SPECULATIVE FICTION POLL BALLOTS

post em up, y'all

My ballot was ranked, although somewhat haphazardly ordered. I stand by the top 10 but after that it got dicey due to time constraints.

Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)
Richard Adams - Watership Down
Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
Stephen King - The Stand
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens
Robert Jordan – The Wheel of Time
Glen Cook - The Black Company
George R R Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire
Tad Williams - Outland
William Gibson – Neuromancer
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Jim Butcher - The Harry Dresden Files
John Christopher - The Tripod trilogy
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
Robert C. O'Brien - Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Roald Dahl - Charlie & the Great Glass Elevator
Anne McCaffrey - The Harper Hall Trilogy
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination

(actually in retrospect I would have swapped Hitchhiker's and WD)

My ballot with blurbs! I only voted for 12 things in the end because I wanted to keep it to things I unambiguously think are great, there was a lot I just like a lot that I ended up leaving off, but it felt like there was a huge gap after #12 so it felt like the natural break?

1. AD&D 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide

I don't think there's another book like this in all the world - taken
as a prose work it's just 440 pages of unbroken astonishment, this
brilliant and sincere and insane attempt to construct all of life as
something you can read off a table with two rolls of a d20. I read
fantasy because I like to imagine myself in the worlds and this book
made it the easiest, but it was also the best world before or since -
there's a precise and particular clarity to the towns and dungeons I
imagine when I read this book that nothing else has ever touched.

2. Ursala Le Guin - A Wizard Of Earthsea

3. Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun

4. Erik Frank Russell – Wasp

I kept moving this up and up as I was organizing my ballot - as a
story it's got something elemental to it, that sense of there only
being so many plots (not seven; about 30) and this being one of them
that you knew now and could keep and tell whenever.

5. Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide

This is very funny, I think!

6. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit

7. Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas

I was so relieved that this was other people's favorite Banks too -
there's a sharp and constant colour to it - it's inventive but that's
never foregrounded, you never forget in the world building the cold
gravity of the situation.

8. Roger Zelazny - Lord Of Light

I remember reading the pages before the battle over and over again,
marveling and imagining all these strange and wonderful forces - when
I try to think about the pleasure of this kind of reading it is that
moment I come back to.

9. Jeff Noon - Pixel Juice

In hindsight lots of this is awful! But there are moments I find
completely impossible to forget - Solace I think about once a month
still.

10 - Terry Pratchett - Lords and Ladies

It's the horror Pratchetts that stick with me - I don't find the funny
bits as funny any more, or the deep bits even tolerable mostly, but
this and Moving Pictures still raise a shudder.

11. William Gibson - Count Zero

12. Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

I think this kind of invented xkcd in some ways! As in - there exists
an ideal of maths writing which explains things with allegory but
without deceit to a bright 11 year old - this book is that ideal p.
much perfected - and ushered in by how good it is it introduces the
one mode of sentiment allowed, which is an awkward but total reverence
for small-l human adult love.

oh man, I could really spend some time talking about how Pratchett's horror sequences are greatly underrated; the whole creepy death mall in Reaper Man and the bits in Hogfather when they're at The Hogfather's house...

Mine are ranked. I wld say that my top 15 are like my pantheon level shit, 16 to 25 are great books I think abt all the time, all 25 are things I would and will reread.

1- Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
2- Jack Vance - The Demon Princes
3- Italo Calvino – Cosmicomics
4- John Crowley – Aegypt
5- James P. Blaylock - The Last Coin
6- J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
7- Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
8- R. L. Stevenson – Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde
9- Samuel R. Delany - Neveryon
10- Charles Finney - The Circus Of Dr. Lao
11- R.A. Lafferty - Nine Hundred Grandmothers
12- Michael Swanwick - The Iron Dragon's Daughter
13- Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
14- Jorge Luis Borges - The Aleph
15- Robert E. Howard - The Complete Chronicles of Conan (2006)
16- Robert C. O'Brien - Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
17- Robin Hobb - The Farseer trilogy
18- Ray Bradbury - The October Country
19- Frank Herbert - Dune
20- Richard Adams - Watership Down
21- H. G. Wells - The Island of Dr Moreau
22- Edward Whittemore - Quin's Shanghai Circus
23- Fritz Lieber - Conjure Wife
24- Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
25- J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)

(I would have voted for Small Gods somewhere between 13 and 20 - sorry Dan! - it was my favourite book bar none as a kid but I haven't read it since and I'm not sure how well it would hold up?)

