Wednesday November 22 2006
| Posted by Jonathan | 06:49:am
There’s a meme going around. Respond to the SF Book Club’s Top 50. I might. I might not. The only one I’ve not read is the Willmar Shiras, and yet my life feel’s complete. Best response to the meme, though, is from the irrespressible David Moles. Read his response instead.
NB: Edited to remove by stupid error, as wisely advised by Mike Walsh. The book I’ve not read is Wilmar Shiras’s novel Children of the Atom.
November 22nd, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Willie Shiras? Her name was Wilmar Shiras.
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:12 pm
urg. You got me, Mike. I wrote too quickly. Corrected now.
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Your life “feel’s” complete? It may feel more complete with this Flickr pool.
I am hereby flabbergasted that you’ve read all but one of those books.
November 24th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
[…] Via Jonathan, even though he has not done it yet. The list is the top 50 science fiction and fantasy books from 1953 to 2002 according to the SF Book Club. Bold the books you have read, strike through the books you hated, and as this is a blog, what would be a list without editorial comments. […]
November 28th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Belatedly, here’s what I said elsewhere about the Shiras book:
Children of the Atom is worth reading; it’s a collection of a series of short stories about genius kids. The first story, “In Hiding,” is a classic, and I think fairly important to the field even though most of it is probably old hat by now. The series as a whole prefigured Nancy Kress’s “Beggars in Spain” (and to some extent the novels that grew out of that), as well as the entire idea of the X-Men; “outcast genius kids find each other” is a classic sf theme, and “In Hiding” (1948) wasn’t the first such story nor the best known (cf Slan, 1940), but it was imo one of the best. The Shiras stories after the first one aren’t as good and aren’t as important, except that the plot resolution of the overall story [or rather, the book] is one that I see as extremely rare in sf on this theme. Also of possible interest: Wilmar H. Shiras was one of the few women writing sf at the time, though she didn’t write very much sf and wasn’t nearly as well-known as some of the others.