Way back in the dawn of time — by which I mean 2011 — we ran our original science fiction and fantasy poll and came up with a list of 100 favorite science fiction and fantasy books. The process was broadly similar to the way we do it today: Readers voted, and a panel of judges argued about which books did and didn't meet the critera they'd laid out.
There are a lot of hard-to-argue-with classics on that list: Tolkien, Gaiman, Orwell, Bradbury, Adams, Atwood, Le Guin and many more. But there are just as many now-shocking omissions. No Octavia Butler? No writers of color at all? Only a handful of women?
You can see the brand-sparkly-new poll, celebrating all the supernova-amazing changes in SF/F since 2011, here — but we also thought it would be worth pulling together a few of the books that, with our 2021 hindsight, seem like they should have been on that original list.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
