Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read yourself out of here...,
By William Ramos (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels : An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984 (Paperback)
I first bought this book as a student in 1987. At the time a friend had recommended three or four books of Science Fiction (by authors like Arthur C Clarke and Brian W Aldiss). When I bought David Pringle's guide to the 100 best SF novels from a small shop in London, it introduced me to a much broader scope of fiction. A fiction based on science (to varying degrees), that always had something important to say about us. David Pringle's guide takes us through the "golden age" of SF, the sixties and seventies "experimental" stage of SF and the best of the early eighties SF. Thanks to Mr Pringle, I have travelled back in time, viewed our planet from the future, witnessed history unravel itself from a different prospective, I have flown into space and witness the development and regression of the human race. Finally, I would like to mention one book recommended in this guide that almost changed my life (dramatic words yes, but I still think about this book 12 years later). That book is: Theodore Sturgeon's "More than Human". I would never have read that book if it were not for Mr Pringle's fine commentry.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not many like this,
By
This review is from: Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels : An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984 (Paperback)
I suppose if you want to argue with the books that Pringle selects, you might give this 4 stars, but as far as what Pringle is trying to accomplish, I really haven't seen this book's equal. One of the biggest problems in reading s-f (or any genre fiction, I suppose) is that you have to wade through a lot of dreck in order to get to the good stuff.
Well, Pringle has selected a good beginning list of "the good stuff." He devotes the same two pages to each book, and doesn't seem to favor one school of s-f over another, giving the volume as a whole a very balanced feel. Lastly, a couple of caveats: first, the book does limit itself to the time frame listed in the title, beginning with Orwell's 1984 and ending with Gibson's Neuromancer; it would be interesting to read Pringle's thoughts on the last twenty years. Lastly, Pringle's reviews contain "spoilers;" as he's trying to write thoughtful mini-essays on the books in his list, he occasionally refers to specific plot twists while discussing them. All in all, a very nice job.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beware this title...,
By thetwonky (Northridge, CA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels : An English-Language Selection, 1949-1984 (Paperback)
First of all, be cautioned that this list was not the result of some poll or grading system based on genre accolades...it is simply the opinion of David Pringle, one man who admits this point in the book's introduction. Although I do believe Pringle really knows the genre including gems like Bernard Wolfe's Limbo and Malzberg's Galaxies.
But there are some dogs here, given the time period. Harrison's Centauri Device is thirty years behind its time reading like a scientific romance pulp with stock characters and is extremely unimaginative for the time it projects. Ian Watson's Miracle Visitors is just poorly written, despite some keen parody of the American lifestyle. Which brings me to my biggest complaint, the decidedly British slant of this book. It also seems Pringle tried too hard to include female authors (there is a sudden burst toward the latter years). Some titles have merit -Russ' Female Man for instance- but Carter's Heroes and Villains is quite forgettable. The greatest strength of this book is the inclusion of many books that I enjoyed that are on the bubble of the genre- Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and William Golding's The Inheritors are two outstanding novels. Find this book, find some titles you may not have sought out yourself and then see how others view those titles, not only Pringle. After all, there are plenty of ways to research these titles on the internet.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
See all 100 books this book cites
See all 57 books citing this book
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
|
|
