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

Man there should never be ANY PKD cover designs except these DAW ones, they are kicking my ass!

(putting in an early vote for the crazy LOTR cover designs from the early Ballantine pb's where there are like a million little stylized creatures running around)

(or the ones w the low-contrast Tolkein paintings, anything but photorealistic eagles tbh)

Woot. A Scanner Darkly is my favorite PKD.

Mine too.

mine too

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/dispossessed2.jpg?t=1302110245
16 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
132 points/9 votes/0 #1 votes

Not in the least bit trashy: 'The Dispossessed' by Ursula le Guin. Probably the best political sci-fi I've read. Including '1984'.

― Wooden (Wooden), Wednesday, August 18, 2004 2:23 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

I love books, and I love Ursula Le Guin! In fact I just wrote a paper on how she redefined traditional notions of text/literature as a ?? post-modernist author. What fun!

― kath (kath), Friday, June 11, 2004 9:54 PM (6 years ago) Bookmark

This muthafucka has still never read Scanner Darkly or Palmer Eldritch. Sort of saved them for later on purpose (my time of biggest PKD reading activity was like 1989-1994).

Ursula K Le Guin hooray! Must reread them all some day.

great book, surprised to see it place so high (presumably beating out Left Hand of Darkness?) It's definitely a high point for her. I think it was the first place I really read anything that took anarchism seriously.

The Dispossessed was totally a formational book for me in terms of my political views when I read it as a teen.

today's dick ratio is 1:2

Wow, girthy!

WmC what is your problem with Dick

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/15ASong.jpg?t=1302110900
15 George R R Martin - A Song of Ice and Fire
133 points/10 votes/1 #1 vote

Trust, remy. Martin executes his plots deftly and swiftly, and his characters are really well drawn. It does have some of the weaknesses of the fantasy genre -- the prose can get a bit, uh, purple -- but a lot of the supernatural stuff is kept in the background. It's all about the subterfuge and intrigue and suspense. Do it. You won't regret it.

― elmo, patron saint of nausea (allocryptic), Saturday, January 7, 2006 6:57 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JjTZojojDPI/SxPR-ffvWkI/AAAAAAAAAok/bzrrZEsb1T4/s1600/0007stfc.jpg

― Sheenastia Easton (ENBB), Friday, January 28, 2011 9:56 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark

I mean sure maybe he's overrepresented here (does he have more great books than, say, Lem? or Moorcock? eh maybe) but his body of work is pretty impressive and broad on the whole

xp

I am kinda dreading dealing with George R. R. Martin

also uh isn't that the wrong cover bro

It's a series. That's the upcoming book.

also uh isn't that the wrong cover bro

its a joke

... on the ppl thinking that book will actually come out

I took three serious runs at PKD in my teens, early 20s and late 20s, and in each case there was something about the prose style that turned me off -- I guess a similar reaction to your issues with Delany. No denying the scope of his ideas and the body of work as a whole, there was just something about the execution that turned me off. I owe him another shot, I guess.

x-post - lol

GRRM did not make it into my ballot but he deserves a placement. No one had ever done high fantasy noir quite like this b4 he came along. Fantasyland as infernal machine.

Like you get the feeling in these books that the world FUKN SUCKS but even worse is the cold void outside it.

huh. seems like the kind of thing I would hate, tbh

I dated someone once who wasn't too bright but was into PKD as some kind of...subversive thing? No objection to people read and liking books for their own reasons, but I'm p sure it was liking the IDEA of liking PKD more than actually reading him. Because he didn't read.

Gave a bunch of PKD a try in that year but hated it all except the short stories. Quite liked the shorts, actually.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/14DoAndroids.jpg?t=1302111945
14 Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
133 points/11 votes/0 #1 votes

I read him amongst a lot of other science fiction when I was 12 and only read 'Gollancz'. So as a purist I think you ought only to read the Gollancz editions. Those yellow labels really used to stick out. He's great before you hit puberty. After that he's a drag because of things like his above-mentioned attitude to women. Who's gonna pretend he's not childish and vain? When I read 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' it was comparable to the experience of reading 'Crime and Punishment' before I could understand it. I can't complain about his style at all. I have no problems with the use of adverbs - I mean Dick's books are full of vague phrases like 'Abba was a tender and wise entity, huge and furry and pretty' - but I have few problems with that; to me it's better than Hemingway-esque 'Style and Grace' editing. And obviously the ideas he deals with and his willingness to go with a dream (not a 'fantasy') over a plot make him better than most sci-fi writers. It's a gift to impoverished readers to have some Kafka or Dostoevsky inserted into a pulp novel - a novel that doesn't take you a year to recover from, as a 'masterpiece' would.

― maryann, Thursday, May 30, 2002 7:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark

okay this is getting kind of ridiculous

ridickulous, even.

yeah i love PKD too but i only voted for 'a scanner darkly' since it's my favorite one and i dont like to look like that guy who's got 6 beatles records on his top 20 albums list

I think I put A Scanner Darkly and the Valis trilogy on my list, I tried to stay away from voting for more than one book per author in general

and we still haven't gotten man in the high castle on here so it's probably not over yet...

In ILX terms, PKD = New Order or something.

(which i just read for the first time a couple weeks ago, very good)

Earth Abides is not going to make this list, but another 4 or 5 Dick books will at this rate

I voted for Man in the High Castle

The only author allowed two votes on my ballot was Vance.

so is it just crazy vote-splitting that got us these results? everyone voted for a couple different PKD books? I guess that's some kind of consensus, but it seems wrong.

I'd laugh if all of the Gibson books ended up in the top 10

If this was a poll on dissensus or w/e we would be complaining about too high a Ballard ratio.

given all the heavy-hitting canonical stuff I still expect to place I guess no one else voted for Noon or Lethem eh

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/13Ficciones.jpg?t=1302111945
13 Jorge Luis Borges - Ficciones
138 points/10 votes/0 #1 votes

I just finished Borges' Ficciones, which may be the best thing I've ever read.

― Z S, Sunday, June 24, 2007 8:29 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark

It is also possible to argue that Borges’s work was indeed political, that he himself was a political activist all his life, that his lack of interest as an artist in the world outside the book arose from his and his mother’s dislike of the dominant elements in Argentine society, that his style and his system developed not despite Argentine society but because of it.

― Colm Tóibín, Sunday, May 11, 2006 3:17 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark

^^ kinda on some "if you dudez were going 2 vote 4 it shouldve been #1" tip here personally btw

also: Z S otm

Borges is like a genre unto himself

is Calvino gonna place too now lol

OK well Cosmicomics better be on here then (showing my allegiances)

ha xpost

Love Borges and Calvino should imo!

Calvino got my #1 vote.

:D