John Lewis tell me more about Jack Vance!

Well, based on what you said it might not have the same impact but it's the Discworld book I've reread the most and it has continuously held up every time I've read it. It being a standalone helps it tremendously, plus the way it deals with the philosophy behind worship remains among the most accessible AND the most hopeful that I've encountered.

Plus it's hilarious!

1 J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)
2 John Crowley - Little, Big
3 Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy
4 M.R. James – The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (1931)
5 Rudyard Kipling - The Mark of the Beast And Other Fantastical Tales
6 Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan
7 David Lindsay - A Voyage to Arcturus
8 John Crowley - Engine Summer
9 Christopher Priest - The Affirmation
10 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
11 H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
12 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
13 J.G. Ballard - High Rise
14 T.H. White - The Once and Future King
15 Arthur Machen - "The White People"
16 Thomas Disch – Camp Concentration
17 Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
18 John Crowley – “The Great Work of Time”
19 Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
20 J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
21 William Gibson – Neuromancer
22 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – The Illuminatus! Trilogy
23 Neal Stephenson - The Diamond Age
24 Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)
25 Joe Haldeman - The Forever War

It gets shakier as it goes down. The last five I kept pulling and switching with a few other things - it was basically a mess of competing reservations ('haven't read in 20 years' vs trashy & annoying vs whatever) - & i mean yeah on reflection of course it should be Earthsea not Illuminatus!, but then again maybe I'm happier to have a hideous shallow mess somewhere in there somewhere, I don't know.

gravel!!!! so sorry i didnt include your comments for flatland! i think i scanned your ballot was like, none of these write-ups really place & totally missed that one :/

01. Guy Gavriel Kay - The Last Light of the Sun
02. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Earthsea Trilogy
03. R.W. Chambers - The King in Yellow
04. Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time
05. Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
06. Glenn Cook - The Black Company
07. H.P. Lovecraft - "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"
08. H.P. Lovecraft - "The Colour out of Space"
09. Thomas Ligotti - Songs of A Dead Dreamer
10. Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
11. Michelle West - The Sun Sword
12. Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics
13. China Miéville – Perdido Street Station
14. Kim Stanely Robinson - The Mars trilogy
15. John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
16. M.R. James – The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James (1931
17. James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
18. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future
19. Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
20. Harlan Ellison - "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"
21. Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time
22. Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow & Thorn
23. Sean Russell - Moontide & Magic Rise
24. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
25. Robert V.S. Redick - The Chathrand Voyage

I had narrowed my ballot down to around 57 books and was going insane because I wanted to vote for all of them; at some point I said "fuck it" and just did a mass delete on 20 of them on the grounds that others would vote for them and surprise surprise half of those placed

Lamp it is okay! You ran an amazing poll in which nothing you voted for placed :/

2 John Crowley - Little, Big

12 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun

Kinda fascinated to see these on the same ballot - they are such opposites in my head?

My actual top 10 sci-fi novels (or pretty close--I didn't rank my ballot...was Space Merchants not nom'd that would be here as would Fury maybe?):

Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination*
Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man*
Barry Malzberg - Beyond Apollo*
Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus*
J.G. Ballard - High Rise*
John Brunner - The Sheep Look Up*
K.W. Jeter - The Glass Hammer
Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside*
Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly*
Thomas Disch – 334

The rest:

Alfred Bester - "Fondly Fahrenheit"
Alfred Bester - "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed"
C.L. Moore - "The Vintage Season"
Frederick Pohl - Jem
Frederick Pohl – Gateway
James Tiptree - "The Girl Who Plugged In"
James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever"
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
John Varley - "The Persistence of Vision"
Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip
Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Philip K. Dick – Ubik
Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
Thomas Disch – Camp Concentration
Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz

uh I didn't save my ballot

Ranked ballot, sorry about all the Dick.

1. J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)
2. Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy
3. Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
4. Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
5. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
6. Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
7. Philip K. Dick – Ubik
8. Alan Garner - The Owl Service
9. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left hand of Darkness
10. Diana Wynne Jones - The Dalemark Quartet
11. Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
12. J.G. Ballard - High Rise
13. Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
14. Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
15. Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
16. Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron
17. Samuel R. Delany – Nova
18. Thomas Pynchon - The Crying Of Lot 49
19. Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
20. Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
21. Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
22. William S. Burroughs - The Naked Lunch
23. Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
24. Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas
25. Barrington J Bayley - The Rod Of Light

dude Shakey, lol

2 John Crowley - Little, Big
12 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
Kinda fascinated to see these on the same ballot - they are such opposites in my head?

