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Comment by BelleOfTheBall | Hacker News Reader

Quite a few on this list are sci-fi legends but I'm most glad to see the tail-end: both Maria Machado and Jemisin are amazing voices who write thick and lush prose, something that sci-fi lacks sometimes. Charlie Jane Anders, meanwhile, is delightfully off-beat and every novel of hers was a pleasant time so far.

In general, I'd recommend to not stick to the oldies. Read a bit of the classics and then venture into the modern stuff, there's a lot to like there. Martha Wells, Matt Wallace, T. Kingfisher, K.B. Wagers, to name a few.

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Quite a few on this list are sci-fi legends.

Indeed.

"The Machine Stops" is a must-read. It's over a century old and is not dated.

I've always liked "With the Night Mail". Kipling wrote two SF stories, and this is one of them.

"A Logic Named Joe" - the Internet and Google, from 1946.

"Ender's Game", the short story, was of course expanded into a series of books and a movie. The original short story is better.

That's also true of "Farewell to the Master", not on the list. That's the basis for "The Day the Earth Stood Still". The original short story is very rarely seen. Nor is the ending well known. It should be. Wikipedia summarizes it.

I thought about that one. Yes, different from the film. And in the original The Science Fiction Hall of Fame chosen by the SFWA. There were just other stories I preferred to include so it wasn't all "classics."

I read farewell to the master in a Hugo winners collection. I then saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and felt the movie was much better. The ending of the short story was IMO the weakest part, but ymmv.

I agree. The movie is my Top 100 list. The story is "OK."

The 1951 movie, yes. The 2008 remake, er, no way.

I had forgotten there even was a remake. I think I heard it was pretty bad and didn't want to ruin my memory of the original.

Thanks. There are a lot of recent Hugo and Nebula Award winners I can't really bring myself to like. But one of the things I liked about this project was it got me to explore some recent voices that are really fantastic. (ADDED: And I probably didn't pull in enough of them.) I feel a little guilty about ending on that Machado story in our current times, but it was really beautifully written and I had no idea it was going there when I started reading it.

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