THE ILX ALL-TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL RESULTS THREAD & DISCUSSION

ok! so thank you to everyone that participated, this was a lot of fun for me, if a little heartbreaking. im going to ~roll out~ the TOP 50+1 over three days & then on the fourth list the remainder of the TOP 100, some stats results &c

get hype!

hurrah!

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/51StarsMy.jpg?t=130194483351 Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
74 points/5 votes/0 #1 votes

Just getting through Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

Liking it, it reads (to me anyway) like a Chuck Palahniuk novel. I think this is something to do with how I'm seeing the main character, like he's kind of self destructive but somehow everythings going his way, and everythings basically a bit bleak. dunno. anyone else read it?

― Guru Meditation (Ste), Tuesday, July 20, 2010 2:40 PM (8 months ago) Bookmark

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/50We.jpg?t=1301945091
50 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
74 points/6 votes/0 #1 votes

What Zamyatin seems to be aiming at is not any particular country but the implied aims of industrial civilisation. I have not read any of his other books, but I learn from Gleb Struve that he had spent several years in England and had written some blistering satires on English life. It is evident from We that he had a strong leaning towards primitivism. Imprisoned by the Czarist Government in 1906, and then imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1922 in the same corridor of the same prison, he had cause to dislike the political regimes he had lived under, but his book is not simply the expression of a grievance. It is in effect a study of the Machine, the genie that man has thoughtlessly let out of its bottle and cannot put back again. This is a book to look out for when an English version appears.

― George Orwell, Tribune, 4 January 1946 11:56 PM (65 years ago) Bookmark

haha, great post!

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/49CatsCradle.jpg?t=1301945441
49 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
74 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

read a cat's cradle: fine stuff. wish i was 23 (am 23 and a half).

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Monday, March 10, 2003 6:04 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark

Haha, I love that.

Ste otm re Palahniuk!

that Bester book is so great

I can't believe I cut Cat's Cradle from my ballot; 25 books was way too few IMO (I could easily have voted for 50)

i meant to vote in this but neglected to. look forward to some ideas on new reading material, at least.

really wish someone would buy me a copy of Howard Chaykin's Bester adaptation from the late 70s

Stars is overdue for a rereading -- I think it's been 30 years since I read it.

really really hoping there were enough write-ins for A Clockwork Orange

agree that the Palahniuk parallel is a good one re: Stars, Bester's character has a similar unattractive machismo/self-destructive mania kind of thing

Stars is overdue for a rereading -- I think it's been 30 years since I read it.

I re-read it recently, it's a hoot.

I've never read Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut kind of leaves me cold

Yay countdown!

Lamp by any chance were u able to do that tweak to my ballot for which I pled? (Adding Ligotti?)

i understand if not (sorry Tom Ligotti please don't kill self thx)

bookmarked!

I don't know most of the books but I like the elaborateness with which each is being announced.

Lamp by any chance were u able to do that tweak to my ballot for which I pled? (Adding Ligotti?)

haha i think so? my biggest fear is i fucked up the data somehow tbh - i didnt really automate the #1 counting since it never affected the rankings at all & im almost positive that i missed a couple. the points are counted tho!

Well shakey you should read cat's cradle, sirens of titan and slaughterhouse five. I bet you read the latter and hated it.

I didn't vote because I sort of forgot and I only have 8 or 9 all time favorites and didn't think they would influence this fun countdown. Plus smartphones.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/48Tigana.jpg?t=1301946764
48 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
76 points/5 votes/0 #1 votes

Yes yes yes. Tigana was the point where I realized that he wasn't simply good but absolutely great, however those next two are when he perfected not merely the alternate Europe approach but the sheer moral greyness of his world.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Wednesday, September 7, 2005 9:34 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

tigana wuz robbed imo

― thomp, Sunday, April 4, 2010 5:35 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Vonnegut I have read: Welcome to the Monkey House, Galapagos, uh one other involving some giant painting in a barn...? Also Man Without a Country. I didn't think any of them were particularly bad, but I didn't think they were particularly great either.

xp

huh never even heard of Tigana or its author before...

Lamp loves that dude.

... so basically you read a bunch of the Vonnegut no one cares about and skipped over all the ones that everyone loves?

that would be kind of like judging Michael Jackson's entire career off of Invincible

lol

SMC - Cat's Cradle is really good.

I know this is big, but --

http://pulpfaction.net/files/images/gully/gully_page_a.jpg

Australian comic strip version of Stars called "Gully Foyle" -- described here.

I am IRRATIONALLY ANGRY at everybody who had weeks to vote and couldn't manage it.

Tigana is magic. I like books to be magic.

I should read that

that would be kind of like judging Michael Jackson's entire career off of Invincible

― whelping at his sandpapery best (DJP), lundi 4 avril 2011 16:04 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

this kind of reminds of a friend who once told me he doesn't really like the godfather movies and then later mentioning he's only actually seen part 3.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/47FlowMyTears.jpg?t=1301946764
47 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
77 points/5 votes/0 #1 votes

I always liked Flow My Tears The Policeman Said but it rarely gets mentioned. The television personality/identity crisis angle is possibly relevant in our celebrity obsessed reality TV age. Or not.

― m coleman, Wednesday, August 22, 2007 5:02 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

I am IRRATIONALLY ANGRY at everybody who had weeks to vote and couldn't manage it.

― The Louvin Spoonful (WmC), Monday, April 4, 2011 4:09 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

i thought about it but most of the stuff i had in mind to vote for wouldn't have ranked (i meant to nom that stuff to get it out there but missed the deadline) - plus im just not very well read when it comes to spec fic

Flow My Tears is the one with the v. prescient portrayal of the Internet, yeah?

best thing about this poll is that it basically creates my summer reading list for me!

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/46SnowCrash.jpg?t=1301949032
46 Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
78 points/5 votes/0 #1 votes

I'm totally with Dan - when I started Snow Crash I hated it. That first chapter is awful. Pizza delivery on futuristic skateboards? Yeah right. It must have picked up though as I still remember it as a great story.

Maybe you have to be here or something -- the description of everything, from the pizza delivery to the nature of the burbs to all that -- is SO GODDAMN LA and Orange County especially. My laughter was the laughter of recognition. Last year I spoke to an English class taught by an old teacher of mine who was using _Snow Crash_ as a key text (she was the one who actually got me reading the book in the first place) and in rereading that first chapter all I could think of was the 55 freeway and Newport Beach.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, February 7, 2003 12:46 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/45AWrinkle.jpg?t=1301949136
45 Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
78 points/6 votes/1 #1 vote

I can't get started on L'Engle, I'll never do any work today!! My favorite author for so many reasons I can't even explain, it's useless to try.

― Laurel (Laurel), Tuesday, October 11, 2005 10:20 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

god i love that cover

Pro tip never listen to the L'Engle audiobooks where she reads them herself, just don't.

... so basically you read a bunch of the Vonnegut no one cares about and skipped over all the ones that everyone loves?

lol yeah I know. what can I say, those were the ones I was assigned to read!

L'Engle covers always freaked me out - do they have anything at all to do with the material within?

that one is an alex rodriguez bio

lol

I A Wrinkle in Time with that cover and it always sort of scared me too.

Stars My Destination being #51 = I don't care about this poll.

Hey, it's - nevermind

Cool. That's a nice contribution to this thread.

44 Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
81 points/5 votes/0 #1 votes

lem is especially awesome, he gets compared to borges sometimes. he mostly wrote sci-fi (including "solaris," which is really different from and better than both movie versions) but also really weird mysteries and a collection of reviews of imaginary books.

― congratulations (n/a), Tuesday, January 19, 2010 8:45 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/44Solaris.jpg?t=1301950334

xxp that's what I do

somehow I completely missed out on the happening of this literary event

appreciating the use of vintage mass market PB covers

Stars My Destination being #51 = I don't care about this poll.

were you the person annoyed abt allowing short story collections?

srsly A+ on that

xp

lamp you are a king or perhaps a mentat

generally speaking, if you are asking Alex in SF "are you the person who was annoyed" the answer is yes

just perused the noms list, ftr I totally would've voted the fuck out of dr adder

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/43ACanticle.jpg?t=1301950486
43 Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
81 points/7 votes/1 #1 vote

Walker Percy affirmed what is cryptic about Canticle by declaring that it contains a secret which either one gets or fails to get. And if one gets it, Percy admonishes, one dares not tell

― Ralph C. Wood, Friday, April 13, 2001 4:35 AM (10 years ago) Bookmark

"were you the person annoyed abt allowing short story collections?"

I don't recall arguing that they shouldn't have been allowed, but I would rather people voted/nominated their favorite story, yes.

Ed III have u ever read Infernal Devices? Excellent early Jeter and a great Victoriana piece to go alongside Powers and Blaylock.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/42TheCrying.jpg?t=1301950986
42 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
82 points/5 votes/0 #1 votes

I am reading it again, for perhaps the 5th time. I thought it might prove unreadable as a result, my eyes skimming off it - but no, it's more readable than ever, slowed down, yielding up fresh treasures, probably-important passages that I have somehow not fully seen before, small sentences likewise whose minor connecting work I ponder anew.

I don't know where to begin with this extraordinary slim packet of treasures and intellectual thrills. Save to say: what's your favourite bit?

― the pinefox, Tuesday, October 25, 2005 7:26 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

I made a mistake in reading V. before this one, didn't I

(because after that experience I'll be damned if I ever read another Pynchon novel again)

two things:

- sorry for running through these p quick but i have a dinner thing & need to get out of here reasonably soon
- crying of lot 49 is the 1st thing that i ~dislike~ on this list, some sort of ilx record

xpYou probably wouldn't like it either.

no, his shit's so hard to get a hold of I pick up whatever I stumble across, but I guess infernal devices is about to get reissued?

xp to jon

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/41Flatland.jpg?t=1301951562
41 Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
86 points/6 votes/0 #1 votes

An engaging fable, worthy of being remembered for its individual, literary merits --- it thus appears somewhat oddly, among the books dealing with that rebuilding of scientific abstractions, which is the most notable architectonic achievement of our age. Flatland was invented as one would invent a game. It is the product of ingenuity, acting on material which has amusing possibilities.

-- Frank V. Morley, Saturday, October 26 1:48 PM (85 years ago) Bookmark

Someone is reissuing Jeter novels. That's crazy.

Not sure I'm qualified to comment (or to have voted in the first place, but hey): A Canticle for Leibowitz is the first book here I've read...it was responsible for me deciding at age 15 to become a priest. About three days later I changed my mind. Great book anyway.

xp - I've read Flatland too!

Morlock Night is pretty fun too. Good for K.W.

re: Jeter that's good news! Is it Subterranean Press? They did a nice omnibus of Blaylock's victorian SF not long ago.

Some serious use of Innsmouth Look in Infernal Devices iirc...

by angry robot... in a reasonably priced mass market pb to boot...

http://www.amazon.com/Infernal-Devices-Angry-Robot-Jeter/dp/0857660977/

http://angryrobotbooks.com/

I think I liked the original cover a little better.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/40Foundation.jpg?t=1301951993
Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
86 points/6 votes/0 #1 votes

re-read the first three last year and I think they're still peerless. the idea of a three novel epic retelling Gibbons' book as a future science fiction epic was genius, and this trilogy is more relevant today than ever, everyone simply forgot.

― Milton Parker, Wednesday, January 21, 2009 5:01 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark

Surprised Infernal Devices got the re-ish treatment before Dr. Adder or the Glass Hammer too. Although I guess I'm most surprised any of his stuff is getting it.

Flatland was a revelation when I read it; I was 13 and it probably did more to make me fascinated with math (particularly geometry) than anything else in my life aside from number bases.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/39Slaughterhouse-Five.jpg?t=1301952208
39 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
87 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

lfam, without having read the rest of this thread, i just wanted to say that you should start with slaughterhouse-five. my dad convinced me to read it a few years ago and it was absolutely brilliant. i wish i appreciated vonnegut more in his own lifetime, but i suppose now is the time to delve into more.