Really? I suppose that's right, thinking at it. They've both got a strong literary surface; I guess that's why they're both there for me.

Wolfe's a lovely writer at his best, sort of love that cold & eloquent insistence, & the word stunts, also a great image maker; I'm more interested in Crowley in almost every way though. Wolfe pisses me off more; Crowley can bore me sometimes, but I like spending time in his books.

03. R.W. Chambers - The King in Yellow

glad someone else has actually read this AND voted for it too!

dude Shakey, lol

I mean I remember most of what was on there and what the top few were, but I don't remember how I ranked them

yes but didn't you have Lamp send it back to you?

can't remember if that was this or the all time hip hop poll tbh

Ranked, stuff that placed in bold:

1. Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
2. Philip K. Dick – Ubik
3. Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
4. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
5. Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
6. Kim Stanley Robinson - Years of Rice and Salt
7. Roger Zelazny - The Amber Series
8. Edgar Rice Burroughs - A Princess of Mars
9. Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix Plus
10. Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
11. Richard Matheson - I Am Legend
12. Glen Cook - The Black Company
13. H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
14. William Gibson – Neuromancer
15. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings
16. Fritz Leiber - Lean Times in Lankhmar
17. China Miéville - Iron Council
18. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – The Illuminatus! Trilogy
19. Herman Hesse - Magister Ludi
20. George R R Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire
21. Neal Stephenson – Anathem
22. Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
23. Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
24. Isaac Asimov – Foundation trilogy
25. H. G. Wells - The Time Machine

non-ranked, a little cavalier, only made it to 20. wish I'd remembered to nominated 'The Space Merchants'.

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Arthur C. Clarke - Childhood's End
Bernard Wolfe - Limbo
Edwin Abbott Abott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories (Schocken; 1971)
George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
Herman Hesse - Magister Ludi
Isaac Asimov – Foundation trilogy
J.G. Ballard - High Rise
John Crowley - Engine Summer
Monique Wittig - Les Guérillères
Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy
Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
Thomas Disch – Camp Concentration
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
Yevgeny Zamaytin - We

1. Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
2. George Orwell – 1984
3. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
4. Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
5. C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
6. Roald Dahl - Charlie & The Chocolate Factory
7. Cormac McCarthy - The Road
8. J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
9. J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)
10. J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter septet
11. Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories (Schocken; 1971)
12. Ursula K. Le Guin - Earthsea Trilogy
13. William S. Burroughs - The Naked Lunch
14. Jules Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days
15. Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
16. J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World
17. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
18. Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
19. Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
20. Roald Dahl - James & The Giant Peach
21. Gustav Meyrink - The Golem
22. Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
23. Terry Pratchett – Mort
24. Terry Pratchett - Night Watch
25. Roald Dahl - Charlie & the Great Glass Elevator

Thanks a lot lamp, loved your work!

woof as an appreciator of both Wolfe and Crowley you are my bro.

Also the distance between New Sun and Aegypt/Love & Sleep does not seem very far to me!

Gravel I am writing what is turning into a Vance manifesto for you, will hopefully post it later 2nite!

Lamp u have great taste in books.

actually, WKIW the book taste of just abt everyone on this thread, love u ILX

My votes

1 Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
2 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
3 H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
4 John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
5 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
6 Peter Watts - Blindsight
7 John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
8 Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths
9 Adolfo Bioy Cesares- The Invention of Morel
10 Christopher Priest - Inverted World
11 Ted Chiang - Stores of Your Life and Others
12 Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
13 Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic
14 George Orwell – 1984
15 George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
16 Frederick Pohl – Gateway
17 H. G. Wells - The Time Machine
18 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
19 John Christopher - The Death of Grass/No Blade of Grass
20 Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
21 J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World
22 Philip K. Dick – Ubik
23 Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside
24 William Gibson – Neuromancer
25 R. L. Stevenson – Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde

1. Frederick Pohl – Gateway
2. George Orwell – 1984
3. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game (first book only!)
4. Adolfo Bioy Casares- The Invention of Morel
5. Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
6. Tim Powers - The Anubis Gates
7. Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)
8. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
9. Jonathan Lethem - Girl in Landscape
10 Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
11 Isaac Asimov - "The Last Question"
12 George Saunders - "Jon"

xps

excellent, also want to read abt Vance, been curious about him for a while now, never quite sure where to start. (& your ballot packed with exciting-looking stuff I do not know, Jon)

& on Wolfe/Crowley (Aegypt, yes, especially), I can also see they do both have something going on with emblem & symbol, that funny & slippery sense of 'wait, what is going on, what is this actually about?'.

