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Worlds Without End Blog

New version 5 of Classics of Science Fiction Posted at 8:00 AM by James Wallace Harris

jwharris28

We are now rolling out version 5 of the Classics of Science Fiction list. Since 1987 how the lists were generated has changed with each new version. Version 5 is driven by a database and programs that allow us to add new citation sources on the fly. Hopefully, that means we won’t have to write new versions of the list generator in the future. But it does mean the list will automatically change when we add new data.

We have never claimed our lists of “classic science fiction” are the absolute best of all science fiction to read. Our goal has been to track how science fiction stories are remembered over time. Most stories are quickly forgotten. A few get remembered for years, and sometimes decades. Rare works are still read a century later. Collectively, we remember some stories, but that doesn’t mean that individuals don’t find stories that resonate overwhelmingly with their own unique reading tastes that don’t get recognition statistically.

In version 5 of the Classics of Science Fiction and Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories, almost everything is a hyperlink, and each column can be resorted by clicking on the heading label. There is also a build your own list where visitors can create custom lists. Titles and authors are linked to ISFDB.org, and from there you can follow links to other resources.

At the top of each list is the option to show the citations or turn them off. The citations are in order by year. If you study these lists and citations, you’ll see how stories are remembered and forgotten. If you are old enough, this might spur wistful memories.

We control the size of the generated lists by specifying the number of citations. For our classics lists we use 12 for books, and 8 for stories. These produce lists of around 100 titles, a size that seems to capture the most remembered stories. Stories we like to think of as classics. If you want fewer stories up the citation requirements, if you want more, lower them.

A fun thing to do with the custom list builder is to search for the most popular science fiction for the decade of your teen years. That tends to be everyone’s golden age of science fiction.

Our new URL is https://csfquery.com.

 

1 Comment

MIchael   |   05 Jul 2019 @ 10:08

Happy to see a new version of this. Your 3rd version was one of my main guides for reading through the classics over the last dozen years. Is it possible you guys could add all five versions to the WWE? It would be really interesting to see how the list has changed over time and would help people to discover the classics from earlier lists that havent made it to version 5.

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