― modestmickey, Thursday, April 12, 2007 9:05 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark

didn't feel qualified to vote as i hadn't read much of these in more than a decade, but 'foundation' would've been my no. 1, probably.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/38Lanark.jpg?t=1301952646
38 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
88 points/5 votes/0 #1 votes

Reading Lanark during the holidays, when I had dug myself a 6-foot deep pit of despair already, capped it rather neatly. When the Author showed up, on New Year's Eve after a fairly miserable day with embittered angry family members, I yelled "well, fuck!" and slammed it shut. But then went back to reading it, as the PS2 wouldn't co-operate with the hotel tv and I felt compelled to know the rest. It is a hellish book, full of nightmares and horrors, mysteries and dark puzzles. I thought the best part was Thaw's descent as he painted and painted the church murals.

― Jaq (Jaq), Monday, January 2, 2006 4:49 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

oh man so many books to check out! I now feel like my ballot was childish and pedestrian...

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/37Frankenstein.jpg?t=1301952696
37 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
88 points/6 votes/0 #1 votes

Frankestein by Mary Shelley:
There is a monster.But, who is the real one?

― - H.H. -, Saturday, April 17, 2004 2:18 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/36Ubik.jpg?t=1301953104
36 Philip K. Dick - Ubik
89 points/6 votes/0 #1 votes

> You need Ubik. Ubik is safe when taken as directed.

GET UBIK _

> You don't see any Ubik here.

― muus lääv? :D muus dut :( (Telephone thing), Tuesday, November 9, 2010 10:08 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark

ubik?

― stirmonster, Wednesday, September 1, 2010 5:47 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark

Lot 49 & Lanark the first things to show in the category of 'things I would have voted for if I hadn't had some muddled, self-imposed voting restrictions in place'. They could make a top 20 novels of all time for me, maybe (probably a 50), but I wanted to vote a bit more narrow-genre.

fwiw lanark had the 2nd highest average placement out of any book in the top 50 & i had never even heard of it

! i'm shocked that you havent heard of Lanark!

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/35Alices.jpg?t=1301953339
35 Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
89 points/7 votes/1 #1 vote

I reread a great deal. Books that were amazing and lifechanging, or at least ones that made me think, often find new niches to roost in when read again because _I_ am not the same reading the book. I reread mysteries with characters I like as if visiting old friends. I reread childhood and teen novels at the rate of two or three weekly. I've read "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" more times than I can count.

― Rabin the Cat (Rabin the Cat), Monday, May 10, 2004 10:22 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

51 Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination

50 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
49 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
48 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
47 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
46 Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

45 Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
44 Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
43 Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
42 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
41 Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

40 Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
39 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
38 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
37 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
36 Philip K. Dick - Ubik

35 Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass

this is quite a strange list so far

how so?

C'mon, Vance!

crap, I didn't vote. I hope you guys voted for my nominees.

I am kind of bummed because I'm pretty certain that The Diamond Age won't place now.

Slaughterhouse five followed by Lanark! Two of my favourite books. This is a great list

The most memorable part of Lanark for me is the final book with all the temporal disorientation. 6 months seem to go by in a day and there's this nightmarish panic when Thaw can't seem to keep up with his family. It's a truly dreamlike book, often terrifyingly close to an anxiety nightmare in places.

Two of mine have placed so far - Slaughterhouse 5 and Through the Looking Glass. I don't think I'm going to have masses more judging by what's shown up 'til now.

How many ballots did you get in the end, lamp?

how so?

well, I for one would be hard-pressed to say what the Crying of Lot 49 and A Wrinkle in Time have in common, for example.

Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more highly imaginative fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as related static, motion, and virtual arts.

excited by this poll, it is an area of fiction i have rarely touched. so cheers for all involved and i enjoy coming back in a couple years time to bring challops.

i'll*

Some books here I like a lot

it is nice to see my own words under CL49

but I didn't vote for it in this poll; feel that this probably stretches the definition too far

but did vote for Lanark, Vonnegut, Alice.

Was surprised to see Stars My Destination come in so low. Don't care for it that much myself (a bit disjointed, fine writing not that fine, Foyle unengaging), but it always seems to get such love in SF world. Ubik appearing already is good - feared a boring top ten that was half-PKD, half-young adult, & that seems a bit less likely.

btw can't believe there's a novel called TIGANA

TIGANA ... TIGANA ... PLATINI ... GOAL!

More Chris Foss book jackets please!
6 of my votes have made it so far, surprised to See Flow My Tears in there as I never thought of it as first tier Dick. Anyway, great list so far, I'll be using this as my reading list for the next couple of years.

Read ten of these, only voted for one so far, Frankenstein. Added to my reading list: Bester, Flatland, Ubik (on my shelves already). Think I'm a bit a lot to old to get anything out of A Wrinkle in Time. Might give Tigana a go but I'm not really a fantasy fan.

Three of my picks have come out already, including two of my top ten - Lanark (2) and Tigana (8).
Another three were on my longlist.

3 of mine have placed as well - Ubik (my #2), Cat's Cradle and Foundation (23 & 24, respectively). Only one's I haven't read are We and Lanark. Added them to the Amazon shopping list.

Thanks again for doing this Lamp - it's off to a great start!

good interview w/ alasdair gray on lanark

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/lanark.shtml

nothing i have voted for so far! yesss

also i have never read tigana so i am kind of confused by my comment above, oh well

Three from my ballot have placed so far -- Slaughterhouse-Five, Alice and Frankenstein. The vote for Frankenstein was a vote for its historical importance more than for the actual reading enjoyment I got out of it (the only entry on my ballot to get such a vote).

i had an idea my list would be dragging the poll toward the lower brow...

huh

Morlock Night is a science fiction novel by K. W. Jeter. It was published in 1979. In a letter to Locus Magazine in April 1987, Jeter coined the word "steampunk" to describe it and other novels by James Blaylock and Tim Powers.

Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term . . . like "steampunks", perhaps...

—K.W. Jeter[1]

yeah Jeter seems to have really been screwed out of a lot of recognition imho

So has Blaylock. The only member of the poker-with-PK Dick-every-thursday-gang who's really gotten his garlands is Powers, and even he is only a modest success.

(Wait, was Kim Stanley Robinson part of the PKD poker group? If so I guess he's the most successful).

somehow jeter never seemed to connect with an audience and he didn't do himself any favors with all the genre work he did in the 90s, tho I guess they paid the bills

jeter wrote dr adder when he was 22 and spent the next 12 years trying to get it published, that's gotta grind a fella down

KSR is part of that whole UCSD scene (Bear, Vinge, etc. although all those guys have radically different politics, interestingly)

he didn't do himself any favors with all the genre work he did in the 90s, tho I guess they paid the bills

I get the impression he's given up altogether...? I seem to recall some interview where he was talking about being "reduced" to working in bookstores and stuff to pay the rent. But ugh yeah all those Bladerunner sequels and star trek hackery, bad brand management there fella. "Noir" was kinda the last decent thing he did afaik, and even that was marred by some seriously pointless/ugly digressions re: copyright law.

Yeah I think the poker gang was just Blaylock-Powers-Jeter-Dick, those first three all from Fullerton.

xpost

ugh that is depressing xxpost. Blaylock has managed to avoid that by career teaching to pay the bills...

mean star WARS hackery there btw

can I take a moment to give props to the cover of the french edition of dr adder

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/Dr-Adder.jpg

wow

lol awesome.

Jeter did a comic in the early 90s? For Vertigo maybe? It was some Books of Magic offshoot, I think.

Mister E

btw I posted that cover on the assumption dr adder is not going to place in this horse race

That's a pretty safe assumption.

jeter's last published work is a novella from 2006 called ninja two-fifty, available on yr kindle for $2.99

There are no customer reviews yet.

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #251,750 Paid in Kindle Store

"mean star WARS hackery there btw"

He also hacked out some Star Trek actually.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/34TheDark.jpg
34 Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising Sequence
91 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

THE DARK IS RISING IS THE BEST SHIT EVER. SUSAN COOPER.

― cutty (mcutt), Thursday, 14 July 2005 18:07 (5 years ago)

^^ searching for quotes on that is the most lol intersection of n0ize doodz & britishers

also another book(s) id never even heard of

also before the next couple a note on ties:

- if a title tied on points first tie-breaker was # of votes then average placement on ballot then # of #1 votes (this was never used tho). i had so many bcuz i h8 ties, deal with it

- some of the next entries are p heartbreaking for me so

they're like worse alan garner, have you read alan garner

xpost

would never have heard of that book at all if it weren't for Mercury Rev lol

okay that's just dumb

I read some of 'em in grade school... was also a major motion picture that no one saw apparently

http://imdb.com/title/tt0484562/

All the folklore stuff in them is really annoying and anti-fun. There's like a three-page bit where one character pedantically corrects another for not pronouncing Welsh properly. f u, Susan Cooper

I remember that movie poster. I had no idea it was a book (or a series of books.)

the only reason I read the dark is rising in 4th grade was because of freaky cover art, def didn't look like other children's fantasy novels of the time, kudos art dept

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/dark-is-rising-the-pix.gif

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/33TheCall.jpg
33 H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
93 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

lovecrafts whole THING is hating the other--makes for awful politics and worse interpersonal relationships but AMAZING short stories

― Bobby Wo (max), Friday, 23 October 2009 03:16 (1 year ago)

I used to think he was dud but I was a fool.

― Tom (Groke), Thursday, 6 February 2003 12:34 (8 years ago)

I think the Cooper books being relentlessly grim anti-fun is a large portion of what drew me to them

I was an angsty kid before I ever had any reason to be, lol

I was such a discipline problem in 4th grade that the exasperated school system stuck me in a room by myself with my schoolwork, when I finished I could read whatever I wanted

this is the environment in which I read the dark is rising

did I mention the room was windowless? talk about relentlessly grim anti-fun!

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/32NakedLunch.jpg
32 William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
93 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

of course Naked Lunch is funny: it's just one hilarious stand-up comic routine after another!! (admittedly it might not go down well in most clubs, but there was a reason the CBGBs crowd liked Bill so much) (actually it was the wrong reason, they were just trying to be cool, but this was the reason they SHOULD have had)

― Justyn Dillingham (Justyn Dillingham), Thursday, 9 January 2003 13:41 (8 years ago)

I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.

― Nelson (Muntz), Sunday, 31 March 1996 6:49 (15 years ago)

My vote for Naked Lunch is basically a vote for Burroughs' entire ouevre.

nothing i have voted for so far! yesss

lem is especially awesome, he gets compared to borges sometimes

I used to think he was dud but I was a fool.

― Tom (Groke), Thursday, 6 February 2003 12:34 (8 years ago)

Am I right in thinking the only English version of Solaris available is still the one that was translated via French? Or has there been a new translation?

I'm surprised that I've read a fair number of these. That will prob change as Lamp continues to roll them out but I've been surprised so far. I read NL in high school and don't really remember anything about it except that I gave my copy to a boy I liked and he never gave it back. :/

I didn't vote for Cthulhu because I decided on a one book per author list. Lovecraft warped me as pre-teen, to the point that I wrote my own bad horror stories with my own elder god rip-offs led by one Hloab-Guru (sadly, I don't remember all their names. I do remember their avatars met around and ever shifting surface which also had a name now lost to time, but known as The Table of Chaos ). Oh, to be 10 and under H.P.'s spell again.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/31TheThree.jpg
31 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
96 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

i just read "the three stigmata of eldritch palmer" in one evening. did a lot better than when i was a sixth-grader. i think i stopped "getting it" sometime around the sixth or seventh chapter back then ... this time i could follow it almost all the way to the end. i got more of the jokes and references this time around, too. particularly the dirty ones and the ones about religion. weird, that.

― renegade bear shot by cops on frat row (vahid), Wednesday, 7 June 2006 05:17 (4 years ago)

I think Dick's rep as a (technically) 'bad' writer is seriously overstated - ok he's no John Updike (thank fucking christ) w/ loads of uselessly 'poetic' observations, and being a speed freak novel-writing machine did mean his quality control wasn't always the highest, but he has great empathy for his characters, spits out a new idea every other page, can make you laugh in sympathy or horror, and generally fucks over yr mind like nobody else.

― Andrew L, Tuesday, July 2, 2002 7:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

Yet more canonical books that I shouldn't admit I've never read. I did read The Dark Is Rising when I was 9 or 10; kind of surprised it didn't make a bigger impression, it's blended with all the other young people's fantasy I read back then (I have much stronger memories of tat like The Demon Headmaster).