& yes I like ilx taste a lot. Will take a close look at these ballots in the morning, can see a lot of stuff I should be finding out about tucked in with stuff I love.

10 Christopher Priest - Inverted World

this one is really something else. the edition I had came with an excellent afterword pointing out how the book was a literal inversion of the standard hard sci-fi plot, which made me appreciate it even more.

Sorry for repost: mean to bold those that made it

My votes

1 Russell Hoban - Riddley Walker
2 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
3 H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
4 John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
5 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
6 Peter Watts - Blindsight
7 John Wyndham - The Chrysalids
8 Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths
9 Adolfo Bioy Cesares- The Invention of Morel
10 Christopher Priest - Inverted World
11 Ted Chiang - Stores of Your Life and Others
12 Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice
13 Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic
14 George Orwell – 1984
15 George R. Stewart - Earth Abides
16 Frederick Pohl – Gateway
17 H. G. Wells - The Time Machine
18 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
19 John Christopher - The Death of Grass/No Blade of Grass
20 Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
21 J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World
22 Philip K. Dick – Ubik
23 Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside
24 William Gibson – Neuromancer
25 R. L. Stevenson – Strange Case of Jekyll & Hyde

10 Christopher Priest - Inverted World

I should really read this, but it felt too hard SF for my taste when I began it. The Affirmation is such a neat, well-executed head-fk.

THE SHAKEY MO COLLIER BALLOT: DICK & THEN MOORCOCK

1. J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
2. Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
3. Michael Moorcock - Cornelius Chronicles
4. Philip K. Dick - VALIS trilogy
5. Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
6. George Orwell – 1984
7. James Tiptree - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
8. H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (Penguin; 1999)
9. William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
10. Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination
11. Frederick Pohl - Jem
12. Stanislaw Lem - The Cyberiad
13. Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
14. K.W. Jeter - Dr. Adder
15. Thomas Disch – 334
16. Philip K. Dick – Ubik
17. Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
18. Kim Stanley Robinson - The Mars trilogy
19. R.W Chambers – The King in Yellow
20. Michael Moorcock – Pyat Quartet
21. Michael Moorcock – Oswald Bastable trilogy
22. Pohl & Kornbluth - The Space Merchants
23. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
24. Jonathan Lethem - Gun, With Occasional music
25. C.S. Lewis – Out of the Silent Planet trilogy

lol thx bro

remember when I posted that I tried to no more than one book per author? I LIED

to keep it to no more than one book

My ballot consisted of things I read in the past two or three years, things I read as a schoolboy thirty years ago and things I read in between that might not normally be classified as science or speculative fiction. Stuff I read recently tended to get a higher ranking and as you get to the second half of the list the ranking is somewhat arbitrary. I boldfaced the first "a" in Bioy Casares as it keeps getting misspelled.

1: Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)
2: Christopher Priest - The Affirmation
3: Christopher Priest - Inverted World
4: M. John Harrison - Viriconium
5: Alasdair Gray - Lanark
6: David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress
7: James Tiptree - Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
8: H. G. Wells - The Island of Dr Moreau
9: Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
10: Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
11: Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic
12: Ted Chiang - Stores of Your Life and Others
13: Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
14: Ray Bradbury - The October Country
15: Fritz Lieber - "A Pail of Air"
16: Robert Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow
17: Isaac Asimov - Caves of Steel/Naked Sun
18: Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
19: Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
20: Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
21: Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
22: Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld
23: Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
24: Pohl & Kornbluth - The Space Merchants
25: Adolfo Bioy Casares- The Invention of Morel

I wrote mine down somewhere but I think I tossed the list after. Oh well. It was mostly fantasy.

And yeah, thanks, Lamp, one of the more interesting polls in a long time.

Lamp, post Laurel's ballot

1. Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
2. Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
3. Larry Niven – Ringworld
4. Robert Heinlein - The Past Through Tomorrow
5. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – The Illuminatus! Trilogy
6. Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
7. Frederick Pohl – Gateway
8. Bram Stoker – Dracula
9. William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
10. William Gibson – Neuromancer
11. Edgar Allan Poe - Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1908)
12. Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
13. George Orwell – 1984
14. H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
15. Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
16. Kim Stanely Robinson - The Mars trilogy
17. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
18. Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - The Mote in God's Eye
19. Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
20. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
21. Philip Jose Farmer – Riverworld
22. Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
23. Samuel R. Delany - stars in my pockets like grains of sand
24. Thomas Disch - "Descending"
25. J.G. Ballard – The Drowned World

this was a fantastic poll btw

Idle fantasies on film versions of some on my ballot.

