The data contains 193 novels, with 80+ additional titles in the pool. All novels were published in 2001 or later.
You can help! Wikipedia is lacking biographical details for these authors:
M. M. Buckner
Minister Faust
Kay Kenyon
Karin Lowachee
Lyda Morehouse
Chris Moriarty
Karen Traviss
Ray Vukcevich
Ken Wharton
Liz Williams
Ann Tonsor Zeddies
I am interested in year of birth and year of first publication. Leave a comment and/or contribute to Wikipedia if you would like to help with this project.
Book suggestions are also welcome.

This is the same gizmo I’ve been working on for the 20th century novels project. I haven’t made many improvements to the interface since the last time I wrote about it. In fact, at this point I would say that the interface is almost-but-not-quite useless. There’s nothing intuitive about it, there is no way to see which flags are associated with a book, the whole thing is too small.
Notes about the book selection
The list is a compilation of several award lists, bestseller lists, and anything I consider notable. Awards are useful because they are progressive — they are likely to continue in the coming years. Same with the New York Times Bestseller list. I found a list from Peter Ackroyd (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die) which includes lots of books from the 21st century, but this list will eventually become out-of-date.
As a result, the list includes Booker prize winners next to The Da Vinci Code, and this is as it should be. After all, what is it that makes an ordinary novel into a Great Novel of the Century? I think selling millions of copies is probably a good indication.
And about that Booker prize… after looking at the selections of these various annual prizes, I find the book selection for most of these laurels to be disappointing. Maybe this is because the quality of writing has simply gone down in general, but if so that doesn’t mean you should dilute your standards, because if you do the prize becomes nothing more than a gimmick to sell books.
Another horror of the publishing industry I have discovered is that ghost writers are now starting to dominate the bestseller market. This is a new kind of ghost writing where the writer actually gets their name on the cover alongside the more marketable author’s name. Someone like Andrew Gross can become a writing celebrity even before they have published an original book.
Project status
There are 161 books in the xml datafile, and another 120 books that still need to be filed. That means there are a lot of holes in the data currently available.
Some day I will build a control so that only the highest rated novel by a given author will appear on the list. These days there are so many popular writers who publish every year or even several times a year, taking up a lot of space in the list. Unfortunately there is rarely anything distinguishing about these books; one Alex Cross thriller is pretty much like any other.

Task list:
- score (timer) display
- timer operation
- city structure
- make exits
- navigation gfx
- alien display
- alien move logic
- high score database
- high score submit – server
- high score retrieve – server
- splash screen
- status display – ???
rel preloader – external clip?
rel hide status box
1 victory screen
1 instructions screen
2* medium city structure
2 difficulty select screen
3 high score display
2 high score submit – client
3 high score retrieve – client
4 iterate alien move logic
4 tutorial city structure
4 revise nav gfx
4 multiple difficulties
4 high score per difficulty
5 more buildings, large city structure

To do list:
- score (timer) display
- timer operation
- city structure
- make exits
- navigation gfx
1 alien display
1 alien move logic
2 game over screen
2 medium city structure
3 large city structure
4 revise nav gfx
3 splash screen
3 difficulty select screen
4 high score display
4 high score submit – client
4 high score database
4 high score submit – server
4 high score retrieve – client
4 high score retrieve – server
5 multiple difficulties
5 high score per difficulty
5 preloader – external clip?
* status box

There is a timer, and some mechanisms to add penalty time to the timer.
There is also a debugging monitor that has not been disabled in the current version. I use the “trace” function a lot, but these days I wrap all traces in a debug handler. This way I can output the debug messages to both the output window (for authoring) and to an on-screen monitor (for live testing).
Here is my task list for completing the game:
1 score (timer) display
1 timer operation
2 city structure
2 make exits
2 navigation gfx
2 game over screen
3 preloader
3 splash screen
3 difficulty select screen
4 high score display
4 high score submit – client
4 high score database
4 high score submit – server
4 high score retrieve – client
4 high score retrieve – server
5 multiple difficulties
5 high score per difficulty
* status box
The number is the priority I have given to each task.

Today I put together a simple prototype for creating the city blocks. First I wanted to collect some photographs of buildings to use as game assets. There is a good library of images at WetCanvas!, a website for artists. I found some barns, some churches, some castles, and so on.
I took some of the images into Photoshop to crop and mask them, then saved them as PNG files. Then I imported the PNGs into Flash and played with Trace Bitmap until I got a satisfactory vector drawing. I have to balance image quality with file size. I would like to have a city size of sixteen rooms, and with six unique buildings per room I will need at least 96 vector images. At a very small 5k per image, the game will be 500kb in size.
If you click on the first link above you can see my current progress. I’ve written some simple code to generate the city block when you press a button. Also, the buildings will hilite when you roll over them with the mouse.
I have tried to balance the layout so that at least some portion of each building is visible. It may only be a small corner, which is fine for the game; if the aliens are sometimes obscured, that means you will have to search for them even harder.