t published by a children’s publisher, it wasn’t reviewed as a children’s book, it wasn’t marketed as a children’s book, bookshops don’t stock it in the children’s section… why on earth would you think that?

No CJ Cherryh?
No Andre Norton?
No C L Moore?
No Poul Anderson?
No Clifford Simak?
No John Wynham?

And if you’re going to include WATCHMEN aren’t you ethically required to include SUPERMAN and maybe BATMAN as well?

I think the moral here is that a list of “the 100 best” requires serious constraints. There shouldn’t be any works begun after say 2001 for example. Maybe there should be a requirement that each decade of the 20th century should have at least 5 representatives. Maybe one in ten authors should be non-English-speaking.

“Especially if it was voted for by the dullard listeners to NPR”

Really? Having a go at public radio listeners? Snob.

“Because I read it and was taught it in 4th grade.”
We did it in 8th. It seems a little bit advanced for 4th grade.

“What can I say? Canadian public school in the early 90’s was very big on warning its students of the dangers of Bolshevism.”

I also went to a Canadian public school. Must have been a different curriculum.

what on earth did the expert panel use as criteria for inclusion?

I’m not sure why those particular Pratchett books made the list. I worry that some people picked Small Gods because they are impressed with Pratchett’s intermittent aspirations to profundity. To be fair, though, it is one of his best stories, just as a story. So is Going Postal, for that matter.

My favorite has always been Wyrd Sisters, but I’ve never found anyone to agree with me.

I don’t know anyone who’s read Watership Down, I don’t think. I do remember a book about an English girl who gets a copy of the book when what she really wants is a paintbox and a recording of Debussy (the American equivalent is a girl who gets a little brother when what she really wants is a horse).

The presence of the execrable Wheel of Time on the list at all, never mind in the top 20 devalues it significantly IMHO (I used to be a fan till it became clear Jordan was just padding the damn thing out into retirement…)

This could be applied to GRRM’s series as well. ASoIaF came off the rails after the third book, WoT after the fourth. But Martin’s crash-and-burn is more disappointing since he’s capable of writing decent prose. But in his fifth brick, he managed to turn the most interesting characters and plot lines into some of the most boring passages of prose I’ve ever had the pleasure to read to slog through.

Others have already made some of my points, but:
Dick, The Man in the High Castle
Stapledon, The Star Maker
Lem, Solaris
Bester, The Stars My Destination
Stewart, Earth Abides
Moore, Bring the Jubilee
Benford, Timescape
Harris, Fatherland

Ballard is a notable omission; a problem for voters might have been that no one particular book of his stands out from his others, and much of his best writing is in his short stories. Also, Christopher Priest is a favourite of mine, though his books are for some obscure reason difficult to find in my corner of North America.

Mijnheer, since the list makers were willing to aggregate (which I like, a lot), I wonder if Ballard might have gotten a slot for, say, the apocalypse trilogy of Drowned World, Burning World, and Crystal World, or something like that.

Oh, please please, let’s see some alternative lists. Let’s start with the moderators. For my money CT has the best adult discussions about sf on the webz. There a few better uses for the internet than the aggregation of top xxx lists.

Too many fantasy titles, & given the prevalence of fantasy Moorcock is all the way down at 90 ? No J. G Ballard, only one Philip Dick. No Clarke in the top 20 ! Pavane by Keith Roberts should be in there. No A .E Van Vogt.

“EE ‘Doc’ Smith”

Of great historical important to SF? Yes. But also has a critical liability. His work is mostly garbage.

And yes, the list is titled to two categories sure to incite CT readers:

1. Officially-approved-Literary-SF; and
2. Readable but irrelevant “popular authors,’ e.g., Eddings.

Ridley Walker probably could’ve used a spot, and anything by Wyndham, but my pick would’ve been Re-Birth, which I think was The Chrysalids in the UK.

There’s a fair amount of controversy about the merits of Van Vogt. I loved him as a kid, but Damon Knight seemed to make it his mission in life to slag him off at every opportunity.