More Than Human - Lynch
Ringworld -- I've said many times that this would make a fantastic Pixar film.
The Past Through Tomorrow -- an Altmanesque "Short Cuts" style mashup of 5 or 6 of the stories
Illuminatus! - Edgar Wright, or Soderbergh a la Schizopolis
Rendezvous With Rama - Ridley Scott
The Forever War, The Mote in God's Eye or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress - K. Bigelow
The Drowned World - Fincher

Most are pretty straightforward narratives though and screenwriter/cinematographer/editor would be at least as important as director.

...this might have been a dumb path for me to wander down.

Ridley Scott is working on doing The Forever War at the moment. In 3D.

Ranked:

John Crowley -- Engine Summer
Kurt Vonnegut -- Cats Cradle
Ursula LeGuin -- The Compass Rose
William Gibson -- Neuromancer
Ursula LeGuin -- The Earthsea Trilogy
John Crowley -- Little, Big
C.S. Lewis -- Chronicles of Narnia
Fritz Lieber --- A Pail of Air
Philip K. Dick -- The Man In The High Castle
Jonathan Lethem -- Gun, With Occasional Music
Madeleine L'Engle -- A Wrinkle In Time
David Mitchell -- Cloud Atlas
Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid's Tale
Isaac Asimov -- I, Robot
David Brin -- Uplift Trilogy
Christopher Priest -- Inverted World
Norton Juster -- The Phantom Tollbooth
John Brunner -- Stand on Zanzibar
Philip Pullman -- His Dark Materials
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson -- Illuminatus! Trilogy
Orson Scott Card -- Ender's Game
Larry Niven and Stephen Pournelle -- Dream Park
Ray Bradbury -- The Martian Chronicles
Philip Jose Farmer -- Riverworld

ranked, with selected commentary:

01 Michael Bishop - Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas

Esteemed literary novelist Philip Dick dies; reality begins to disintegrate; various individuals across America begin to realise that things were never quite right to begin with: this may or may not be my favourite novel ever written. It's also probably not very good, though I've never been able to determine whether that's deliberate, or whether Bishop's deliberately aping the infelicities of Dick's prose along with his plots. If it's the latter then it's definitely my favourite thing ever written; if the former, it probably still is, anyway. Title comes from an inspirational verse penned by one of the characters on hearing the news: Philip K Dick is dead, alas: / Let's all queue up / And kick God's ass.

02 Philip K. Dick - Galactic pot-healer

Washed-up depressive is given the option to transcend mortal status, become a higher lifeform: decides to make pottery instead: realises he is a terrible potter. Probably a key Philip Dick moment, not that I'm in a position to tell. I've read probably too much Philip K Dick; I can't really call a lot of them to mind separately anymore -- oh, that's the one with the simulacra and the concern about the nature of humanity! that's the one with the schizoid displacements in reality! that's the one with the still-domineering ex-wife! &c. -- but that kind of works. After the ninth or tenth novel it starts to seem like the mind-expanding-sociological-metaphysical stuff isn't really important in itself; they're a document of one person's neuroses which in its depth is unique in SF and rare anywhere. What I mean is that Dick is -- after maybe novel fifteen, and you might want to take my word on this -- maybe better at conveying exactly what another human being finds difficult about life than anyone else I've read.

03 Robert Heinlein – Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

In which Scout's Honour and Be Prepared! prove remarkably helpful concepts for making friends, navigating the universe, averting interstellar genocide, etc.

04 Samuel R. Delany - Stars in my pockets like grains of sand
05 Frank Herbert -- Whipping Star
06 William Mayne – Earthfasts
07 Gygax & Arneson - 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide

EACH OF YOU MUST CREATE A WORLD

08 Brian Aldiss (ed) - The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973)
09 Robert V.S. Redick - The Chathrand Voyage

10 Doris Lessing - Canopus in Argos: Archives (1992)

For whatever reason Lessing is the only serious-novelist-does-sci-fi I can tolerate; I could probably write a lot more words about this but I think it's probably sufficient to note that in her Paris Review interview she refers to Stanislaw Lem as "the Solaris bloke."

