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jeffy at 01:00pm on 11/08/2011
jeffy at 01:00pm on 11/08/2011Well, apparently 60,000 people cast ballots to narrow down the 237 finalists to 100.
I decided to cast only one vote per author and ended up with five of my choices on the final list: Gaiman's Sandman at 29, Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness at 45, Stephenson's Diamond Age at 75, McKinley's Sunshine at 92, and Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep at 93. My other five didn't make the cut: Brust's Vlad Taltos books, Crowley's Little, Big, Delany's Dhalgren, Kress's Beggars in Spain, and Kushner's Swordspoint and sequels.
It's interesting seeing who appeared multiple times. Bradbury, Gaiman and Stephenson each had four placements. Old masters Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Niven (2 with Pournelle) each had three. King, Le Guin, Orwell, Pournelle (with Niven), Pratchett, Sanderson, Tolkein, Verne, Vonnegut, and Wells each placed two. Of course since NPR grouped series, this statistic favors authors with stand alone books more than series. I'm too lazy to look up how many books are in all the series that placed. Also their groupings were somewhat arbitrary as some series books appeared individually (e.g., McCaffrey's Dragonflight) and when do you stop counting the series that won't die like the posthumous Dune books?
Five books from the 19th century, the earliest Wollstonecraft Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein. Three from the 1930s, two from the 1940s, eleven from the 1950s, 14 from the 1960s, 17 from the 1970s, 14 from the 1980s, 18 from the 1990s, 15 from the 2000s and the most recent Sanderson's The Way of Kings from 2010.
( the obligatory memeification )
I decided to cast only one vote per author and ended up with five of my choices on the final list: Gaiman's Sandman at 29, Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness at 45, Stephenson's Diamond Age at 75, McKinley's Sunshine at 92, and Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep at 93. My other five didn't make the cut: Brust's Vlad Taltos books, Crowley's Little, Big, Delany's Dhalgren, Kress's Beggars in Spain, and Kushner's Swordspoint and sequels.
It's interesting seeing who appeared multiple times. Bradbury, Gaiman and Stephenson each had four placements. Old masters Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Niven (2 with Pournelle) each had three. King, Le Guin, Orwell, Pournelle (with Niven), Pratchett, Sanderson, Tolkein, Verne, Vonnegut, and Wells each placed two. Of course since NPR grouped series, this statistic favors authors with stand alone books more than series. I'm too lazy to look up how many books are in all the series that placed. Also their groupings were somewhat arbitrary as some series books appeared individually (e.g., McCaffrey's Dragonflight) and when do you stop counting the series that won't die like the posthumous Dune books?
Five books from the 19th century, the earliest Wollstonecraft Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein. Three from the 1930s, two from the 1940s, eleven from the 1950s, 14 from the 1960s, 17 from the 1970s, 14 from the 1980s, 18 from the 1990s, 15 from the 2000s and the most recent Sanderson's The Way of Kings from 2010.
( the obligatory memeification )