Of all the omissions, the one that stings the most is Bester. If only people knew what a pleasure they were denying themselves…

I saw above that David Brin was mentioned. A quick anecdote about Brin. I was going to Reed College and found myself at Powell’s Books in Portland one afternoon. David Brin walked in and asked to see the store’s book buyer. It seems he had a box of The Postman in the trunk of his car and was hoping the buyer would put some copies on Powell’s shelves. I couldn’t believe a giant like Brin was having to drive around and flog his books. Weird.

No one has complained Battlefield Earth is on the list??? L. Ron Hubbard had to be one of the absolute worst sci fi writers of all time.

And, Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg should be included. One of the most interesting looks at what alien life could be in the environment of a neutron star.

Also, Niven’s Integral Tree should have made the list.

I somehow doubt The Handmaid’s Tale was nominated mostly by men.

I think of it as a future documentary of the political rise of the Dominionists in America.

Zelazny’s Amber books are fine. But no Lord of Light? No Creatures of Light and Darkness?

The omission of Samuel Delany is, well, thoughtless. Dahlgren and The Einstein Intersection are amazing books.

Piers Anthony, but not Philip Jose Farmer? The Riverworld and World of Tiers books are extraordinary.

Maybe the problem is that any list of 100 books in any genre would exclude things just as good as the things that do make the list…

Excluding Octavia Butler is almost criminal.

Plenty of Vance imitators, but no Vance? Nuncupatory!

Left Hand of Darkness is on there.

My experience with the Dune books was:
quality of book n = 1/2 * quality of book n-1

With Robert Jordan, there’s more of a discontinuity along around books 5 and 6, where one suddenly realizes things are going very wrong. Almost everyone I know who’s read that series loves the first two or three books, and gives up around books 7-9.

And yes, Jack Vance, Guy Gavriel Kay should be there. And putting Terry Goodkind’s series above Susannah Clarke is about as bad an insult to literature as I can imagine.

He’s been mentioned above, but the exclusion of Stanislaw Lem is simply unforgivable. Though best known for Solaris (which is great), I recommend The Star Diaries and Memoirs of a Space Traveller, as well as Tales of Pirx the Pilot, The Cybriad, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, and others, many of which are available only in Polish (which unfortunately I cannot read). His A Perfect Vacuum is very comparable to the best work of Borges, and his non-fiction body of work is world-class as well. The greatest shame is that though he received many prestigious awards, he did not receive the Nobel. As I guess you see, he’s my favorite sci-fi writer.

Has CT not discussed this list, which is a year and a half old now? Marred by a lack of William Gibson, and very heavy on Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, and Ursula LeGuin, but otherwise probably better than the NPR list.

A mildly fun question: Which is the highest ranked entry such that you’ve never heard of either book or author

In my case: Wheel of Time Series by Robert Jordan – judging by comments I haven’t missed much.

After that, there are a fair number which all seem to be summarised as: Young Marie Sue (of Race X and Character Class Y) grows up to discover hir mystical powers and Use Them for Good, becoming well-loved, rich and powerful in the process.

Certainly never heard of Brandon Sanderson or ever seen his books in a UK bookshop – but he makes the list twice.

And Orson Scott Card at #3!

Although he blurb does make it sound vastly more fun than any book by a right-wing Mormon can conceivably be:

‘Young Andrew “Ender” Wiggan, bred to be a genius, is drafted to Battle School where he trains to lead the century-long fight against the alien Buggers’.

OK I may be British but surely Bugger must mean the same in the States as it does over here?

OK I may be British but surely Bugger must mean the same in the States as it does over here?

Not necessarily.

See here for other senses, which (in my admittedly idiosyncratic personal experience) are fairly common in the U.S., including among people who don’t even know that there’s another usage of the term. Among the people where I grew up, “He’s a cute little bugger, isn’t he?” doesn’t carry any vulgar connotation. People would be shocked……

See also here for more specifics on the use of the term in Ender’s Game, which I haven’t read.

