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

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

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

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

M R James - Complete Ghost Stories

If so. Mad to leave it out.

uh

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

What are you uh-ing, Lukas?

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

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

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

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

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

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

three more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

did Riverworld already

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

did Riverworld already

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

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

Neal Stephenson - Anathem

nice!

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

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

Man, going down to 13 is really hard!

I put 1984 up already

I already nominated Dracula.

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

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

Thomas M. Disch- On Wings of Song

uh

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

What are you uh-ing, Lukas?

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

he somehow left out all my noms. sadface.

John Crowley - Engine Summer

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

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

David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stanley Elkin - The Living End

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

he somehow left out all my noms. sadface.

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

That's addressed to Lamp.

david mitchell - ghostwritten
david mitchell - cloud atlas

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

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

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

Marge Piercy - Woman at the Edge of Time

ON the Edge of Time , obv...

Also no Doris Lessing?

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

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

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

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

lanark has been nom'd as well

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

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

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

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

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

booooo!

fine, split the votes :(

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

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

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

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

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

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

margaret weis and tracy hickman, the dragonlance chronicles

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