I love Lem but only know the shorter texts; "A History of Bitic Literature" blew my mind to a greater extent than any Borges did.

xp - Oh wait - something I voted for! Hurrah!

Last time I read Three Stigmata it left me feeling psychically itchy, I was uneasy for days. Maybe Dick's most paranoid book, and that's saying something.

I read that in college while on a choir tour; it was about the only time I really didn't notice the horrible bus rides.

I should reread it, I think.

Three Stigmata is incredible

And on that DAW pb an unforgettable cover.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/30TheHandmaids.jpg
30 Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
98 points/6 votes/0 #1 votes

everyone in the world has read more novels than me, so you perhaps have already read my current book (as in, the one I am reading, not my latest authored book), "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Attwood. It presents a nightmare vision of a USA rule by people like Dick Cheney.

- DV (dirtyvicar), Saturday, February 8, 2003 8:35 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

She calls The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake 'speculative fiction'.

Compound or no Compound, you're still dead.

- Archel (Archel), Tuesday, July 22, 2003 8:09 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

ilx does not really have much thats good to say abt that book btw

which is a shame because it's excellent

generally speaking, ILX hates sad women

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/29MRJames.jpg
29 M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James
101 points/6 votes/0 #1 votes

Collected Stories lives on my bedside cabinet but Xmas = M.R. James time for real. Read "Casting the Runes" again the other night cos it's pleasant enough to not kick the nightmares in i.e. at least it ends well. That thing he wrote for the Boy Scouts is maybe the wickedest piece of child-scaring I've ever read.

I know there's some James love on this board, let's try and work out why he's the best Christmas writer ever.

― http://uktv.co.uk/ can fuck right off imo (Noodle Vague), Friday, November 13, 2009 6:27 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

The late Mr. james is enjoying a boomlet!

― Aimless (Aimless), Tuesday, December 13, 2005 9:07 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

Wish J0hn D. was posting in this thread. I bet he'd have some insights on how The Handmaid's Tale is basically COMING TRUE with all this anti-abortion/anti-woman legislation going on this year.

MR James is the best Christmas writer ever, and is also the alpha and omega of ghost story writing. Found its environmental niche right here.

He also used to ride on a safety tricycle round England n France looking at churches.

Flawless.

Haven't read any James but "Night of the Demon" is a really cool 50s film adaptation of "Casting the Runes".

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/28Gateway.jpg
28 Fredrik Pohl - Gateway
108 points/7 votes/1 #1 vote

Frederik Pohl's Gateway -- wowed by the bleakness, the mysteries, and that ending

― a nan, a bal, an anal ? (abanana), Monday, November 29, 2010 1:08 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark

how about frederik pohl, he's pretty badass too

― moonship journey to baja, Monday, September 17, 2007 5:48 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

fwiw i know the 'gateway' cover isnt for the book but i liked it too much not to use it

Oh I see - I was o_O at a novel coming with a "Free Hint Book".

I recommended Flatland to a kid at a month ago school and he loved it, it was really gratifying.

Joining the chorus loving the covers - that L'Engle one really really makes me want to read it.

I actually read Gateway because I played that game

Only things I voted for that have shown up so far have been Lanark and M.R. James. But there's a lot of dope stuff showing up that I'm putting on my to-read list...

Nothing from my ballot has placed yet, but some stuff I'm pretty happy about.

I am assuming Mountains of Madness is the HPL which will hit top 10 or 5 since Cthulhu placed relatively low. Also yay for MR James! Be born be born!

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/27BraveNewWorld.jpg
27 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
110 points/13 votes/0 #1 votes

In my English 110 or something I got in, not quite trouble, but ah increased my rep as a lit-scoundrel for arguing (this was a long time ago, so details are sketchy) that the way the one guy kept quoting Shakespeare was no different from the Somatose people always reciting their mantras. That everybody's just programmed anyhow, so we should eat donuts and get fat.

This was the class where I also suggested that Lady Macbeth had recently had a miscarriage or lost an infant since there is a reference to her lactating in one of her solils. This evoked a wonderful "ewwww" from the rest of the class, and I didn't sleep with any of them.

― The Luge (Horace Mann), Friday, January 23, 2004 4:06 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

Well, there could be a serious lack of human intimacy in my world. But I find there isn't if I make an effort, and try to connect with people, and "love is a verb, not a noun, blah blah blah" and all that.

The future of BNW *has* to be somewhat slightly appealing and/or realistic, or we wouldn't buy the idea that people would have chosen to live in it. Many Dystopian stories (Logan's Run, f'rinstance) I just can't picture how it could have happened. BNW, I could. But it wouldn't be my choice.

― the river fleet, Saturday, January 24, 2004 8:57 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

People who disparage the Soma-world are ignorant of how shitty life is for a lot of people. Free will would be great if everything else was free too

― dave q, Saturday, January 24, 2004 9:13 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

^ lowest average ballot placement in the TOP 50 fwiw

BNW is so badass

xpost so this is the book everyone felt obliged to throw a vote

lol, it was my #24

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/26Illuminatis.jpg
26 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy 
111 points/8 votes/0 #1 votes

Fnord is a vacume... but also at the same time it is .....

Fnord?

Fnord is evaporated herbal tea without the herbs.

Fnord is that funny feeling you get when you reach for the
Snickers bar and come back holding a slurpee.

Fnord is the 43 1/3rd state, next to Wyoming.
Fnord is this really, really tall mountain.
Fnord is the reason boxes of condoms carry twelve instead of ten.

Fnord is the blue stripes in the road that never get painted.
Fnord is place where those socks vanish off to in the laundry.
Fnord is an arcade game like Pacman without the little dots.
Fnord is a little pufflike cloud you see at 5pm.

Fnord is the tool the dentist uses on unruly patients.
Fnord is the blank paper that cassette labels are printed on.
Fnord is where the buses hide at night.
Fnord is the empty pages at the end of the book.

Fnord is the screw that falls from the car for no reason.
Fnord is why Burger King uses paper instead of foam.
Fnord is the little green pebble in your shoe.
Fnord is the orange print in the yellow pages.

Fnord is a pickle without the bumps.
Fnord is why ducks eat trees.
Fnord is toast without bread.
Fnord is a venetian blind without the slats.

Fnord is the lint in the navel of the mites that eat
the lint in the navel of the mites that eat
the lint in Fnord's navel.

Fnord is an apostrophe on drugs.
Fnord is the bucket where they keep the unused serifs for H*lvetica.
Fnord is the gunk that sticks to the inside of your car's fenders.
Fnord is the source of all the zero bits in your computer.

Fnord is the echo of silence.
Fnord is the parsley on the plate of life.
Fnord is the sales tax on happiness.
Fnord is the preposition at the end of sixpence.

Fnord is the feeling in your brain when you hold your breath too long.
Fnord is the reason latent homosexuals stay latent.

Fnord is the donut hole.
Fnord is the whole donut.

Fnord is an annoying series of email messages.
Fnord is the color only blind people can see.

Fnord is the serial number on a box of cereal.

Fnord is the Universe with decreasing entropy.
Fnord is a naked woman with herpes simplex 428.
Fnord is the yin without yang.
Fnord is a pyrotumescent retrograde onyx obelisk.

Fnord is why lisp has so many parentheses.
Fnord is the the four-leaf clover with a missing leaf.

Fnord is double-jointed and has a cubic spline.
Fnord never sleeps.
Fnord is the "een" in baleen whale.

Fnord is neither a particle nor a wave.
Fnord is the space in between the pixels on your screen.

Fnord is the guy that writes the Infiniti ads.
Fnord is the nut in peanut butter and jelly.
Fnord is an antebellum flagellum fella.

Fnord is a sentient vacuum cleaner.

Fnord is the smallest number greater than zero.
Fnord lives in the empty space above a decimal point.

Fnord is the odd-colored scale on a dragon's back.
Fnord is the redundant coin slot on arcade games.
Fnord was last seen in Omaha, Nebraska.

Fnord is the founding father of the phrase "founding father".
Fnord is the last bit of sand you can't get out of your shoe.
Fnord is Jesus's speech advisor.
Fnord keeps a spare eyebrow in his pocket.
Fnord invented the green hubcap.
Fnord is why doctors ask you to cough.

Fnord is the "ooo" in varooom of race cars.
Fnord uses two bathtubs at once.

― Gauge StraenJ, Wednesday, January 7, 2004 3:44 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/25TheMaster.jpg
25 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita
114 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

yeah reality is often pretty boring. musicians with no imagination should just go away. ever read master and margarita? now that book's got a lot of imagination, and even somehow thru the wild magic of it all says everything it needs to about everything. beautiful.

― Bob Shaw (Bob Shaw), Thursday, June 19, 2003 2:40 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

halfway done!

lol I was about to be all "I have never even heard of this" and then I clicked on the URL for the image and I think I read it...?

The Master & Margarita is one of those books I should love but don't...much better magical realism elsewhere imo.

(at the very least I remember that cover from when I was a kid)

if be pretty surprised if you hadnt read m&m dan its a staple of 'serious fiction' that gets rec'd/pushed on genre readers. it has a weird reputation, i think, in that 'unserious' ppl often really love it & i think that makes chin-strokers less receptive to it

its also kinda glib, but so much fun

that cover is super rad so I am going to read it (again possibly!)

I have to admit I only got halfway through the Illuminatus trilogy before giving up, although that's further than I got with the Foundation trilogy.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/24TheDrowned.jpg
24 J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
114 points/9 votes/1 #1 vote

I did view [Ballard] as one of post-war Britain's major imaginations and interventions; maybe more than Britain's. He's surely on a par with Philip K. Dick, if not even way beyond him already; not a writer to rank alongside Beckett who cared differently for words, but a greater figure than Hunter S. Thompson or William Burroughs, a greater mind than Kerouac or Ginsberg, maybe equal to Mailer or Vonnegut if you'll indulge the thought. He was Very Twentieth Century. He might be read centuries hence.

― the pinefox, Monday, April 20, 2009 4:21 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

― ears are wounds, Wednesday, July 1, 2009 8:43 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Master and Margarita is awesome and hilarious

The Illuminatus Trilogy is one of those things I've always looked at and said "eh, I'll read that someday" and then I blinked and 20 years had gone by

literally every bookish friend I have has urged M & M on me at some point, it is inevitable that I read it.

Trivia point, the Italian weirdo-genius pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was mega obsessed with that book.

So far this list has been rather "SF and F is something one reads in one's formative years but not as an adult" IMO

Like these are all the mind-blowing staples of the smart & questioning middle school/high school kid.

(just an observation and Bulgakov + Ballard prob fall outside this)

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/23ThePlayer.jpg
23 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
115 points/8 votes/0 #1 votes

get me one?

fuckin hardcover!

sci-fi should come out in paperback. word is bond.

― s1ocki, Wednesday, January 30, 2008 1:55 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

Master and Margarita is awesome and hilarious

― first it smells like donuts, then it smells like don't ask (askance johnson), Tuesday, April 5, 2011 3:12 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/22Kafka.jpg
22 Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories
120 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

My very belated 2 cents is that Kafka, being hugely influenced by Freud, was a sort of proto-surrealist. He certainly had a political side -- an interest in Zionism, and his job at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute gave him a vivid picture of the exploitation of workers. But his genius was to cast his ideas about victimhood in religio-cosmological rather than political terms. In other words, Gogol rather than Bakunin, Kierkegaard rather than Marx, Dostoyevsky rather than Mrs Gaskell were his mentors. (He did like Dickens, though.)

This is what made people like Brecht scorn him as a 'man caught beneath the wheels of history'. But he has outlived Brecht as a literary / cinematic influence for this very reason: he proposes no rationale or remedy for the world of pointless persecution he portrays. And he even gives bureaucratic menace and the sense of guilt it fosters a certain comic charm. So he's much closer to the Gogol of 'A Government Inspector' than the Brecht of 'The Measures Taken'.

Brecht was always after a certain Schweikian lightness, but never achieved it, more often ending up didactic and prescriptive. Kafka, influenced by the Yiddish theatre troupes he saw in Prague, couldn't help being as folksy and entertaining as he was Modern and serious.

― Momus (Momus), Sunday, November 3, 2002 5:51 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark

Momus OTM

I didn't vote for PoG but it's a novel I'm glad exists - in the end I wanted the whole thing to be about Azad and didn't care about the tournament or whatever, but that's a different novel.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/21AttheMountain.jpg
21 H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
123 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

"Mountains of Madness" = Totally awesome!

