ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

As in a lot of the polls *SPOILER ALERT* I don't invest too much in the results if I can help it, but I really liked the discussion on that thread and the kind of stuff that was nominated.

I think I learned on ILX that the interesting part of polls is always 50-100 and not 50-1.

Seems to be a good rule of thumb

the industry was just a boys' club for most of the last century

don't really agree w this tbh, although it's generally true of the first half of the 20th century. But after that, outside of LeGuin (who is over-represented in the results for some reason) there's Tiptree, Brackett, MacLean, C.L. Moore, Wilhelm, Emshwiller, Merrill, Russ, McCaffrey, etc. All of these women wrote highly celebrated and popular (relative to the genre) material. Post-50s the list expands and just gets longer and longer. And of course there's a good argument to be made that the genre's foundational text is Frankenstein, written by a woman.

Of course, the results not reflecting this is more a function of the voters and their stupid priorities than anything else.

I'd have to go back and check the list but I don't recall it being dominated by pre-1950 texts, it not like ILB voters were stanning for Hugo Gernsback-certified writers

I guess that's a long way of me disagreeing and saying that yes, the sausagefest results list actually IS ILX's fault

For reference:
100 Iain M Banks - Excession
099 Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human
098 Robin Hobb - The Farseer Trilogy
097 Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous With Rama
096 Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
095 Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
094 William Gibson - Pattern Recognition
093 Roald Dahl - James & The Giant Peach
092 Norton Juster - The Phantom Tollbooth
091 Thomas Disch - Camp Concentration
090 Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan
089 H.P. Lovecraft - "The Colour out of Space"
088 Roger Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber
087 Octavia Butler - Lilith's Brood
086 Christopher Priest - Inverted World
085 Gene Wolfe - Book of the Long Sun
084 Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds
083 Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
082 Russell Hobon - Riddley Walker
081 Cordwainer Smith - The Rediscovery of Man (1993)
080 Alfred Bester - The Demolished Man
079 Michael Moorcock - Dancers at the End of Time
078 J.G. Ballard - High Rise
077 Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
076 Dan Simmons - Hyperion
075 Samuel R. Delany - Dhalgren
074 John Crowley - Engine Summer
073 Lloyd Alexander - Prydain Chronicles
072 Iain M Banks - Consider Phlebas
071 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Lathe of Heaven
070 Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange 59
069 J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter septet 59
068 Italo Calvino - Cosmicomics 60
067 Edgar Allan Poe - Tale of Mystery & Imagination 60
066 Jack Vance - Tales of the Dying Earth 61
065 Gygax & Arneson - 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide 61
064 James Tiptree - "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" 61
063 Glen Cook -The Black Company 64
062 Ted Chiang - Stories of Your Life and Others 66
061 John Wyndham - Day of the Triffids 66
060 Richard Adams - Watership Down 66
059 John Crowley - Little, Big 67
058 Haruki Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 68
057 Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities 70
056 China Miéville - Perdido Street Station 70
055 Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens 72
054 Adolfo Bioy Cesares - The Invention of Morel 72
053 Terry Pratchett - Small Gods 73
052 Kim Stanley Robinson - The Mars trilogy 73
051 Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination 74
050 Yevgeny Zamaytin - We
049 Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle
048 Guy Gavriel Kay - Tigana
047 Philip K. Dick - Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
046 Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
045 Madeleine L'Engle - A Wrinkle in Time
044 Stanislaw Lem - Solaris
043 Walter Miller - A Canticle for Leibowitz
042 Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
041 Edwin Abbott Abbott - Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
040 Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
039 Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
038 Alasdair Gray - Lanark
037 Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
036 Philip K. Dick - Ubik
035 Lewis Carroll - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass
034 Susan Cooper - The Dark is Rising Sequence
033 H.P. Lovecraft - The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
032 William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch
031 Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
030 Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
029 M.R. James - The Collected Stories of M.R. James
028 Fredrik Pohl - Gateway
027 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
026 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy
025 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita
024 J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
023 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
022 Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories
021 H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
020 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time
019 Philip K. Dick - The VALIS Trilogy
018 J.R.R. Tolkein - The Hobbit
017 Philip K. Dick - A Scanner Darkly
016 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
015 George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire
014 Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
013 Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
012 Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle
011 J.G. Ballard - The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
010 Frank Herbert - Dune
009 William Gibson - Neuromancer
008 C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
007 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
006 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
005 George Orwell - 1984
004 Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
003 Gene Wolfe - Book of the New Sun
002 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Earthsea Trilogy
001 J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings

roughly 10% of the list is women, and with the exception of Shelley, all of the works written by women that appear on the list were published post-1960, when the gender balance in the genre started to noticeably shift.

