Alcohol is a gateway drug to more alcohol!

Darned French. Tinnimentum is in town*, staying with us while visiting jo&stv (on account of how, unlike the Dynamic Duo, we actually have a guest room with visible floor space) and we celebrated her 30th birthday yesterday with a braai and cake and champagne cocktails. French 75. Gin, Cointreau, lemon juice and champagne. Very good, and kicks like a big gun. I got giggly. In a good way. Kudos to strawberryfrog and short_mort, who cunningly got married and had a pre-marriage cocktail party at which somebody** first made me a French 75, thus sealing my fate. Doom! Addicted doom!

In a fit of random somethingorother (probably excess glee at having finished the year's marking), I bunged the last post's list of influential SF classics into Excel, dug up some dates, and analysed the hell out of it. Interesting Observations as follows:

• For a start, it wasn't actually Time's list, it was apparently a book club selection from 2002; the only online ref I can find to it is here. This explains the funny dates: it is, as wolverine_nun points out, an odd choice of period, unless you know that it was a 50-year choice from 1953 to 2002. This also explains its cheerful willingness to consider successful pulp as "influential".
• Considerable weighting towards the earlier part of the period. By decade: 1950s, 14; 1960s, 13; 1970s, 13; 1980s, 7; 1990s, 3. In some ways this makes sense: it's difficult, in the absence of madly high-profile movements such as cyberpunk, to define something as "influential" until it's had time to exert some influence. But I also think that the people who compile this kind of list are (a) quite conservative, and (b) a bit older than I am, or most of you witterers. Lots of Golden Age stuff here.
• Actual gender breakdown, once I'd tracked down a couple of unknowns: 44 male writers, 6 female. This is still a genre in horrible gender-imbalance, although I think the male-heaviness was also exaggerated by the list's reliance on earlier works.
• I'm not sure why, as strawberryfrog rather snarkily points out, "science fiction" is wantonly defined as including fantasy, although it's a common enough blurring of boundaries. There is, however, definitely a tendency to marginalise fantasy in the list: 11 fantasy to 39 science fiction novels. This suggests a notion of fantasy as somehow less serious and literary than sf.
• The non-serious fantasy perception was interestingly reinforced by the process by which I dug up the dates on all the novels: mostly through my Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature. To my surprise, most of the classic, Golden Age sf writers had an entry. The ones who didn't were either one-hit wonders or not madly prolific (Clement, Matheson, Budrys, Cordwainer Smith), or pulp fantasy writers (McCaffrey, Rice, Donaldson, Brooks, Bradley). Note, though, that out of the 9 who were not included in the encyclopedia, more than half were fantasy writers.
• If you cross-reference fantasy writers from the list against gender, fantasy novels are represented by 7 male and 4 female authors, and sf by 37 male and 2 female authors. Fantasy is apparently a girly genre, something which I can't help seeing as correlated to its low status. *foams feministically at the ears*

I'd be interested to see if people have particular texts they feel either should or shouldn't be on the list. I've never even heard of Children of the Atom, for all it's supposed to have inspired the X-Men mythology. John Wyndham? I'd back Triffids or Chrysalids as influential way before some of the things on that list. And if you're going to argue for Terry Bloody Brooks, what about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser? Pshaw.

* we like her.
** I can't remember who, owing to aforementioned kick.