I agree that this is an awfully conventional list. I don’t intend to argue the author’s taste here, just provide another counterpoint. If you look at their fav

I agree that this is an awfully conventional list. I don’t intend to argue the author’s taste here, just provide another counterpoint. If you look at their favorite books, the ones in red, they are almost all standard space opera written decades ago. That’s a narrow slice of possibility. Writers from the canon are wildly over-represented, IMHO — Asimov has 8 books on the list, at least, but most circles I’ve run in consider him well surpassed even by his contemporaries. Even the LeGuin they include is old, before her shift to (in her own words) writing like a woman, rather than a fake man. (By “circles I run in” I mean a degree in English literature with an emphasis on science fiction, and many geeky and literate friends in the ensuring 25 years. That’s not a judgement, just where I come from.) They include no Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, Ian McDonald — and those dudes are only “modern” from the perspective of the 80s. They include no James Tiptree Jr (a woman, for those not in the know), Pat Cadigan, Nancy Kress — and again, those are old-skool, established. So I agree. This is a greatest hits list of popular and conventional science fiction over the last 100 years. As a reading journal I have no argument with it. As a way of understanding or modeling human diversity in the future, which is what they appear to claim in the followup article, it does feel like a small echo chamber.