NPR Top 100 SciFi Books List Omits Critical Authors

It’s a popularity contest, I get that. Furthermore, I didn’t really do much about it. I didn’t nominate any books and I didn’t vote in the poll. So the results of NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books survey shouldn’t really surprise me. They do, after all, reflect the views of the people who did participate in the poll.

I chose not to involve myself because I’ve seen this kind of poll before. How many times should one feel compelled to speak up for one’s favorite authors? How many causes and crusades should one wage on behalf of literary opinion? I feel like I have done my duty for — well, for representing my literary interests.

The actual list of top 100 books was built from nominations provided by 5,000 people and votes cast by 60,000 people. On the one hand, 5,000 nominations seems impressive. On the other hand, 60,000 votes seems rather pathetic. Are there so few people left who have favorite books they’re willing to go to bat for them, or did NPR just do a poor job of getting the word out?

The Internet makes it difficult to reach a lot of people quickly. If rules-of-thumb hold true, probably between 600,000 and 1.2 million people followed the NPR poll. That is, most people who heard of the poll simply lurked (like me). It was just another curiosity on a Web filled with curious things. There really was no compelling reason to vote (or nominate).

That said, the top-ranked books do make sense. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien took Number 1 again. There are many polls and surveys where LoTR sweeps into first place. It even does very well against general fiction in these kinds of surveys.

Fans of George Orwell, George R.R. Martin, and Frank Herbert should also be pleased to see their favorite authors in the top 10. But but there are some strangely missing names (from the entire list).

J.K. Rowling doesn’t feature among authors who have sold far fewer books than her. Why is that? I know she expressed umbrage at the thought that Harry Potter is a fantasy franchise but it IS a fantasy franchise.

Andre Norton is also missing. Maybe most of NPR’s readers are too young to remember Andre (who passed away in 2005) but her novels have influenced generations of science fiction and fantasy writers, including a few number of TV shows and movies (and I’m not just talking about Beastmaster). Andre is arguably one of the first militaristic science fiction authors, for example.

Twilight fans will be stunned to see that Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series is not in the top 100. What happened to the legions of rabid Bella and Edward fans? Maybe they’re just not into NPR.

The poll was an experiment in audience engagement. Opinion polls draw people in and help build up audience loyalty. Retailers, publishers, and news organizations have been using opinion polls for decades, perhaps centuries. Opinion polls migrated to the World Wide Web fairly easily and quickly in the early 1990s but many people (like me) saw too many of them ruined by robots voting faster than you can say “Quidditch”. I sort of gave up on opinion polls years ago for that reason (and also because too many people liked books I had never heard of).

I give a huge thumbs up for all the people who voted for The Mote in God’s Eye but some of the folks on this list I have never heard of. Does that make me snobby or does it just mean I’m out of touch with mainstream science fiction and fantasy? Truth be told, I haven’t bought any new books in ages. I read a lot of material on the Internet. I migrated to eText almost 2 decades ago. I’m so ready for my holographic interactive novels.

All that said, I feel a little disappointed in NPR for not giving it more gusto. They could have reached out to science fiction and fantasy Websites and sought community support. Instead they kept their poll pretty much to themselves. They missed a great opportunity for building audience and readership; more importantly, they sidestepped and opportunity to reach out to a fairly large community of fan sites.

Science fiction and fantasy fandom may not be as visible as they once were but we haven’t really left the Internet. I routinely drop references to science fiction and fantasy books, movies, and TV shows into articles I write for other sites and people come out of the woodwork to acknowledge the insider remarks. There are plenty of fellow fans out there.

We’re just not all reading the same Websites…or books.