{democracy:9}
About S. K. Sloan
Samuel K. Sloan's love of Star Trek brought him to Slice of SciFi, where he was Managing Editor from 2005-2011, and returned from 2013-2014 before retiring once again from scifi news gathering.
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Those are our only choices!
Yes, they are. Let’s see – we have great novels written by:
Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, George Orwell, Stephen King, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, Kurt Vonnegut, Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, and Kim Stanley Robinson…… yeah, that’s your choices for this week’s poll.
Boy there are some tough choices there. I am going for Dune though. The shear epicness of it does it for me.
Some good stuff there – came down to a choice between Dune or Red Mars for me.
I’m surprised you left off Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Caslte or UBIK, Wm. Gibson’s Neuromancer, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow–there are just so many great sci fi novels on the list.
Battlefield Earth? Really? Why is that on the list? That book was only marginally better than the movie.
Anyway, I had a hard time choosing between The Stand and Red Mars, but I voted Red Mars, since I doubt it’ll be getting much love in the votes. Since it hasn’t been turned into a movie yet (thank goodness, I have a hard time imagining anyone doing it without dropping the best part, the political intrigue), I bet most of the people have only heard of it.
See what I mean? 7 votes out of 152. Sad.
I concur that Heinlein and Asimov must be included in this list, yet the works of theirs which you list are certainly not their finest (IMHO).
I, Robot is not even a novel!
Heinlein’s best: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Puppet Masters
Asimov: Foundation, the End of Eternity
Missing:
Ringworld, by Larry Niven
The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester
the Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
DUNE!!! one of the movies that turned me into a scifan… even though we’re talkin about the books..
Brian, I agree that Red Mars is one of the finest scifi novels ever written and, like you am not surprised however, at its low vote count. I also loved the other two books in the trilogy Blue and Green Mars, and, just to let you know – they are under serious consideration for possible movie adaptations sometime down the road.
Paul, you mention a great number of novels, all worthy of being on this list, but there are literaly hundreds worthy of being on the list, and I wanted to narrow it down to at least 10 most people might be more inclined to know. I really battled with myself not to include The Martian Chronicles, but it was either that or Solaris, and I simply could not let this list not include something from the great Stanislaw Lem (since we mention Bradbury frequently on the site and show), so it won out over Bradbury’s work.
Compiling a list like this for vote consideration is never an easy thing to do, and one goes into this realizing there will be some great works left out of it, especially in a poll of only 10 or 20, and you go into it also knowing that the final list you come up with will not please everyone….but that is my job to worry about and I’ve got big shoulders so I can take the heat. 😉
hmmm. No women writers represented. WTF?
I’m sorry…you just cannot justify grouping 1984 with the rest of these novels as though it were just another good sci-fi story, even a classic sci-fi story. As far as the sci-fi relatedness of these works, almost all of them can be placed on the same list for comparison. But 1984 outstrips them all in the sense that it is a literary classic. It transcends the sci-fi genre, indeed it was never intended to be classified as sci-fi, and therefore is not really susceptible to more or less equal comparison with any of the others – even though some of those authors may be really good. But Orwell’s quality as a writer rests on various other factors that place him alongside people like Joseph Conrad or Herman Melville…not Ron Hubbard or Orson Scott Card! Come on, guys and gals, do your homework and get your game up. It’s like someone in another comments section (KAMN) said a short while back: you’re bright enough to figure these kinds of things out.
If that is the way you feel, then I certainly hope you voted for 1984. I even considered “Animal Farm” as part of the list – bet that would of really tarred your feathers. 🙂
Red Mars is the only one the list I read more than once. I consider it political science fiction…
Alas, the translation of Solaris currently available sucks – but if you read the original Polish version, there can be no doubt as to the winner. Of course Dune was my second choice. Slaughterhouse third. Ender’s game, the shittiest book in sf, was last.