The Skeptical Alchemist tagged me with the Pharyngula Mutating Meme - a series of questions that can change as they get passed from blogger to blogger according to a set of simple rules.
The original questions were:
1. The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is...
2. The best romantic movie in historical fiction is...
3. The best sexy song in rock is...
The Pharyngula mutating genre meme:
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.
My great-great-great-great-great grandparent is Pharyngula
My great-great-great-great grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club
My great-great-great grandparent is Flying Trilobite
My great-great grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock
My great grandparent is The Primate Diaries
My grandparent is Conspiracy Factory
My parent is The Skeptical Alchemist
The best time travel book in SF/fantasy is:
Time and Again
The best English novel in scientific dystopias is:
1984
The best page-turner book in historical fiction is:
The Three Musketeers
The best landscape painting in American art is:
Heart of the Andes
I am propagating this meme on to:
Orac
The Good Rabbi's Blog
My Brother Dan
The Greenbelt
Highly Allochthonous
and
Pharyngula - because what goes around comes around.
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The best time travel SF novel is H. G. Wells, "The Time Machine," which despite the passage of 100 years since it was published has not been surpassed.
As a work of fiction, prose, speculation, and original sensawunda, yes, but it is not a time travel story in that it does not deal with the implications. For that, IMHO, Hogan's Thrice Upon A Time has to be the best. Or Heinlein's All You Zombies or By His Bootstraps.
But 1984, now more than any time since its writing, yes, has proven to be right on the money.