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A review by bent
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985 – 2010 by Paul Di Filippo, David Pringle, Damien Broderick
1.0
I want to preface this review by stating that the reason I read (as do most people, I would think) a book like this is as a "what to read next." And in this it succeeded, as I have pulled several books or authors from this book to try, including Fuzzy Dice by Paul Di Filippo, an excellent book which I really enjoyed.
It's hard to believe that someone that wrote such a fun, witty book as Fuzzy Dice could be involved in such a dud as this. The book is excrutiating to try and read. Full of half-baked literary theories, author bios, recommendations of almost every other work by the author, comparisons of each book with mentions of several other authors and books, I gave up on reading the entries and turned to scanning them after awhile. Then I stopped doing that and simply grabbed the title of each book and looked up reviews on-line to get an idea of whether the book would interest me or not.
This book is intended as a sequel to David Pringle's Science Fiction: the 100 best novels. As a consequence, I went and sought out Pringle's book, a vastly superior work. Pringle keeps his reviews short and to the point. If an author has written more than one book that ranks as one of the best novels, Pringle gives them multiple entries. Not so with Damien Broderick and Di Filippo, who never give an author more than one listing, but then mention several of the author's works under that book's entry. In one book (which escapes me), the reader is told not to start with the book in question, but rather with an earlier book in the series. But that book doesn't make the list on its own. Many specific entries are meant to stand in for a whole series. The book does not read like the authors wanted to compile a list of the best sf books between 1985 and 2010 as much as give a literary overview to books of that period. It may not seem that different, but it is.
I also didn't like that fact that the table of contents included a list of the books, but not the authors. There was no index, either, which made it impossible to see who had written what without flipping through the whole book. I thought this was a huge omission.
Overall, I'd recommend this book for the list of recommendations, which the reader can then go elsewhere to find out about. Reading this book is just too painful.
It's hard to believe that someone that wrote such a fun, witty book as Fuzzy Dice could be involved in such a dud as this. The book is excrutiating to try and read. Full of half-baked literary theories, author bios, recommendations of almost every other work by the author, comparisons of each book with mentions of several other authors and books, I gave up on reading the entries and turned to scanning them after awhile. Then I stopped doing that and simply grabbed the title of each book and looked up reviews on-line to get an idea of whether the book would interest me or not.
This book is intended as a sequel to David Pringle's Science Fiction: the 100 best novels. As a consequence, I went and sought out Pringle's book, a vastly superior work. Pringle keeps his reviews short and to the point. If an author has written more than one book that ranks as one of the best novels, Pringle gives them multiple entries. Not so with Damien Broderick and Di Filippo, who never give an author more than one listing, but then mention several of the author's works under that book's entry. In one book (which escapes me), the reader is told not to start with the book in question, but rather with an earlier book in the series. But that book doesn't make the list on its own. Many specific entries are meant to stand in for a whole series. The book does not read like the authors wanted to compile a list of the best sf books between 1985 and 2010 as much as give a literary overview to books of that period. It may not seem that different, but it is.
I also didn't like that fact that the table of contents included a list of the books, but not the authors. There was no index, either, which made it impossible to see who had written what without flipping through the whole book. I thought this was a huge omission.
Overall, I'd recommend this book for the list of recommendations, which the reader can then go elsewhere to find out about. Reading this book is just too painful.