To answer John Quiggin’s question–the highest rated entry on the NPR/IndieClick lists I had never heard of:
NPR: Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series (#12)
IndieClick: Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana (#5)

Here’s another question: The NPR list is an attempt at the “wisdon of crowds” approach, whereas the IndieClick list is the one person approach. So–wisdom (or ignorance) of crowds?

Jamie #89

So no connection between bugger and buggery at all?

Pity – the idea of someone called Ender fighting evil gay aliens did rather appeal to me.

And I am now rather intrigued by whether there is some peculiar Mormon propensity to the writing and consumption of SF and Fantasy .

Other than Card and Sanderson there’s also the Twilight woman, Tracy Hickman of Dragonlance infamy and the great tabletop and computer RPG designer Sandy Petersen – plus a long list of people I’ve never heard some of whom are frighteningly prolific listed at mormonsf.org.

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, definitely deserves a place in the Top Ten. Another great dystopian novel is Karin Boye’s Kallocain.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials deserves its place among the best. A brilliant trilogy. I’m still hoping someone gets back on the bus and turns the last two books into movies.

OK, The Wheel of Time was derailed somewhere after book 4-7 (your choice). Who is going to do the necessary job of writing the proper final novel of the series?

@Quiggin
I get down to #43 Mistborn Trilogy for never-heard of, #23 Dark Tower for never-read, and #5 Song of Ice and Fire for shouldn’t-be-there

I had never heard of Rothfuss, at number 18.

Some of the choices are weird: American Gods, by Gaiman is in above anything else he’s done? It’s one of his weakest works. Also, Watchmen is tedious crap. I’m glad I’ve never read Ender’s Game, but its position at number 3, with Watchmen in the top 20 tells me about the sensibilities of the voters: ageing neck-beard sf men who love reading books about genius men who save the universe with their brilliance, but are also becoming increasingly aware that their own masculinity is being pushed out to the periphery by age and their own burgeoning waistlines.

You see these people in role-playing circles too much …

you can also tell they aren’t academic versions of same. If they were, Wyndham would be on the list – his books are all about a middle-aged academic who shows a young woman the way of the world, in a crisis, and is flawlessly able to do anything despite his middle age and previously cushy lifestyle.

Lavie Tidhar on Ender and the buggers …

I’m only a sci-fi dabbler (mostly before age 20), but I was also surprised by the dearth of Philip K Dick and the lack of Lem and also L’Engle. While her adult stuff isn’t as good as her kid’s stuff, it definitely beats out some of the stuff on that list.

Gwyneth Jones (another author notable for her omission) on Ender’s Game:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann/Wild%20Hearts.htm

The list doesn’t look that bad to me — it’s just somebody else’s, or some other group’s, list. Not mine.

Still, it’s fun to whinge! Where’s Charles Stross?

Jake B @ 102

I’ve never read any of his books but was well aware of Card’s fear and loathing of homosexuals as expressed in that and IIRC other pieces – which is precisely why I raised the question of whether he really is comparing what I presume are evil alien hordes who we must exterminate or die to teh gays.

Re Mary Gentle’s Ash in the absence of actual sales figures it may be worth comparing amazon.com and .co.uk rankings.

Amazon.com doesn’t even have the big single volume collection in paperback that other than the Gollancz UK edition as an import which tells you straight away that it can’t have sold that brilliantly.

It does have the hardback single volume and as US consumers are much fonder of buying hardbacks than us Brits here are its rankings:

426,899th bestselling book
4.5 stars
8 reviews
12 copies available on amazon marketplace ( IMO a not insignificant metric) priced $0.01 to $50.00
Appears to have been OOP since 2001

The first book of the of 4-volume paperback has a lot more reviews (36 averaging 4-stars), copies in marketplace (52) but a lower sales rank of 860,969 and also seems to have gone OOP a long time ago.

