I recently applied for an opening with Lit Reacter as their Sci-Fi columnist. If you haven't heard of the site yet, I definitely encourage you to check it out. It's a newish venture from the creators of Chuck Palahniuk's very popular website ChuckPalahniuk.net, and it offers a great combination of articles, writing classes, and forums for hobnobbing with readers and writers alike. In any case, I made it into the final list of applicants and was asked to come up with a list of my favorite Sci-Fi books with brief annotations as to why I picked them. Sadly, I wasn't chosen for the position, but since I put so much deliberation into creating the list, I thought I'd share it here. I've presented it in chronological order as opposed to ranking the books. Am I crazy? Did I leave out obviously better books? Probabably yes and yes, but such is the way of top ten lists. Let me know what I missed in your comments below.
"The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster - written in 1909, this novella is amazingly prescient--predicting a slew of technologies from video conferencing to the Internet--and it is arguably the granddaddy of dystopian fiction. (Plus, it's the name sake of my blog!)
