ᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥ THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL - NOMINATIONS & DISCUSSION THREAD ᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥᴥᴕᴥ

because the making and arguing over of lists of things is the supereme occupation of every free person

What's all this then?

its an ilx email poll for books of speculative fiction - primarily science fiction, fantasy, horror & adventure stories - that will if not determine 'the best' works in these genres at least give an interesting & informative list of rad books

How is it made?

to start any and all posters can nominate up to 13 different prose works that fit within the genre guidelines. there are a couple of caveats:

* any work that was conceived as a single entity but published in separate volumes (e.g. the lord of the rings, the wheel of time) should be nominated for the TOTAL WORK, rather than in their component parts
* both short story collections & short stories are eligible
* where overlap exists precidence will be given to the title published earliest
* non-english titles more than welcome
* for works in translation please note the translator

it would be helpful if all nominations could follow the form of AUTHOR - TITLE OF WORK

So that's it?

yeah, p much

How do we deal with a situation like: I think Gateway is awesome but think quality drops way down in the rest of the Heechee Saga, so I only nominate Gateway. Somebody else thinks "fuck you, all the Heechee novels are rad!!!" and nominates the whole thing. See also: Ender's Game, Ringworld, etc.

i think for fairness & uniformity's sake we have to treat everything the same. if the work is intended to be a single whole than you have to make a choice about whether the parts you like are flawed enough to taint the whole, & whether its still worth nominating. the same way in the tv poll you couldn't nominate only a single season of show - you have to weigh the entire work

my list of nominations:

robert jordan - the wheel of time
yevgeny zamaytin - we
urusla k le guin - the lathe of heaven
michelle west - the sun sword
robert w. chambers - the king in yellow
h.p. lovecraft - "the shadow over innsmouth"
kim stanely robinson - the mars trilogy
sean russell - moontide & magic rise
thomas ligotti - songs of a dead dreamer
stephen donaldson - the chronicles of thomas convenant
tad williams - memory, sorrow & thorn
sigizmund krzhizhanovsky - memories of the future
patricia a mckillip - the riddle-master trilogy

Good work!

Couple of questions before we start:

• series which aren't a continuing saga, but have overlap of setting or character e.g. Discworld. Are these single entities for this poll?
• how strict are we to be with story collections? Do you want The Complete Ballard, or just the volumes they were originally published?

man seriously don't know where to even begin

yevgeny zamaytin - we
robert w. chambers - the king in yellow

would definitely second both of these fwiw

um is there a limit on how long our list can be

roger zelazny - the amber series, books 1-5
william gibson - neuromancer
mervyn peake - gormenghast
madeleine l'engle - a wrinkle in time

isaac asimov - foundation
philip k. dick - do androids dream of electric sheep
harlan ellison - "i have no mouth and i must scream"
ray bradbury - the martian chronicles
ray bradbury - illustrated man
margaret atwood - handmaiden's tale
william goldman - the princess bride
nevil shute - on the beach
neal stephenson - snow crash
stephen king - the stand
walter miller - a canticle for leibowitz
warren ellis - transmetropolitan

more to come when i think of them

oh wow, that's more than i thought i had. one more, hmmm....

john christopher - the tripod trilogy

warren ellis - transmetropolitan

wait comics are eligible? that's a whole other level

oh, i didn't notice prose-only in the title, so idk. maybe not.

series which aren't a continuing saga, but have overlap of setting or character e.g. Discworld. Are these single entities for this poll?

books which take place in the same world & feature some of the same characters &c but are not part of a single cohesive saga/cycle/work are all separate entities so yeah, each discworld book gets its own nominations. or for example the two towers would get nominated as part of the 'lord of rings' but the silmarillion would be its own separate nomination.

i realize there are grey areas & will bow to w/e the majority think is right but this seems the fairest and clearest way of dividing things

also yeah no poetry no comics. partly because i don't know enough about either to adjudicate fairly & partly to contain the scope of the poll

if not, let me nom

frank herbert - dune

xp to shakey

to start any and all posters can nominate up to 13 different prose works that fit within the genre guidelines

if we don't get a lot of noms, i recommend opening up more noms per person (maybe even unlimited like they do on the decade film polls)

no worries, I totally missed that we're limited to 13 lol

um okay off the top of my head

JRR Tolkien - Lord of the Rings (I don't care if it's old/tired/obvious it's canonical for a reason)
Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy (VALIS, Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Frederick Pohl - Jem
Michael Moorcock - Cornelius Chronicles (Volumes I, II and III)
Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow
H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu
William S. Burroughs - The Red Night Trilogy (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands)
James Tiptree - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever anthology
Koushun Takami - Battle Royale
Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time (Dancers at the End of Time (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, The End of All Songs, The Transformation of Mavis Ming, and Legends From the End of Time)

Frank Herbert - The Jesus Incident [could nom the whole trilogy instead but this is the one I really love]

some obvious ones and some personal faves, 3 more later once I think about it

Rudy Rucker - Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware
Bruce Sterling - Islands In The Net
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
Tove Jannson - Moomin series
Philip K. Dick - Collected Stories Vol. 4
Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld
Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
Richard Adams - Shardik
Susan Cooper - Dark Is Rising series
Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles

thanks for nominating Tiptree shakey! was gonna do Ten Thousand Light-Years but I bet your anthology has most of that.

Prydain! <3

Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow

shakey i already nom'd both of these (which you previously noted, um) so you can have two more nominations

@ mordy - yeah depending on how many ppl post opening up nominations might be necessary. i just want to see what sort of interest this thread gets 1st

Not being hitherto familiar with the term, let me fly a couple of kites:

George Orwell - 1984
Cormac McCarthy - The Road

Both definitely 'speculative' to a large degree. Seems to me 1984 should count if Dick does. The Road, I can understand why it wouldn't - too close to our world, which is kinda crazy when you think about it.

oh sorry I always have trouble figuring how these nominations/voting/polls things work

cuz I am dum

SO...

K.W. Jeter - Dr. Adder
Thomas Disch - 334

some canon & kids' canon at that:

Ursula Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit
CS Lewis - The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe
CS Lewis - The Silver Chair
CS Lewis - The Voyage of the Dawntreader
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials

madeleine l'engle - a wrinkle in time
urusla k le guin - the lathe of heaven

omg yes to both of these!

some more:

ted chiang - stores of your life and others
arthur c. clarke - childhood' end
arthur c. clarke - the city & the stars
alfred bester - the demolished man
ursula le guin - the left hand of darkness
kurt vonnegut - the sirens of titan
diana wynne jones - archer's goon
joe haldeman - the forever war

if we don't get a lot of noms, i recommend opening up more noms per person (maybe even unlimited like they do on the decade film polls)

don't let nominations run away ahead of potential votes though, else your final list will be too flat to run a proper countdown

more lovecraft:

hp lovecraft - at the mountains of madness
hp lovecraft - the whisperer in darkness

ok that's 10 for me. dunno whether lovecraft should be combined into the 'necronomicon' collection say?

Tove Jannson - Moomin series

yessssssssssss! :D

Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Frederick Pohl - Gateway
Octavia Butler - Dawn
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe - Book of the Long Sun
Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Iain M Banks - Excession
Michael Moorcock - Elric
JG Ballard - The Crystal World
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
M John Harrison - The Centauri Device

I'm gonna have to look at the bookcase, make a list, check it against the thread so I don't repeat stuff...

I will nominate & vote. Just might be a day or two to get to it.

that Octavia Butler is included in the Lilith's Brood series I nommed above, so you got 1 more xp

those Narnia books should all be part of one as well, right?

Ah ok...then replace the Octavia Butler with:

Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth

Should Wizard of Earthsea be nommed as part of the Earthsea Quartet series?

I nom'd Book of the New Sun already fyi

dunno whether lovecraft should be combined into the 'necronomicon' collection say?

I think his stuff should be nommed separately as not all of it share the same universe and even those that do are generally connected by theme and setting rather than plot and character. I mean I would probably vote for 'At the Mountains of Madness' but I don't love all his mythos stuff equally.

xp

Ah damn, I thought I'd checked all of them. Ok so replace Book of the New Sun with:

Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

any work that was conceived as a single entity but published in separate volumes (e.g. the lord of the rings, the wheel of time) should be nominated for the TOTAL WORK, rather than in their component parts

Lovecraft doesn't seem to fit this, so yeah those should be separate imo

dan simmons - hyperion

glen cook - the black company
alastair reynolds - house of suns
joe haldeman - the forever war
m john harrison - viriconium
victor pelevin - omon ra

whoops forever war already nommed

julian may - pliocene exile

alasdair gray - lanark

clive barker - imajica
george r r martin - song of fire and ice
steven erikson - malazan book of the fallen

william gibson - burning chrome
samuel delany - babel-17

china mieville - perdido street station
china mieville - the scar

aren't his kind of related?

orson scott card - Ender's Game (first book only)
douglas adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)
jonathan lethem - Girl in Landscape
isaac asimov - "The Last Question"
kurt vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
tim powers - The Anubis Gates

This is out of control already. There's no clear genre here, and therefore no possible poll.

i don't see what the lack of a "clear genre" has to do with anything. and it's a poll because you vote in it.

Taco Bell: "I don't see what the lack of 'meat content' has to do with it. And it's food because you eat it."

i hear ya cluckin but that is maybe not a great analogy

Harlan Ellison would have this thread's head on a spike and paraded through the streets of Rome.

He's a bit of a dick, mind you. I do realize that.

Jonathan Lethem -- Gun, With Occasional music
John Crowley -- Little, Big
John Cristopher -- Tripods triolgy
Ursula Le Guin -- The Compass Rose
Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes -- Dream Park

lots of my faves already nommed, will put more later if i think of it

Lots of stuff I would have gone right for is already nommed (including Book of the New Sun -- twice -- does that mean I can vote for it twice?), but a few more off the top of my head:

Ray Bradbury - The October Country
Arthur Machen - "The White People"

Ray Bradbury - The October Country

Seconded.

Oh, we can do short stories! OK, so

Fritz Lieber, "A Pail of Air"
Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations"

Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
JG Ballard - The Complete Stories (um does this count?)
Philip K Dick - Ubik
Philip K Dick - The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Alan Garner - The Owl Service
Samuel R Delany - Nova
Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Diana Wynne Jones - The Dalemark Quartet (Cart And Cwidder, Drowned Ammet, The Spellcoats, Crown Of Dalemark)

I was tempted to nom E.E. "Doc" Smith but thought better of it

russel hoban - ridley walker -- curse bless you, sleeves
stanislaw lem - the cyberiad
rachel carson - the autobiography of red
samuel r delaney - the einstein intersection
christopher priest - inverted world
larry niven - ringworld
jorge luis borges - ficciones
jorge luis borges - the aleph
franz kafka - the collected stories (esp "a country doctor", "the hunger artist", "the metamorphosis", and "in the penal colony")

ummm, more later...

Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside
Barry Malzberg - Beyond Apollo
Thomas Disch - 334
J.G. Ballard - High Rise
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
K.W. Jeter - The Glass Hammer
C.L. Moore - "The Vintage Season"
Alfred Bester - "Fondly Fahrenheit"
James Tiptree - "The Girl Who Plugged In"
James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
John Varley - "The Persistence of Vision"

334 up above so replace that with Camp Concentration

Dying Inside also there so pop in Shadrach In The Furnace instead

Fifth Head also there so put in Frederich Pohl - Gateway, I guess

most of my favorite stuff has already been nominated, but

philip k dick - flow my tears, the policeman said
thomas m disch - camp concentration
aldous huxley - brave new world

Bah Stars My Destination also there but that's easy replace with Alfred Bester - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed"

@ ismael & eaw - i'm going to roll the first three earthsea books into a single nomination for the trilogy (so a wizard of earth sea, tombs of atuan & the farthest shore)

@ kenan sure, ok

jorge luis borges - ficciones
jorge luis borges - the aleph

this is p corny but ok

Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

otm

Gateway has been nommed already

I got bored and compiled a list of all the nom so far. Hopefully I have got rid of all the duplicates:

robert jordan - the wheel of time
yevgeny zamaytin - we
urusla k le guin - the lathe of heaven
michelle west - the sun sword
robert w. chambers - the king in yellow
h.p. lovecraft - "the shadow over innsmouth"
kim stanely robinson - the mars trilogy
sean russell - moontide & magic rise
thomas ligotti - songs of a dead dreamer
stephen donaldson - the chronicles of thomas convenant
tad williams - memory, sorrow & thorn
sigizmund krzhizhanovsky - memories of the future
patricia a mckillip - the riddle-master trilogy
isaac asimov - foundation
philip k. dick - do androids dream of electric sheep
harlan ellison - "i have no mouth and i must scream"
ray bradbury - the martian chronicles
ray bradbury - illustrated man
margaret atwood - handmaiden's tale
william goldman - the princess bride
nevil shute - on the beach
neal stephenson - snow crash
stephen king - the stand
walter miller - a canticle for leibowitz
frank herbert - dune
JRR Tolkien - Lord of the Rings (I don't care if it's old/tired/obvious it's canonical for a reason)
Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy (VALIS, Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Frederick Pohl - Jem
Michael Moorcock - Cornelius Chronicles (Volumes I, II and III)
H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu
William S. Burroughs - The Red Night Trilogy (Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands)
James Tiptree - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever anthology
Koushun Takami - Battle Royale
Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time (Dancers at the End of Time (An Alien Heat, The Hollow Lands, The End of All Songs, The Transformation of Mavis Ming, and Legends From the End of Time)
Frank Herbert - The Jesus Incident
Rudy Rucker - Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware
Bruce Sterling - Islands In The Net
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
Tove Jannson - Moomin series
Philip K. Dick - Collected Stories Vol. 4
Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld
Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
Richard Adams - Shardik
Susan Cooper - Dark Is Rising series
Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
George Orwell - 1984
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
K.W. Jeter - Dr. Adder
Thomas Disch - 334
Ursula Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea
JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit
CS Lewis - The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe
CS Lewis - The Silver Chair
CS Lewis - The Voyage of the Dawntreader
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
ted chiang - stores of your life and others
arthur c. clarke - childhood' end
arthur c. clarke - the city & the stars
alfred bester - the demolished man
ursula le guin - the left hand of darkness
kurt vonnegut - the sirens of titan
diana wynne jones - archer's goon
joe haldeman - the forever war
hp lovecraft - at the mountains of madness
hp lovecraft - the whisperer in darkness
Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Frederick Pohl - Gateway
Gene Wolfe - Book of the Long Sun
Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Iain M Banks - Excession
Michael Moorcock - Elric
JG Ballard - The Crystal World
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
M John Harrison - The Centauri Device
Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside
dan simmons - hyperion
glen cook - the black company
alastair reynolds - house of suns
m john harrison - viriconium
victor pelevin - omon ra
julian may - pliocene exile
alasdair gray - lanark
clive barker - imajica
george r r martin - song of fire and ice
steven erikson - malazan book of the fallen
william gibson - burning chrome
samuel delany - babel-17
china mieville - perdido street station
china mieville - the scar
orson scott card - Ender's Game (first book only)
douglas adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)
jonathan lethem - Girl in Landscape
isaac asimov - "The Last Question"
kurt vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
tim powers - The Anubis Gates
Jonathan Lethem -- Gun, With Occasional music
John Crowley -- Little, Big
John Cristopher -- Tripods triolgy
Ursula Le Guin -- The Compass Rose
Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes -- Dream Park
Ray Bradbury - The October Country
Arthur Machen - "The White People"
Fritz Lieber, "A Pail of Air"
Tom Godwin, "The Cold Equations"
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
JG Ballard - The Complete Stories (um does this count?)
Philip K Dick - Ubik
Philip K Dick - The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
Alan Garner - The Owl Service
Samuel R Delany - Nova
Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Diana Wynne Jones - The Dalemark Quartet (Cart And Cwidder, Drowned Ammet, The Spellcoats, Crown Of Dalemark)
stanislaw lem - the cyberiad
rachel carson - the autobiography of red
samuel r delaney - the einstein intersection
christopher priest - inverted world
larry niven - ringworld
jorge luis borges - ficciones
jorge luis borges - the aleph
franz kafka - the collected stories (esp "a country doctor", "the hunger artist", "the metamorphosis", and "in the penal colony")
Barry Malzberg - Beyond Apollo
J.G. Ballard - High Rise
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up
K.W. Jeter - The Glass Hammer
C.L. Moore - "The Vintage Season"
Alfred Bester - "Fondly Fahrenheit"
James Tiptree - "The Girl Who Plugged In"
James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
John Varley - "The Persistence of Vision"
Alfred Bester - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed"
Robert Silverberg - Shadrach in the Furnace
philip k dick - flow my tears, the policeman said
thomas m disch - camp concentration
aldous huxley - brave new world
Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

That seems like a pretty good list of speculative fiction so far. I've not read absolutely everything on there, but most of what I have indisputably comes under the umbrella and stuff like Flann O'Brien, Borges, Kafka, Cormac McCarthy that is a bit more borderline, probably isn't worth making a fuss over, as you do see them crop up in these sorts of contexts from time to time.

Ted Chiang - The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids

Now I think about it my nomination for Alan Garner - The Owl Service should be taken out, as it's more in the ghost / horror fiction category. In its place I nominate

Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human

robert heinlein - stranger in a strange land
philip k. dick - martian time-slip

that's 4 for me so far

"Gateway has been nommed already"

Sigh fine Pohl & Kornbluth - The Space Merchants

I got bored and compiled a list of all the nom so far. Hopefully I have got rid of all the duplicates:

uh

John Crowley - Engine Summer
John Crowley - 'The Great Work of Time'
David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus
Christopher Priest - The Affirmation

Clans of the Alphane Moon - Philip K Dick
The Alteration - Kingsley Amis
The Drowned Word - JG Ballard

Is trad ghost horror legit for the poll? Will nom:

M R James - Complete Ghost Stories

If so. Mad to leave it out.

uh

― just woke up (lukas), Saturday, February 5, 2011 2:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

What are you uh-ing, Lukas?

will do the sorting & listing probably tomorrow when im less brutally hungover but... BUMP to encourage ppl to keep nominating books!

wheres ilx poster thomp, i wouldve thought he'd be all up in this

Erewhon - Samuel Butler
Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
News from Nowhere - William Morris

wheres ilx poster thomp, i wouldve thought he'd be all up in this

Would also be curious abt noms from a few other ppl - James Morrison, Soukesian spring to mind.

I'll try to think of a few more tomorrow - feel like I'm missing some obvs stuff, but a lot of what I'd vote for is in now.

three more

Olaf Stapledon - Sirius
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49 (feel like this is his most explicitly SF type book, Vineland comes close but nope)
Alan Garner - The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen

I am excited for this but my mind has gone totally blank!

When are nominations due by? Do I have time for some re-reading first?

someone needs to nominate CS Lewis' space trilogy and more Stanislaw Lem plz

Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
Hal Clement - A Mission of Gravity
Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany - "Aye, and Gomorrah..."
Thomas Disch - "Descending"
Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld series
Philip Jose Farmer - "Mother"
Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow
Damon Knight - The Man in the Tree
Kim Stanley Robinson - Three Californias trilogy (The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge)
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Peter Straub - Ghost Story
Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter

When are nominations due by? Do I have time for some re-reading first?

i'm going to give the nominations at least a couple of weeks, depending on how much interest we can get

there are a bunch of fantasy thread regs that havent shown up yet that i really hope participate

Thought about nominating Dangerous Visions but wasn't sure what the ruling would be on multi-author anthologies; also, it just wouldn't make a cut of 15.

did Riverworld already

yeah any thoughts on anthologies Lamp? Dangerous Visions is a classic, but it's a can of worms.

did Riverworld already

― sleeve, Sunday, February 6, 2011 4:20 PM (55 seconds ago)

whoops, ok, then I'll make my #15:

Neal Stephenson - Anathem

nice!

i'm fine with multi-author collections but if siginificant overlap exists btw titles then ill give precedence to the title first nominated

Greg Egan - Axiomatic
Peter Watts - Blindsight
George Orwell - 1984
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells - The Time Machine
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Bram Stoker - Dracula
R L Stevenson - Jekyll & Hyde
Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths
Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic
Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
John Christopher - The Death of Grass/No Blade of Grass (US, UK titles)

Man, going down to 13 is really hard!

I put 1984 up already

I already nominated Dracula.

Yeah think we have had a few of those already. I nominated Day of the Triffids.

Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
Alistair Reynolds - Revelation Space Trilogy
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
Isaac Asimov - I, Robot

Thomas M. Disch- On Wings of Song

uh

― just woke up (lukas), Saturday, February 5, 2011 2:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

What are you uh-ing, Lukas?

― My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Princess TamTam), Sunday, February 6, 2011 4:17 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark

he somehow left out all my noms. sadface.

John Crowley - Engine Summer

thanks, this is what i actually meant to nominate and somehow typed Little Big instead

Would be awesome if someone nom'd Gaiman's American Gods...

David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress

I didn't see anyone mention that Autobiography of Red is by Anne Carson, not Rachel Carson. Great book, although it seems the main character's being a monster was mostly metaphorical. I guess there were a few physical descriptions.

If no one has nominated these yet (I looked at the nominations but I didn't commit them all to memory and I'm on a phone, so cross-referencing is hard):

Cordwainer Smith - Norstrilia
Thomas Disch - Camp Concentration
John Sladek - The Reproductive System
Emmanuel Carrere - The Moustache
William Pene du Boise - The Twenty-one Balloons
Jules Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days
RL Stevenson - New Arabian Nights
RL Stevenson - Fables
Friedrich Schiller - The Ghost-Seer
Jonathan Lethem - Amnesia Moon
Strugatskys - The Ugly Swans
Wiliam Beckford - Vathek
Osamu Dazai - Blue Bamboo

New Arabian Nights? really? There's the Avenging Angel (is that right? I'm sleeplessly posting on phone) story I suppose, but I'm not sure it really fits in this poll - always saw it more as a somewhat whimsical set of tales - detection stories really, if anything.

Am thinking of The Great God Pan by Machen from the same period, but in some ways wd prefer to nom The Novel of the Black Seal from the Three Impostors. Will think more when I get up and go to work.

Also, what's the view on Asimov's I Robot stories? Remember loving them as a teenager, not sure how they'd hold up now.

Okay, cross off New Arabian Nights. I just realized a second ago that I wanted to add

Stanley Elkin - The Living End

Read most of I, Robot one day while I was substitute teaching about eight years ago. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Really functional, determinedly unpretentious writing, maybe one step up from Richard Matheson in his story-as-screenplay mode.

he somehow left out all my noms. sadface.

Oops. Sorry. I knew I would do something like that. I guess at the end of noms ignore my list or at least remember to add in Lukas' noms if you do use it!

That's addressed to Lamp.

david mitchell - ghostwritten
david mitchell - cloud atlas

Am thinking of The Great God Pan by Machen from the same period, but in some ways wd prefer to nom The Novel of the Black Seal from the Three Impostors

Haven't read the latter, but either way The White People will be on my list.

I'd just like to note that Tove Jansson's Moomin series probably shouldn't count as one entry. Each Moomin book tells a finite story and the series wasn't "conceived as a single entity", as said in the nomination rules. So it would make more sense to nom separate Moomin books, not the whole series.

Marge Piercy - Woman at the Edge of Time

ON the Edge of Time , obv...

Also no Doris Lessing?

Can I get a ruling on RPG sourcebooks? Do they count as prose works?

totally nom'ming Arms + Equipment Manual for ADnD 2nd edition "i won dungeons and dragons! and it was advanced!"

