I was very impressed by Eifelheim. (Probably not a must-read but the thread about UFO sightings from ancient history are the reason I combed through my not enough shelfs should do something about it book mountains)
A Deepness in the Sky is my favorite book, period. Vernor Vinge is underrated.
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Whatâs the difference between the two again other than framing?
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âA Deepness in the Skyâ is there. Is it really better than âA Fire upon the Deepâ? Personally I would prefer to see âThe Peace Warâ or âMarooned in Realtimeâ on there.
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You do get that this is a promotional gimmick by Amazon and not any sort of critical analysis? From their perspective, itâs just one market. The only question thy asked themselves is, will this list be seen by people who will buy these books? Answer: yes.
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But that doesnât stop us from happily kvetching about it here. Which is more fun than supporting ClearCase right now.
No Tiptree either. Or Karen Joy Fowler. Or Gwyneth Jones, but thatâs hardly surprising.
Of course, Iâd put in The Devil is Dead by R.A. Lafferty and Moderan by David Bunch, just to screw with some heads.
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Cover art.
One features big ships, the other big swords?
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Youâre dead right about Aldiss, well said.
Re. influencing Douglas Adams - you should peruse some of Robert Sheckleyâs books, especially Options, Mindswap, and Dimension of Miracles (just today I made my avatar into an image from a mid-80s cover of the latter, after posting his name earlier in this thread).
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Sorry. I meant to just post a link to the google doc, but the bbs embedded it.
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I believe if you put a space before your link, it wonât get embedded and will stay a link.
With a space:
Without a space:
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Not sure that worked.
But if you link some text that should work.
And since I am too lazy to figure out to make it show the code, just use the chain icon in the posting menu.
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Holy crap, it changed! Lemme see hereâŚ
Ok I changed it back. Seems that when the BBS took a copy of the hotlinked image, it replaced both URLs with the new server ref for that img.
No idea if itâll come back and âcorrectâ it again.
HTML Entitties, how do they fucking work?
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Well more the remembering the html code, the bbs code, or which bbs code depending on the bbs hosting, or you know look nice pictures on the menu bar cause I got enough weirdo fiddly tech related things to deal with already.
Yes, both excellent choices. Iâd probably give the edge to Flow My Tears, but to be honest I canât really remember much about The Man in the High Castle.
Thatâs the problem with these things: itâs been so long since Iâve read many of these books that a lot of the time I can remember really liking a book, but not exactly why. For example, I wasnât super impressed with The Galactic Pot Healer as I was reading it, but the ending totally turned it around for me in just the last few pages. I donât remember the actual ending, however, just that I liked it.
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I think of Fantasy as essentially escapist; adventure stories with a hero and a quest, where the main pleasure in reading comes from a well told story.
Much of Science Fiction is like that as well, to be fair. Think Space Opera, where the name says it all: high drama in outer space (and letâs not worry too much about plausibility). And Iâm not knocking that, as I do enjoy a good space opera.
Thereâs the obvious future vs. past setting, but as youâve pointed out, thatâs often not much of a difference.
But the best science fiction usually isnât really about the future, so much as it is about the present and a way of exploring the ideas and implications of the current zeitgeist. All the post-apocalyptic SF of the 80s reflecting the cold war, for example. What the current zombie obsession says about us as a culture today is left as an exercise for the reader. 
To be clear, a lot of genre fiction is not great literature, but then a lot of literature is not great literature, either.
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+1 for the unobtrusive Theodore Sturgeon reference.
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To everyone who mentioned Roger Zelazny, Paul Linebarger (aka Cordwainer Smith), A.E. Van Vogt, Gene Wolfe, and Ted Sturgeon: well done. Zelaznyâs Jack of Shadows is my personal fave, though.
Now, what about Kuttner, or Abbottâs Flatland?
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Quite a solid list. The main thing its sad not to see is Roger Zelazny and the Amber Chronicals.
