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

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

^^ way to politely word that, macmillan books website

So much Aldiss and yet no:

Brain Aldiss - Report On Probability A

*Brian lol

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

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

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

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

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

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

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

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

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

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

Marge Piercy - Woman on the Edge of Time

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

thank you!

Apuleius - The Golden Ass

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

Brain Aldiss - Report On Probability A

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

William Burroughs - The Naked Lunch

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

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

haha okay lol I hadn't heard that before

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

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

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

Isaac Asimov – Foundation

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

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

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

invention of morel otm

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

Think his names is Casares not Cesares

that will cost you a nomination

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

Apuleius - The Golden Ass

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

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

whereas Homer, Chaucer, Dante etc. would not.

And indeed Shakespeare!

Something Wicked This Way Comes?

Oh wait

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

NOMINATIONS close on friday

Ta

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

Yeah, adored those Aiken books as a kid.

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

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

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

more of a tizzy really

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andre Norton The Beast Master
Andre Norton Judgment on Janus

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

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

Nicholas Fisk Time Trap

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

Brian Earnshaw Dragonfall 5 and the Empty Planet

Then some other stuff

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

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

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

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

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

The Illuminatus! Trilogy - Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Thanks!

And sorry for the completely unsubtle hint.

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

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

Also, no Harry Potter!

hp is on there

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

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

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

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

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