Res ipsa loquitur

Wow, so my second issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction arrived this week, and, wow, this one has more than one actual good story in it. The first issue I got was so very bad (with the exception of Kelly Link's "Magic for Beginners") that I was beginning to think somebody ought to be paying actual money to my betas, since they were obviously better editors than the editors of F&SF.

But our local library is so very lame when it comes to speculative fiction -- they can't even keep up to date on the Year's Best collections, never mind buy a reasonable selection of new novels each year -- that it's amazingly wonderful and inspiring just to have new stories to read arriving at my house once a month.

(And then the museum bookstore had the last six months' worth of Locus, so I bought the whole bunch, but they're so full of nonfictional stuff that I feel I ought to digest and understand. They make me tired just to look at them.)

And now I have the occasional paycheck coming in, and I want to subscribe to everything.

What spec-fic periodicals do y'all like?

I've read 38 of Phobos' Index of the 100 science fiction books you just have to read.

( And, predictably, I have some quibbles. )

I don't know about this. I've read "Mission of Gravity," and I would call it a curiosity, not a must-read. I have serious doubts that "Snow Crash" is still going to be on lists like this in fifty years. And ... would you -- would you really -- go out today and pick up a copy of "A Princess of Mars" or "Flatland" or "The Day of the Triffids" and read it just for pleasure? And if we're going to go the 'historical importance' route, where's de Bergerac's "Voyages to the Sun and Moon"?

And if we're only going to get 100 sci-fi books, do we really need three Heinleins and three Asimovs? Two Van Vogts, two Philip Jose Farmers? When we've excluded James Tiptree Jr. and Zenna Henderson and Sturgeon's short stories (it does say "books" and not "novels") and "We" and "The Left Hand of Darkness" and "Watership Down" and "The Gate to Women's Country" and "The Famale Man" and "The Sparrow" and "Becoming Alien" and "Riddley Walker"?!

I'd like to see the equivalent list of fantasy books. No, actually, I wouldn't, since I don't find the distinction between fantasy and sci-fi all that useful, unless you're a reader with a phobia ("Eeeek! Space ships!" "Eeeek! Dragons!"). So what I'd really like to see is a Top 200 Speculative Fiction Books. So I could quibble with that, too.