Most of the SF I could think of has been nominated. Borderline perhaps, but Lanark by Alasdair Gray? Half of it is a realist 'portrait of the artist as a young man' novel, the other half is a dystopian projection of certain characters and their settings into a dystopian SF setting, with timey-wimey weirdness, sinister corporations, and a heavy allusion to HG Wells' Time Machine.
Oh, and forgive me if I've missed it, but there's no Ian M Banks.

Actually, scratch that. Of course there is some IMB upthread.

lanark has been nom'd as well

So it has. Ah well, never mind.
A dystopian projection into a dystopian setting? Argh, I need more coffee.

I am not huge on speculative fiction, but as I haven't seen them mentioned I would like to nominate

Guy Gavriel Kay - The Fionavar Tapestry
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Sarantine Mosaic
Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines

I'd just like to note that Tove Jansson's Moomin series probably shouldn't count as one entry. Each Moomin book tells a finite story and the series wasn't "conceived as a single entity", as said in the nomination rules. So it would make more sense to nom separate Moomin books, not the whole series.

― Tuomas, Monday, February 7, 2011 4:28 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

booooo!

fine, split the votes :(

if I have to nominate just one it is Tales From Moominvalley.

wheres ilx poster thomp, i wouldve thought he'd be all up in this

v flattered! er i've barely been around this week, family health issues, um let's see

lord dunsany, the king of elfland's daughter
michael bishop, philip k. dick is dead, alas
philip k. dick, galactic pot-healer
robert sheckley, options
tove jansson, moominvalley in november

and beyond that i'll think about it, i guess.

i suppose to be honest to my younger self i need to nominate

margaret weis and tracy hickman, the dragonlance chronicles

by which for the sake of clarity i refer to the original trilogy and not any latterday sequels or expanded-world business

Brian Aldiss - Hothouse
Iain M Banks - Look to Windward
Iain M Banks - The Player of Games
China Mieville - The City & The City
Phillip Reeve - The Mortal Engines Quartet

xp - I fully expect an army of lurkers to put Dragonlance at #1.

I want to nominate some Roald Dahl but his stuff fills the full spectrum tween real and fantasy and I'm not sure where to draw the line

Well, OK, if no-one else will

Doris Lessing - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
Doris Lessing - The Making of the Representative for Planet 8

Also

Jack Vance - Big Planet

They are, of course, both part of the Canopus in Argos but they're different stories (in the same way I suppose that Banks novels are about the Culture) so they should count separately, yes?

This list is looking pretty good, and you now have his novel but you still don't have

Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man

which has all the short fiction- "Scanners Live in Vain," "The Game of Rat and Dragon," etc.

list of nominees so far:

Alan Garner - The Owl Service
Alan Garner - The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon
Alastair Reynolds - House of Suns
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space trilogy
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Alfred Bester - "Fondly Fahrenheit"
Alfred Bester - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed"
Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End
Arthur C. Clarke - The City & The Stars
Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
Arthur Machen - "The White People"
Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan

Barry Malzberg - Beyond Apollo
Bram Stoker – Dracula
Brian Aldiss - Hothouse
Bruce Sterling - Islands In The Net

Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Herland
China Miéville – Perdido Street Station
China Miéville- The City & The City
China Miéville – The Scar
Christopher Priest - The Affirmation
Christopher Priest - Inverted World
Clive Barker – Imajica
Cordwainer Smith – Norstrilia
Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
C.L. Moore - "The Vintage Season"
C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia

Damon Knight - The Man in the Tree
Dan Simmons – Hyperion
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus
David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Mitchell - Ghostwritten
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Diana Wynne Jones - Archer's Goon
Diana Wynne Jones - The Dalemark Quartet
Doris Lessing - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
Doris Lessing - The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)

Edward Bellamy – Looking Backward
Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Emmanuel Carrere - The Moustache

Frank Herbert - Dune
Frank Herbert - The Jesus Incident
Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories (Schocken; 1971)
Frederick Pohl - Jem
Frederick Pohl - Gateway
Fritz Lieber - "A Pail of Air"

Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
George R R Martin - Song of Fire and Ice
Glen Cook - The Black Company
George Orwell – 1984
Greg Egan - Axiomatic
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Fionavar Tapestry
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Sarantine Mosaic

Hal Clement - A Mission of Gravity
Harlan Ellison - "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"
H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
H.G. Wells - The Time Machine
H.P. Lovecraft - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
H.P. Lovecraft - "The Call of Cthulhu"
H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
H.P. Lovecraft – “The Whisperer in Darkness”

Iain M. Banks - Look to Windward
Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
Isaac Asimov - "The Last Question"
Isaac Asimov – Foundation
Isaac Asimov – I, Robot

Jack Vance - Big Planet
Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
James Tiptree - "The Girl Who Plugged In"
James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World
J.G. Ballard - High Rise
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up
John Christopher - The Tripod trilogy
John Christopher - The Death of Grass/No Blade of Grass
John Crowley - Little, Big
John Crowley - Engine Summer
John Crowley – “The Great Work of Time”
John Sladek - The Reproductive System
John Varley - "The Persistence of Vision"
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
Jonathan Lethem - Girl in Landscape
Jonathan Lethem - Gun, With Occasional music
Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges - The Aleph
JRR Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
JRR Tolkien - The Hobbit
Jules Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days
Julian May - Pliocene Exile

Kim Stanely Robinson - The Mars trilogy
Kim Stanley Robinson - Three Californias trilogy
Kingsley Amis – The Alteration
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
K.W. Jeter - Dr. Adder
K.W. Jeter - The Glass Hammer
Koushun Takami - Battle Royale

Larry Niven & Stephen Barnes - Dream Park
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
Larry Niven - Ringworld
Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland's Daughter

M. John Harrison – Viriconium
Madeleine l'Engle - A Wrinkle In Time
Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
Margret Atwood - Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Weiss & Tracy Hickman - The Dragonlance Chronicles
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
Michael Bishop - Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas
Michael Moorcock - Cornelius Chronicles
Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Michelle West - The Sun Sword

Neal Stephenson – Anathem
Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Neil Gaiman – American Gods
Nevil Shute - On the Beach
Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
Olaf Stapledon - Sirius
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game (first book only!)

Patricia A. McKillip - The Riddle-Master trilogy
Peter Straub - Ghost Story
Peter Watts - Blindsight
Philip Jose Farmer – Riverworld
Philip Jose Farmer - "Mother"
Philip K. Dick – Clans of the...
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick - Galactic pot-healer
Philip K. Dick - Collected Stories Vol. 4 (pub Citadel 1954-1964)
Philip K. Dick - Ubik
Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
Phillip Reeve - The Mortal Engines Quartet
Pohl & Kornbluth - The Space Merchants

R.L. Stevenson – Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde
R.L. Stevenson – Fables (1896)
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury - Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury - The October Country
Richard Adams – Shardik
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow
Robert Jordan – The Wheel of Time
Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside
Robert Sheckley - Options
Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow
Roger Zelazny - The Amber Series
Rudy Rucker - Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker

Samuel Butler – Erewhon
Samuel R. Delany – Babel-17
Samuel R. Delany – Nova
Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection
Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany - "Aye, and Gomorrah..."
Sean Russell - Moontide & Magic Rise
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future
Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
Stanley Elkin - The Living End
Stephen Donaldson - The Chronicles of Thomas Convenant
Stephen King - The Stand
Steven Erikson – Malazan Book of the Fallen
Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic
Susan Cooper - Dark Is Rising

Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow & Thorn
Ted Chiang - Stores of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang - The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
Thomas Disch – 334
Thomas Disch – Camp Concentration
Thomas Disch - "Descending"
Thomas Disch- On Wings of Song
Thomas Ligotti - Songs of A Dead Dreamer
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49
Tom Godwin - "The Cold Equations"
Tove Jansson – Tales From Moominvalley
Tove Jansson - Moominvalley in November

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin - Tales of Earthsea trilogy
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Compass Rose

Victor Pelevin – Oman Ra

Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
William S. Burroughs - The Red Night Trilogy
William Gibson – Neuromancer
William Gibson – Burning Chrome
William Goldman - The Princess Bride
William Morris – News from Nowhere
William Pene du Boise - The Twenty-one Balloons

Yevgeny Zamaytin - We

so the following ppl had duplicate nominations:

ismael klata +2
ears are wounds +1
omar little +1
eephus! +1
alex in sf +2
peter in montreal +1
pixel farmer -1
james morrison +2
bamcquern +1

the following were removed from the list:

JG Ballard - The Complete - not sure which edition or version you wanted
M R James - Complete Ghost Stories - title doesnt exist?
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - tempted to put this back in now, sorry
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman - this is really far out of the poll's scope

i combined the three narnia nominations into a single one for the chronicles - i can break this back up if the person nominating really wants. i did the same for the earthsea trilogy

Here's some noms, will post more later:

Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
Bob Shaw - Who Goes Here?
Tove Jansson - Moominland Midwinter
Michael Ende - The Neverending Story
Octavia Butler - Kindred

Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman - this is really far out of the poll's scope

I've never read this one, but I've always assumed it's some kind of surreal fantasy novel - is it not?

Just a little tech tip for everyone - you can find things in a thread by pressing ctrl-f and typing a name or other word, and thereby avoid duplicate nominees. Hope that helps!

that alphabetized list of nominees is missing Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, which was nominated somewhere upthread

(I'm currently reading it and will almost certainly vote for it)

Does Lewis Carroll fit this poll? Jonathan Swift?

Neil Gaiman - Coraline

Just a little tech tip for everyone - you can find things in a thread by pressing ctrl-f and typing a name or other word, and thereby avoid duplicate nominees. Hope that helps!

― Princess TamTam, Monday, February 7, 2011 7:40 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

Not on macs you can't!

Command f on a mac

Aha, thanks.

and make sure you 'show all messages' too.

Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy (VALIS, Divine Invasion, Transmigration of Timothy Archer)

AFAIK the Transmigration of Timothy Archer wasn't written as a part of any "trilogy" - it was only labeled so after Dick's death, because of some thematic similarities. Nothing really connects it to VALIS, so I think it should count as its own entry.

xposts.

MR James - wd be Ghost Stories of an Antiquary + More Ghost Stories + A Thin Ghost + A Warning to the Curious. It's as a body of work with a fairly discernible and coherent philosophy/aesthetic that I reckon they best qualify for this poll, let alone for their individual qualities - so would nom The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James, which was I think the first omnibus edition, and contains all but a handful of more or less unimportant stories iirc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collected_Ghost_Stories_of_M._R._James

^^ this is what im going to list?

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49 (feel like this is his most explicitly SF type book, Vineland comes close but nope)

― sleeve, Sunday, February 6, 2011 4:46 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

if we're gonna include Pynchon (and I'm not sure we should), I think the most obvious one for this poll would be Mason & Dixon.

See, I'd've said Against the Day! But like you, not really sure he fits here (i'm already having enough problems weighing the apples and oranges of science fiction and fantasy - not saying objectively but in my head they occupy quite different personal zones)

third policeman and wind up bird chronicle should both be included imo

More'n happy for Narnia to be a single entry, yes xp (think that also accounts for my two duplicates, thread nazi)

You have some of my noms but not all. I haven't checked them all, but I noticed

Strugatskys - The Ugly Swans
Lethem - Amnesia Moon

No one has nominated Olaf Stapledon.

I agree that VALIS should be broken up.

xps - yup, that's the MR James I was thinking of Lamp, slipped on the title, sry.

Agree with Tuomas on the Valis trilogy.

Think Max is right on 3rd Policeman - if Kafka's in, then I can't see a reason to cut it.

There's a nom for Sirius upthread I think Bam

Wait, I didn't see how these were alphchecking by first name. Double checking.

alphabetized. Checking

stupid phone

I can't do anything right.

Sorry Lamp, but I think you forgot to include some of my nominations:

Gene Wolfe - Book of the Long Sun
Iain M Banks - Excession
Michael Moorcock - Elric
JG Ballard - The Crystal World
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
M John Harrison - The Centauri Device

sorry! now added

Sorry, coming in late, you all have done all the canonical ones and my appreciative thanks to everyone who nommed YA and the Riddlemaster Tril. Throwing in a few that won't win anything but I believe in them and they deserve to be noted:

CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG - Maureen McHugh
FORGOTTEN BEASTS OF ELD - McKillip
WEE FREE MEN/HATFUL OF SKY/WINTERSMITH (The Tiffany Aching trilogy) - T Pratchett
FOOL'S RUN - a space opera from McKillip, maybe her only??

