Geeks, Geeks, Geeks, Geeks, Geeks All Over The Globe

As mainstream as many thinkers would like to say the Internet has become — and it has, to a large measure — it still originally the province of guys who talk about horizontal HTPC enclosures. Here's another way to put it: we found, after perusing The Guardian's list of the top 20 English-language geek novels that is today'd top link, that whereas we had read a full 45 percent of them, we had no idea what a horizontal HTPC enclosure was. Only those who do, and who've read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, are the true masters of the Internet. The rest of us are just sort of trespassing. You can see rumblings of it in various blogs, as posters gloat about how many of the books they've read, or criticize the Guardian's list for being too mainstream: "From the books that I know on the list, apparently, “geek” only means scifi, which rules out a ton of books that would have displaced others here on the list. American Gods is a vastly inferior novel to Gaiman’s own Neverwhere." Ha ha! Of course it is, sir, of course it is. Less quibbling and more discussion of the existing list is available here, but this blog is home to a rather elitist dismissal: "It's not so much what's on the list as what's missing. The books are a snapshot of mid to late 20th century sci-fi, as if the readers were ignorant of anything that predated the Great War. Where are the books that started the genre, like The Time Machine, Gulliver's Travels, and Frankenstein? Yes, where indeed? Where indeed.

Posted by Philip Ewing at November 22, 2005 10:11 AM

Category: The Dead-Tree Scene