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We Picked Our Favorite Sci-Fi And Fantasy Books 10 Years Ago. Here Are Some We Missed

NPR

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.

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Petra Mayer died on November 13, 2021. She has been remembered by friends and colleagues, including all of us at NPR. The Petra Mayer Memorial Fund for Internships has been created in her honor.