The Sword and Laser discussion

A friend linked me an interesting map of science fiction books on Goodreads, organized by tags in a graph. It's a bit hard to read, but you get an idea of the major topics people have entered in GoodReads to describe the book genre. It goes back to books from 1900.

Here is the article about the work done: https://medium.com/@bethaniemaples/10...

And here is the actual map:
https://openmappr.com/play/100YrsOfSciFi

So cool, thanks for sharing.

Interesting.

With the tags cleared, the Science Fiction map looks like a Jackson Pollack.

The densest part with the yellow seems to mostly be tagged “human nature”.


i was curious about that orphan cluster at the top - turns out it’s the Dune sequels tagged “non-sentient AI”.

I love this crazy analysis of arbitrary fields in the database that can be entered by anyone, just tickles me. The Dune sequels is a great find, and the main difference from them and the original is "Cyberpunk". Why is the original Dune cyberpunk? The tags can be pretty random.

Found another island formed by I, Robot and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Kind of cool and strange. They are:

ai as a menace
android
artificial intelligence
culture
galactic empire
genetic enhancement
mad scientist
telepathy
world government

This is great, thanks for sharing

Great find, thanks for sharing. I'm not sure I've ever thought that hard about the categorization of my sci-fi reading - I just like the stories!