― Jonathan Williams (ex machina), Thursday, February 6, 2003 3:18 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

[Lovecraft] was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list.

― Luc Sante, Thursday, October 19, 2006 5:01 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

A post I think about about all the time is Remy's one about sleeping in Lovecroft's bed.

WAHT that is low!

as a social satire and evidence of its author's precognitive genius, brave new world is aces

as a literary novel it is a heap of steaming dung

are you sure you aren't confusing it with "Heart of Darkness"?

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/20Wheel.jpg
20 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time
123 points/8 votes/0 #1 votes

The only contemporary fantasy I really stan for is Robert Jordan which is a hangover from my youth, but when I've tried to explain to skeptics what I like about him the half-hearted attempts at arguments I've made probably apply to a lot of (the better) fantasy, namely:

While an absolute emphasis on realism now seems to be pretty rare in modern lit crit or its more popular variants (e.g. newspaper book reviews) I think instead there's quite a strong judgmental binary between realism and playing-with-form, such that what counts as good writing often has to slot into either (or sometimes both) of those categories, an opposition which stuff like "magic realism" really only papers over. It's not so much that this restricts what kinds of stories can be told, but rather it defines the contexts in which particular kinds of achievements can be recognised as such.

Jordan is (was) probably the most sophisticated "plotter" of any writer I've read in terms of the dizzying interplay of characters, twists, narrative arcs etc. but because the actual writing style is fairly conventional, this can never be celebrated as such, it's defined as being soap opera-ish (which it is) or even decadent b/c fantasy just isn't supposed to try for complexity; while at the same time a "merely" complex plot isn't enough by itself to impressive in a non-fantasy context. It would be different if he had been constructing a social realist drama or if he'd been playing with literary convention (or both!) both of which provide a more respectable framework in which the complexity of the plot would become at least for some critics a point in its favour. I mean it's pretty obvious why new wave SF of the 70s and 80s gets a lot of critical support whereas fantasy does not - it ticks so many more of the boxes that exist for good non-SF writing. To be fair, figures like Dick and Ballard and Gibson are just all around better and more interesting writers than most prominent fantasy writers, but that doesn't mean the cards aren't also stacked against the latter group in terms of achieving recognition when they are doing good or interesting work.

I think "we" are much better at recognising how populist and/or middlebrow techniques can be inventive and effective in the context of television shows or, obviously, music, than we are with writing.

― Tim F, Tuesday, January 19, 2010 5:43 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

every single one of them

― yes! no rabies! (Lamp), Sunday, August 2, 2009 7:52 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

aw, you should have used the classic Tombot "MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!!!" post

lol i forgot abt that post - it is p classic. i had known i wanted to use that tim f quote since it first started to look like the wheel of time wld chart tho

I voted "The Drowned World" number one. I found it haunting me for months afterwards - as much the atmosphere as the actual story.

I was a major Wheel of Time fan until the slow releases killed it for me - couldn't bring myself to vote for it after that.
I'm going to re-read it when Sanderson finishes the whole thing though.

i hope Alex in SF hasnt stopped reading cuz i was hoping for some HARD SCI-FI nerd rage @ how high the wheel of time ended up placing...

wait until A Game of Thrones hits the top 10

(btw is it just me or is this the most congenial, civilized poll thread we've had)

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/19VALIS.jpg
19 Philip K. Dick - The VALIS Trilogy
125 points/6 votes/1 #1 vote

I can't say enough positive things about PKD (he inspired one of my email addressed and my AIM handle). Esp the Valis trilogy--brilliant on so many levels.

― Orbit (Orbit), Thursday, July 21, 2005 11:34 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

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.

― Tuomas, Monday, February 7, 2011 2:48 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark

^^ the best average placement for any title w/ 3+ votes btw, like almost every vote for it was in top 5

I enjoy the plot of Wheel of Time, and don't have any problems with the writing as writing, but I loathe the many, many repetitive interior monologues. Enjoyed Sanderson's two much more than Jordan's because he doesn't do it as much.

you idiots decided to put kafka in your sci fi poll and then have the freaking wheel of time and philip k dick placing higher than him

"you idiots" -- oh good, we're back to being a normal ilx poll thread

you idiots decided to put kafka in your sci fi poll and then have the freaking wheel of time and philip k dick placing higher than him

you should write an angry email to n+1 abt it

hahaha

I am writing a post to you

VALIS is the Dick novel I'd recommend to any reader coming from a "literature" background, as he'd actually learned to write by then. Or maybe it was that he had an editor and time for rewrites.

glad people are talking about books though

always liked this cover for the divine invasion (that's part of valis trilogy right?)

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y176/edwardiii/philip_k_dick_divine_1stus.jpg

Prediction : the congeniality of this poll will start to wear thin by the top 10.

"i hope Alex in SF hasnt stopped reading cuz i was hoping for some HARD SCI-FI nerd rage @ how high the wheel of time ended up placing..."

I'm pretty annoyed that Valis placed higher than three far superior Dick novels, but whatever.

Pretty sure I've already argued that people who think Valis trilogy is Dick's best are savages not to be trusted elsewhere.

Alex in SF, which is best : VALIS or Vulcan's Hammer?

I am writing a post to you

well you couldve voted & then complained abt gilbert sorrentino getting less votes than childern's books abt magic furniture

I misremembered the name of the book, googled for "the divine intervention dick" and got this picture of one of my bandmates in the results lol

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4040/4605423117_aea097986e.jpg

Alex, which PDK do you rate? I've never read Valis but always intended to; I think 3 Stigmata is fucking choice tho.

well you couldve voted & then complained abt gilbert sorrentino getting less votes than childern's books abt magic furniture

http://triangulations.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/mushroom-cloud.jpg

PKD could prolly use his own ILX poll

I nominate Lamp for running all ILX polls from here on out

I don't vote ever

Prediction : the congeniality of this poll will start to wear thin by the top 10.

Weirdly I'm not sure about this - it's been very consensus-y so far in part bcz a lot of what's placing high we all read as kids - I didn't vote for Stars or Illuminatus or Snow Crash and I don't think I'd get that much out of them now but I still remember them really fondly?

well you couldve voted & then complained abt gilbert sorrentino getting less votes than childern's books abt magic furniture

The role of actual literature is v lols to me in this poll - like enough people dediced they weren't gonna vote for the lit fic stuff that it's all placed in kinda demeaning positions, it's like an alternate world in which PKD has just placed at #22 in a 'best books ever' list and everyone is like 'rly u guys?'

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/18TheHobbit.jpg
18 J.R.R. Tolkein - The Hobbit
125 points/7 votes/1 #1 vote

Charming, genial, convivial. Prefer it to LotR, which i often think is boring apart from the Mines of Moria section, which never fails to get the heart racing. Still incredulous how long it takes them to get to Rivendell

― Gamaliel Ratsey, Saturday, March 26, 2011 11:25 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark

so thats the last one for today. could a mod possibly fix the numbering on the VALIS post? - should be #19 obv, lol doing this while holding office hours, sorry job.

so is #1 going to be a toss-up between Hitchhiker's Guide and Watership Down?

"Alex in SF, which is best : VALIS or Vulcan's Hammer?"

I'm not likely to re-read either, but VALIS trilogy is better, sure.

This was what I posted on the POX thread.

POX Phillip K Dick

#1 will probably be either dragonquest or harry potter you non-hard-scifi DOUCHES

Yeah I'd mostly agree with that, I remember nothing of Radio Free Albemuth tbh. I tried to limit the amount of PKD on my ballot, still ended up with 4 though I think, which is more a reflection on how few sf writers I've actually read in any depth.

xpost to alex in sf

the story so far...

51 Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination

50 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
49 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
48 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
47 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
46 Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

45 Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
44 Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
43 Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
42 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
41 Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

40 Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
39 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
38 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
37 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
36 Philip K. Dick - Ubik

35 Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
34 Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising Sequence
33 H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
32 William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
31 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

30 Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
29 M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James
28 Fredrik Pohl - Gateway
27 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
26 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

25 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita
24 J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
23 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
22 Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories
21 H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

20 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time
19 Philip K. Dick - The VALIS Trilogy
18 J.R.R. Tolkein - The Hobbit

Radio Free Albemuth is a better VALIS imo. Similar themes, but a more interesting framework.

I've read 14 of those and given up on around 3 or 4 others, one of which was Lovecraft's "At The Mountains of Madness" due to my second-hand copy having some unpleasant stains on it.

the stains were only unpleasant? You sure they weren't "unnameable and utterly wretched"?

Yes that's a better description

stuff from my ballot that placed:

50 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We (05)
48 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana (19)
31 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (10)
29 M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James (16)
20 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time (04)

this is probably true for many others but every one but mr james i first read as a teenager or younger.

Ha, I am actually in the middle of reading M.R. James for the first time RIGHT NOW. (though I had read a couple of stories before).

Stuff that's placed for me so far,
Lanark,
We,
The Hobbit,
Frankenstein,
MR James,
Susan Cooper (tried to think about why it was good. didn't get very far, but sheer juvenile affection got it a vote).
Foundation, probably incredibly boring and dry to read now, but loved all that psychohistory schtick when I was younger.
The Call of Cthulu,
The Drowned World.

A couple of mine have placed, but I'm happiest about The Drowned World.

Interesting poll! Philip K. Dick heavily represented, predictably, but a good spread of other stuff too. Wish I'd voted!

I can think of at least two things wrong with that title.

― Nelson (Muntz), Sunday, 31 March 1996 6:49 (15 years ago)

lol nicely done

it's been very consensus-y so far in part bcz a lot of what's placing high we all read as kids

it's been consensus-y cuz I was in a 4 hour meeting that kept mre from complaining about people placing fucking Master and Margarita and the Illuminatus trilogy and other silly ass nonsense

Margaret Atwood? gtfo

glad to see Pohl place though (Gateway is canonical but imho Space Merchants and Jem are both waaaaaay better)

and I'm dreading the top 10, honestly, with all the best PKD stuff already placing so low. yikes

fingers crossed for my favorite Moorcock stuff lol

Illuminatus was high on my ballot. I concede it's silly ass nonsense, but for this 14-year-old, it was huge fun. Different books went on my ballot for different reasons. ::shrug::

Stuff from my ballot that has shown up:
Drowned World
Naked Lunch
Alice
At the Mts of Madness
Gateway
Illuminatus trilogy
Frankenstein
Slaughterhouse-Five

ahhh, fuck Moorcock ppbbbbtttthhh

Although I almost nommed/voted for the Cornelius Chronicles

So far this list has been rather "SF and F is something one reads in one's formative years but not as an adult" IMO

yeah and I find this kind of annoying tbh. I certainly didn't formulate my ballot this way.

'the master and margarita' is a genuinely great work and even better in the more recent translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky (Ginsburg's is spotty and i guess from a censored version of the work.) i probably would not have voted for it here just b/c i'm not sure for my own personal definition of this genre it would fit.

yeah and I find this kind of annoying tbh. I certainly didn't formulate my ballot this way.

― in my world of loose geirs (Shakey Mo Collier), Tuesday, April 5, 2011 5:34 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark

do you feel like you've been bamboozled

no, I feel like I've participated in an ILX poll lol

I really do not understand the near-universal adoration of Master & Margarita. It was okay, but it wouldn't even place in my Top 10 Russian Novels list.

stuff i voted for

Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time

my number one! thx you mum for giving me such great books to read when i was young

Philip K. Dick - Ubik

only just getting into PKD at the moment (recently I've read martian time slip, a scanner darkly and ubik). his writing is incredible but ubik stands out for me for being so fun

M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James

another one i read when i was really quite young! 'casting the runes' is so dope

Fredrik Pohl - Gateway
J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
read both of these in the last year. gateway is such a cool concept - is this book part of a series? i read the drowned world on holiday lying on the beach in the sun dreaming of swimming out into primordial swamps <3 AWESOME <3

H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

my favourite lovecraft story

needed a new book today so picked up 'lanark' thx to this thread

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSFkGKBG-LiS6T5aT8FyKd4wmUrlLLjAz2Gjy1JxOrj1G8yUF0Blw

tpp, yes --

Pohl's novels featuring the Heechee are:

* Gateway (1977)
* Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980)
* Heechee Rendezvous (1984)
* Annals of the Heechee (1987)
* The Boy Who Would Live Forever: A Novel of Gateway (2004)

Pohl has also released a collection of short stories in the series:

* The Gateway Trip (1990)

http://i.imgur.com/eZVoY.jpg

Are any of the other Heechee books good? Love Gateway.

oooooooooh will try and get around to checking those out thanks xp

they're all pretty good imho, although I haven't read the most recent two

They're all good.