All my sci-fi has been in storage for so long, I can't remember what other little groundwood-printed gems are yellowing away in those boxes. I wish I could love you all equally, my mass market collection.

I have some lesbian/queer cyberpunk that I really like, too, from the 90s or something, but I can't reeememberrrrrrrrr....

OH OH I remembered

TROUBLE AND HER FRIENDS - Melissa Scott

I feel like a bit of a fake putting them in this thread because they are clearly not "all-time" except to me.

not "all-time" except to me

This is what makes them all the more interesting though.

the following were removed from the list:

JG Ballard - The Complete - not sure which edition or version you wanted
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - tempted to put this back in now, sorry
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman - this is really far out of the poll's scope

OK, these were mine so I'll replace them with :

JG Ballard - The Atrocity Exhibition
Barrington J Bayley - The Rod Of Light
Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland & The End Of The World (if The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle doesn't count, this one certainly does)

I also replaced my nomination for Alan Garner - The Owl Service as I figured on reflection that it didn't count.

Are concept albums allowed btw?

lloyd alexander - prydain chronicles

matt#2 - i put the murakami back in & i just wasnt sure which of these were the intended nom:

# The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001)[33]
# The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006)[33]
# The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006)[33]
# The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)

afaik the Vol 1 / Vol 2 are a divided version, and the 2009 one is when they rereleased it for the US in one large edition again. I think the divided version is paperback, while the one volume version is hardcover.

Any Simak fans? I only read City, but remember enjoying it - that's all I remember apart from the basic premise, hence not actually nominating it.

PUT THE THIRD POLICEMAN BACK IN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO3qJGKs9gw

lol max its back in

All the Lewises

Wyndham Lewis - The Human Age Trilogy (comprising The Childermass, Monstre Gai, Malign Fiesta) Ok, this is explicitly a purgatorio/limbo/inferno trilogy, but the post-war landscape of The Childermass, and more specifically the strange science-fiction community in Monstre Gai get it in to this poll I think.

CS Lewis - Out of the Silent Planet Trilogy (comprising Out of the Silent Planet, Voyage to Venus (UK)/Perelandra (US) and That Hideous Strength) The first two are ace, the third features a talking bear and is a bit rubbish imo.

(Sorry Lamp, I got the author/work thing the wrong way round before. 8 noms left)

Does Lewis Carroll fit this poll? Jonathan Swift?

No one answered this. I did think about nominating the Alice books.

They totally fit, if the essence of this is 'worlds that aren't our own' (that's basically it, right?)

OK so Lamp is a genius as always and this damn poll has lured me back into posting.

Mad love to those who nommed some of my less than famous choices already, such as The Anubis Gates, Sean Russell's stuff, and especially The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which I didn't think anyone else cared about. Book of the New Sun is my all-time jam but it's already been nommed too, so here are my 13:

Charles Finney - The Circus Of Dr. Lao
Jack Vance - The Demon Princes (5 books)
Jack Vance - The Lyonesse Trilogy
Jack Vance - "The Moon Moth"
Richard Adams - Watership Down
Fritz Lieber - Conjure Wife
James P. Blaylock - The Last Coin
Samuel R. Delany - Neveryon (4 books)
R.A. Lafferty - Nine Hundred Grandmothers (story collection)
Edward Whittemore - Quin's Shanghai Circus
Robert E. Howard - The Conan Stories (is this allowed? They weren't collected together in REH's lifetime, but he clearly viewed them as a coherent body)
John Crowley - Aegypt
Robin Hobb - The Farseer Trilogy

Alright then,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass

Lewis Carroll obv

Edward Whittemore the Sinai Tapestry guy? His endings are sentimental but his plotting is so knotted and magnificent. Glad he showed up.

matt#2 - i put the murakami back in & i just wasnt sure which of these were the intended nom:

# The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001)[33]
# The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006)[33]
# The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006)[33]
# The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)

The one-volume version of the Ballard short stories is the one I meant, so many of his stories are variations on the same obsessive themes I found it difficult to pick a representative one so I nom'd them all.

No one has nominated Olaf Stapledon.

I did! I nominated Sirius!

xpost Yeah the Sinai Tapestry/Jerusalem Quartet guy. Quin's is his first novel. It's the only one I have the right to nom because I haven't read the Quartet yet.

especially The Iron Dragon's Daughter
...
R.A. Lafferty - Nine Hundred Grandmothers (story collection)

I worry there's going to be a lot of Delany vote-splitting, but I'm glad to see the Neveryon books nominated anyway. Almost did it myself.

Never mind vote splitting. I predict there will be way more nominees than voters so the results will be mostly ones and zeroes, like many Film Snob and Jazz D-bag polls.

Neveryon was honestly my 1st Delany choice, so.

Re: Lafferty, last time I checked there was a print-on-demand edition of Nine Hundred Grandmothers... oh shit, I guess not! I see the cheapest available edition on Amazon is a used paperback for 60 bucks! Damn. I guess the print on demand folks lost the rights...

Here's a couple more noms:

William Gibson - Count Zero
Clive Barker - Cabal
Susan Cooper - Seaward

I think I still have 5 left.

Crud, what's the cutoff on this? I keep meaning to do some nominations but I've been looking at the thread when I'm away from my bookshelf.

When are nominations due by? Do I have time for some re-reading first?

i'm going to give the nominations at least a couple of weeks, depending on how much interest we can get

there are a bunch of fantasy thread regs that havent shown up yet that i really hope participate

― cowboys_defeats_magic_earth2.jpg (Lamp), Sunday, 6 February 2011 22:05 (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

will be posting mine tonight.

Had stopped reading this kind of stuff for thirty years, until the sluglords started podcasting. Yet another reason to say Damn you, Tracer Hand!

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon Deep
Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky

Adam Roberts - On

That reminds me!

DOOMSDAY BOOK, Connie Willis

Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky

was surprised at how much I liked this one when a coworker leant it to me last year. nothing flashy or particularly unique, just good solid hard sci-fi/space opera sorta stuff

Someone should nominated some Pratchett really (going on fifteen year-old memories, this)

Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
Terry Pratchett - Mort

/Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky/

was surprised at how much I liked this one when a coworker leant it to me last year. nothing flashy or particularly unique, just good solid hard sci-fi/space opera sorta stuff

It's my favorite of the two, and probably in my top five books ever. But I don't read much so my sample size is small.

Laurel someone already nommed Doomsday Book. (And well they should, it's awesome)

Oh good, I must have scanned right by it.

fifteen year-old memories

Somewhat burning a candle here for some YA SF (Robert Swindells, Nicholas Fisk, William Sleator) but I haven't read them since I was 14 so I have no idea how it stands up. This seems like a fun research project, except I got them all out of the library and don't have my own copies.

Yr Pratchett picks were my two favourites of his at that age, too.

(Maybe someone will come by and be mad at the mere thought of ranking YA SF alongside the overall giants of the genre, but the fantasy picks already include earlier childhood favourites of mine, e.g. Susan Cooper)

so... the ligotti book is extortionate on amazon huh

Never fear, just get the collection The Nightmare Factory. It has most of Songs Of A Dead Dreamer in it, most of Grimscribe, and some later stuff too. V convenient Ligotti one-stop.

ahhh... thanks!

Now, the Nine Hundred Grandmothers situation is really fkin serious. I spent two hours online last night trying to find one and the cheapest anywhere was $37.50 for a beat up paperback. I know what happened now-- Neil Gaiman named named it as one of his all time top 10 and so ppl scarfed up all the used copies and drove up the damn price. Something called Wildside Press was doing print-on-demand of it in the early 00's but no more.

The copy I read back in the day was from the library...

David Brin - The Uplift Storm Trilogy

Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden
Brian Aldiss - Heliconia

Think I've got two more noms.

bit of a grab-bag as lots of my faves are here already (not that these aren't also)

TH White - The Once and Future King
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
TH White - The Once and Future King
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
Poul Anderson - Tau Zero
William Hope-Hodgson - The House on the Borderland
JG Ballard - Track 12
John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos
Bruce Sterling (ed) - Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology
Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman (eds) - In Dreams
Brian Aldiss (ed) - The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus

The Once and Future And Once And Future King.

Good call on TH White.

OK, I think I have 3 left because of dupes, so...

John M Ford - The Dragon Waiting
H G Wells - The Island of Dr Moreau
Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (a novella)

The Bible

Erik Frank Russell - Wasp
Gygax & Arneson - 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide
Greg Stolze - Unknown Armies
While we're vote-splitting:
Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies
Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas

Oh wait!

Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

Just gonna declare my intention to vote in this poll (after meaning to so many times) for the first time ever on ilx. Hopefully other apathetic semi-lurkers will follow my lead

George Saunders - "Jon"

Singles short stories? i dunno...

Tad Williams - Outland
CJ Cherryh - Cyteen
Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
Jim Butcher - The Harry Dresden Files
Anne McCaffrey - The Harper Hall Trilogy
Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age
Iain M Banks - Player of Games
Max Berry - Jennifer Government
Alexander Key - Escape To/Return From Witch Mountain
Willo Davis Roberts - The Girl With The Silver Eyes
Piers Anthony - Apprentice Adept

that leaves me with 2 nominations for later

Kim Stanley Robinson - years of rice and salt

glad gravel nominated Noon, I was kinda torn about including him

also lol Dan my wife will be glad someone finally nominated some Anne McCaffrey

i read all those dragon riders of pern books in junior high. i remember there was even a MOO inspired by the series

That was a very SPECIFIC nomination; I also devoured the Pern books in junior high but there are massive diminishing returns past the first two in the original trilogy; I felt the Harper trilogy was the only storyline in that universe that didn't devolve into something cloying and horrible. (Don't get me started on the prequel books; McCaffrey totally beat Lucas to the punch re: stomping all over the legacy that made people appreciative.)

(I also waffled between choosing Anthony's Apprentice Adept and Incarnations of Immortality series until I remembered that And Eternity is essentially unreadable; the previous six sit strongly enough in my nostalgia center that I still might nominate it. Xanth can go fuck a hat, especially once he started crowdsourcing the puns.)

Dan I had no idea Witch Mountain started out as novels. Explain me them.

I just did some research* and apparently Return is an adaptation of the film, so my nomination should just be Escape to Witch Mountain.

The book is basically like the movie, so if you liked the latter you probably would have REALLY liked the former.