So on this evidence Ash just didn’t sell enough US copies when it came out in pieces to justify a single-volume paperback edition and never really got a mass readership

On amazon.co.uk you have the 1-volume hardcover edition

300,072nd best selling book
4.2 stars
45 reviews
20 copies on marketplace ranging from an eye-watering £92.00 to £00.1

And the 1-volume paperback has the same reviews (which are merged with the hardbacks) and a sales rank of 104,556.

Its also long OOP BTW which makes one of those 1p (+£2.75 p&p) secondhand hardbacks look a very attractive proposition.

So given that the US market must be what: 4 times the size of the UK’s? Ash clearly sold a lot less well there than it did over here – unsurprisingly given that IIRC it is a very English book which is most fun to read if you have at least a passing acquaintance with the Wars of the Roses period and of the way we teach ancient and medieval history and do field archaeology in UK universities…

So quite understandable that it is not in a US top 100 while a great deal of absolute dreck that is unaccountably popular in the US is.

So weird though it looks (and assuming that I haven’t wildly miscounted author’s nationalities) this list actually may indicate something quite interesting – that when you ask a really big sample of people who are not for the most part hardcore SF fans what they like the result is far more nationalistic if not parochial than I at least would have expected.

Maybe the reason all these Jordans and Brooks’s and Goodkinds and Sandersons and Feists and Donaldsons and Salvatores do so well in the list is because they really do understand what many American readers want – the literary equivalent of a Big Mac or a KFC Bargain Bucket that delivers a high page count to dollar ratio and entertains within strictly defined parameters of what constitutes a fantasy novel.

Spending way too much time on this but just did a more detailed count.

Of the 100 books 26 are by Brits, 2 by a Frenchman (Verne) and 1 by a Canadian (Atwood) – so 71% are by people who are AFAICT without checking every ones wiki page American writers.

But of the Brits 9 books are by writers who I’d describe as literary (in that they are not primarily known as genre SF/fantasy writers – i.e. Orwell, Huxley, Burgess, Lewis, Wells, Shelley) or which are only dubiously SF/Fantasy at all (R Adams, S Clarke)

So if you only count the genre writers and discount for multiple books by single authors (with Gaiman getting 4 and Tolkein and Pratchett 2 entries each) the American preponderance here looks like its at least three quarters.

As I said much more biased nationally than I’d have expected.

Roger,

Since Americans make up 3/4 quarters of the English speaking world, I think 25 non American authors on the list, sounds about right.

You have never heard of Sanderson yet you know the quality of his work? Neat trick.

Also I guess Donaldson’s Unbeliever series fits into guy goes to another world and saves it but the world is original, extremely richly imagined, and leper rapist refuses to believe and take action to save world is bit different not sure it fits into the mass produced cheeseburger category.

Like Mieville who I got the analogy from I am not saying that that cheeseburgers are a bad thing – sometimes there really is a cheeseburger-shaped hole in your life.

The trick is how you balance your consumption of cheap, filling and satisfying junk food with healthier and/or more adventurous fare.

And not all cheeseburgers are alike – Donaldson (who I have read) is obviously one of those exotic this month only specials with chipotle chillis or whatnot and GRR Martin is that artisanal establishment whose burgers and service used to be fine enough to fool you to pay fine dining prices for them but who for some reason has completely lost his touch since he took that long vacation.

Where’s The Island of Doctor Moreau? It didn’t even make the list of 237 finalists. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon should be on there as well, if only for “The Book of the Machines” chapters.

Sorry to go on and on but another key factor seems to be currentness (currency?).

Other than the literary classics that I assume got in because it was a survey of NPR listeners and not just of genre fans, there aren’t that many ‘old’ books in it – and there are a hell of a lot of very recent books/ongoing fantasy series that are still properly in print and being actively marketed (or which are linked to either recent or perennially popular films).

So not only are Lem and Zamyatin and Stapledon and Lindsay foreigners they are very dead foreigners and not being promoted other than as part of some worthy Masterworks series.