Like so many other novels where the author had more ideas than he could fit into the first novel, the Heechee series has diminishing returns, but I remember the first three being really good. I don't think I read past the first three.

Actually the fourth one is just okay now that I refresh myself with the plot points.

So happy to come online and find the countdown! Please/surprised to see some of my noms so high, and also pleased to see love for some I felt bad for not being able to include.
But no power on earth will make me read Robert Jordan.

I for one am totally stoked with this melange of YA stuff and 'grown up' sci-fi and fantasy and po-faced adult 'not scifi or fantasy at all nonono' books.

3 of my picks charted so far (frankenstein, lovecraft, m.r. james), pleased to see the kafka in there, and definitely gonna check out pohl.

Stuff I voted for starting to turn up. MR James, 3 Stigmata, Valis, &:

26 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

One of those things I couldn't quite believe I was voting for - annoying, loved by wake-up-sheeple types, not especially important to me (read in my mid-20s, so about ten years too late). Think it's the relentlessness cheap thrills, the way it throws ideas, jokes, bullshit around non-stop, pointless cerebral sugar rush & narrative fairground.

still nothing i voted for, i think? kind of holding out, now

Five of mine are in. I'm pleased to say I pulled Brave New World after submitting so I could get a far better book in. BNW has good ideas for sure, but as a novel it is terrible. Nowadays I'd rather have great stories and the author can keep his ideas to himself, thanks. Maybe this Illuminatus! sounds like just the ticket, actually.

i dunno, Illuminatus! is a total fking mess as a novel, and pretty pleased with itself for being such a mess.

Couldn't get more than 20 pages in. Hate conspiracy theory.

It's garbage.

It's one of those books (like Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land, in a different way) that seemed like the most profound thing I'd ever read at the age of 15, and embarrassing nonsense 5 years later.

so is the top half all delany all the time or did vote splitting leave us w/no delany, i wonder

also like that for me, with lags of varying lengths:

• The Alchemist
• most books by journalists (if they ever seem profound)
• Chomsky
• any tract predicting the downfall of the west
• experimental fiction

so is the top half all delany all the time or did vote splitting leave us w/no delany, i wonder

I've only read Nova, but didn't vote for it in the end.

I'm thinking the same about Michael Moorcock (who I voted for three times!)

enjoying the slightly unpredictable, all-over-the-shop this is rolling - thinking Ballard should pop up again. Expecting to see LOTR, Scanner Darkly, Lion in my Wardrobe, Forever War, Book of the New Sun, Hitch-hikers Guide.

Was a lot of Moorcock nominated? He seems a natural vote-splitter.

Maybe if I show you a picture of Vernor Vinge he'll place higher. http://www.gbn.com/images/people/46_vernor%20vinge.jpg

Starting to think from now on it's all going to be butterflies and zebras, moonbeams and fairy tales.

i predict the #1 will be a book that most teenagers are forced to read in school.

The list so far, like SF as a whole, has too much Dick.

can't take exception to PKD, the placing of The Hobbit is some bullshit tho imo

Just see at as a sweet-natured 20th century fairy tale really. It was also the first book I properly read. But I'm feeling a bit guilty now. It's nowhere near as good as some stuff I left off.

i like it well enough but JRR is a clunker of a writer imo and I would've place more or less every book that finished below it above it

The list so far, like SF as a whole, has too much Dick.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, April 6, 2011 9:31 AM (4 minutes ago)

otm

I have halfling-fatigue like every other right-thinking person, but Tolkien had to make the list somewhere.

don't agree. being the originator don't make you the leader of the pack

Ey now, The Hobbit's a terrific yarn. It's the follow-up I have ambivalence about - applaud the ambition, wish he'd been kept on a leash a bit more.

LOTR was another I was surprised to find myself throwing a low vote to - fond of its overinvention & academic fussiness/depth spread across a 30s-ish landscape & England book. Amazingly bad passages (all that romance stuff late on!) and fairly boring stretches, but it fascinates me (like I try to imagine alternate universe in which it is an out-of-the-way book that had no success - a forgotten project of obsessive don - I would be screaming about it all day in that universe)

I gave LOTR quite a high vote but that was mainly because of what it meant to me growing up.
I think four books on my list got their position due as much to their formative influence as their absolute quality as books.

This poll isn't at all what I expected. I didn't vote (or even read the threads) because I assumed it would be just sci-fi and wizardy stuff (which, despite being named after a Michael Moorcock character, I don't read at all) but Pynchon, Shelley, Vonnegut, Huxley, Carroll, Bulgakov and MR James are some of my all-time favourites. I think the list I feared was maybe the one Shakey wanted.

I think four books on my list got their position due as much to their formative influence as their absolute quality as books.

Yeah that was the approach I took - prob more than four tbh. Although I will rep for absolute quality of LOTR, screw you all.

My LOTR vote was present-day and sincere, reread them all not long ago and it's one of those tremendous monsters of a work where the flaws just get steamrollered by the vision. Did not vote it top 5 but did vote it top 10.

I predict no Delany in this countdown. That makes me sad. In fact, it's starting to feel like the only things I voted for which will get in are LOTR and New Sun.

Will totally check out some Pohl cuz of this Poll.

It's garbage.

^^^this. I read the whole thing a few years ago and it was fun in a goofy way but it is a) really shittily written and constructed, b) oppressively smug, and c) its best ideas are liberally cribbed from other, better sources

My LOTR vote was present-day and sincere, reread them all not long ago and it's one of those tremendous monsters of a work where the flaws just get steamrollered by the vision.

^^^also cosign this. I give points for being such a seminal work.

Don't get me wrong LOTR would probably have scraped into my top 25 on it's own merit. The fact that it transformed my life as a pre-teen pushed it right up into my top 5.

I was going to agree about transforming life as a teen, but how can that possibly be true?!

Tolkien didn't make my final ballot, but it would have made a top-50.

LOTR is still my favourite "big fantasy" work, more for the layers of loss and sadness that saturate it than for the (obviously seminal) plot and characters.

I agree with that. LotR has in many ways a more adult sensibility and more depth than a lot of the fantasy that followed in its footsteps. It's not all just high adventure (though there's plenty of that too), the sense of an older, more mythical world fading away is almost tangible in the books. And when you think about, even though none of the main characters die, Sam is pretty much the only one of them who gets a traditional storybook happy ending.

whoever suggested 1984 wins, i hope they are very wrong

And when you think about, even though none of the main characters die, Sam is pretty much the only one of them who gets a traditional storybook happy ending.

And that fact then makes Sam's ending kind of sad in a way, too.

1984 shouldn't win, but I reread it several years ago and that's a good piece of writing there

everybody reads it in high school but everybody reads hamlet too and so what

I never read 1984 in high school, or any school. Or at any point in my life.

I re-read it a few years ago. it's classic status is well-deserved.

yep

jeff you are missing out on some wacky dystopian hijinks!

I can't believe all you horrible Britishes hate The Dark Is Rising and think Cooper is anti-fun. The first book in that series still makes my neck prickle with the menace and wildness of the magic that is coming to, and for, Will Stanton, and later books The Greenwich and the last one, Silver on the Tree, are quite adult for their reading audiences and hint at a lot of things that they don't say outright, which is very deftly done and not found NEARLY enough in YA lit. Silver is also hugely synthetic, if that's the right way to say it? and grabs so many images and story bits that are in our vague awareness/culture/mythology and puts them to work adding symbolism and a feeling of momentousness.

Do you hate it because of antipathy about any kind of Welsh/Irish pride stuff? The later books are p heavily Arthurian, but everything of interest is set in Wales.

Have a feeling James Morrison and myself won't be enough to get Morel in the Top Ten

The list so far, like SF as a whole, has too much Dick. ― Guayaquil (eephus!)

Fully expect it will also have too much dick, but I'll wait and see how the countdown goes on. Don't blame me, I voted for plenty of women authors.

I would guess that most of the PKD stuff that's going to place has already made it. Only one left that I would expect to place is A Scanner Darkly. maybe Man in the High Castle, can't remember if that has any serious defenders or not

if this list has no Delany on it, that will be a small victory

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/17AScanner.png
17 - Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
131 points/10 votes/0 #1 votes

It's as corny as anything, but I once had a near-religious epiphany while reading 'A Scanner Darkly' on a bus going from Brockley to Lewisham. It wasn't so much a mind-altering/expanding bk as a text capable of bringing back certain lived lysergic experiences. Powerful and unsettling.

― Andrew L (Andrew L), Tuesday, May 13, 2003 3:05 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

lol

so many great things have already made it I'm a little scared of what the upper bracket is composed of tbh

ugh, jesus! Dick Dick Dick Dick Dick Dick Dick

http://cdn.mos.totalfilm.com/images/r/reservoir-dogs-1992--00-630-75.jpg

lookin fwd to LOTR #1 may well re-read in celebrimbation

Man there should never be ANY PKD cover designs except these DAW ones, they are kicking my ass!

(putting in an early vote for the crazy LOTR cover designs from the early Ballantine pb's where there are like a million little stylized creatures running around)

(or the ones w the low-contrast Tolkein paintings, anything but photorealistic eagles tbh)

Woot. A Scanner Darkly is my favorite PKD.

Mine too.

mine too

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/dispossessed2.jpg?t=1302110245
16 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
132 points/9 votes/0 #1 votes

Not in the least bit trashy: 'The Dispossessed' by Ursula le Guin. Probably the best political sci-fi I've read. Including '1984'.

― Wooden (Wooden), Wednesday, August 18, 2004 2:23 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

I love books, and I love Ursula Le Guin! In fact I just wrote a paper on how she redefined traditional notions of text/literature as a ?? post-modernist author. What fun!

― kath (kath), Friday, June 11, 2004 9:54 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

This muthafucka has still never read Scanner Darkly or Palmer Eldritch. Sort of saved them for later on purpose (my time of biggest PKD reading activity was like 1989-1994).

Ursula K Le Guin hooray! Must reread them all some day.

great book, surprised to see it place so high (presumably beating out Left Hand of Darkness?) It's definitely a high point for her. I think it was the first place I really read anything that took anarchism seriously.

The Dispossessed was totally a formational book for me in terms of my political views when I read it as a teen.

today's dick ratio is 1:2

Wow, girthy!

WmC what is your problem with Dick

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/15ASong.jpg?t=1302110900
15 George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire
133 points/10 votes/1 #1 vote

Trust, remy. Martin executes his plots deftly and swiftly, and his characters are really well drawn. It does have some of the weaknesses of the fantasy genre -- the prose can get a bit, uh, purple -- but a lot of the supernatural stuff is kept in the background. It's all about the subterfuge and intrigue and suspense. Do it. You won't regret it.

― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Saturday, January 7, 2006 6:57 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JjTZojojDPI/SxPR-ffvWkI/AAAAAAAAAok/bzrrZEsb1T4/s1600/0007stfc.jpg

― Sheenastia Easton (ENBB), Friday, January 28, 2011 9:56 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark

I mean sure maybe he's overrepresented here (does he have more great books than, say, Lem? or Moorcock? eh maybe) but his body of work is pretty impressive and broad on the whole

xp

I am kinda dreading dealing with George R. R. Martin

also uh isn't that the wrong cover bro

It's a series. That's the upcoming book.

also uh isn't that the wrong cover bro

its a joke

... on the ppl thinking that book will actually come out

I took three serious runs at PKD in my teens, early 20s and late 20s, and in each case there was something about the prose style that turned me off -- I guess a similar reaction to your issues with Delany. No denying the scope of his ideas and the body of work as a whole, there was just something about the execution that turned me off. I owe him another shot, I guess.

x-post - lol

GRRM did not make it into my ballot but he deserves a placement. No one had ever done high fantasy noir quite like this b4 he came along. Fantasyland as infernal machine.