* lol Wikipedia

I also devoured the Pern books in junior high but there are massive diminishing returns past the first two in the original trilogy;

aw man The White Dragon is a fun read

d@n small gods & players of games have already been nom'd. my bf is nominating the harry potter books

updated list:

Alan Garner - The Owl Service
Alan Garner - The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon
Alastair Reynolds - House of Suns
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space trilogy
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Alexander Key - Escape To Witch Mountain
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Alfred Bester - "Fondly Fahrenheit"
Alfred Bester - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed"
Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red
Anne McCaffrey - The Harper Hall Trilogy
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End
Arthur C. Clarke - The City & The Stars
Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
Arthur Machen - "The White People"
Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan

Barrington J Bayley - The Rod Of Light
Barry Malzberg - Beyond Apollo
Bob Shaw - Who Goes Here?
Bram Stoker – Dracula
Brian Aldiss - Heliconia
Brian Aldiss – Hothouse
Brian Aldiss (ed) - The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973)
Bruce Sterling - Islands In The Net
Bruce Sterling (ed) - Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1988)

Charles Finney - The Circus Of Dr. Lao
Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Herland
China Miéville – Perdido Street Station
China Miéville- The City & The City
China Miéville – The Scar
Christopher Priest - The Affirmation
Christopher Priest - Inverted World
CJ Cherryh - Cyteen
Clive Barker - Cabal
Clive Barker – Imajica
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
Cordwainer Smith – Norstrilia
Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (a novella)
C.L. Moore - "The Vintage Season"
C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
C.S. Lewis – Out of the Silent Planet trilogy

Damon Knight - The Man in the Tree
Dan Simmons – Hyperion
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
David Brin - The Uplift Storm trilogy
David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus
David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Mitchell - Ghostwritten
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Diana Wynne Jones - Archer's Goon
Diana Wynne Jones - The Dalemark Quartet
Doris Lessing - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
Doris Lessing - The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)

Edward Bellamy – Looking Backward
Edward Whittemore - Quin's Shanghai Circus
Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Emmanuel Carrere - The Moustache
Erik Frank Russell – Wasp

Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Frank Herbert - Dune
Frank Herbert - The Jesus Incident
Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories (Schocken; 1971)
Frederick Pohl - Jem
Frederick Pohl - Gateway
Fritz Lieber - "A Pail of Air"
Fritz Lieber - Conjure Wife

Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe – Book of the Long Sun
Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
George R R Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire
Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden
George Orwell – 1984
Glen Cook - The Black Company
Greg Egan – Axiomatic
Greg Stolze - Unknown Armies
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Fionavar Tapestry
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Sarantine Mosaic
Gygax & Arneson - 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide

Hal Clement - A Mission of Gravity
Harlan Ellison - "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

H. G. Wells - The Island of Dr Moreau
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells - The Time Machine
H.P. Lovecraft - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
H.P. Lovecraft - "The Call of Cthulhu"
H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
H.P. Lovecraft – “The Whisperer in Darkness”

Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas
Iain M Banks - Excession
Iain M. Banks - Look to Windward
Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
Isaac Asimov – Foundation
Isaac Asimov - "The Last Question"
Isaac Asimov – I, Robot

Jack Vance - Big Planet
Jack Vance - The Demon Princes
Jack Vance - The Lyonesse Trilogy
Jack Vance - "The Moon Moth"
Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
James P. Blaylock - The Last Coin
James Tiptree - "The Girl Who Plugged In"
James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World
J.G. Ballard - High Rise
J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)
J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World
J.G. Ballard – Track 12
Jim Butcher - The Harry Dresden Files
J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter septet
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up
John Christopher - The Tripod trilogy
John Christopher - The Death of Grass/No Blade of Grass
John Crowley – Aegypt
John Crowley - Engine Summer
John Crowley - Little, Big
John Crowley – “The Great Work of Time”
John M. Ford - The Dragon Waiting
John Sladek - The Reproductive System
John Varley - "The Persistence of Vision"
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos
Jonathan Lethem - Girl in Landscape
Jonathan Lethem - Gun, With Occasional music
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges - The Aleph
J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Jules Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days
Julian May - Pliocene Exile

Kim Stanely Robinson - The Mars trilogy
Kim Stanley Robinson - Three Californias trilogy
Kim Stanley Robinson - years of rice and salt
Kingsley Amis – The Alteration
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
K.W. Jeter - Dr. Adder
K.W. Jeter - The Glass Hammer
Koushun Takami - Battle Royale

Larry Niven & Stephen Barnes - Dream Park
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
Larry Niven – Ringworld
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland's Daughter

M. John Harrison - The Centauri Device
M. John Harrison – Viriconium
Madeleine l'Engle - A Wrinkle In Time
Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
Margret Atwood - Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Weis& Tracy Hickman - The Dragonlance Chronicles
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
Marueen McHugh – China Mountain Zhang
Max Berry - Jennifer Government
Melissa Scott – Trouble and Her Friends
Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
Michael Bishop - Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas
Michael Ende - The Neverending Story
Michael Moorcock - Cornelius Chronicles
Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
Michael Moorcock - Elric
Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Michelle West - The Sun Sword
M.R. James – The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (1931)

Neal Stephenson – Anathem
Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle
Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Neil Gaiman – American Gods
Neil Gaiman - Coraline
Nevil Shute - On the Beach
Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron

Octavia Butler - Kindred
Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
Olaf Stapledon – Sirius
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game (first book only!)

Patricia A. McKillip – Fool’s Run
Patricia A. McKillip – Forgotten Beasts of Eld
Patricia A. McKillip - The Riddle-Master trilogy
Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman (eds) - In Dreams (1986)
Peter Straub - Ghost Story
Peter Watts - Blindsight
Philip Jose Farmer – Riverworld
Philip Jose Farmer - "Mother"
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick - Clans of the...
Philip K. Dick - Collected Stories Vol. 4 (pub Citadel 1954-1964)
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Philip K. Dick - Galactic pot-healer
Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip
Philip K Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K. Dick – Ubik
Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
Phillip Reeve - The Mortal Engines Quartet
Piers Anthony - Apprentice Adept
Pohl & Kornbluth - The Space Merchants
Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

R.A. Lafferty - Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury - Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury - The October Country
Richard Adams – Shardik
Richard Adams - Watership Down
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
R. L. Stevenson – Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde
R. L. Stevenson – Fables (1896)
Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow
Robert Jordan – The Wheel of Time
Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside
Robert Sheckley - Options
Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow
Robin Hobb - The Farseer Trilogy
Roger Zelazny - The Amber Series
Rudy Rucker - Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker

Samuel Butler – Erewhon
Samuel R. Delany - "Aye, and Gomorrah..."
Samuel R. Delany – Babel-17
Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany - Neveryon
Samuel R. Delany – Nova
Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection
Sean Russell - Moontide & Magic Rise
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future
Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
Stanley Elkin - The Living End
Stephen Donaldson - The Chronicles of Thomas Convenant
Stephen King - The Stand
Steven Erikson – Malazan Book of the Fallen
Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic
Susan Cooper - Dark Is Rising
Susan Cooper - Seaward

Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow & Thorn
Tad Williams - Outland
Ted Chiang - Stores of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang - The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies
Terry Pratchett - Mort
Terry Pratchett - The Tiffany Aching trilogy
Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
Thomas Disch – 334
Thomas Disch – Camp Concentration
Thomas Disch - "Descending"
Thomas Disch- On Wings of Song
Thomas Ligotti - Songs of A Dead Dreamer
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49
T.H. White - The Once and Future King
Tom Godwin - "The Cold Equations"
Tove Jansson – Tales From Moominvalley
Tove Jansson - Moominvalley in November
Tove Jansson - Moominland Midwinter

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin - Earthsea Trilogy
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin -- The Compass Rose

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon Deep
Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky
Victor Pelevin – Oman Ra

Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
William S. Burroughs - The Red Night Trilogy
William Gibson - Count Zero
William Gibson – Neuromancer
William Gibson – Burning Chrome
William Goldman - The Princess Bride
William Hope-Hodgson - The House on the Borderland
William Morris – News from Nowhere
William Pene du Boise - The Twenty-one Balloons
Willo Davis Roberts - The Girl With The Silver Eyes
Wyndham Lewis - The Human Age trilogy

Yevgeny Zamaytin - We

was any kind of consensus reached on the VALIS trilogy? according to wikipedia dick 'himself called the three novels a trilogy, saying "the three do form a trilogy constellating around a basic theme."' but ive never read them or know much about them...

I'd be cool with VALIS trilogy as one item.

lol @ no one nominating Jacqueline Carey

Valis should be individual books.

i vote individual books too fwiw

Missed out

Adam Roberts - On

I never thought of the Valis-related books as one work myself, so they should be separate nominations I'd say.

Lamp did u decide to disallow the REH Conan stories as a single cycle?

just noticed diana wynne jones - archer's goon - high five, tpp! real trippy stuff for a kid, politics and fallible gods and time travel, iirc. one of those things where i'm in two minds about getting hold of it and reading it again, or keeping the memory pristine.

I read a cool thing by DWJ when I was a kid about feuding wizards in renaissance Italy, can't remember what it was called.

the Valis books don't share characters - I guess you could say they take place in the same "world" but well, what constitutes "the world" is kind of a central theme of the books so... um yeah.

It's been years since I read The Tranmigration of Timothy Archer, but IIRC it doesn't even have any sci-fi elements in it.

child coming back from the dead and possessing a living person = kinda sci-fi

I mean I guess that's more "supernatural" or whatever but this is a speculative fiction poll and ghosts/poltergeists/posession/reincarnation is pretty speculative imho

I think we've established that supernatural horror is in.

I almost nommed Straub's KOKO, but then I couldn't remember if anything indisputably supernatural even happens in it. And then I also remembered it's part of a trilogy, and both sequels kind of fail.

John Brunner - The Shockwave Rider
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Jose Saramago - Blindness
Don DeLillo - White Noise
Charles Stross - Accelerando

I LOVED the first 2/3rds of Shockwave Rider a lot but it seemed like he ran out of steam at the end as the multiple personalities conceit kinda fell away

I haven't read it in years, just felt it was worthy.

I still want to read Stand on Zanzibar, but haven't yet so I won't nom.

John Brunner - The Shockwave Rider
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Jose Saramago - Blindness
Don DeLillo - White Noise
Charles Stross - Accelerando

I was considering voting for Blindness, which is in my top 10 best books of all time, but I wasn't sure if it's speculative enough; the only speculative thing in it is the epidemic that makes people go blind. OTOH it does have a strong post-apocalyptic vibe, so I guess it may count here.

"I was considering nominating Blindness"

It definitely counts -- speculative, fantastic, post-apocalyptic. Put it in!

I've only read White Noise from that list, and I really don't see how it would fit in this poll at all.

was thinking of nomming White Noise but i thought lamp'd reject it a la third policeman

Can you explain how it fits though? Like I said, I just don't see it.

great great list. can only think of two things to add, first one pretty crucial, second one more like good fun

George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
Bernard Wolfe - Limbo

http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Limbo.htm

Limbo's pretty great actually, and way way early for what it is. & actually, two more:

David R. Bunch - Moderan
Monique Wittig - Les Guérillères

Figure White Noise might look eligible primarily because of exploration of invented technology, secondarily use of paranoia/apocalypse tropes common in the genre. Really marginal, tho', even in the accommodating definitions that lamp's (rightly imo) using.

wait, wittig writes fiction???

Based on what's already been nominated I'd like to add these nominations:

Diana Wynne Jones - Chrestomanci series
Frederik Pohl - Man Plus
John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar
Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light Trilogy
Ken MacLeod - Fall Revolution Series
Charles Stross - Halting State
Charles Stross - Laundry Series
Robert Charles Wilson - Spin
Terry Pratchett - Night Watch (or the Guards series if people prefer)
William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
Roger Zelazny - Lord Of Light
Stephen King - IT
Ken Grimwood - Replay

Stephen King - The Dark Tower

That's a nomination for the whole series, not just the last book.

Clive Barker - Books of Blood
George R R Martin - Wild Cards

I still have 2 left, right?

I don't think White Noise fits in this poll.

Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Roald Dahl - Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl - James & The Giant Peach

oh snap how did we go this long with no Roald Dahl

Robert C O'Brien - Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

^^^YES!!!

I don't think White Noise fits in this poll.

agree, more or less. tho' I've only read 7/8 of it. If a spaceship turns up at the end and uploads Jack into a space entity hivemind to fight a future robot hitler then I wld reconsider.

^^^!!! xp!!!

another one on the 'reread or keep the memory?' pile.

Feel free to chuck out White Noise, the whole fictional drug angle toward the end kind of pushes it in the speculative fiction direction for me, but as a whole it's probably not really there.

(The wife has been taking a drug that is supposed to treat a fear of death.)

lol every other book/series that easily comes to mind has already been nominated

Yeah, by the time I got around to nominating, I think 2/3 of my bookshelf was already on the list

I'm on the verge of nominating Terry Goodkind just so I won't have lost a nomination!

(Hey, at least I didn't say Feist or Eddings)

he first Feist trilogy (Riftwar?) is better than Eddings.

even though i haven't read them all i nominate the Oz series. 14 books. i think.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Tik_tok_cover.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Ozbook10cover.jpeg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Ozbook03cover.jpg

That first cover illustration is wicked.

