{"id":2905,"date":"2011-04-22T02:45:28","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T07:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/04\/22\/the-gollancz-fifty\/"},"modified":"2011-04-25T07:02:25","modified_gmt":"2011-04-25T12:02:25","slug":"the-gollancz-fifty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/04\/22\/the-gollancz-fifty\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gollancz fifty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nThis year it will be fifty years since Gollancz started publishing science fiction and fantasy. To celebrate the publisher set up a website listing its fifty best science fiction and fantasy novels<\/a> (or at least the ones it still has the rights to) and is asking us, their readers to chose our favourites out of these. Twentyfive science fiction and twentyfive fantasy novels are listed and you get to choose one of each. The top five choices will be published in a special “collectable retro-look edition”. A nice idea to celebrate a very important British science fiction and fantasy publisher. I can’t be the only fan who quickly learned to associate yellow covers in the library’s bookcases with proper science fiction….\n<\/p>\n

\nGiven that these lists had to be created out of the books Gollancz still had the rights to, they’re somewhat biased towards contemporary authors, but unfortunatly also heavily biased towards male authors: of the twentyfive science fiction novels, only two are by women. The fantasy list is slightly more balanced, but still only has five novels written by women. Both lists are also very white and anglosaxon. Of course you can argue that given the constraints of having to work from their own backlist meant that these lists would always be imbalanced, but than that only moves the argument to why Gollancz hasn’t had a more diverse publishing list in these fifty years…\n<\/p>\n

\nApart from that, these lists are a good excuse to play the usual “bold if you’ve read it, italicise if you own it” game. First the science fiction list, which seems to be the stronger of the two and from which I’ve certainly read the most. On the downside, there are no real surprises in this list either: a mix of obvious classics always present in these lists and contemporary bestselling authors. Many of these books have had special editions recently as well, e.g. in the Science Fiction Masterworks series. Which probably explains why I read so many of them…\n<\/p>\n