Like you get the feeling in these books that the world FUKN SUCKS but even worse is the cold void outside it.

huh. seems like the kind of thing I would hate, tbh

I dated someone once who wasn't too bright but was into PKD as some kind of...subversive thing? No objection to people read and liking books for their own reasons, but I'm p sure it was liking the IDEA of liking PKD more than actually reading him. Because he didn't read.

Gave a bunch of PKD a try in that year but hated it all except the short stories. Quite liked the shorts, actually.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/14DoAndroids.jpg?t=1302111945
14 Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
133 points/11 votes/0 #1 votes

I read him amongst a lot of other science fiction when I was 12 and only read 'Gollancz'. So as a purist I think you ought only to read the Gollancz editions. Those yellow labels really used to stick out. He's great before you hit puberty. After that he's a drag because of things like his above-mentioned attitude to women. Who's gonna pretend he's not childish and vain? When I read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' it was comparable to the experience of reading 'Crime and Punishment' before I could understand it. I can't complain about his style at all. I have no problems with the use of adverbs - I mean Dick's books are full of vague phrases like 'Abba was a tender and wise entity, huge and furry and pretty' - but I have few problems with that; to me it's better than Hemingway-esque 'Style and Grace' editing. And obviously the ideas he deals with and his willingness to go with a dream (not a 'fantasy') over a plot make him better than most sci-fi writers. It's a gift to impoverished readers to have some Kafka or Dostoevsky inserted into a pulp novel - a novel that doesn't take you a year to recover from, as a 'masterpiece' would.

― maryann, Thursday, May 30, 2002 7:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

okay this is getting kind of ridiculous

ridickulous, even.

yeah i love PKD too but i only voted for 'a scanner darkly' since it's my favorite one and i dont like to look like that guy who's got 6 beatles records on his top 20 albums list

I think I put A Scanner Darkly and the Valis trilogy on my list, I tried to stay away from voting for more than one book per author in general

and we still haven't gotten man in the high castle on here so it's probably not over yet...

In ILX terms, PKD = New Order or something.

(which i just read for the first time a couple weeks ago, very good)

Earth Abides is not going to make this list, but another 4 or 5 Dick books will at this rate

I voted for Man in the High Castle

The only author allowed two votes on my ballot was Vance.

so is it just crazy vote-splitting that got us these results? everyone voted for a couple different PKD books? I guess that's some kind of consensus, but it seems wrong.

I'd laugh if all of the Gibson books ended up in the top 10

If this was a poll on dissensus or w/e we would be complaining about too high a Ballard ratio.

given all the heavy-hitting canonical stuff I still expect to place I guess no one else voted for Noon or Lethem eh

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/13Ficciones.jpg?t=1302111945
13 Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
138 points/10 votes/0 #1 votes

I just finished Borges' Ficciones, which may be the best thing I've ever read.

― Z S, Sunday, June 24, 2007 8:29 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

It is also possible to argue that Borges’s work was indeed political, that he himself was a political activist all his life, that his lack of interest as an artist in the world outside the book arose from his and his mother’s dislike of the dominant elements in Argentine society, that his style and his system developed not despite Argentine society but because of it.

― Colm Tóibín, Sunday, May 11, 2006 3:17 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark

^^ kinda on some "if you dudez were going 2 vote 4 it shouldve been #1" tip here personally btw

also: Z S otm

Borges is like a genre unto himself

is Calvino gonna place too now lol

OK well Cosmicomics better be on here then (showing my allegiances)

ha xpost

Love Borges and Calvino should imo!

Calvino got my #1 vote.

:D

yesss

alright gonna get the next one out of the way, lol...

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/12TheManintheHigh.jpg?t=1302112813
12 Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
161 points/11 votes/0 #1 votes

Where is the love for The Man In The High Castle? I thought this was by far his best. Though love Ubik and Palmer Eldritch too, think those are the three to go for. I found Valis beyond dullsville.

― Meg Busset, Thursday, January 17, 2008 3:58 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark

I see Man in the High Castle as of a piece with Dick's other "alternate reality/timestream" novels and stories, of which there are many. But the thing that really differentiates it is the I Ching device, which clearly compounded Dick's already rather half-assed approach to plot construction and narrative pacing... I like it okay, but it doesn't contain many ideas I feel compelled to return to (unlike other books of his which have similar structural problems but also more challenging concepts). Why it won the Hugo is also kind of a mystery to me...

― Shakey Mo Collier, Monday, February 26, 2007 5:44 PM (4 years ago) Bookmark

hahaha

lol

^ & xpost
What they said.

Vote-splitting keeps Dick out of the top 10, unless Now Wait For Last Year or something equally left-field sneaks in.

galactic pot healer at #1

Clears the way for E.E. "Doc" Smith I guess

galactic pot healer at #1

I lol'd

I'm guessing there weren't a ton of write-ins for A Clockwork Orange as I would have expected to see it by now.

goddamn sausage party

I'd laugh if all of the Gibson books ended up in the top 10

― fat fat fat fat Usher (DJP), Wednesday, April 6, 2011 1:52 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

If this happens Jon Lewis is off the web because of you

(I still think the top 3 is going to be some permutation of Watership Down, Hitchhiker's Guide and LOTR)

only a half-dozen or so people's #1 votes have placed so far, so I expect there's gonna be some kind of consensus/canonical stuff to come. (Tiptree better be in there you bastards!)

I'm not sure a single Dick novel (outside of Scanner) would make my top 20 sci-fi novels, but he would have a dozen in my top 100 so I'm sort of pleased by this.

11 James Smith - The Mace Windu Chronicles
172 points/13 votes/5 #1 votes

Dan don't forget about harry potter!

goddamn sausage party

not sure what you were expecting - more Anne McCaffrey votes? list is heavily (albeit not ALL) male yeah, but the genre is really male-dominated too

I voted for 3 Dick novels and I kind of feel bad about it now

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/11Ballard.jpg?t=1302113231
11 J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
162 points/11 votes/3 #1 votes

I agree the short stories are probably better than many of the novels. I wouldn't know which one of those to vote for, there are too many astounding ones.

― Milton Parker, Monday, March 9, 2009 4:40 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark

[W]orking my way through The Collected Stories of JG Ballard. Reading his early stories now, they're more conventional/scientific sci-fi than you might expect, with intricate twists & surprise endings but you can see the Ballardian themes/obsessions start to emerge/evolve. what sets him apart from genre is his diamond-brilliant prose. and his writing is why I vastly prefer Ballard to PK Dick (who I respect but find physically hard to read). never gonna finish 1000+ pages by the time this book is due back at the library, even with renewals, but finishing it will be worth whatever fines are incurred.

― the mighty the mighty BOHANNON (m coleman), Tuesday, February 9, 2010 5:23 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Dan don't forget about harry potter!

oh, right

bleah

oh shit dogs you know what we haven't seen yet

rhymes with goon

the ballard collection is technically the most contemporary title itl

http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQbWVtAFhE9yD1tnUZjw8PHdIFWuyY6kq2FbjvYGra6r0oszXFx&t=1

not sure what you were expecting - more Anne McCaffrey votes?

it was a "too much Dick" pun

I must say - Ballard's recycling of the "charismatic madman running a cult in some post-apocalyptic scenario" plot has always made me kind of underrate him. every time I run into it (Crash, Hello America, a bunch of short stories) I'm always like "wtf THIS again?"

Ballard's novels are pretty unnecessary if you've read all the short stories imo, he covers all the same ground and you don't notice the non-existent characterisation so much.

I've always preferred Ballard's re-use of themes over Moorcock's Eternal Champion.

eh, I appreciate that Moorcock at least constructs a convincing excuse for recycling characters/plots

Maitland looked across the drained lagoon at dusk. His semen traced the coutours of Elizabeth's thigh etc etc etc

I like that we've moved from Dick to Moorcock

LOOOL

if only there was a sci-fi fantasy writer named sausage

Anus Anus Attanasio

There must be a Wang.

George R. R. Sausage

I want to complain about everything but I kind of love this thread

Man, I've only ever read one PKD novel (The Man in the High Castle fwiw) and I didn't think too much of it, so these results are kinda wtf to me

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/10Dune.jpg?t=1302113771
10 Frank Herbert - Dune
179 points/14 votes/0 #1 votes

Dune the first one = Classic.

Probably one of my top 5 SF novels - loved how the setting was based around this hard environmental science (which in retrospect doesn't make sense anyway), but then it kind of deliberately tried to piss off all the physics nerds by inserting all this great psychic/telepathy stuff into the narrative. "Screw realistic FTL travel, let's just stick this alien in a tank, feed it hallucinogenic drugs, and it can bend us through space and time." Also loved the idea of the Mentats - "we don't trust AI so we will train humans to be computers instead."

It is a) one of the few canonical SF novels that really stands up, b) seems to pave the way for New Wave in the 1960's and simultaneously make a break with SF as it was in the 40's and 50's (although admittedly this is pure speculation on my part as it was many decades before my birth - contemporary fans and writers may have felt differently).

The rest of the series seemed like a dud to me though - I've read several of the sequels multiple times and really I can't remember anything much about them, except the impression that Frank Herbert really didn't want to write them (maybe that is wishful thinking).

― ears are wounds, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:29 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

i've read them many many times.

i understand the series up to the fourth book.

my comprehension gets rather fuzzy at the fifth.

i've been rereading the sixth in bits and pieces to try to get it.

TOTALLY CLASSIC.

― vahid (vahid), Wednesday, January 7, 2004 5:03 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

boooooo

is that a too low boo or a too high boo

welp my nerd rage about the placement of kafka and borges is weaker than my nerd rage about the placement of dune so here we are

Liked the first one a helluva lot, but seriously diminishing returns for me as I kept reading deeper into the series.

^^^ yes

too high!

but then I like the movie better than the book lol. book was just ponderously impenetrable to me. granted that was 15 years ago

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/9Neuromancer.jpg?t=1302113980
09 William Gibson - Neuromancer
188 points/14 votes/1 #1 vote
Favorite first sentence of a novel

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

― Onimo (GerryNemo), Monday, May 24, 2004 10:22 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

THIS BOOK OWNS

Poor showing for The Big Three so far (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov), maybe they're not The Big Three any more.

Thus, I didn't vote for Dune. Diminishing returns made me skip Erikson too, even though books 2-6 of the Malazan series are some of the best Fantasy I've ever read.

x-post

I actually thought Neuromancer might win.

Neuromancer is awesome.

I'm looking back at my ballot and I think I was high when I submitted it.

My #10 comes in at #9 -- closest match to my ballot so far, v. satisfying. ::burp::

This was my #12, and I really don't know why it wasn't higher

have never read neuromancer and I don't know why

loved dune but haven't read it since high school

Dune and Neuromancer are both really overrated and boring.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/8Narnia.jpg?t=1302113771
08 C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
195 points/12 votes/1 #1 vote

i haven't read wardrobe since early elementary school pretty much because of familiarity compounded by ubiquity but i think i will try again after finishing the last battle, it was my (and everyone else's i bet) introduction to both narnia and lewis and i was completely utterly captivated by it as a child. edmund was my favorite, of course.

― ethan, Sunday, March 10, 2002 8:00 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark

He plagarized THE BIBLE.

― JM, Sunday, March 10, 2002 8:00 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

that colour is blue now. see also: my display name

Yuck.

Great to see the Ballard short stories there - ideas factory, dapper literary style (and often characters), great at a sort of weird colonial/heart of darkness thing - affectless people gradually going into completely out there places, based on weird imaginative extrapolations of current scientific and popular culture.

Read Dune a lot when I was younger (i was a bit in love with one of the characters), but the big politics bored the hell out of me even then.

Neuromancer is great, in fact, I haven't read it since I was 15/16, and I reckon I'd enjoy it as much now or even more maybe as I did then.

Poor showing for The Big Three so far (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov), maybe they're not The Big Three any more.

― Gully Foyle is my name (Matt #2), Wednesday, April 6, 2011 2:22 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

http://images.wikia.com/simpsons/images/5/5a/Martin.jpg

From what I remember, here's how I'd rank the Narnia books

The Silver Chair
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Magician's Nephew
.
.
.
.
The Horse and His Boy
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
[about a bazillion more "."s]
The Last Battle

Hoo boy, Narnia. The Last Battle is srsly weird, in a bad way. I read them all again recently (was convalescing and there weren't any other books for a few days). Not sure I really liked them. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe taps into some great stuff, the rest, there's a lot of dubious race characterisation, well Turk/Christian stuff anyway, or so it seems to me. Wd go for his science fiction trilogy personally. Silver Chair is pretty weird tho. Very subterranean iirc.