Edgar Allan Poe - Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Charles Robert Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer

A few more from me:

George MacDonald - Lilith
Rudyard Kipling - The Mark of the Beast And Other Fantastical Tales
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle - The Blazing World
Max Beerbohm - 'Enoch Soames'

Diana Wynne Jones - The Dalemark Quartet (Cart And Cwidder, Drowned Ammet, The Spellcoats, Crown Of Dalemark)

never heard of these! is it a brit thing that i wouldn't understand?

she's british but not 'british'

no cave bear love, huh? thought those things were beloved.

i will look the jones books up on the internet.

cave bear is sceince fact

and sexy

how many graphic novels have been nominated? or do they not count?

cave bears still "speculative" though. to say the least.

i wrote some stuff to nominate on my hand but then i washed my hands

think White Noise and Blindness would both be out of place in this poll (altho the latter is one of my favorite books from the 90s)

xp

xxxp

yeh j/k, never actually read one, but recently had to edit an article about how Auel is now a top expert on lots of stone age stuff. They sound a hoot, sex + spec anth.

has anyone ever written a book about graphomania and sci fi writer? was looking up a title and came upon robert silverberg's biblio. holy toledo! 77 non-fiction title!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Silverberg

another vote for white noise not fitting the poll. also, i don't think Pattern Recognition is really speculative fiction either, or at least not substantially so. (i was thinking about nomming it myself but i don't really feel like it qualifies)

oh and i wanna nominate this:

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm

can't believe ned didn't nominate his favorite book. he's based his whole life on it!

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n0/n4526.jpg

can someone nominate some andre norton books so i know which ones to buy. she wrote about 400 novels, i think.

i wrote some stuff to nominate on my hand but then i washed my hands

lol was kinda hoping you or darragh or somebody would nominate some more contemp fantasy stuff but tbh i don't think it really matters - not sure how many ppl would vote for abercrombie or sanderson or morgan itp

i'm going to break the VALIS trilogy up for consistency. if it makes a material difference in the poll results ill figure out something fair.

w/r/t to the conan stories - there are seven gnome press collections - is there a particular one that you want to nominate? otherwise ill just list the gollancz collection: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Chronicles_of_Conan

Agree on Pattern Recognition - is there anything spec in it? Can see it has a genre claim because of the author & sensibility, but think it's an over-the-line edge case.

It borders on sci-fi with the brand reaction and the spy/technology stuff; I considered nominating it.

I still might nominate Sanderson's Mistborn series or Elantris.

Also considering C. S. Friedman.

Lamp, the Gollancz Conan is fine. I myself own the 2-volume Millenium one with all the typos.

Scott u should read Diana Wynne Jones you'd love here! She's pure YA gold.

Also yeah Andre Norton is an impenetrable edifice to me as well.

at the used book store around the corner from my store they have, like, at least 100 norton paperbacks. i should just buy 5 at random.

From what I remember of what I read of Norton as a youth, that is exactly what you should do. I remember enjoying them all but none of them particularly stand out in my memory. Maybe Star Ka'at.

Is she, like, science-fantasy? Straight up fantasy?

Depends on the book; she's done straight SF, straight fantasy, and pretty much everything in between.

ayo lamp i may as well nominate:

robert v.s. redick, the chathrand voyage

oh and also:

joanna russ, the female man
samuel delany, stars in my pockets like grains of sand

of all the recent stuff i've been reading recently (um) the redick and the black company are the only ones that strike me as potentially all time yoga flame etc. the morgan maybe if there was another book to judge on.

also also: can the doris lessing books go in as one series? i think they're at least as much so as the narnia books, f'r'example.

How are Anne McCaffrey's dragon novels thought of around here? I can't in good conscience nominate the entire series, which is by this point loaded with dismissable garbage, but I'll nominate:

Anne McCaffrey, Dragonflight and Dragonquest

Those first two were very good examples of world-building, and had just enough tempting hints of hard sci-fi to mitigate the fantasy aspects.

Those two and the Harper Hall trilogy are great but then the whole series falls apart, ESPECIALLY when she starts expanding on those tempting hints of hard sci-fi and totally ruins everything about the series that made it enjoyable.

Yeah, you can throw out my questionable two.

Now I just have to figure out wtf to nominate

On the fantasy thread a lot of ppl have repped for the Locke Lamora guy, but I haven't seen him mentioned here. Too soon? (I still haven't read him myself).

I read Pattern Recognition as an alternate reality piece. While it's seemingly contemporary, the tech doesn't fit, the internet works differently to the real internet and the political landscape is different to the real world. It's a while since I last read it but at the time I felt it was full of clues that this was a different version of now.
I haven't read the subsequent books in the series so maybe there's stuff in those that clarify things one way or another.
Anyway if tbe consensus is that it doesn't belong it the poll then I'm happy to go with that.

A few offhand:

Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
Gustav Meyrink - The Golem
E.T.A. Hoffman - The Devil's Elixir (Die Elixiere des Teufels)
E.T.A. Hoffman - The Golden Pot (Der goldne Topf)
Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth

man I love Calvino but I dunno...

well, it is fantastical

but if you guys are talking strictly straight genre stuff, then I could see the case for its exclusion

someone already did star maker, didn't they?

yep - oops

Zamyatin as well.

I must not have been checking against the latest list of noms

Cosmicomics should be elig if Kafka is. I mean it and tZero were definitely science fiction.

2nded, we've got Borges and Kafka, no good reason to keep out Calvino.

(tho' I reckon I'll mostly vote by narrower genre defs, more interested in the list that would produce)

so..

Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
Gustav Meyrink - The Golem
E.T.A. Hoffman - The Devil's Elixir (Die Elixiere des Teufels)
E.T.A. Hoffman - The Golden Pot (Der goldne Topf)
Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth
+
Roald Dahl - Charlie & the Great Glass Elevator

? - is A Wrinkle in Time supposed to rep for the whole l'engle Time Quartet, 'Lord of the Rings' style?

no, i remember A Wind In the Door being really good but I'm hazy on 3 & 4. if you'll rep for them, I'd be happy to replace my nom with the quartet.

yeah, that is probably best. so as not to split votes and all..

I was going to say, if you're going to allow Murakami and axe Calvino I don't know wtf is going on.

this is all cuz max was such a baby about the third policeman

wait, wittig writes fiction???

― plax (ico), Thursday, February 10, 2011 10:37 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

she started in fiction in the 60's, then moved to criticism. Les Guérillères definitely fits: the core theme is militarized gender war taking place in the future, told with second person / first person shifts from the Amazon point of view. immersive descriptions of the alternative culture / technologies invented by the women. plus, alien pets.

will read

i mean, the straight mind, man

you know what i never knew until recently. that leslie fiedler wrote sci-fi and wrote some books on sci-fi. i only know his earlier lit crit stuff.

I wonder how his efforts stack up against Harold Bloom's?

steve erickson, "tours of the black clock"
cyrano de bergerac, "a voyage to the moon"
xavier de maistre, "voyage around my room"
arkady & boris strugatsky, "roadside picnic"
john barth, "chimera"

roadside picnic already picked. i remember cuz i'd never heard of it.

someone should nominate Karel Capek for nerd value.

for newt value.

Alfred Jarry - The Supermale

Fuck yeah. If i had any nomes left i'd put in Capek's 'War with the Newts'. Can't believe I forgot it.

nomes, noms, gnomes, argh

Karel Capek - War With The Newts

this is all cuz max was such a baby about the third policeman

― just woke up (lukas), Thursday, February 10, 2011 2:30 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

YOURE THE BABY YOU BABY

calvino should count

so should pattern recognition and white noise btw

i dont know why you guys care so much none of these books will win

baby out

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/513HOPpJ3IL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

i clicked on that and yet i seem unable to 'look inside'

Ismael, you are a star

More noms:

Johanna Sinisalo - Not Before Sundown
David Eddings - The Belgariad
Nancy A. Collins - Sunglasses After Dark

I still have 2 noms left.

i clicked on that and yet i seem unable to 'look inside'

The McCaffrey Dragon series was like my Twilight, when I was 12-15 or so, only it never got made into a movie and I didn't know anyone else who liked them and also there was no internet to tell me anything about anything. Wanted to live in those books SO BAD.

My nominations:

Neal Asher - The Skinner
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Edgar Rice Burroughs - A Princess of Mars
John Christopher - The Sword of the Spirits Trilogy
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens
Harry Harrison - The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat
Herman Hesse - Magister Ludi
Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
Ellen Kushner- Swordpoint
Fritz Leiber - Lean Times in Lankhmar
China Mieville - Iron Council
John Steakley - Armor
Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix Plus

ooh thanks for that Bruce Sterling, one of my faves

It's my favorite of his too.

I kind of hated Master and Margarita

Haven't read it myself, but you're the first person I've ever heard slating it

Master and Margarita is one of my desert island books. I'd guess I've read it close to ten times.

Master and Margarita is crazy and creepy and awesome, it didn't occur to me to nominate it though.

I was kind of waiting for someone to nominate it tbh - more or less as soon as noms for Murakami and DeLillo and Pynchon and Calvino showed up. It's a well-written book, there's a bunch of funny stuff in it, but it seems massively overrated to me.

I agree with the "it's ok" sentiment re Master and Margarita. This is my favourite book of all time though:

Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds

(compared to The Third Policeman, this one is uncontrovertibly on-topic: central characters include fairies and a king who turns into a bird)

Though I've no idea whether this one will get in:

Vasya - Mahābhārata

Most of the tru genre books I'd vote for have already been nominated...

Nobody has nominated Battlefield Earth yet? Hmm...

thanks for reminding me

Jim Theis - The Eye of Argon

haha i've read battlefield earth (although i'm not sure why, exactly)

in a hammock, during a junior high (of course) summer. something about the wood pieces in the hammock attracted wasps and i was stung nastily when i threw my arm over my head.

I used to read a ton of fantasy/sci-fi but I'm realising now that it was pretty much all junk (Death Gate Cycle anyone?).

xp - I've read Battlefield Earth too!

Herman Hesse - Magister Ludi aka the glass bead game fyi fwiw iirc

allowing that most of what i'd really list is here already-

The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton. call this a nostalgic nom
Prince of Nothing trilogy - R Scott Bakker - the best recent work not already nommed imo

Robin Hobb - The Farseer Trilogy

could add the follow-on Golden Fool trilogy too I guess.

okay will post updated list when im @ home

NOMINATIONS close on friday. i wont be around much this week but i should have a voting thread up on monday. how long do ppl ususally need to 'think about' their ballots?

If I'm going to read everything on the list, um about 3 years. Realistically, a week or two?

I would say let's give a couple weeks for discussion. but yeah it's not like I expect to have time to read everything that's been nominated

Two or three weeks just to make sure all potential voters see thread. Ballots trickle in very slowly though - the important thing is to keep the voting thread alive imo, to motivate/harangue/guilt-trip the electorate as appropriate

Ecstatic because an eagle eyed buddy spotted a Powell's copy of the abovementioned Lafferty collection for $5. Could not tell which paperback edition it is, but I hope it's this one which I read from the library ye long years ago:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34782241@N00/73139505/

Well that image didn't work. This here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34782241@N00/73139505/

I'm going to squander my last nom on some epic and highly entertaining nonsense:

Peter F Hamilton - The Night's Dawn trilogy

H.P. Lovecraft - "The Colour out of Space"

you can't leave that one out!

Okay, here's my final two nominations:

Astrid Lindgren - Ronia, the Robber's Daughter
Michael Ende - Momo

i've got a couple left, here's one:

fred hoyle - the black cloud

Did we agree that Pattern Recognition wasn't getting in? If that's the case, I still have a nomination left.

