I guess there’s no point in listing the same stuff over and over, but still.

Of the newer books:

The Mountain in the Sea probably deserves to be on there.

Rosewater is pretty worthy.

A Memory Called Empire was good, but I wouldn’t include it. I haven’t read the sequel yet.

Hey B.D., if you want to read something I hated the shit out of, read This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. _ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet_, by Becky Chambers is even higher on that list, and I am confident that I would loath it, so you can just read it for me.

Semiosis is good but not that good, and the sequel that is mediocre and has an ending that makes it clear that a stupid, unacceptable interpretation of a key SF element of both books is the correct one.

I’d have liked to see Chris Beckett’s Dark Eden on there.

Anyone here read Iain Banks? He’s really beloved and respected but I’ve only read one book of his, Excession, which is #60 on that list, and which I had trouble enjoying for the dumbest, most embarassing reason imaginable. BECAUSE ALL THE SENTIENT SPACESHIPS IN THE BOOK TALK IN ALL CAPS, AND I HAVE TROUBLE READING LONG PARAGRAPHS IN ALL CAPS. IN MY MIND IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMEONE YELLING IN A MONOTONE AND I CAN’T FOLLOW IT AND AM ANNOYED BY IT. But it was an ambitious and imaginative book that seemed like something I should have liked, so I guess I just need to get around to reading some of his other books.

There are two short story collections that don’t have the requisite unity. I might accept I, Robot, but The Complete Robot (stupidly) leaves out the linking material, but has additional stories. The Ted Chiang is also just a collection. There should either no such collections on the list, or there should be alot more of them.

Gene Wolfe should be in the top 5, if not in the top 1. Also, if Book of the New Sun can’t be there as one book, I’d have picked the first book, Shadow of the Torturer, but whatever. I still need to read the last 7 books/two sub-series of that series. Will probably reread the first five, then next four, then reread all those before finishing it. So that will probably happen in a decade.
Has anyone played Dark Souls? I haven’t. People call it the video game equivalent of Book of the New Sun. If Book of the New Sun is the Science Fiction Ulysses, and Dark Souls is the video game Book of the New Sun, is Dark Souls transitively the video game Ulysses?

I’ve only read 5 and-a-third of the top 10 (the third was from Exhalation, a collection of short stories). I haven’t read the ones by girls that aren’t Le Guin or Mary Shelley.

Reading Red Mars now. It’s good, but not #21 good.