11 C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia
12 Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)

Let's see if I can explain this: In one of Cordwainer Smith's stories a pilot, in space, is being attacked by evil homosexual turtle people (don't ask) with superior weaponry, is hopelessly outgunned. He deals with this problem, if I recall correctly, by sending a bomb full of puppies i. to a surface of a nearby planet ii. thousands of years back in time. These puppies (or is it kittens? I forget) are genetically doctored to serve man: and so the pilot finds himself saved from the evil homosexual turtles by a race of highly evolved cat-people, the descendents of the I'm-pretty-sure-it's-kittens-actually he just sent back in time. For what it's worth -- google "Kirk Allen" -- Cordwainer Smith may have actually been clinically insane.

13 Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
14 Roger Zelazny - Lord Of Light
15 Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
16 Joanna Russ - The Female Man
17 John Brunner - Stand On Zanzibar
18 M. John Harrison – Viriconium
19 Robert Sheckley - Options

Sheckley had already written at least two vaguely picaresque novels on the order 'bizarre cosmic adventure happens to shlub'. Options starts off as another, and the least of these -- it has about the single least interesting plot hook imaginable, viz. "will our intrepid hero and his pet robot succeed in locating a spare part" -- before completely disintegrating. Characters transform, disappear; the grail quest theme is brought up, discussed, dismissed; the author shows up, to little use whatsoever; the narrative is abandoned entirely, and replaced with a sleazy sex-in-the-tropics riff which is either 'Heart of Darkness' or Eric Ambler or William Burroughs. The cast of this replacement narrative die before the symbolic replacement for the spare part can be resolved. The author apologises to his characters. It's not that it's any better than Barthelme or Barth would manage - it isn't - or even that it's as good, or quite contemporary; it's that it seems genuinely born out of frustration with form, and that it's weirdly affecting in that.

21 Stanislaw Lem - His Master's Voice

Don DeLillo rewrote this novel sometime in the eighties. His version is pretty good, actually. It's easy enough to see why: His Master's Voice's central conceit seems in some ways a readymade exemplar of the things we genuinely take as the postmodern condition -- this sounds terrible and not at all like a description of a book that is good, oh well -- and is probably the most explicit formation Lem managed of an idea that's implicit in Solaris: what if alien contact provided proof, in the end, there was nothing particularly meaningful or interesting about human consciousness? I read this in one sitting during an eight hour wait-around to meet someone at an airport; this seemed entirely apropos.

22 John Christopher - The Tripod trilogy
23 Tove Jansson - Moominvalley in November

Recently I made someone read one of these for the first time; not this one; the one with the theatre. They claimed that it was the most miserable children's book they'd ever read. I don't have any reason to doubt that, to be honest: the moomin books are frequently miserable, and this is the most miserable of them. The usual protagonists have vanished, and the novel deals with the various side characters introduced in the proceeding books holing up in their abandoned house, trying and failing to mesh as a group. It's a constant in all the moomin books that they deal with feelings of alienation and sadness at a level that small people can get behind, or at least I think so; I never read them as a kid. I can't help feeling they'd have helped.

24 Ursula K. Le Guin - Earthsea Trilogy
25 Diana Wynne Jones - Chrestomanci (series)

Ridley Scott is working on doing The Forever War at the moment. In 3D.

― EZ Snappin, Wednesday, April 6, 2011 8:55 PM (13 minutes ago)

I knew this but somehow managed to dump that data while I was writing my post, doyyyy.

Thomp, love your notes. And I love the Moomin books, and did read them as a kid, and think they were very significant in forming my personality
Agree with you on the Lem, which I voted for, too. Also has interesting stuff about inability to understand messages from totally alien minds, yet the weird way in which what seems like 'noise' may produce useful things

Have to read your #1 vote now

Also has interesting stuff about inability to understand messages from totally alien minds, yet the weird way in which what seems like 'noise' may produce useful things.

The McKillip space book Fool's Run is also about this!

haha um well all of that is pretty much spelled out in the first 20 pages of the first book so

Yeah--doesn't Elric die in the first Elric story>? The rest are filling-in-the-gaps tales
I love 'Dancers at the End of Time', and really enjoyed the steampunk/alternate 1970s Bastable books

Have only read that one Simak, 'Way Station', as well, but really liked it.

who = motorhead, in this analogy

moorcock thing i thought was clever when i was 15 but do not anymore: that there were elric and jerry cornelius stories w/ EXACTLY THE SAME PLOT at the same time

if i'd been voting more honestly on past taste i'd have put moorcock in: on the other hand, i'd have to have included weis and hickman, as well

You say that like it's a bad thing. I put in ANNE MCCAFFREY, DON'T U SEE??