I think any Gibson should definitely be allowed.

updated noms list:

Adam Roberts - On
Alan Garner - The Owl Service
Alan Garner - The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen
Alasdair Gray - Lanark
Algis Budrys - Rogue Moon
Alastair Reynolds - House of Suns
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space trilogy
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Alexander Key - Escape To Witch Mountain
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
Alfred Bester - "Fondly Fahrenheit"
Alfred Bester - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed"
Anne Carson – Autobiography of Red
Anne McCaffrey- Dragonflight
Anne McCaffrey - Dragonquest
Anne McCaffrey - The Harper Hall Trilogy
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End
Arthur C. Clarke - The City & The Stars
Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
Arthur Machen - "The White People"
Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan
Astrid Lindgren - Ronia, the Robber's Daughter

Barrington J Bayley - The Rod Of Light
Barry Malzberg - Beyond Apollo
Bernard Wolfe - Limbo
Bob Shaw - Who Goes Here?
Bram Stoker – Dracula
Brian Aldiss - Heliconia
Brian Aldiss – Hothouse
Brian Aldiss (ed) - The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973)
Bruce Sterling - Islands In The Net
Bruce Sterling (ed) - Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1988)
Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix Plus

Charles Finney - The Circus Of Dr. Lao
Charles Robert Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer
Charles Stross - Accelerando
Charles Stross - Halting State
Charles Stross - Laundry Series
Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Herland
China Miéville - Iron Council
China Miéville – Perdido Street Station
China Miéville- The City & The City
China Miéville – The Scar
Christopher Priest - The Affirmation
Christopher Priest - Inverted World
CJ Cherryh – Cyteen
Clive Barker - Books of Blood
Clive Barker - Cabal
Clive Barker – Imajica
Connie Willis - Doomsday Book
Cordwainer Smith – Norstrilia
Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Cory Doctorow - When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (a novella)
C.L. Moore - "The Vintage Season"
C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
C.S. Lewis – Out of the Silent Planet trilogy

Damon Knight - The Man in the Tree
Dan Simmons – Hyperion
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
David Brin - The Uplift Storm trilogy
David Eddings - The Belgariad
David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus
David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress
David Mitchell - Ghostwritten
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
David R. Bunch - Moderan
Diana Wynne Jones - Archer's Goon
Diana Wynne Jones - Chrestomanci (series)
Diana Wynne Jones - The Dalemark Quartet
Doris Lessing - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
Doris Lessing - The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)

Edgar Allan Poe - Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1908)
Edgar Rice Burroughs - A Princess of Mars
Edward Bellamy – Looking Backward
Edward Whittemore - Quin's Shanghai Circus
Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Ellen Kushner- Swordpoint
Emmanuel Carrere - The Moustache
Enid Blyton – The Magic Faraway Tree
Erik Frank Russell – Wasp
E.T.A. Hoffman - The Devil's Elixir (Die Elixiere des Teufels)
E.T.A. Hoffman - The Golden Pot (Der goldne Topf)

Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Frank Herbert - Dune
Frank Herbert - The Jesus Incident
Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories (Schocken; 1971)
Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud
Frederick Pohl - Jem
Frederick Pohl – Gateway
Frederik Pohl - Man Plus
Fritz Lieber - "A Pail of Air"
Fritz Lieber - Conjure Wife
Fritz Leiber - Lean Times in Lankhmar

Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe – Book of the Long Sun
Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Geoff Ryman - The Child Garden
George MacDonald - Lilith
George R R Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire
George R R Martin - Wild Cards
George Orwell – 1984
George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
Glen Cook - The Black Company
Greg Egan – Axiomatic
Greg Stolze - Unknown Armies
Gustav Meyrink - The Golem
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Fionavar Tapestry
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Last Light of the Sun
Guy Gavriel Kay - The Sarantine Mosaic
Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
Gygax & Arneson - 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide

Hal Clement - A Mission of Gravity
Harlan Ellison - "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"
Harry Harrison - The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat
Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Herman Hesse - Magister Ludi
H. G. Wells - The Island of Dr Moreau
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells - The Time Machine
H.P. Lovecraft - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin; 1999)
H.P. Lovecraft - "The Colour out of Space"
H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
H.P. Lovecraft – “The Whisperer in Darkness”

Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas
Iain M Banks - Excession
Iain M. Banks - Look to Windward
Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
Isaac Asimov – Foundation
Isaac Asimov - "The Last Question"
Isaac Asimov – I, Robot
Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

Jack Vance - Big Planet
Jack Vance - The Demon Princes
Jack Vance - The Lyonesse Trilogy
Jack Vance - "The Moon Moth"
Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
James P. Blaylock - The Last Coin
James Tiptree - "The Girl Who Plugged In"
James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World
J.G. Ballard - High Rise
J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)
J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World
J.G. Ballard – Track 12
Jim Butcher - The Harry Dresden Files
Jim Theis - The Eye of Argon
J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter septet
Joanna Russ - The Female Man
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
Johanna Sinisalo - Not Before Sundownz
John Barth – Chimera
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up
John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar
John Brunner - The Shockwave Rider
John Christopher - The Tripod trilogy
John Christopher - The Death of Grass/No Blade of Grass
John Christopher - The Sword of the Spirits Trilogy
John Crowley – Aegypt
John Crowley - Engine Summer
John Crowley - Little, Big
John Crowley – “The Great Work of Time”
John M. Ford - The Dragon Waiting
John Sladek - The Reproductive System
John Steakley - Armor
John Varley - "The Persistence of Vision"
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
John Wyndham - The Midwich Cuckoos
Jonathan Lethem - Girl in Landscape
Jonathan Lethem - Gun, With Occasional music
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges - The Aleph
Jose Saramago - Blindness
J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Jules Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days
Julian May - Pliocene Exile

Kate Wilhelm – Where the Late Bird Sang
Ken Grimwood – Replay
Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light Trilogy
Ken MacLeod - Fall Revolution (series)
Kim Stanely Robinson - The Mars trilogy
Kim Stanley Robinson - Three Californias trilogy
Kim Stanley Robinson - years of rice and salt
Kingsley Amis – The Alteration
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
K.W. Jeter - Dr. Adder
K.W. Jeter - The Glass Hammer
Koushun Takami - Battle Royale

Larry Niven & Stephen Barnes - Dream Park
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
Larry Niven – Ringworld
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
Lord Dunsany - The King of Elfland's Daughter

M. John Harrison - The Centauri Device
M. John Harrison – Viriconium
Madeleine l'Engle - A Wrinkle In Time
Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
Margret Atwood - Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle - The Blazing World
Margaret Weiss & Tracy Hickman - The Dragonlance Chronicles
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
Marueen McHugh – China Mountain Zhang
Max Beerbohm - 'Enoch Soames'
Max Berry - Jennifer Government
Melissa Scott – Trouble and Her Friends
Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
Michael Bishop - Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas
Michael Ende - Momo
Michael Ende - The Neverending Story
Michael Moorcock - Cornelius Chronicles
Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
Michael Moorcock - Elric
Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Michelle West - The Sun Sword
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Monique Wittig - Les Guérillères
M.R. James – The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (1931
Nancy A. Collins - Sunglasses After Dark
Neal Asher - The Skinner
Neal Stephenson – Anathem
Neal Stephenson - The Baroque Cycle
Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age
Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
Neil Gaiman – American Gods
Neil Gaiman – Coraline
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens
Nevil Shute - On the Beach
Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron
Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth

Octavia Butler - Kindred
Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
Olaf Stapledon – Sirius
Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game (first book only!)
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Patricia A. McKillip – Fool’s Run
Patricia A. McKillip – Forgotten Beasts of Eld
Patricia A. McKillip - The Riddle-Master trilogy
Paul J. McAuley and Kim Newman (eds) - In Dreams (1986)
Peter F. Hamilton - The Night's Dawn trilogy
Peter Straub - Ghost Story
Peter Watts - Blindsight
Philip Jose Farmer – Riverworld
Philip Jose Farmer - "Mother"
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick - Clans of the...
Philip K. Dick - Collected Stories Vol. 4 (pub Citadel 1954-1964)
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Philip K. Dick - Galactic pot-healer
Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip
Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K. Dick – Ubik
Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
Phillip Reeve - The Mortal Engines Quartet
Piers Anthony - Apprentice Adept
Pohl & Kornbluth - The Space Merchants
Poul Anderson - Tau Zero

R. Scott Bakker – The Prince of Nothing trilogy
R.A. Lafferty - Nine Hundred Grandmothers
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury - Illustrated Man
Ray Bradbury - The October Country
Richard Adams – Shardik
Richard Adams - Watership Down
Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
R. L. Stevenson – Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde
R. L. Stevenson – Fables (1896)
Roald Dahl - Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
Roald Dahl - Charlie & the Great Glass Elevator
Roald Dahl - James & The Giant Peach
Robert C. O'Brien - Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths
Robert Charles Wilson - Spin
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Robert Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow
Robert E. Howard - The Complete Chronicles of Conan (2006)
Robert Jordan – The Wheel of Time
Robert V.S. Redick, - The Chathrand Voyage
Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside
Robert Sheckley - Options
Robert W. Chambers - The King in Yellow
Robin Hobb - The Farseer trilogy
Roger Zelazny - The Amber Series
Roger Zelazny - Lord Of Light
Rudy Rucker - Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware
Rudyard Kipling - The Mark of the Beast And Other Fantastical Tales
Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker

Samuel Butler – Erewhon
Samuel R. Delany - "Aye, and Gomorrah..."
Samuel R. Delany – Babel-17
Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany - Neveryon
Samuel R. Delany – Nova
Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection
Samuel R. Delany - stars in my pockets like grains of sand
Sean Russell - Moontide & Magic Rise
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future
Stanislaw Lem - Mortal Engines
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
Stanley Elkin - The Living End
Stephen Donaldson - The Chronicles of Thomas Convenant
Stephen King - The Dark Tower (series)
Stephen King - IT
Stephen King - The Stand
Steven Erickson – Tour of the Black Clock
Steven Erikson – Malazan Book of the Fallen
Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic
Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Susan Cooper - Dark Is Rising
Susan Cooper - Seaward

Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow & Thorn
Tad Williams - Outland
Ted Chiang - Stores of Your Life and Others
Ted Chiang - The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies
Terry Pratchett – Mort
Terry Pratchett - Night Watch
Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
Terry Pratchett - The Tiffany Aching trilogy
Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
Thomas Disch – 334
Thomas Disch – Camp Concentration
Thomas Disch - "Descending"
Thomas Disch- On Wings of Song
Thomas Ligotti - Songs of A Dead Dreamer
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49
T.H. White - The Once and Future King
Tom Godwin - "The Cold Equations"
Tove Jansson – Tales From Moominvalley
Tove Jansson - Moominvalley in November
Tove Jansson - Moominland Midwinter

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
Ursula K. Le Guin - Earthsea Trilogy
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Ursula K. Le Guin -- The Compass Rose

Vasya - Mahābhārata
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon Deep
Vernor Vinge - A Deepness in the Sky
Victor Pelevin – Oman Ra

Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
William S. Burroughs - The Red Night Trilogy
William Gibson – Burning Chrome
William Gibson - Count Zero
William Gibson – Neuromancer
William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
William Goldman - The Princess Bride
William Hope-Hodgson - The House on the Borderland
William Morris – News from Nowhere
William Pene du Boise - The Twenty-one Balloons
Willo Davis Roberts - The Girl With The Silver Eyes
Wyndham Lewis - The Human Age trilogy

Xavier de Maistre – Voyage Around my Room

Yevgeny Zamaytin - We

Doris Lessing - The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
Doris Lessing - The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)

Can the Lessings go in as 'Canopus in Argos: Archives (series)'? If the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the benchmark to pass to be a single literary entity then they definitely pass it

also i really want them to place

i kinda just want to use that as my reading list for the next 2 years

i counted and i've only read about 40 of them already, mostly obvious/popular ones

!

Frank Herbert -- Whipping Star u&k

I LOVE WHIPPING STAR AND THE OTHER ONE!

THE DOSADI EXPERIMENT.

