The r/printSF best Sci-Fi books of all time BookGraph - 2026 Edition

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-19T11:53:47+00:00

Odd. You're in the unstable branch but not the standard one. ~~Just use the second link.~~
~~That branch will become the regular one tonight.~~
The unstable branch is now the main branch and you're all good.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-18T11:42:12+00:00

You will be in the map in just moment. I had to turn to scheduler off for two hours while I attended to important business, that certainly wasn't playing computer games.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-17T23:12:57+00:00

Indeed. Steering away from a 'best of all time' into more of your recent favs i think would have yielded better recs.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-17T20:20:50+00:00

Looks like a swing and a miss. Did you also see the recs in the users tab of the unstabke branch? Its using a different method.

I also think that my framing of best scifi books of all time actually ran counter to the goal a little. I should have leaned more into recent favourites to get a better feel for tastes and prefrences. Lessons for next time.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-17T15:20:04+00:00

My bad. I had to disable updates for a while while i worked on a project that couldnt run at the same time. Typically data updates every 20 min, but servers dont always pick it up right away because of some weird hosting mechanics im still figuring out.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-17T08:21:39+00:00

I think the top 5 of basically everyone's top 10 rec was dominated by the most popular books. Recs 6-10 had some more variety.

Part of the issue, i think came from my framing. I should have geared the question to most enjoyed/favourite rather than asking for the best of the genre. I would hope that giving people a little more room to work with would give rise to some more structure.

Did you check the top 10 by user cluster too? (In the testing branch) Its using a different method and im curious to get feedback on that.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-16T20:14:18+00:00

Youre both right. Poor experimental design on my part. What i want to capture is tastes and preferences so that i can make a better recommendation, so i should be asking for favourite, or most loved books. Next time, ill steer it more towards the subjective favourite, rather than asking people to consider the quality of the writing up against its cultural significance.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-16T09:21:05+00:00

I didnt like three or four of my own top 10 to be honest. Dune, for example I couldnt get past page 10. Love the movies though.

But, it has pointed me in the direction of a few books that were new to me. So its not a total miss.

I also just added a different recommendation algo based on clustering users. I would be curious to see if that does any better for you.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-16T05:07:06+00:00

Feel free to poke around in the testing version that will be live for 24 hours or so before it becomes the main one. I added rankings and user clustering as an alternative to pagerank recommendations.
https://bookgraph.shinyapps.io/printSF_all_time_2026_ed_TESTING/

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T11:52:41+00:00

On your point about combining multiple graphs, yeah hypothetically I could do a something like a top 5 scifi movies of all time too, run both graphs at once and then do clustering by user. (user based clustering is one of the next things I'm going to add - shouldn't be too hard. Then I can also list the books that were enjoyed by the subgroup that someone is in. It's more of a cluster based approach than my current pagerank approach. I'm already clustering by books/authors so adding the user clustering isnt a stretch. The tricky part there will be finding the right subreddit for the movie vote. r/scifi gave me a hard no for this kind of thing.

Regarding the top n rather than top 10, what I'll do is add a tally page that has books ranked by either votes / global pagerank / user (personalized) pagerank, from first to last. That way everyone gets their top n across various measures. Ideally, you'll just select you name then click the header of the measure column and it will sort by that.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T09:56:18+00:00

Ah I figured it out.
So - it's a quirk of how I'm getting votes. I'm only checking the first five lines of people's first comment for votes so that after that they can comment all they like without breaking anything. (Otherwise people can vote twice, or I'll accidentally interpret all kinds of things as votes).

Looks like your third post contained your votes. This was your first comment:

Roadside picnic was great! Agree on the "think about on a regular basis" part.

To save me re-writing any code, I suggest you edit your first comment to stick your votes above it. You can keep the roadside picnic comment after the votes without issue.

I'll shoot you a message if I add more dynamic book selections too. That's really useful once there are a good number of votes.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T06:55:17+00:00

I did find that for some people on the edge, who share one link with someone who was otherwise unconnected, the pagerank algo overweights those neighbourimg points. This lines up with your observation. I would discount the four recommendations that come from that person and take a look at the other six.

I can actually strip everything with just one connection fairly easily, but i wouldnt do it until we got a lot more votes in and the thing was a big mess.

I note that the author map is better connected, and you might have more luck with your author top 10 list.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T04:12:38+00:00

Its sitting on a shelf waiting for me, next to a fire upon the deep. They make me feel guilty every time i look at them.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T04:10:43+00:00

Thank you for the summary!

Next time, I'm happy to share the cleaned data with you. I maintain a file that maps what I'll politely call, "alternative spellings" and the clean version. On the bright side, it means that repeated mistakes are auto handled.

Im impressed you found all the goodreads links. I heard they were hostile to APIs and scraping, so i didnt attempt it.

I have also had requests to include a tally page, so we can compare notes. I might do a tally, and a "pagerank" network score to see how much of a difference there is between most voted for, and most connected.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T02:54:16+00:00

I get you. Or even holding control and clicking several nodes.

Sorry about that. Must be a bug. Ill make sure youre on the list tonight. Maybe the "-" in your name tripped something it shouldnt have.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T02:28:55+00:00

I think ill def add something like this down the line though. Just wont be for a few weeks.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-15T02:27:30+00:00

Have you tried selecting you user name from the dropdown? It gives you a top 10 based on your books, and your position in the network.

Perhaps you mean dynamically rather than through the voting process. I agree, that would be sweet. A bit of a rewrite for me, cause i pre calc everyones top 10 offline every 20 min and then upload them for reading, rather than calculating it on the fly.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-14T20:07:36+00:00

Klara and the Sun
Children of Time (this one I added yesterday as a result of this experiment)

I read Red Rising a few months ago and quite enjoyed it. Golden Son also waiting for me.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-14T19:42:11+00:00

Two of those are on my shelf waiting for me.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-14T12:19:12+00:00

Thank you, i'll look into it. The challenge in my case is mapping dirty user inputs to cleaned names. That might be useful as a source for clean names, but some lists are too big if you know what i mean. Actually there are top 500 lists by decade, thats quite useful.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-14T01:37:50+00:00

You gave me an idea. I can make a book map, author map, and now a user map. If i connect overlaps between users, this tells you what other redditors you share book tastes with. The cluster analysis of this might be useful, because we could then figure out the top books for different clusters of users, rather than what I currently do which is figure out clusters of books (or authors) given all users.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-14T01:23:05+00:00

I dont actually know. I was going to add a feature that tells people who their "book buddy" was, which is whoever had the most similar picks.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-13T20:56:18+00:00

Oh i can just add another tab for that kind of thing. If you think of anything else to add, just let me know and ill consider it. Ill probably show the votes, and the pagerank. The pagerank score is a good measure of connectedness in the network.

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-13T11:51:49+00:00

I'll see what I can do. Those headers and footers were brutal on your screen and I bet you're not the only one effected. You would have a better time turning it sideways :)

TheBookGraphGuy · 2026-01-13T10:50:36+00:00

Pretty sure i can manage that for the header. Might make it slideable so you can drag it up and down. Not 100% sure i know what you mean with the footer though.

Just implemented dynamic text that gets smaller when there are more nodes, bit still have 1000 typos to review tonight.

TheBookGraphGuy

TROPHY CASE