But overall 70% of the winners were published post-1960. So that's some disproportionate garbage going on imo. Many of the major female figures in the genre that I noted above don't appear at all.

i don't doubt there were major female authors but what was the proportion? if you look at the nebula awards the best novel nominees are something like 80% male up till the early 90s.

tough to evaluate (lots of caveats) but there's a wiki entry on this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_speculative_fiction

first sentence of that is probably the most relevant:

In 1948, 10–15% of science fiction writers were female. Women's role in speculative fiction (including science fiction) has grown since then, and in 1999, women comprised 36% of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's professional members.

where/when that big shift happened is hard to pinpoint, but Hugo's Best Novel awards/nominations tell some of the story:
- Leigh Brackett nominated in 1956
- Marion Zimmer Bradley nominated in 1963
- Andre Norton nominated in 1964
- Le Guin finally wins in 1970 (for Left Hand of Darkness)
- Le Guin nominated again in 1972, as is Anne McCaffrey
- Le Guin nominated yet again in 1975 (Disposessed)
- Kate Wilhelm nominated in 1977
- Marion Zimmer Bradley nominated in 1978
- Vonda McIntyre wins in 1979 (for Dreamsnake. I've never read it but this seems like something of a turning point for various reasons)
- Patricia McKillip nominated in 1980
- Joan Vinge (argh how could I have forgotten her) wins in 1981
- C.J. Cherryh wins in 1982, Julian May also nominated
- Cherryh nominated again in 1983
- Anne McCaffrey nominated in 1984
- Cherryh yet again in 1986
- Cherryh again in 1989, as well as Lois McMaster Bujold

anyway you get the idea.

Of course, the boundaries of the nominee pool in the ILX poll expanded far beyond the restrictive categories of the Hugos - compared to some of the stuff that placed I don't see why the likes of, say, Angela Carter (who would never have been up for a Hugo) didn't show up.

tbf my ballot was very male-heavy as well (the only two women I voted for were LeGuin and Tiptree) but in my defense it was also limited to a handful of authors that I very much wanted to place, particularly Moorcock and PKD, so there was some strategy there that didn't necessarily reflect what I would actually consider ALL TIME GREATS as much as it reflected what I suspected other people were going to vote (or not vote) for.

thx shakes, you make a good argument that ilx is sexist after all :) if nothing else you've given me lots of names to check out.

ILX or not, thing that bugs me a lot is that after Kuttner died and C. L. Moore got remarried she stopped writing altogether.

surely we can figure out some way to blame that on ILX

Maybe the time tourists in “Vintage Season” were actually ILX0rs.

DO U SEE?

tbf half the sff books published since 1970 are by piers anthony, necessarily driving down the percentage of those published by women

There's an N.K. Jemisin profile in the New Yorker btw

Always frustrates me wondering how to handle short stories and poetry into these polls and lists, often collections and anthologies are too uneven to put forward with confidence.

As far as I know about CL Moore, she did tv writing until her health prevented her writing but she did attend conventions. I don't know if there's a firm basis for stories of her last husband discouraging her from writing (very grim if true).

jeez, Silverbob's Time of Changes has to be the worst of his New Wave-period novels. A clumsily executed central premise (a culture where the first-person is grammatically verboten) that doesn't make any sense, tons of exposition, cardboard characters, tons of lame sexual stuff. I don't think I'm going to be able to finish it.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/joanna-russ-the-science-fiction-writer-who-said-no

thought provoking piece on russ & feminist sf - spoilers within.

saw that yesterday, great piece

kinda ignores how funny Russ could be though. I think her image as a dour and strident ideologue (at least in her fiction) is a little overstated.

The opening also gives a rather misleading impression of The Female Man - it's almost nothing like 'John Wayne’s wet dreams with the sexes reversed'.

haha yeah that is not a blurb I would put on the back cover

that piece about going back in time to fix her relationship with her mother was in that collection I read recently ("The Hidden Side of the Moon"), really great in its emotional depth, all these conflicting impulses and desires about how she wants to be seen by (and see) her mother. I'm glad a bunch of her stuff has come back into print recently, would love a comprehensive collection of her short fiction and/or criticism.

I picked up Jeff Vandameer's Dead Astronauts in the library, and it passed the totally unfair, ruthless Random Read Test, which rarely happens. So far so good: he fuses show and tell via starlit, pungent, burnt-in imagery, which can also turn slippery, like wet tattoos and brands---the bitterness of many defeats/continuations, also the idealism and love of common cause and deep connection/metamorphosis, revelations along the way---the three principals have been through a lot together, incl. killing themselves and each other--- story now: once more unto the breech, for another assault on the City and the Company:

The equation of the Company eluded Chen, perhaps because he had been lost within it once upon a time (he used to work for it, was maybe created by it; assaults tend to or maybe always incl. Chen vs. Chen, physically and every other way.)Or as he said sometimes, the system abhors source, makes its mapping into a maze, a mockery, and the more you think you understand it, the more you are colonized by it, and lost.
So, the "affecting poetic compression" I mentioned re that story by early New Waver Sonya Dorman, but also like he's been smoking Ballard, Malzberg, early Delany, Peter Watts. Maybe PKD, we'll see (ontology figures, but don't yet know how much or how).

