… someone somewhere will be determined to drag you backwards. Everyone is talking about women in sf and the fact they’re appallingly under-represented… and Technology Review goes and publishes a list of The Best Hard Science Fiction Novels of All Time, which includes ten books, only one of which is by a woman sf writer. Sigh.

As if that weren’t enough, number two on their list is that well-known paragon of scientific rigour, The Time Machine by HG Wells. And, of course, there has to be a book by Asimov there too, though thankfully it’s not Foundation. Instead they picked I, Robot. I must admit, I’ve never understand the reverence in which the Three Laws are held. I mean, they’ve never been implemented in robots, there would be no point in doing so – robots, or “computer numerical control” machines, do exactly what their programming instructs them to do, and nothing more. So if you want a robot to kill a person, you simply put that in its instruction set.

As for the rest of Technology Review’s list… they’ve not made entirely embarrassing choices, though I wouldn’t actually classify many of the books on the list as hard sf. Still, as lists of science fiction works go, it’s a pretty poor job.