Top Ten Sci-Fi & Fantasy

To begin with, an admission. I don’t like top ten lists. For a start, they are always going to be flawed. Take this top ten sci-fi category – surely the only person qualified to write a definitive top ten sci-fi list is someone who had read every single sci-fi novel ever written. Which is asking quite a lot of one person. Otherwise, the list is bound to be nothing more than one person’s opinion of a small subset of all sci-fi. There is also the problem of writing the list today and then starting to read the best ever sci-fi book the world has ever seen tomorrow. Too late to put it on the list, and you have all the fiddle of coming back to change the op. ...

I have been so inspired by Deany’s list of top ten sci-fi books that I am going to attempt a list of my own. Master Deany, however, has already listed some of the books I would have, so I won’t go on about Dune and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy again. Instead, I will try to build on the existing list, so that, conceivably, somebody looking for an instant top-titles sci-fi library will know which books to include for at least half a year’s good reading. One thing worth mentioning is that, as with the fantasy genre, one book is often not enough for a story – there is a time-honoured tradition in sci-fi and fantasy of writing ...

Fantasy fiction is possibly the fastest growing literary genre in the past 30 years. Mention fantasy fiction and most folks will think immediately of the works of Tolkien, and rightly so! Tolkien's epic adventure has touched the hearts and minds of millions, and perhaps done more for this genre of fiction than any other work. Yet fantasy fiction has expanded now beyond Middle Earth and can, in fact, contain stories in which elves do not even make a guest appearance. (Try not to gasp in shock.) Magic of some sort usually does seem to shape this genre, but I believe fantasy is becoming a more widely written, more popularly read field of literature simply because it has no ...