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

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.

I hit 11 overall, 6 of those are in my bottom 10.

I'd put Diamond Age over Snow Crash too, but went with Anathem as my lone Stephenson.

placing LOTR #1 on your ballot

uh wow this is moving fast.

yes I am serious!

xp

I'm really sad that Sturgeon didn't make the top 50.

Hey Dan, did you ever read his first book, The Big U?