Ditto for a lot of the the American greats of the golden and silver ages (the latter being Vance, Leiber, Bester, Anderson, Cordwainer Smith etc) – unless like Howard they created something that has a much wider cultural resonance these authors just don’t register any more at this level now that popular taste has shifted towards bloated fantasy epics and graphic novels.

One big problem with these lists, other than those pointed out above, is that they are much too long.

By analogy, over a couple hundred players are enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But they didn’t select all of those players at once, they put in two to five players a year, every year, for eighty years to get to the current list. And there are people who complain that too many players are enshrined in the BHOF, or about this or that player being excluded, pointing to a similar player that is included.

Since no one can be familiar with over a hundred science fiction books (you might have read all of those books but you certainly won’t remember all of them), trying to put together a best one hunded list all at once will always be a botched effort, including lots of marginal at best selections which will lead to criticism about why some other marginal selection wasn’t included instead. If you do it by a poll where everyone votes for their five favorite books, that solves some of the problem, but you will wind up on books getting into the list with a handful of votes.

This can be avoided by doing a top twenty list, which also has the advantage in that more people will actually wade through the list in one sitting.

Was L’Engle meant seriously (way up at @1)? I don’t think she’s written any adult fantasy. The Other Side of the Sun has seriously meant black magic, but I wouldn’t think it counts, and A Severed Wasp has some Dan Brown-esque anticlerical conspiracy theorizing, and references to black magic and IIRC something like a Svengali relationship between some characters, but it isn’t fantasy either.

Wow, lots of CT commenters haven’t heard of Rothfuss and the Kingkiller chronicles. I think I envy you. Here’s a link to the FerretBrain review of the second book… it should tell you all you need to know–and make you wonder how this series made it to 18th.

http://www.ferretbrain.com/articles/article-751

@129: Or, equivalently, that most fantasy series degrade in quality over time, some faster than others. The reviews of the first book are very strong. It appears that the author of the review of the second book desperately wanted a dark, Game of Thrones style and was angry that he was getting traditional fantasy conventions.

Marc, I was actually using the phrase as a shortened form of “neck-breathing fatbeard,” which is the precise type of person I was aiming my description at. In case you aren’t sure, I’m a fantasy role-player. I think the behavior of a certain type of role-player is a scourge on our hobby and part of the reason it’s gone down the gurgler in the past 20 years. I don’t detest fantasy and I don’t detest RPGers, but I do get the shits with the conservatism of the fantasy doorstopper and the reflexive curmudgeons who maintain its prominence in the genre. Though much maligned for it, Mieville was right when he described Tolkien as “the wen on the arse of fantasy” and the negative aspect of his influence is clear in these kinds of lists.

Any list of 100 should include at least three Philip K. Dick titles, of which one should be Ubik.

Lem and Bester, of course.

John Gray’s Park.

The Moon Pool.

If historical importance is a criterion, then surely Looking Backward.

@ someguy,

Firstly, Dan Hemmens and the FerretBrain people are not me, and I’m not them. So your comment is probably better served on that site, rather than this one.

To address your post, however… I think there were signs of extreme Mary Sue-ism developing in Rothfuss’ first book. Personally, I had hoped the second book would dampen them, not ratchet them up to fanfic levels. I think your understanding of Mary Sues (and wish fulfillment) is lacking. The definition of a Mary Sue is that they are author self-inserts. They are characters created to do things the author would like to do. And by this definition Kvothe is nothing but a Mary-Sue. He is good-looking, adored by others, can sleep with anyone he wants without impunity, and is the most powerful being in the universe.

Yet you believe the “unrequited” love by Denna might somehow “cancel out” all of this? But I submit that, based on the first two books, it’s inevitable that Kvothe eventually “gets” Denna, and if he does, then what? Will you admit that Kvothe is the all-time King of Mary Sues?