I want it understood that my Dune vote at #20something was for the first book only...

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/7TheLeft.jpg?t=1302114074
07 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
199 points/11 votes/2 #1 votes

you would hope people have moved beyond looking at le guin as a sci fi writer

― moonship journey to baja, Friday, July 17, 2009 5:43 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

When I was 14 I was Mr. Tumnus in a production of the musical version of Narnia. They made me, in all of my early adolescent awkward and chubby glory, wear white spandex with a cropped tuxedo jacket, a top hat and hooves made out of construction paper. It was so traumatizing that I don't think I've been able to think of anything even remotely related to CS Lewis fondly since then.

okay wait

(Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov), maybe they're not The Big Three any more.

Heinlein is mostly garbage. Clarke eh, I dunno - I would hope that Rendezvous with Rama or 2001 would place? Asimov is seminal but definitely archaic/outdated to read him now. I tried to re-read Foundation recently and couldn't really do it.

you heard me

Wd go for his science fiction trilogy personally.

^^^yes

that's a perfect storm of awful, E!

Yes Le Guin! Was my #7 vote too.

"you would hope people have moved beyond looking at le guin as a sci fi writer"

hahaha

x-post - Trust me, I know. I had a solo too. It was so mortifying.

huh didn't expect LHOD to place so high but I'm cool with that. LeGuin is great, book is phenomenal, etc.

a panpipe solo?

xp

I still haven't read that Le Guin, largely because my wife had to read it for a class in college and thoroughly detested it. (Then again, she also hated Snow Crash which I ended up loving; I don't remember why she was getting assigned all of these SF books but it was kind of severe bait-and-switch on the part of the professor, lol)

Actually re-read The Last Battle relatively recently to see if it was as insane as i remembered. Yeah, pretty much

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/6HisDarkMaterials.jpg?t=1302114111
06 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
219 points/12 votes/2 #1 votes

I think this is a magnificent series. I expect they work beautifully as adventure stories for children, with the daemon idea being very charming, and intelligent polar bears in armour are another winner. However as an allegedly intellectual adult, I loved the richness of the underpinnings and thematic content, the radical ideas spun off from the fringes of modern physics, and the astounding central meaning: even if religion is 100% true (as it can be and is in this fantasy world) it is still a very bad thing, to be opposed. This is a daring and original theme, especially for a young audience.

I don't care about Harry Potter, and these aren't that market - they're much more in the Lord of the Rings sector, but I think they are superior in every way to that, and (urgent and key point) immensely more enjoyable to read.

― Martin Skidmore, Friday, July 19, 2002 7:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

I had two Heinleins on my ballot, a case of loving the work even when I know the creator is a dickhole. I can see one of them sneaking in top-6, but not the other.

xpost, top-5 rather

Another one I left off despite loving the first book. Thought the second okay but hated the last one.

xpost

this just barely missed my ballot

have to admit the overwhelming love for pullman on ilx (not just on this poll but when searching for quotes ppl fukken adore him) surprises me... have no h8 for this series or anything but its 'ideas' seem p tedious & its sorta cross & didactic in an unappealing way

My #1 - voted for the alternate world which I think is the best and best-done I know. I was a little surprised that I thought this, but only a little.

06 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials

I haven't read this but gtfo with this atheist propaganda angle being a selling point

x-posts Yeah I loved the first one but didn't even like the 2nd one enough to finish it.

but it's really fun atheist propaganda!

xp

First one great, second one is fine, third gtfo.

Lost interest in Pullman after the second book. Daemons are a pretty cool idea tho

well that's a better selling point, but I hate aesthetics that privelege ideology

xp

too bad the film adaptation was poor. the only good things in the film were the daemons and the bears.

Pullman was apparently my #2, not quite sure how that happened. though I do love it.

Strongly disagree that the first book is the best. Though I think we can all agree that the movie was garbage.

xp

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/51984.jpg?t=1302114333
05 George Orwell - 1984
223 points/14 votes/0 #1 votes

do the actions of winston and julia change the world ?

does it matter ?

― anthony easton (anthony), Saturday, November 23, 2002 2:22 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

He's a pragmatist as only a disillusioned idealist can be. How can you not be when you've lived through the collapse of several ideologies in the course of ten years?

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Wednesday, July 25, 2007 8:54 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

Some unfortunate omissions, but genuinely innovative and effective.

― the Orwellian scholar, Sunday, June 15, 2003 5:06 PM (7 years ago) Bookmar

*whew* back on track

I don't know whether anyone's read his teenage female detective books, but I thought all four were superb. woah xpost wrt pullman

Somehow I have never read 1984, I guess I should?

xxxxpost try the audiobook which is a "full cast" radio drama type thing, it's a blast.

i just read that despite the disappointing box office of that movie in the u.s. it still hit nearly $400 million worldwide, which is pretty amazing.

too bad the film adaptation was poor. the only good things in the film were the daemons and the bears.

Never read the book but saw them film. Was there any atheist propaganda in the film? None that I can remember.

The most striking image in the Pullman series for me (aside from the daemons) was the revelation of God near the end. I wish he had ended with that.

1984 is great but somehow not on my ballot...?

pretty sure that Steve Aylett's Shamanspace - about an assassin hired to kill God - is more entertaining

Well, I think they had to tone it down for the movie, which is one of the reasons it sucked.

xp

Tiptree better be in there

does anybody anywhere rate Aylett? His name never seems to come up on these threads.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/4Hitchhikers.jpg?t=1302114726
04 Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
254 points/17 votes/0 #1 votes

More importantly, however, is that after many years away from the book versions of the story -- I usually dig out the radio series once a year for a listen -- I realized two clear things about Adams' work. First, a large part of my writing style in terms of humorous fiction writing comes from him and his various picaresque spins, grotesques and playing with the language. I say this not to claim I'm equal to his writing ability or that I'm slavishly following in his footsteps, but to note with a pleasant shock as to how clearly and carefully his work was inculcated into my way of working with words. I'm quite positive I use the word 'bemused' in general from a part where Adams wrote: "'Catch it?' said Arthur, then frowned in bemusement...' -- read very well by Moore and instantly returning to memory upon replaying it.

Secondly...he was, quite simply, an extremely fine writer. In the same way that something like Peanuts reads one way at one age and then another way later on, moments in the books that once seemed only amusing or slight take on newer casts, suggest new depths, reveal that Adams definitely had a lot on his mind but was able to deftly suggest many things as a result, in a framework that he more or less stumbled into after Hitchhiker's initial success on the radio, and which eventually became his core metier. From a distance, for instance, the seeming 'disappointment' of So Long not being a 'classic' Hitchhiker's story becomes an appreciation of the book's own virtues, at capturing feelings of desire and love, of suggesting something as awesome as a break between two near identical worlds, of creating a whole new conception of reality out of an instruction on a toothpick box. There's a part near the start of the book where Arthur looks out from his house and finds himself connecting with all around him, almost being able to sense other minds, in a way that's both empathetic and regarding from on high, that's very captivating to me.

Then there's something as imaginative, sad and amusing as the story of 'the Reason' in the epilogue from Life, the Universe and Everything, which somehow reduces the story of stupidity and war into a simple but sad fable, one without resolution. Listening to it was almost like heaving a great sigh, one with both warmth and melancholy, the latter predominating. Ed on one of the movie threads noted that Adams' universe in his fiction was one where humanity wasn't at the center, not even on the barest fringe, in a larger construct of existential action -- it reminds me, very much, of H. P. Lovecraft's similar conceptions, but Adams had so much which Lovecraft lacked. If Agrajaj is a Lovecraftian horror down to the name, his scenario of being constantly killed by Arthur Dent is still cosmic japery, and Lovecraft could never capture at all the simple joy of being in a beautiful park with someone you love on a late summer afternoon.

All that and he can be just so funny, making me laugh out loud when talking about the sun shining down on the burglars of Islington.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Monday, April 18, 2005 11:53 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

ooh so close re: my prediction

(this was my #2)

(also curse all of you who voted for Harry fucking Potter)

Another series that faded as it went on. Love the first two though.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/3Book.jpg?t=1302114760
03 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
261 points/14 votes/2 #1 votes

Gene Wolfe thirded - his Book of the New Sun novels are a far-future fantasy which can be very cryptic because it's written first-person and the perspective shift is often quite unforgiving (this is also how it gets round the "magic" thing). Beautifully done, though, easily my favourite fantasy novels.

― Tom (Groke), Wednesday, September 7, 2005 6:55 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

Book of the New Sun! Shit this is weird. I was going to start a thread on this the other day. Reason being - you know when something reminds you of a book you read, until you realise, "Wow, a LOT of things lately have reminded me of scenes in the same book so therefore the book must be kinda good?" Well the description in 'SotT' of the world where layers of civilisation are lost underfoot and minutely-calibrated-pain-exchanges = society-distilled-to-essence (sort of 'Songs of [collective] ExperiencexUltra'] - reminds of (u KNOW what I'm going to say right?) Also I remember being in luv w/ Dorcas but feeling like an asshole about it right? I think one is supposed to. I dunno, I'm not very good with this 'emotions' thing. Wassit like? I read this book when I lived in prefab W Canadian community w/ no 'collective memory' or whatever, and 'SotT' made me wonder, "What must it be LIKE to be in a world like that?" (Now I'm in one and it's - giggle - TORTURE! heh heh) Then a few years later I lived in NYC and I thought "This must kinda be like 1% of what the Citadel-world is like", and I actually met some chick called Dorcas and I did have a bit of a weird thought like "Am I only talking to this person because of that name?" (I didn't tell HER that tho, I mean c'mon). Man, I'm trippin' out on the sci-fi thing, thanx! Here's the worst bit though, I finished 'SotT' in my teens and I think that when I started 'CotC' it unfortunately coincided with me moving away from home the first time (we're talkin' triple-digit mileage here N. American style, not the UK 'moving to the garden shed, wow what an adventure in self-reliance' thing), so amidst all that upheaval I never got any further, but if I ever get a chance to do some guaranteed uninterrupted reading (highly unlikely except in case of a) confinement to nuclear bunker b) MASSIVE cash windfall coinciding with crippling accident, c) something else of that nature) I'll tackle the whole New Sun thing. Thanx for the reminder!

― dave q, Saturday, December 7, 2002 6:02 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark

reading book of the new sun again theres a lot of words in it

― jveggra va pbqr (Lamp), Friday, August 21, 2009 1:08 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

New Sun is amazing.

really, I only have issues with Mostly Harmless and that is mostly because there are times when you can sense palpable waves of hatred and disdain emanating off of the page directed squarely at you, the reader

xp: okay this is a massive blind spot, never read this

Nice! New Sun was my number one. Possibly the only book I've ever felt compelled to re-read.

also i know using that cover for book of the new sun is childish but it made me lol so hard i cant even

wow i guess i need to read this

RIP Watership Down, you should have been ranked much much higher

That cover is a hoot. I still have all my "timescape" paperbacks.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/2Earthsea.jpg?t=1302114786
02 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Earthsea Trilogy
302 points/19 votes/1 #1 vote

search: first earthsea trilogy as near-perfect fantasy, 90s earthsea as elucidation/exploration of why it's not really possible to write that sort of fantasy anymore; the lathe of heaven (hey-i-could-be-philip-dick-if-i-wanted); the dispossessed (ish); always coming home, but not to actually you know read

― tom west (thomp), Wednesday, December 24, 2003 4:28 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

Earthsea rules them all - Le Guin spare prose is truly outstanding and still reads well with my adult sensabilities (I probably appreciate her artistry more now).

― Stone Monkey (Stone Monkey), Wednesday, October 12, 2005 7:30 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

Wolfe! yes. Figured this would place high. lol he always has the worst cover art, for the most part.

I dunno how I feel about a genre parody placing in the top 5, seems kinda... wrong. And I say this as someone who thinks that first book is really great.

