Top 100 Sci-Fi Books.  Joe Gregorio points to Mark Paschal who points to a list of the Top 100 Science Fiction books of all time. It's a good list!  [The .NET Guy]

That's a tough list to put together.  Many of the stories listed are great literature, sci-fi or not.  Putting Heinlein, Dick, Herbert, Asimov, and Clarke in the top five is a solid start -- convince everybody you mean business.  Putting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the top ten is a classy move -- she did invent the genre, after all.  (By the way, if you've never read Frankenstein, do so.  It's short but powerful, and thought provoking.)

I could disagree with a few of the choices (I've read several of Ben Bova's novels, and I'm just not all that impressed by him), but you could make an argument in each case.  As much as I love them both, I'm not sure either Alice In Wonderland or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy belong in a Sci-Fi list.  Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars is one of the best books I've ever read in any genre -- I'd like to see it rated higher than 82.  I liked Diamond Age better than Snow Crash, but at least Neal Stephenson is on the list.

It's funny.  Looking at the list just now, I realized many of these books made me cry or otherwise touched me when I read them.  That's not something you usually attibute to Science Fiction.  But it's definitely something attributable to classic literature.  And I think many of these books are destined to be studied by high school students a couple of decades from now.  Lucky bastards.

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