Look at it this way… Kvothe is Rothfuss’ self-insert and Denna is Rothfuss’ insert for the girl he didn’t get in high school (or college or wherever). But in the Kingkiller World, I’m wagering Rothfuss will get her. How can you think he won’t? Who else is “worthy” of Kvothe… who else could he end up with? And if you don’t believe Kvothe is Rothfuss’ self-insert, take a moment and read a quick bio on Rothfuss and then get back to me.

Look, it’s okay for a person to have personal fantasies, but it’s not okay for the world to worship an immature author’s self-insert as the “next great thing” in the genre, be that genre fantasy, sci-fi or what have you. And I think Hemmens’ review does a pretty good job of laying that out.

J.G.Ballard, who he?

Obviously the three Dick titles should be Galactic Pot Healer, The Game Players of Titan and Martian Time Slip.[Reserves option of completely changing mind in Dickian fashion]

The Handmaid’s Tale has many of the flaws pointed out in Vonda N.McIntyre’s “The Straining Your Eyes Through the Viewscreen Blues”, most notably Excessive Capitalization.

I don’t know if someone has pointed this out upthread, but while the Amber series is entertaining, This Immortal, Lord of Light and for manyThe Dream Master are far better books

“Americans make up 3/4 quarters of the English speaking world”

This is a much-promulgated phony statistic, arrived at by combining Americans who speak English as a first language and Americans who speak it as a second language, and then counting the result against only the worldwide total of people who speak it as a first language.

When you compare Americans who speak it as a first language with people worldwide who also do so, the percentage is about 66%.

When you add in the (well over) 300 million people who speak English as a second language — Indians, Filipinos, Nigerians, and not incidentally 36 million Americans and 7.5 million Canadians — Americans who speak English as a first language are about 35% of the “English speaking world.”

Having gone over the list again, one redeeming quality is –no E.R. Eddison!

To be honest, I don’t read much modern fantasy – as a result, I’m perfectly prepared to believe that it leaves a lot to be desired. I’ve never read Kingkiller, for instance – I’m simply reacting suspiciously to a poison-pen review. (LeGuin was fond of the first – any specifics about her opinion on the recent one?)

The ones that I’m fond of are Lord of the Rings, Mists of Avalon, Earthsea, etc. And I do admit to having really liked the Elric series (although it has been many moons since I last read any of them.) I’m more of an SF guy, really (Brin, Reynolds, etc.)

So I don’t think that sg and I are necessarily in disagrement per se – there is just something in the lingo that triggered a button for me. The fantasy genre can provoke a really arrogant and dismissive attitude among some (especially female) reviewers – probably the mirror image of male reviewers of romantic comedies and romance novels, I suppose. I’m more inclined to let people enjoy what they enjoy and not try to lay my tastes and standards on them.

I will, however, defend Lord of the Rings vigorously against slurs….

Dunno, only read the first book. That was bad enough. I wouldn’t really care if I hadn’t been suckered into reading it by all the hype.

Mary Sue comes in different grades. The adult Tenar looks like one to me, but the books are fine. (Well, not Tehanu actually, but I like The Other Wind.) But I quit on Riverworld as soon as “Peter Jairus Fisher” made his appearance.

Sprizouse,

‘Firstly, Dan Hemmens and the FerretBrain people are not me, and I’m not them. So your comment is probably better served on that site, rather than this one.’

Are you serious? You placed a link to a caustic, unfavorable, review of the Wise Man’s Fear and claimed that review ‘ it should tell you all you need to know—and make you wonder how this series made it to 18th.’ And now you are all like go direct your comments to the month’s old review and comments thread that was last updated a month ago instead of on the thread were you just brought up the topic?

‘ I think your understanding of Mary Sues (and wish fulfillment) is lacking. ‘

Why do you think that? What did I say that makes you believe that? I mean I thought it was a pretty simple concept to get

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

‘A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the author or reader’

But hey I am wrong all the time. So, please, explain it to me.

