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

Haven't read any James but "Night of the Demon" is a really cool 50s film adaptation of "Casting the Runes".

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28 Fredrik Pohl - Gateway
108 points/7 votes/1 #1 vote

Frederik Pohl's Gateway -- wowed by the bleakness, the mysteries, and that ending

― a nan, a bal, an anal ? (abanana), Monday, November 29, 2010 1:08 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark

how about frederik pohl, he's pretty badass too

― moonship journey to baja, Monday, September 17, 2007 5:48 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

fwiw i know the 'gateway' cover isnt for the book but i liked it too much not to use it

Oh I see - I was o_O at a novel coming with a "Free Hint Book".

I recommended Flatland to a kid at a month ago school and he loved it, it was really gratifying.

Joining the chorus loving the covers - that L'Engle one really really makes me want to read it.

I actually read Gateway because I played that game

Only things I voted for that have shown up so far have been Lanark and M.R. James. But there's a lot of dope stuff showing up that I'm putting on my to-read list...

Nothing from my ballot has placed yet, but some stuff I'm pretty happy about.

I am assuming Mountains of Madness is the HPL which will hit top 10 or 5 since Cthulhu placed relatively low. Also yay for MR James! Be born be born!

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27 Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
110 points/13 votes/0 #1 votes

In my English 110 or something I got in, not quite trouble, but ah increased my rep as a lit-scoundrel for arguing (this was a long time ago, so details are sketchy) that the way the one guy kept quoting Shakespeare was no different from the Somatose people always reciting their mantras. That everybody's just programmed anyhow, so we should eat donuts and get fat.

This was the class where I also suggested that Lady Macbeth had recently had a miscarriage or lost an infant since there is a reference to her lactating in one of her solils. This evoked a wonderful "ewwww" from the rest of the class, and I didn't sleep with any of them.

― The Luge (Horace Mann), Friday, January 23, 2004 4:06 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

Well, there could be a serious lack of human intimacy in my world. But I find there isn't if I make an effort, and try to connect with people, and "love is a verb, not a noun, blah blah blah" and all that.

The future of BNW *has* to be somewhat slightly appealing and/or realistic, or we wouldn't buy the idea that people would have chosen to live in it. Many Dystopian stories (Logan's Run, f'rinstance) I just can't picture how it could have happened. BNW, I could. But it wouldn't be my choice.

― the river fleet, Saturday, January 24, 2004 8:57 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

People who disparage the Soma-world are ignorant of how shitty life is for a lot of people. Free will would be great if everything else was free too

― dave q, Saturday, January 24, 2004 9:13 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

^ lowest average ballot placement in the TOP 50 fwiw

BNW is so badass

xpost so this is the book everyone felt obliged to throw a vote

lol, it was my #24

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26 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - The Illuminatus! Trilogy 
111 points/8 votes/0 #1 votes

Fnord is a vacume... but also at the same time it is .....

Fnord?

Fnord is evaporated herbal tea without the herbs.

Fnord is that funny feeling you get when you reach for the
Snickers bar and come back holding a slurpee.

Fnord is the 43 1/3rd state, next to Wyoming.
Fnord is this really, really tall mountain.
Fnord is the reason boxes of condoms carry twelve instead of ten.

Fnord is the blue stripes in the road that never get painted.
Fnord is place where those socks vanish off to in the laundry.
Fnord is an arcade game like Pacman without the little dots.
Fnord is a little pufflike cloud you see at 5pm.

Fnord is the tool the dentist uses on unruly patients.
Fnord is the blank paper that cassette labels are printed on.
Fnord is where the buses hide at night.
Fnord is the empty pages at the end of the book.

Fnord is the screw that falls from the car for no reason.
Fnord is why Burger King uses paper instead of foam.
Fnord is the little green pebble in your shoe.
Fnord is the orange print in the yellow pages.

Fnord is a pickle without the bumps.
Fnord is why ducks eat trees.
Fnord is toast without bread.
Fnord is a venetian blind without the slats.

Fnord is the lint in the navel of the mites that eat
the lint in the navel of the mites that eat
the lint in Fnord's navel.

Fnord is an apostrophe on drugs.
Fnord is the bucket where they keep the unused serifs for H*lvetica.
Fnord is the gunk that sticks to the inside of your car's fenders.
Fnord is the source of all the zero bits in your computer.

Fnord is the echo of silence.
Fnord is the parsley on the plate of life.
Fnord is the sales tax on happiness.
Fnord is the preposition at the end of sixpence.

Fnord is the feeling in your brain when you hold your breath too long.
Fnord is the reason latent homosexuals stay latent.

Fnord is the donut hole.
Fnord is the whole donut.

Fnord is an annoying series of email messages.
Fnord is the color only blind people can see.

Fnord is the serial number on a box of cereal.

Fnord is the Universe with decreasing entropy.
Fnord is a naked woman with herpes simplex 428.
Fnord is the yin without yang.
Fnord is a pyrotumescent retrograde onyx obelisk.

