The #1 choice was silly. Fair amount of not-really sci fi on the list, but overall pretty good.  Too many trendy titles and recent stuff that won’t stand the test of time (Redshirts? /eyeroll). And no CJ, boo. 

I found it instructive and yes, highly amusing to read the comments thread after the article, to see many of my own reactions duplicated there.

'A list by milennials for millenials', the rampant political correctness and woke-ism on display, the clear bias towards newer works and younger trendy authors harrumphed wome of the commenters. It was all grist for the mill of my sense of humour.

'Where's Cordwainer Smith?' 'Why no Jack Vance?' and so on.

And yet, amongst the undeserving dross (Scalzi, Kowal and Chambers - really?) and the obvious necessary inclusions, there were some good choices I wasn't expecting - Simak, Stapledon, Strugatsky were older examples of these. Mieville and Tchaikovsky were more recent ones.

I didn't expect to see CJ included but was pleased to see our own Haudesert recognised.

The list is also a perfect example of exactly why I think the Hugo Award for best novel is now irrelevant. I need to get those thoughts in order and documented.  I'll be back.
 

I am just wandering through the list myself.  So far I don’t recognize many, but I just hit on Way Station, by Clifford Simak, which i think I first read about 50 years ago. It was one of my early SciFi reads, back in the days I devoured Andre Norton and Asimov.  I think it’s not safe to reread it now, because I don’t want anything to diminish my recollection of it as one of the best 

I look forward to having a look at this list.
In the meantime, I enjoyed the recent episode 656 of the Coode Street Podcast. The topic was old great science fiction, what stands the test of time and why, which older stuff might interest younger readers and which reads poorly, etc. An interesting conversation for readers familiar with the older works discussed…

Ok, I went through this. Of course making any such list is a losing battle, and people are going to be irritated by some of the choices. I was.
What I want in any such project is to understand the process. Is this someone’s personal back-of-the-envelope opinion? Have they read everything on the list personally or did they solicit opinions? How did they decide what qualified as science fiction? What does “best” mean? Most enjoyable to read? Influential?

Off the top of my head, as much as I love Huxley, Brave New World is not one of my favorites of his, although it’s highly influential. Same with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. The film versions of Dick’s work were often more enjoyable than his written work, despite his creative and paranoid genius. 

Parenthetically, The NY Times recently came out with their “top 100 books of the new millennium”, and whatever else you might say, they explained that 100s of writers were surveyed, you can examine the lists of various writers whose opinions went into the making of the list, etc. I found that much less annoying.

One way to proceed, as a group exercise, might be to take the selections and discuss their inclusion and placement. We’d need to undertake the same process I described. For instance, Frankenstein is #1. Is it science fiction? (Maybe) Does it belong atop the list?

As much as I often recoil at these lists, they do tend to be the raw material for discussion or dismay!