About this list

Tor, 116 Books

Germany’s SF portal Tor Online asked its community to help create a definitive, German-language guide to the genre. Over a two-week window, 219 readers were allowed to name up to five favourite novels. Their input produced 1 099 nominations covering 450 different titles.

A six-member jury (three women, three men drawn from the site’s editors/critics) then read the long-list and selected the final 100 books. The list is deliberately alphabetical, not ranked, and the jury’s brief was to offer “einen repräsentativen Querschnitt”—a balanced snapshot of classics plus very recent works (roughly the last four to five years). All titles had to be available in German translation, with one deliberate exception (A Door Into Ocean).

Who voted & how many?
Community phase: 219 readers supplied the raw nominations.
Final decision phase: 6 jurors chose the 100-title shortlist.

This list was originally published in 2019 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.