Via Wired’s Geekdad blog, I hopped over to NPR’s site this morning to vote in their poll of the all-time best science fiction and fantasy novels. You can only select from among the top 100 choices as selected by NPR from thousands of reader suggestions but it’s a pretty good list and with no obvious omissions that I could see (too much Neal Stephenson, I’d say, but I’m in the minority on that one).

But I think the results are going to be skewed by the way in which NPR has set up the vote. The top 100 are listed in alphabetical order on an immense, scrolling list. Since you can only select 10, it seems obvious that books listed higher are the list are going to be much more likely to make the cut than books near the bottom where most people will only have a few slots in their top 10 left. That’s a bummer.

My top 10:

A Canticle for Liebowitz (Walter Miller)

The Chronicles of Amber (Roger Zelazny)

The Culture Series (Iain M. Banks)

The Dune Chronicles (Frank Herbert)

Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser series (Fritz Leiber)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

The Mars Trilogy (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Neuromancer (William Gibson)

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

Way Station (Clifford Simak)