I don't want to split votes, and I don't think they should be listed together because they're totally different books, but I really do like DOSADI a little bit better.

thomp after some research it seems like she did intend the five books as a single series so ill put them into a single nomination for Canopus in Argos: Archives (1992) unless the two ppl who nominated the single books object

they are great btw

robert heinlein, the scribner's juveniles

or if that is a stretch then just the last one: have space suit, will travel

i have read a shade over 47% of the nominations

bit simple, but seeing as i have about 10 nominations left

Legend - david gemmell

here are the rest of mine:

HG Wells - The Invisible Man
Stephen King - Salem's Lot
D. Terman - By Balloon to the Sahara
Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist
Marge Piercy - He, She & It
Apuleius - The Golden Ass
E.B. White - Stuart Little

47% is impressive alright. I feel like this needs to be here:

William Burroughs - The Naked Lunch

robert heinlein, the scribner's juveniles

or if that is a stretch then just the last one: have space suit, will travel

Naked Lunch, YESSSS, good pick.

Dosadi Experiment had frog ppl in it. My reason for reading it at age 11 (under the influence of LOL Barlowe's Guide To Extraterrestrials).

Kind of tempted to nominate Kevin J. Anderson and Timothy Zahn for the lulz

haha do it

I've read a quarter of these books/series, which seems a fair amount to me.
More worrying is that I own 44 of these titles that I haven't read yet.

T Zahn's Blackcollar: the Backlash Misson was in my Top 5 books in jr high.

I guess he won a Hugo award in 1984! Don't think he's as well-known for his award-winning work, though.

47% is impressive alright

I have DEADMAN SWITCH, NIGHT TRAIN TO RIGEL, and some of his one-off others in my mass market boxes. For his reputation's sake, it's almost too bad about those Star Wars books he wrote.

And of course the BLACKCOLLAR two-book bind-up and a bunch of the Cobra works as well.

TIMOTHY ZAHN is the Hugo Award–winning author of more than thirty SF novels, including Night Train to Rigel, The Third Lynx, Odd Girl Out, and the Dragonback sextet. He has also written Star Wars® novels, including the recent Allegiance. He lives in coastal Oregon.

^^ way to politely word that, macmillan books website

So much Aldiss and yet no:

Brain Aldiss - Report On Probability A

*Brian lol

Kind of tempted to nominate Kevin J. Anderson and Timothy Zahn for the lulz
― w/no hesitation (mh), Wednesday, February 16, 2011 12:20 PM (1 hour ago)

haha if you nom KJA you have to go all the way and nominate this epic, monumental addition to the SF/Adventure canon:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/511QC13SNFL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

got one more nom, i'm prob not gonna vote for any of the more 'literary' works meself but this deserves to be here:

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

karel Capek - War with the Newts was left off the big list

How many votes will we each get for the final poll?

holy shit that book cover, I had no idea it existed!

argh can someone nominate Marge Piercy's Woman On The Edge Of Time? My memory was jogged by He, She, It and I have no noms left.

I've only nominated two things so here ya go sleeve:

Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time

(obv. that KJA/LRH abomination was a joke but... all Scientology shit aside there are a few L. Ron works that are pretty good reads -- Fear being the one that comes to the top of my head... don't think it deserves a nom though...)

thank you!

Apuleius - The Golden Ass

this is an amazing book but I don't really see how it qualifies. unless we're gonna include the Iliad and the Odyssey and Satyricon and god knows how many others

Brain Aldiss - Report On Probability A

I was kinda disappointed with this. although I did almost nominate Barefoot in the Head.

William Burroughs - The Naked Lunch

was torn about this, went for his final trilogy instead, which is on the whole a more coherent work imho

I think Report on Probability A is kind of amazing. Although when I first read it I wasn't aware of its inspiration, Last Year at Marienbad, which I still have yet to see.

haha okay lol I hadn't heard that before

(although I haven't seen Last Year at Marienbad either. seems like the kind of thing I would have trouble convincing my wife to sit through)

hah jeez what hasn't been influenced by Last Year at Marienbad? I still haven't seen it either... def. a big mark i need to check off...

Oh, fuck, yeah--
Adolfo Bioy Cesares: The Invention of Morel (which was the inspiration for Last Year at Marienbad)
and Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor
are 2 literary sci-fis I would love for someone else to nominate, since I long used up all mine. The first one is about virtual reality/holograms/3D projections; the second about parallel worlds

Isaac Asimov – Foundation

is this being used to mean "foundation trilogy"? because the first one doesn't hold up that well on its own without the other two (which are awesome).

def hope it doesn't mean "foundation series," as those 800-page sequels asimov wrote in the '80s are unreadably awful.

the fourth one was okay iirc, but yeah def stop there

invention of morel otm

consider those two both nominated james, i've pretty much run out anyway.

Think his names is Casares not Cesares

that will cost you a nomination

Fine with me. I think I have a few left. Was considering nominating some unmentioned M. John Harrison and Christopher Priest books but didn't want to dilute the vote further

Apuleius - The Golden Ass

this is an amazing book but I don't really see how it qualifies. unless we're gonna include the Iliad and the Odyssey and Satyricon and god knows how many others

imo the basis for its inclusion is b/c it is an actual novel & not an epic poem. If the basic ground rule is that something needs to be a work of prose & not verse, TGA would qualify whereas Homer, Chaucer, Dante etc. would not.

whereas Homer, Chaucer, Dante etc. would not.

And indeed Shakespeare!

Something Wicked This Way Comes?

Oh wait

I've only just seen this, and it is awsome and exciting. When do the nominations end (although most of mine are there already)?

NOMINATIONS close on friday

Ta

william mayne, earthfasts
joan aiken, the wolves of willoughby chase series

Yeah, adored those Aiken books as a kid.

I just bought Star Maker and Forever War at Forbidden Planet, two I've meaning to get round to for years.

Whole poll is driving me into into a '14 used from £0.01' buying frenzy from Amazon. 334, Reproductive System, Report on Probability A…

it's driving me into a 'i should look for some of these in that box at my parent's house next time i am there' frenzy. it's not much of a frenzy.

more of a tizzy really

if you find 900 Grandmothers in that box, you will be sitting pretty

My list is basically covered. I have a soft spot for these:

Richard Cowper - Piper At the Gates of Dawn
Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake
Storm Constantine - Hermetech

Having children's and YA in makes this very wide, as most of it's speculative or fantastic in some way, but here are a couple of old favourites not yet mentioned:

Margaret Mahy - The Changeover
Philippa Pearce - Tom's Midnight Garden

can someone nominate some andre norton books so i know which ones to buy. she wrote about 400 novels, i think.

Andre Norton The Beast Master
Andre Norton Judgment on Janus

I read loads of Andre Norton as a kid, but those stick in the mind. There was also a brilliant one about cat people, but I can't remember the title.

On stuff I liked as a kid, I think I should nominate this, which is excellent

Nicholas Fisk Time Trap

and this, which maybe isn't, but is one of the first books I ever read by myself, and started me on sci-fi in the first place

Brian Earnshaw Dragonfall 5 and the Empty Planet

Then some other stuff

Margaret Atwood Oryx and Crake
AA Attanasio Radix
Bruce Sterling 20 Evocations (this is in Schismatrix Plus, which has been nominated, but I want to vote for it on its own; its my single favourite bit of cyberpunk)
Bruce Sterling Holy Fire
Can I add Isaac Asimov Caves of Steel/Naked Sun as one thing, or put the whole Robot series together?
William Gibson Virtual Light (the first books of his trilogies are always the best)
Fritz Leiber Ill Met in Lankhmar (I actually have the First Book of Lankhmar, which is a bigger compilation, but the second two books have been nominated in Lean Times in Lankhmar already)

Michael Moorcock City in the Autumn Stars (or whole Von Bek sequence if that counts)
Arthur C Clarke The Nine Billion Names of God

I'm sure I read some crazy hallucinatory inner space stuff in my 20s that was great, but I am having a total memory failure.

Just occurred to me that Illuminatus! has not been nominated. Don't know how it holds up, but that trilogy had an almost physical effect on me when I was 16, haunted my dreams for weeks. And me with no noms left, ah well.

I'll get that for you (might make my ballot)

The Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Thanks!

And sorry for the completely unsubtle hint.

ha no probs, had forgotten about it reckon it should be in the big list.

Plenty of literary stuff, but no Angela Carter. Has she fallen so far?

Also, no Harry Potter!

hp is on there

Oh yeah, wasn't looking at the latest list.

Never retained any important details of any Andre Norton I read besides a vague recollection of the word "Darkover" and the entirety of THE BEASTMASTER, which I think was a bit out of her norm but I liked it very much.

There was a sequel to THE BEASTMASTER, but I don't remember it being as good, or maybe I was just less impressionable by that time.

Lucius Shepard- The Jaguar Hunter, The Ends of the Earth, Life During Wartime
Kim Stanley Robinson- The Wild Shore
Howard Waldrop- All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past
Connie Willis- Impossible Things

I nominated The Wild Shore as part of the "Three Californias" trilogy, so you get one more.

Here is a list from M. John Harrison: http://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/05/02/some-interesting-science-fiction/

And some additions to it: http://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/livelier-than-the-average-dragon/

am i too late to use up some of my remaining nominations on the duncton chronicles and the book of silence (each a trilogy) by william horwood?

Always meant to read some of those Horwoods. Hard to come across in U.S. used aisles though. I'm an old Wind-in-the-Willows head and latterday Watership Down zealot...

then i dont hesitate to recommend tho they're significantly darker

Plenty of literary stuff, but no Angela Carter. Has she fallen so far?

Just read her 'Heroes and Villains', the postapocalyptic one, and actually really liked it. But I've already use up all my noms and a fistful of other people's, and that's way more books already than I'll be able to vote for, and I'm already uncertain about which of the precious darlings is going to be abandoned

In my limited Angela Carter experience it seems like her short stories own her novels.

^^^
Completely the case in my experience too.

Most of what I'd written down last week has been put already.

GK Chesterton - The Man who was Thursday
Cynthia Ozick - "Puttermesser and Xanthippe" (part of The Puttermesser Papers)
Stephen King - "The Mist"
Hope Mirrlees - Lud-in-the-mist
A E Van Vogt - Slan (I mean, can't have an SF poll without this. "Fans are slans" etc!)

thoroughly baffled at the respect for that chesterton.

I put LUD-IN-THE-MIST on my reading list like 5 years ago but never actually found it anywhere and then got distracted by a shiny object, I guess. Good reminder!

i have tried to start reading that ~ half a dozen times in the past week and got nowhere, btw

Well, I've had the Gormenghast trilogy under my desk for over a year (I should return that) and got nowhere with IT, either.

Abortions for some, tiny American flags for others.

wrong thread?

What, does no one here watch Futurama?? I must have stumbled on the only thread in all of ILX where that is the case -- ironic that it's the spec fic poll, eh?

i lolled despite not getting the reference tbh

To be honest, I felt a bit unsure whether to nominate Lud. Although it's just five years since I read it, all I can remember at this point is that I enjoyed it a lot. Perhaps not the greatest basis to nominate something, but being a latecomer I find I have nominations to burn in any case.

Can totally understand not liking the Chesterton book -- it's so very silly and religious. The sequence where people reveal who they are is so obvious, but the farce of it is humorous enough for me. The Christianity clearly bothers a lot of people. As luck(?) would have it, I'm too obtuse to be bothered by such things, just having a grand old time with Chesty's fine language and Symes' vigorous romp with the anarchists.

Feel like I should nominate some scandinavian SF, but I don't think I've read any! Always meant to read Karin Boye's _Kallocain_, which is another one of those old dystopian messes.

hmmm to nominate the last of the renshai or not....

As oystein says, more indicative of being late to the party than any real belief in the great quality of the books

Bugger! Have bought Gormenghast, only to find I had actually already bought it about 10 years ago, and never got around to reading it.

THEY'LL MAKE NICE BOOKENDS FOR STUFF YOU'LL ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO WADE THROUGH IMO

holy shit, sorry! i should look up more when typing

ok nominations are closed i will put up a voting thread tomorrow once i figure some things out