ha i think your ballot is probably more fun than anyone else's

I'm really about a 12-yr-old reader at heart, permanently.

yeah i'm not even gonna post mine it's all hobbits and princes and dragons i'd be mortified

I didn't do a ballot but if I were to hastily flip through the noms and throw in a couple unnommed titles it might look something like this

Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
Roald Dahl - Tales of the Unexpected
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
William S. Burroughs - The Naked Lunch
Charles Baudelaire - Les Fleurs du mal
Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories
Edgar Allan Poe - Tales of Mystery and Imagination
Comte de Lautreamont - Maldoror
George Orwell – 1984
Frank Herbert - Dune
H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
K.W. Jeter - Dr. Adder
Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
John Gardner - Grendel
Walter Tevis - The Man Who Fell To Earth
Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

1. The Alteration - Kingsley Amis (bit of a tactical vote this, but not much of one)

2. The Complete Stories of JG Ballard - JG Ballard

3. The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James - MR James

4. Clans of the Alphane Moon - Philip K Dick

5. The Call of Cthulu - HP Lovecraft

6. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

7. The Invention of Morel - Adolfo Bioy Casares

8. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

9. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

10. Earthsea - Ursula K Le Guin

11. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkein

12. The Dark is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper

13. Out of the SIlent Planet Trilogy - CS Lewis

14. Lanark - Alasdair Gray

15. A Scanner Darkly - Philip K Dick

16. The Tripods Trilogy - John Christopher

17. Ficciones - Jorge Luis Borges

18. The Drowned World - JG Ballard

19. Tales of Mystery and Imagination - Edgar Allan Poe

20. Neuromancer - William Gibson

21. The Death of Grass - John Christopher

22. The Great God Pan - Arthur Machen

23. Martian Time Slip - Philip K Dick

24. We - Yevgeny Zamaytin

25. Foundation Saga - Isaac Asimov

Threw a load of stuff in at the end, top ten I'm ok with.

You see I look at that now and wonder wtf I can have been thinking to have Lanark lower than The Hobbit. Fond memories/fond idiot.

LISTEN, EDWARD OR WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS IF THAT IS EVEN YOUR REAL NAME, if you didn't submit noms and you didn't do a ballot, we don't want to know NOW what you WOULD HAVE chosen.

I don't know why I feel so brash on this thread? Sorry. I just do.

ratsey's list has the highest ratio of 'stuff i feel like i should read: stuff i have not read', i think. or lamp's. lamp's has the most stuff i haven't actually heard of.

my ballot is a speculative branch in the garden of forking paths leading to an alternate universe

that there were elric and jerry cornelius stories w/ EXACTLY THE SAME PLOT

this is just the first Elric and JC book, iirc

'While the Gods Laugh', Science Fantasy #49, (Nova, October 1961)
'Phase Three', New Worlds, May 1966

-- both of which end up in the first collections. mainly i'm posting this to note that the moorcock wiki seems worryingly comprehensive.

Ha, Clans Of The Alphane Moon holla! That is a GREAT lesser-known PKD joint.

I think my favorite thing about that one is his next-door neighbor buddy, the telepathic ganymedean slime mold

Everyone loves Lord Running Clam.

Just having a character called Lord Running Clam that's one of my favorite Dick books. Sadly the recent edition of the novel lacks the great Barry Malzberg essay which appends the Carroll & Graf vers from the 80s.

^^^yes! that essay is great

Shakey have you ever read Malzberg's Engines of the Night (a collection of essays about sci-fi stories, writers, writing sci-fi, sci-fi magazines, conventions, wife swapping)? It's awesome.

It's kind of the Ball Four of sci-fi.

that sounds killer!

That sounds great - Amazon has a number of cheap used copies.

Yeah my version is a library book from Houston, TX that appears to have only been checked out once. :(

Bought from Amazon obv. Never been to any Friends of the Library sales in Houston sadly.

never heard of it, sounds interesting. I've read Galaxies and Beyond Apollo, both of which I liked a lot but also seemed kind of insane - like there's this meta-level of viciousness towards convention and the characters overlaying both of them

Supposedly equally good (but unread by my) is Benchmarks, Budrys' collection of Galaxy Mag book reviews from the 60s/70s. That's also probably very cheap on Amazon.

"I've read Galaxies and Beyond Apollo, both of which I liked a lot but also seemed kind of insane - like there's this meta-level of viciousness towards convention and the characters overlaying both of them"

That's what I think is so great about them. His love/hate relationship with sci-fi is very compelling. In some ways the essays are the best expression of that (although Galaxies is so meta it might as well be essays, frankly.)

