(Numbers, where present refer to the number of votes. No number means one vote.)
Any way you want. Look at the raw data, come to your conclusions. You might also want to look at the side notes ("SF vs sci-fi," "Information, Message, Signal, and Noise") or "Problems with the Survey," or look at our conclusions and our recommended reading lists on the following pages.
All in all, it was a good survey, and we thank you all for participating. There are some interesting things we've noticed. For one, there's a preponderance of assigned readings on the list. If it hadn't been for this class, would so many people really have considered The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau to be two of the finest works in science fiction?
There are certain things that trouble us about these results. Are there really five people who think SF can't do better than The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy?
But that's really quibbling. There are more things that we find heartening than disturbing. It's great to know that Arthur C. Clarke came a close second to Wells in the number of works voted best, even though his name was barely mentioned in class. The fact that Dune is so popular shows that there are a lot of you out there who are willing to read, absorb, and enjoy difficult books. And we're glad to see that someone else out there has read and loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, Protector, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The City and the Stars.
(Not everything voted for was the title of a specific work. Here are the "nontitles" that people voted for.)
One of the things that human beings do best is pattern recognition. People can hear their names in noisy surroundings (the "cocktail party effect"), answer questions like "complete the series 1, 4, 9, ... " or look at a pattern of gray blotches and recognize themselves in a black and white photograph. Computer scientists are in awe of these capabilities, and working feverishly to write programs this powerful.
The downside of walking around with such powerful pattern recognition is that people can see patterns where there are none. Preachers listen to records backwards and hear exhortations to worship Satan. Some people look at an image of a mountain on Mars and see a monkey's face. Raja used to go around muttering about the Florida License Plate Conspiracy--how there were so many cars around town with Florida license plates. And an Associate Instructor who shall remain nameless linked an Asimov character with a 19th century Supreme Court justice and turned Noys into no/yes. So while our ability to recognize patterns is very powerful and life would be impossible without it (imagine trying to cross a street without being able to recognize a pattern of light and dark as an onrushing car), it can occasionally trip us up. We can imagine spurious signals buried in noise.
What we mean by all this is, don't take our survey or its results too seriously. All we did was ask, "What are the five best books of science fiction?" As Dave pointed out, we should have phrased it as, "What are the five best books of science fiction that you have read?" It's possible that some people listed books that they've heard are great but haven't read, so don't assume that this is the list of the books that people have read and enjoyed the most. Indeed, these aren't necessarily books that they've enjoyed at all--one person returning our survey wrote "I hate science fiction" in the comments section. Ouch.
If the list of titles is shaky, the list of authors on the next page is even shakier. This is the list of the people who wrote the titles people chose. It is not a list of who people thought were the best authors of SF, and nobody knew that we were going to extract such a spurious signal from nice, clean noise. (Hey, if we had known that we were going to do this, Raja might have picked Brightness Falls from the Air and The Ophiuchi Hotline, and David Thorns and Shadrach in the Furnace to help the ratings of our favorite authors, even though we feel these books really aren't the very best that SF has to offer.)
In 1926, a man named Hugo Gernsback started publishing a magazine called Amazing Stories. He said that it was full of scientific fiction, which he shortened to "scientifiction." He gave us the abbreviation "stf." Linguistic forces being what they are, "scientifiction" became "science fiction," "stf" became "SF." Everyone was happy, until ... well, let us quote from Isaac Asimov's "The Name of Our Field" (in Asimov on Science Fiction, page 28)
This brings us to Forrest J Ackerman, a wonderful guy whom I love dearly. He is a devotee of puns and wordplay and so am I, but Forry has never learned that some things are sacred. He couldn't resist coining "sci-fi" as an analog, in appearance and pronunciation, to "hi-fi," the well-known abbreviation for "high fidelity."
"Sci-fi" is now widely used by people who don't read science fiction. It is used particularly by people who work in movies and television. This makes it, perhaps, a useful term.
We can define "sci-fi" as trashy material sometimes confused, by ignorant people, with SF. Thus, Star Trek is SF while Godzilla Meets Mothra is sci-fi.
Ouch. Having insulted most of you with the above quotation, let us sum up by saying: If you want to do to us what fingernails on a chalkboard do to most people, use the term "sci-fi." If you want to impress us as someone with discernment and wisdom, the name of the field is "SF," please.
(The people whose works were selected in the main survey. See "On Information..." on the previous page for a caveat.)
The survey was very loose and open-ended because we hate surveys with questions that force you to give things specific ratings. ("The Civil War was better than World War II. Agree, disagree, strongly agree .... ?") Come to think of it, we hate surveys that force you to anything you don't think is natural. So we asked "What are the five best books of science fiction?" We did not define best because we hoped to see someone's definition of "best" in the comments section. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, though we did get some interesting comments. Some of you asked for "reading lists." In response to this, we've decided to include lists of some of our favorite novels, authors, and collections. We don't by any means guarantee that you'll love everything on these lists, but in our modest opinions, these are some of the best. Hell, even we couldn't agree on all these, and drew plenty of blood eliminating personal favorites from the lists. For what it's worth, though, both of us have read all the items on the lists below and loved them.
(Five Authors Whose Good Works Greatly Outnumber Their Bad)
These lists are far from exhaustive. We gladly acknowledge that there is much, much more in SF that hasn't been mentioned in either C216 or any of the above lists. Our chief concern is that our fellow students not walk away from this class thinking that science fiction died around 1940. Since then, SF has been a growing, changing genre. We hope our lists will let you discover this for yourselves.
"Were it not for the outmoded command of the Constitution, I would prowl the streets at night, break down doors, and force my fellow citizens to read [these books] at gunpoint."
--Jeff Greenfield, in Jeff Greenfield's Book of Books
Given my choice, at least three of the books on the MUST READ list would have been by Robert Silverberg. I mean, I'll admit it -- I think this guy is great. He's written an unbelievable number of books (hundreds and hundreds) varying in quality from mediocre to the best I've read. Only his very best, Dying Inside, made it to the list. Six or seven of his books, however, really deserve special mention because they're very nearly as good as Dying Inside. I'll list some of these below.
We made these lists with a fair amount of arguing, shouting and screaming. A number of my favorite books didn't make the final cut. I'd like to draw attention to five of them:
Umm, what do I write about, now that I have your attention? My own view of the history of SF, starting about twenty years after Geduld's history ended and ending in 1986? My views on the controversy in the genre as to what SF is? My views as to whether SF is really a genre of ideas, predictions, entertainments, fancies? Whether all the best SF is short stories or extended series? Whether SF will leave its current Golden Age and if so, how smooth the transition will be?
When you come right down to it, though, what I really want to say is something that Dave brought home to me a few months (or was it years) back. And that's this: Science Fiction is an incredibly rich and diverse genre, in which virtually anyone can find something that will move them, inspire them, or drive them to laughter or tears. The genre in which E.E. "Doc" Smith invented the raucous space opera is the same one in which Olaf Stapledon stretched people's minds to cover a billion year spree. The same genre that has the crudely written Voyage to Arcturus has the masterfully crafted, finely polished Left Hand of Darkness.
My final advice, then, to anyone who's found SF interesting and would like to seek more is to decide what you'd want to read, and ask someone whose opinions you respect. There's a lot of beauty in the SF field, if you can find it--it's much like the human race as a whole, in that respect.