Fnord is why lisp has so many parentheses.
Fnord is the the four-leaf clover with a missing leaf.

Fnord is double-jointed and has a cubic spline.
Fnord never sleeps.
Fnord is the "een" in baleen whale.

Fnord is neither a particle nor a wave.
Fnord is the space in between the pixels on your screen.

Fnord is the guy that writes the Infiniti ads.
Fnord is the nut in peanut butter and jelly.
Fnord is an antebellum flagellum fella.

Fnord is a sentient vacuum cleaner.

Fnord is the smallest number greater than zero.
Fnord lives in the empty space above a decimal point.

Fnord is the odd-colored scale on a dragon's back.
Fnord is the redundant coin slot on arcade games.
Fnord was last seen in Omaha, Nebraska.

Fnord is the founding father of the phrase "founding father".
Fnord is the last bit of sand you can't get out of your shoe.
Fnord is Jesus's speech advisor.
Fnord keeps a spare eyebrow in his pocket.
Fnord invented the green hubcap.
Fnord is why doctors ask you to cough.

Fnord is the "ooo" in varooom of race cars.
Fnord uses two bathtubs at once.

― Gauge StraenJ, Wednesday, January 7, 2004 3:44 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

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25 Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita
114 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

yeah reality is often pretty boring. musicians with no imagination should just go away. ever read master and margarita? now that book's got a lot of imagination, and even somehow thru the wild magic of it all says everything it needs to about everything. beautiful.

― Bob Shaw (Bob Shaw), Thursday, June 19, 2003 2:40 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

halfway done!

lol I was about to be all "I have never even heard of this" and then I clicked on the URL for the image and I think I read it...?

The Master & Margarita is one of those books I should love but don't...much better magical realism elsewhere imo.

(at the very least I remember that cover from when I was a kid)

if be pretty surprised if you hadnt read m&m dan its a staple of 'serious fiction' that gets rec'd/pushed on genre readers. it has a weird reputation, i think, in that 'unserious' ppl often really love it & i think that makes chin-strokers less receptive to it

its also kinda glib, but so much fun

that cover is super rad so I am going to read it (again possibly!)

I have to admit I only got halfway through the Illuminatus trilogy before giving up, although that's further than I got with the Foundation trilogy.

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24 J.G. Ballard - The Drowned World
114 points/9 votes/1 #1 vote

I did view [Ballard] as one of post-war Britain's major imaginations and interventions; maybe more than Britain's. He's surely on a par with Philip K. Dick, if not even way beyond him already; not a writer to rank alongside Beckett who cared differently for words, but a greater figure than Hunter S. Thompson or William Burroughs, a greater mind than Kerouac or Ginsberg, maybe equal to Mailer or Vonnegut if you'll indulge the thought. He was Very Twentieth Century. He might be read centuries hence.

― the pinefox, Monday, April 20, 2009 4:21 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

― ears are wounds, Wednesday, July 1, 2009 8:43 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark

Master and Margarita is awesome and hilarious

The Illuminatus Trilogy is one of those things I've always looked at and said "eh, I'll read that someday" and then I blinked and 20 years had gone by

literally every bookish friend I have has urged M & M on me at some point, it is inevitable that I read it.

Trivia point, the Italian weirdo-genius pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was mega obsessed with that book.

So far this list has been rather "SF and F is something one reads in one's formative years but not as an adult" IMO

Like these are all the mind-blowing staples of the smart & questioning middle school/high school kid.

(just an observation and Bulgakov + Ballard prob fall outside this)

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23 Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games
115 points/8 votes/0 #1 votes

get me one?

fuckin hardcover!

sci-fi should come out in paperback. word is bond.

― s1ocki, Wednesday, January 30, 2008 1:55 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

Master and Margarita is awesome and hilarious

― first it smells like donuts, then it smells like don't ask (askance johnson), Tuesday, April 5, 2011 3:12 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

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22 Franz Kafka - The Collected Stories
120 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

My very belated 2 cents is that Kafka, being hugely influenced by Freud, was a sort of proto-surrealist. He certainly had a political side -- an interest in Zionism, and his job at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute gave him a vivid picture of the exploitation of workers. But his genius was to cast his ideas about victimhood in religio-cosmological rather than political terms. In other words, Gogol rather than Bakunin, Kierkegaard rather than Marx, Dostoyevsky rather than Mrs Gaskell were his mentors. (He did like Dickens, though.)

This is what made people like Brecht scorn him as a 'man caught beneath the wheels of history'. But he has outlived Brecht as a literary / cinematic influence for this very reason: he proposes no rationale or remedy for the world of pointless persecution he portrays. And he even gives bureaucratic menace and the sense of guilt it fosters a certain comic charm. So he's much closer to the Gogol of 'A Government Inspector' than the Brecht of 'The Measures Taken'.