*Vandermeer's"!

sounds promising

It sure did, but now the occasional bits of poo are starting to accrue, and just ruined a whole chapter. Think I'm done.

A few interviews with Brian Stableford on his productivity, translations (including which ones he likes best) and quite a few bleak pronouncements about what he's doing. Most of these are getting old.

"If your august predecessor Charlie Brown was correct when he declared that print-on-demand books don’t really count as publications, but only as ‘‘potential publications’’ then I suppose I ceased to exist ten years ago, when I was finally relegated from the commercial arena, but if physicists are right in deeming that even the hardest vacuum is a seething chaos of imperceptible subatomic particles, I guess there’s some potential even in the virtual vacuum in which I’m working nowadays. At present I’m trying to produce 24 volumes of translation and a quarter of a million words of fiction per year, which would be quite a lot of potential if anyone ever paid enough attention to any of it to cause it to materialize; but if no one does, it hardly matters; I don’t have anything else to do."

https://locusmag.com/2011/11/spotlight-on-brian-stableford-translator-and-author/
https://www.sfintranslation.com/?p=4408
http://theakersquarterly.blogspot.com/2011/01/brian-stableford-new-worlds-of-fantasy.html
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intbs06.htm

Recently learned he's written a bit about Sopor Aeternus and other goth music!

Where would you suggest someone start with Stableford, and why?
xpost The finely tuned approach of Vandermeer's latest (my first by him) leaves no room to stumble, without disturbing the vibe and groove toward overwrought solemnity and facefalls--even though he gets up and continues, the story's arrived at some very bad precedents. My life's too short.
Random Read Test is ready for these possibly tasty Tors:
http://view.mail.macmillan.com/?qs=ad7ebe31fa0cbca348929a951f49ab8d7e63a7353658c4af53b6b3c037b182dca03a5517118da7e82ecc9f824aa4de4052873b96c0ea45151a38114a6642a62ffcb717a31636300a1845c1459e069e43197eb9992fb1e6a3

is altered carbon good

No

thanks. lol

altered carbon (the novel) has some of the worst sex scene i have ever read, like 40 yo virgin "bag of sand" bad

Yeah the writing is appallingly bad and all the ideas are one-dimensional riffs on old cyberpunk tropes

is there even any good cyberpunk besides Gibson?

KW Jeter’s Dr. Adder, Glass Hammer and Death Arms, early Bruce Sterling (Islands in the Net, Schismatrix, Crystal Express), handful of other things

thanks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLlj_GeKniA

omg

Lmao

Maybe we should poll that

Thats from... 1993?

(A Cybernaut I Should Turn to Be)

Simak was such a weirdo: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2020/02/08/book-review-the-werewolf-principle-clifford-d-simak-1967/#more-19629

Dow- Again ashamed to admit that aside from some articles written by him, I haven't started on Stableford yet, so it's questionable that I own 5 novels by him (some were charity shop finds and some might have been going scarce).

He's written all kinds. He's a specialist in biological hard SF; he's done a fair amount of stuff in the vein of Kim Newman's Anno Dracula and Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, sometimes with characters, writers and trends even more obscure and out of fashion; he written a bunch of Warhammer and vampire/werewolf stuff in the 90s for cash but it's some of his most acclaimed work; he done a lot of decadent, Lovecraftian and dying earth stuff.

I was originally going to start with Curse Of The Coral Bride but I want to read all my Clark Ashton Smith first (it's a sort of tribute).

Then I was going to start with Empire Of Fear (his most popular book) and Young Blood, but they're quite long and I've been getting plenty of vampires recently.

But right now I'm decided on Cassandra Complex (the start of a bio-tech series that was published out of order, but can seemingly be read in any order) and his anthology Scientific Romance (pre-pulp writers from france, usa and uk). Maybe then some of his Maurice Renard, Jean Lorrain and Jacques Spitz translations.

Walking Shadow was chosen by Pringle for 100 Best Novels and Cassandra Complex was in Di Filippo/Broderick's 101 Best Novels.

I found these two overviews extremely helpful.
http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/stableford_brian_m
http://sf-encyclopedia.uk/fe.php?nm=stableford_brian_m

Are those two (noticeably? completely?) different?

I thought so. Second is much shorter.