This thread (well, these three threads) are so great; I've never even THOUGHT about Barry Malzberg before and now I'm all interested.

1. Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
2. Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
3. Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker
4. Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
5. Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
6. Iain M Banks - The Player of Games
7. China Miéville – The Scar
8. Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories (Schocken; 1971)
9. Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
10. Brian Aldiss – Hothouse
11. Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (series)
12. J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)
13. Phillip Reeve - The Mortal Engines Quartet
14. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson – The Illuminats! Trilogy
15. Neal Stephenson – Anathem
16. China Miéville- The City & The City
17. John Christopher - The Tripod trilogy
18. Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
19. Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
20. Dan Simmons – Hyperion
21. Neil Gaiman – Coraline
22. Iain M. Banks - Look to Windward
23. David Mitchell - Ghostwritten
24. Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow & Thorn
25. Adam Roberts – On

^^^ my first Mieville is either gonna be Kraken or City & The City... what do y'all reckon?

yeah there's definitely a love/hate thing with the genre with Malzberg. it's really apparent that he delights in making these little puzzle boxes that frustrate the reader and the characters' expectations in equal measure, it has a kind of humorous sadism to it.

all the sexual frustration/fantasy/speculation stuff in Beyond Apollo, for example - it's very DO U SEE about the homoeroticism and heterocentrism of space opera conventions, and then it zooms in on these to such an extent that the narrator seems to be driven insane by them

Start with The City & The City. I didn't care for the Kraken.

Yeah, I found Kraken to be his weakest since King Rat. I'd do Perdido Street Station first, not his best but a great intro to what he's trying to do and masses of fun.

eh I couldn't make it past the first 50 pages of that

in other news, just got Disch's "The Genocides" from the library (also Jetse De Vries' Shine anthology)

I liked Kraken more than The Cityx2. It has issues, but at least kept the pages turning. Cityx2 was dull.

Kraken seemed very Neil Gaimen/Terry Pratchett to me (which isn't necessarily a bad thing, just not what I was looking for from him.)

Start with The City & The City. I didn't care for the Kraken.

― Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF), Friday, April 8, 2011 10:32 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

you should... REREAD THE KRAKEN!!!

I was away and missed the results, but here is my ballot (ranked highest-to-lowest; bold = top 50 as far as I can remember):

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left hand of Darkness
Frederick Pohl – Gateway
Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids
Iain M Banks - Excession
Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World
J.R.R. Tolkien - Lord of the Rings
Michael Moorcock - Elric
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed
Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
Frank Herbert - Dune
Gene Wolfe - Latro in the Mist
Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
Gene Wolfe – Book of the Long Sun
Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas
H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
Dan Simmons – Hyperion
George R R Martin – A Song of Ice and Fire

Initial impressions of the results: too much PKD; shame LOTR came first - both were kind of inevitable though I guess and I voted for them and can't complain too hard. Pleased Le Guin and Gene Wolfe did well. Shame Kafka and Borges and other fringe stuff (obviously fringe in terms of relative position within the genre, not in the overall literary spectrum) got quite high - would be interested in a more straightforwardly SF&F poll but understand it would be hard to a) agree on nominations, b) get enough people to submit ballots.

Looking foward to checking out some of the stuff I wasn't aware of. I will report back (does anyone use Goodreads btw?).

Good job Lamp!

(does anyone use Goodreads btw?).

i'm a librarything guy.

Hmmm hadn't heard of that one. With 300+ books logged on Goodreads I feel I'm kind of committed to that now (unless there is way of exporting and importing?). Here is me if it is your thing: http://www.goodreads.com/chewmagma

currently reading:
Bruce Sterling "Schismatrix Plus" (actually re-reading this. the story "The Swarm" has been stuck in my head for years and years)
Thomas Disch "The Genocides". Jesus christ this book is bleak.

The Genocides is the big trees take over everything book, right?

yeah. it's like every page features things somehow getting worse (cannibalism, livestock killed, aliens murder some more people, etc.)

although it is a bit of a novelty to read a post-apocalyptic novel where the apocalypse is a non-human-caused, inexplicable Kafka-esque scenario

I really liked that book, but yeah it is dark. The reason for the apocalypse is explained by the end btw.

i find its nihilism a little cheap, corny -- but then disch, i think, was on record as considering the vague hope left at the end of camp concentration, which i loved, to be cheap and corny -- so n/m