02 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Earthsea Trilogy

okay was REALLY not expecting this. this isn't even her best work!

foregone conclusion what number 1 is I guess.

fuck all you guys for not getting ANY Moorcock on here though.

I would never think of Hitchhiker's Guide as a genre parody.

If there's no Delany in this top 50 I swear I'm going to kick my dog to death and he'll never understand why he had to die.

New Sun my #1 as well. My last rereading was abt 3 years ago and was v v rewarding, gonna do it again in a couple years.

Lamp yr cover choise was awesome

So many of these series start so well and I tire of them by the end. Earthsea is another. I think that's probably more me than these series as I keep saying it as each one places.

hitchhiker's is comic sci-fi as opposed to parody

Just as DJP re: Wolfe I have a blind spot re: LeGuin, rly need to rectify

i vaguely remember reading a wizard of earthsea in middle school or so, guess i should re-read if it's really held in that high esteem by folks here

xpost I do not think New Sun suffers at its finale (but note i refuse to consider Urth Of The New Sun as its finale)

RIP WmC's dog

And mine as well

Yes! Earthsea was my #1 and it is the greatest thing ever, all three of the original books.

I guess lotr will be number one, obviously

i was borderline annoyed @ hitchhiker's guide placing so highly (or at all really i think theyre kinda garbage) but when i read ned's post abt the series i softened - i can see how it might mean a lot to other ppl, how it might have real value

lol anyway on to NUMBER ONE...

Gormenghast!

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/1TheLord.jpg?t=1302114814
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
378 points/21 votes/2 #1 votes

Lord of the Rings (started by anthony on board I Love Everything on 16-Nov-2001)

Lord of the Rings (started by Rolf Königshof on board I Love Film on 18-Apr-2004)

LORD OF THE RINGS! (started by gaol clichy (clichy) on board I Love Books on 2-Mar-2004)

Lord of the Rings fillum (started by Alan Trewartha on board I Love Everything on 10-Dec-2001)

favorite "lord of the rings" character (started by mike (ro)bott on board I Love Everything on 18-Aug-2002)

lord of the rings modulator (started by Ian John50n (orion) on board All Noise Dude Summertime Fun Board and Pickle Bar on 21-Dec-2004)

Taking sides: Lord Of The Rings vs Lord Of The Flies (started by the anti-momus on board I Love Everything on 17-Feb-2004)

Lord of the Rings OST - much cop? (started by dave C on board I Love Music on 17-Dec-2001)

LORD OF THE RINGS poll (film version) (started by "he said...all things passantino the night" (omar little) on board I Love Everything on 23-Jul-2009)

ralph bakshi's lord of the rings (and other adaptation frankensteins) (started by jess on board I Love Everything on 17-Nov-2001)

Silencio (or: Mulholland Dr. vs Lord of the Rings - FITE!) (started by Edna Welthorpe, Mrs on board I Love Everything on 7-Jan-2002)

Lord of the Rings, fashion trendsetter, sez Elle (started by Ned Raggett (Ned) on board I Love Everything on 5-Aug-2003)

Lord of thej Rings: ELves were stupid? (started by Mr. Latham Green (hanle y 3000) on board I Love Everything on 31-Jan-2006)

FORCE FIELD "Lord of the Rings Modulator" ....... C/D? (started by maria b (maria b) on board I Love Music on 4-Apr-2003)

Syncing up Andrew WK and Lord of the Rings (started by richard wood johnson on board I Love Music on 30-Sep-2005)

I Have a Colleague Who Has Suddenyl Become Obsessed with Lord of the Rings (started by MarkH (MarkH) on board I Love Everything on 12-Nov-2002)

Oct. 17 Lord of the Rings exhibit in London pre-Tom FAP special! (started by Ned Raggett (Ned) on board I Love Everything on 7-Oct-2003)

OPO: Lord of the Rings Vs Star Wars (Episodes 4-6) (started by hmmmm on board I Love Everything on 19-Jan-2004)

Lord of the Animated Rings: Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" v Rankin-Bass's "Return of the King" (started by Publicidad de Sexo (Abbbottt) on board I Love Everything on 29-Mar-2011)

LORD OF THE RINGS 2 - FIRST BEST FILM NOMINATION FOR A SEQUEL SINCE GODFATHER 2 ? (started by piscesboy on board I Love Everything on 11-Feb-2003)

The official thread for Lord Of The Rings - The Return Of The King [LOTR ROTK TROTK ROK] (NOW CONTAINS SPOILERS) (started by gygax! (gygax!) on board I Love Everything on 12-Nov-2003)

Taking Sides: Star Wars episodes 1 to 3 v. The Lord of the Rings films (started by DV (dirtyvicar) on board I Love Film on 15-Jul-2003)

#1)Tolkien "the lord of the rings" (well, back in my early teens I loved fantasy novels! I've read many of them but this is just insurpassable. Besides it's beautifully written while most fantasy stuff is RPG-derived, which means that the prose is often lacking... What struck me is that Tolkien created an incredibly detailed world, where everything, from the vegetation up to the races and their languages, is richly described. Plus, it' long and I love saga-like books)

― Simone, Friday, April 6, 2001 7:00 PM (10 years ago) Bookmark

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

my poor dog

yay movies

lol

Thank god it wasn't Gormenghast.

I am really kinda pissed at a bunch of stuff I rated in my top 10 not even appearing. what is wrong with you people

Yeah, why don't we all have the same taste as you

wau that gap between #1 and #2

I'm surprised at no Prydain Chronicles or Chronicles of Amber.

I voted LOTR number one, btw

I'm surprised no harry potter

LOTR win just makes me feel kinda nauseated. Milton otm

xp shakey, are you serious?!

I should have voted.

It's kind of appropriate that lotr is #1, no matter what you think of it. It is the most notable, most popular, most influential work of speculative fiction in the 20th c, probably

Aw hell. woof's partially convinced me, although I still find most of The Two Towers, nearly all of The Return of the King and the first part of the final third of Fellowship tiresome as all hell.

I take back my curses towards the Harry Potter ppl btw

TOP 51:

51 Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination

50 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
49 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
48 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
47 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
46 Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

45 Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
44 Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
43 Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
42 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
41 Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

40 Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
39 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
38 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
37 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
36 Philip K. Dick - Ubik

35 Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
34 Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising Sequence
33 H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
32 William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
31 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

30 Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
29 M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James
28 Fredrik Pohl - Gateway
27 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
26 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy

25 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita
24 J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
23 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
22 Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories
21 H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

20 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time
19 Philip K. Dick - The VALIS Trilogy
18 J.R.R. Tolkein - The Hobbit
17 Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
16 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

15 George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire
14 Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
13 Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
12 Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
11 J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard

10 Frank Herbert - Dune
09 William Gibson - Neuromancer
08 C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
07 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
06 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials

05 George Orwell - 1984
04 Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
03 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
02 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Earthsea Trilogy
01 J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings

seriously tho, do ppl just not adore Watership Down the way I do or was that just outside of the boxes ppl were using to pick their votes?

Never read watership down, though the movie haunted the dreams of my youth

btw the dog is my wife's, not mine, so he survives on a technicality

xp I haven't read Watership Down; I guess I should someday.

seriously tho, do ppl just not adore Watership Down the way I do or was that just outside of the boxes ppl were using to pick their votes?

― fat fat fat fat Usher (DJP), Wednesday, April 6, 2011 12:10 PM (1 minute ago)

it was in my top 5, i think?

I haven't read Watership Down since my early teens. Didn't care for it much then so haven't revisited.

i was just the right age for harry potter when the first few books came out but i suspect i'm at the lower end of the ilx demographic age-wise so i'm not that surprised it didn't show up. also probably major harry potter fatigue around now, i didn't even consider voting for it and have also pledged to myself upon finishing the 7th book that i will not re-read them for at least 10 years.

i did like watership down when i was 12 or so but didn't think of voting for it here

watership down is good, but it's no duncton wood.

OMG

SERIOUSLY IF YOU HAVEN'T READ WD READ IT IMMEDIATELY

I encountered it pretty much by chance when I was... 7? I just assumed it was a kid's book because it had a rabbit on the cover. It remains to this day the second-most enthralling reading experience I've ever had and is largely responsible for me reading fantasy and science fiction almost exclusively.

Shall we post and talk about our ballots here or in a separate thread?

even doing a GIS for "watership down" is sending serious shivers down my spine

I vote for a new thread for ballots

Oh wait, Lamp is posting #52-100 tomorrow, right? I'll hold off with my ballot until then.

xp Dan - that was about when the movie came out, wasn't it?

I've neither read it nor seen the movie. I heard it's about bunnies dying and that it's really sad. I don't want to subject myself to that! ;_;

a couple of notes:

- most ppl voted for at least some sci-fi novels, in fact of the single genre ballots all but two were sci fi (the others were fantasy)
- lost of entries got just as many votes as some really highly-ranked ones, it just seems like some more 'cannonical' pix were consistently on the lower end of ppl's ballots
- like half of the #1 votes ended up off the list, weirdly
- i think the fantasy and ya series were helped bcuz there wasnt any real vote-splitting
- lol: two entries (wells the time machine and tad williams memory, sorrow & thorn) got 5 votes but finished under 30 points
- all the titles w/ only one #1 vote & no others:

Guy Gavriel Kay - The Last Light of the Sun
Kingsley Amis - The Alteration
Michael Bishop - Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas
Margaret Weiss & Tracy Hickman - The Dragonlance Chronicles

Really enjoyed this - keen to read

Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time

guess I should read the Wolfe as well.

my dad read the hobbit/lotr to me a chapter at a time for my bedtime stories when i was a little kid instead of childrens books, so i guess i could blame him for me becoming a SF/F nerd. but i won't because that was a pretty rad thing to do imo.

xp Dan - that was about when the movie came out, wasn't it?

The movie was a few years earlier. I don't remember if I read the book or saw the movie first but they happened in quick succession; I can't remember if the movie viewing was a special thing that happened at the library or if it was on PBS.

xp shakey, are you serious?!

about what

Whoever voted the Dragonlance Chronicles at #1 is my hero

aw, the Dragonlance Chronicles also fell off of my ballot at the last second

I don't remember if I read the book or saw the movie first

me neither, actually! I think I was 5 or 6. The next summer my family went to England on vacation, and my parents thought it would be really fun to find the exact locations of the book. So we spent the better part of a day driving through the countryside looking at fields of grass. It was kinda boring.

Watership was my #20 and was the highlight of my 2010 reading year. Srsly if you havent, READ WATERSHIP DOWN AND PLAGUE DOGS ASAP. Yes you will cry copious tears but you can't always hide from yr feelings!

OMG sara i'm jealous!!!!

Also bcuz there will never be a similar opportunity let me give MAD PROPS to Angela Morley for her awesome wonderstruck score to the Watership movie.

Did Ballard get the most number ones?

xp shakey, are you serious?!

about what

placing LOTR #1 on your ballot

Only 2 of my top 10 made it into this ;_;

No Vance = FUCK YOU ALL IN THE EYE-HOLE

but the pleasure of the novel wasn't about that! Like, as a 7 year old, I really was not interested in seeing the real "watership down." The most enjoyable part of that excursion was teasing my parents with, "Oh look! It's another grassy hill! ... Hey, it's a grassy hill with a sheep! .... Oh, another grassy hill, no sheep."

I placed 3 of 10.

If you had told me to guess which 2 out of my top five would place, I totally would have picked Watership Down over Flatland, lol

I had 4 of my top 10 place

I'm also guessing that not as many ppl have read The Forever War or The Black Company series as I thought...?

Placed 4 of my top 10, 11 of my whole ballot.

Forever War was my #15

I thot Black Company had a pretty big stanbase on ILX.

Black Company was my #12.

I don't think I've ever even heard of the Black Company series...?

6 of my 10 placed

my #1 was A Canticle for Leibowitz

I hit 10 out of 25

My #1 was The Diamond Age (Snow Crash is great but this one is just all around better front to back)

Did Ballard get the most number ones?

yeah ballard had the most with 3 - there were a few with 2 #1 votes that didnt chart (in fact 'riddley walker' got 2 #1 votes & no other votes, lol) - there were also 1/5 of the ballots that came unranked

almost all the books in 52-100 had just as many votes as the novels 51-28 (& VALIS finished @ 19 w/only 6 votes) they just didnt get enough top 5 placements on ppls ballots.