Brecht was always after a certain Schweikian lightness, but never achieved it, more often ending up didactic and prescriptive. Kafka, influenced by the Yiddish theatre troupes he saw in Prague, couldn't help being as folksy and entertaining as he was Modern and serious.

― Momus (Momus), Sunday, November 3, 2002 5:51 AM (8 years ago) Bookmark

Momus OTM

I didn't vote for PoG but it's a novel I'm glad exists - in the end I wanted the whole thing to be about Azad and didn't care about the tournament or whatever, but that's a different novel.

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21 H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness
123 points/7 votes/0 #1 votes

"Mountains of Madness" = Totally awesome!

― Jonathan Williams (ex machina), Thursday, February 6, 2003 3:18 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

[Lovecraft] was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list.

― Luc Sante, Thursday, October 19, 2006 5:01 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

A post I think about about all the time is Remy's one about sleeping in Lovecroft's bed.

WAHT that is low!

as a social satire and evidence of its author's precognitive genius, brave new world is aces

as a literary novel it is a heap of steaming dung

are you sure you aren't confusing it with "Heart of Darkness"?

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20 Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time
123 points/8 votes/0 #1 votes

The only contemporary fantasy I really stan for is Robert Jordan which is a hangover from my youth, but when I've tried to explain to skeptics what I like about him the half-hearted attempts at arguments I've made probably apply to a lot of (the better) fantasy, namely:

While an absolute emphasis on realism now seems to be pretty rare in modern lit crit or its more popular variants (e.g. newspaper book reviews) I think instead there's quite a strong judgmental binary between realism and playing-with-form, such that what counts as good writing often has to slot into either (or sometimes both) of those categories, an opposition which stuff like "magic realism" really only papers over. It's not so much that this restricts what kinds of stories can be told, but rather it defines the contexts in which particular kinds of achievements can be recognised as such.

Jordan is (was) probably the most sophisticated "plotter" of any writer I've read in terms of the dizzying interplay of characters, twists, narrative arcs etc. but because the actual writing style is fairly conventional, this can never be celebrated as such, it's defined as being soap opera-ish (which it is) or even decadent b/c fantasy just isn't supposed to try for complexity; while at the same time a "merely" complex plot isn't enough by itself to impressive in a non-fantasy context. It would be different if he had been constructing a social realist drama or if he'd been playing with literary convention (or both!) both of which provide a more respectable framework in which the complexity of the plot would become at least for some critics a point in its favour. I mean it's pretty obvious why new wave SF of the 70s and 80s gets a lot of critical support whereas fantasy does not - it ticks so many more of the boxes that exist for good non-SF writing. To be fair, figures like Dick and Ballard and Gibson are just all around better and more interesting writers than most prominent fantasy writers, but that doesn't mean the cards aren't also stacked against the latter group in terms of achieving recognition when they are doing good or interesting work.

I think "we" are much better at recognising how populist and/or middlebrow techniques can be inventive and effective in the context of television shows or, obviously, music, than we are with writing.

― Tim F, Tuesday, January 19, 2010 5:43 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

every single one of them

― yes! no rabies! (Lamp), Sunday, August 2, 2009 7:52 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

aw, you should have used the classic Tombot "MAGIC IS BAD FOR YOU UNLESS YOU HAVE TITS!!!!!" post

lol i forgot abt that post - it is p classic. i had known i wanted to use that tim f quote since it first started to look like the wheel of time wld chart tho

I voted "The Drowned World" number one. I found it haunting me for months afterwards - as much the atmosphere as the actual story.

I was a major Wheel of Time fan until the slow releases killed it for me - couldn't bring myself to vote for it after that.
I'm going to re-read it when Sanderson finishes the whole thing though.

i hope Alex in SF hasnt stopped reading cuz i was hoping for some HARD SCI-FI nerd rage @ how high the wheel of time ended up placing...

wait until A Game of Thrones hits the top 10

(btw is it just me or is this the most congenial, civilized poll thread we've had)

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19 Philip K. Dick - The VALIS Trilogy
125 points/6 votes/1 #1 vote

I can't say enough positive things about PKD (he inspired one of my email addressed and my AIM handle). Esp the Valis trilogy--brilliant on so many levels.

― Orbit (Orbit), Thursday, July 21, 2005 11:34 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

AFAIK the Transmigration of Timothy Archer wasn't written as a part of any "trilogy" - it was only labeled so after Dick's death, because of some thematic similarities. Nothing really connects it to VALIS, so I think it should count as its own entry.

― Tuomas, Monday, February 7, 2011 2:48 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark

^^ the best average placement for any title w/ 3+ votes btw, like almost every vote for it was in top 5

I enjoy the plot of Wheel of Time, and don't have any problems with the writing as writing, but I loathe the many, many repetitive interior monologues. Enjoyed Sanderson's two much more than Jordan's because he doesn't do it as much.

you idiots decided to put kafka in your sci fi poll and then have the freaking wheel of time and philip k dick placing higher than him