‘Look, it’s okay for a person to have personal fantasies, but it’s not okay for the world to worship an immature author’s self-insert as the “next great thing” in the genre, be that genre fantasy, sci-fi or what have you. And I think Hemmens’ review does a pretty good job of laying that out.’

If it makes the author and the readers happy I am really confused as to why it isn’t ok.

‘Look at it this way… Kvothe is Rothfuss’ self-insert and Denna is Rothfuss’ insert for the girl he didn’t get in high school (or college or wherever). But in the Kingkiller World, I’m wagering Rothfuss will get her. How can you think he won’t? Who else is “worthy” of Kvothe… who else could he end up with?’

We really won’t know until the series ends. But you already know. So much so that you can say all you need to know about the series is contained in the extended virulent rant you linked to.

If at the end the Chandrian show up and Kvothe is all like ah ha I have you now and rips folly off the wall and starts tearing it up as Denna comes around the corner using the power of names and then it is back to the happy university I am going to be bummed. But in the meantime I am going to give Rothfuss the benefit of the doubt.

Also, I don’t think it is ratcheted up in the second book as much as you do, yea he does a faerie queen and learns ninjitsu, but he fails at math, chemistry, and a lot else, the failed designs in the lab and comments about Kilvin’s help , the failure to learn Ylish, etc, struggles to even master the name of the wind. But in the end that really doesn’t matter it is the ending that will decide it.

{Which is a pretty good reason to leave the series off the list at this point}

Patrick Nielsen Hayden,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language

I got 71.6% as a first language which is pretty close to 75%.

And if you go with English language and interent access to vote for the NPR list and awareness of the NPR list you would probably find the percentage of voters that were American to be greater than 71.6%.

someguy @ 155

The Wikipedia page you linked to suggests 215 million native speakers of English in the US, and somewhere between 309 and 400 million worldwide, i.e. somewhere between 54% and 70% of native English speakers being in the US.

Marc, if it helps you deal with the ferretBrain review, bear in mind that it’s contrasting the treatment of Kingkiller’s character Kvolthe to Bella Swan. Its anger at least partially derives from the fact that reviewers would not treat a female-authored Mary Sue with the same respect.

And, as her failure to sell the film rights to Earthsea to Miyazaki Hayao in the ’70s shows, Le Guin is capable of mistakes of critical interpretation.

I’m not sure why Orson Scott Card is a horrible person for believing that one should not be unabashedly out as gay and sexually active and Mormon simultaneously at the current time (barring the type of revelation that opened up all levels of the Priesthood to African Americans in the 1970s – always a possibility in the Mormon church..) Which, if you understand how the LDS church works, is pretty much the only possible outcome. Of course, being a believing Mormon requires you to believe a bunch of other things that would seem to me to be patently ridiculous, but then again, I’m not a believing Mormon. Should the Church’s prophet wake up tomorrow and declare that he had a revelation and that homosexuality would now be tolerated and homosexual marriages would henceforth be sealed in the temple for eternity, Card would immediately change his tune.
And Ender’s Game is a kid’s book. Especially compared to Speaker for the Dead which is far, far better. But both pale compared to the Maker Alvin series which is just plain fun, even if it marked the turn from Card being a decent writer to losing his mind.

From the linked article:
“It is quite possible for me to regard homosexuality as a temptation toward a difficult sin, much to be avoided by members of my religious community, and at the same time recognize that others feel differently about it — and that even those homosexuals within my religious community (which means most of those I have known in my life) are people of value, as they either struggle to control their desires or, despairing of that, leave the religious community that requires of them what they no longer desire to do. The only people I have contempt for are those who try to remain inside Mormonism while denying the validity of guidance from the prophets, and I oppose them, not because they live as homosexuals, but because of the hypocrisy of claiming to be Mormon while denying the only reason for the Mormon community to exist. If they prevailed, it would destroy our community. Homosexuals themselves pose no such threat, provided that those who are Mormon admit that a homosexual act is a sin as long as the prophet declares it to be so, while those who do not accept the prophet’s authority refrain from pretending to be Mormon. “