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

Maitland looked across the drained lagoon at dusk. His semen traced the coutours of Elizabeth's thigh etc etc etc

I like that we've moved from Dick to Moorcock

LOOOL

if only there was a sci-fi fantasy writer named sausage

Anus Anus Attanasio

There must be a Wang.

George R. R. Sausage

I want to complain about everything but I kind of love this thread

Man, I've only ever read one PKD novel (The Man in the High Castle fwiw) and I didn't think too much of it, so these results are kinda wtf to me

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/10Dune.jpg?t=1302113771
10 Frank Herbert - Dune
179 points/14 votes/0 #1 votes

Dune the first one = Classic.

Probably one of my top 5 SF novels - loved how the setting was based around this hard environmental science (which in retrospect doesn't make sense anyway), but then it kind of deliberately tried to piss off all the physics nerds by inserting all this great psychic/telepathy stuff into the narrative. "Screw realistic FTL travel, let's just stick this alien in a tank, feed it hallucinogenic drugs, and it can bend us through space and time." Also loved the idea of the Mentats - "we don't trust AI so we will train humans to be computers instead."

It is a) one of the few canonical SF novels that really stands up, b) seems to pave the way for New Wave in the 1960's and simultaneously make a break with SF as it was in the 40's and 50's (although admittedly this is pure speculation on my part as it was many decades before my birth - contemporary fans and writers may have felt differently).

The rest of the series seemed like a dud to me though - I've read several of the sequels multiple times and really I can't remember anything much about them, except the impression that Frank Herbert really didn't want to write them (maybe that is wishful thinking).

― ears are wounds, Wednesday, February 11, 2009 10:29 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark

i've read them many many times.

i understand the series up to the fourth book.

my comprehension gets rather fuzzy at the fifth.

i've been rereading the sixth in bits and pieces to try to get it.

TOTALLY CLASSIC.

― vahid (vahid), Wednesday, January 7, 2004 5:03 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

boooooo

is that a too low boo or a too high boo

welp my nerd rage about the placement of kafka and borges is weaker than my nerd rage about the placement of dune so here we are

Liked the first one a helluva lot, but seriously diminishing returns for me as I kept reading deeper into the series.

^^^ yes

too high!

but then I like the movie better than the book lol. book was just ponderously impenetrable to me. granted that was 15 years ago

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/9Neuromancer.jpg?t=1302113980
09 William Gibson - Neuromancer
188 points/14 votes/1 #1 vote
Favorite first sentence of a novel

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

― Onimo (GerryNemo), Monday, May 24, 2004 10:22 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

THIS BOOK OWNS

Poor showing for The Big Three so far (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov), maybe they're not The Big Three any more.

Thus, I didn't vote for Dune. Diminishing returns made me skip Erikson too, even though books 2-6 of the Malazan series are some of the best Fantasy I've ever read.

x-post

I actually thought Neuromancer might win.

Neuromancer is awesome.

I'm looking back at my ballot and I think I was high when I submitted it.

My #10 comes in at #9 -- closest match to my ballot so far, v. satisfying. ::burp::

This was my #12, and I really don't know why it wasn't higher

have never read neuromancer and I don't know why

loved dune but haven't read it since high school

Dune and Neuromancer are both really overrated and boring.

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/8Narnia.jpg?t=1302113771
08 C.S. Lewis - The Chronicles of Narnia
195 points/12 votes/1 #1 vote

i haven't read wardrobe since early elementary school pretty much because of familiarity compounded by ubiquity but i think i will try again after finishing the last battle, it was my (and everyone else's i bet) introduction to both narnia and lewis and i was completely utterly captivated by it as a child. edmund was my favorite, of course.

― ethan, Sunday, March 10, 2002 8:00 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark

He plagarized THE BIBLE.

― JM, Sunday, March 10, 2002 8:00 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark

"The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel."

that colour is blue now. see also: my display name

Yuck.

Great to see the Ballard short stories there - ideas factory, dapper literary style (and often characters), great at a sort of weird colonial/heart of darkness thing - affectless people gradually going into completely out there places, based on weird imaginative extrapolations of current scientific and popular culture.

Read Dune a lot when I was younger (i was a bit in love with one of the characters), but the big politics bored the hell out of me even then.

Neuromancer is great, in fact, I haven't read it since I was 15/16, and I reckon I'd enjoy it as much now or even more maybe as I did then.

Poor showing for The Big Three so far (Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov), maybe they're not The Big Three any more.

― Gully Foyle is my name (Matt #2), Wednesday, April 6, 2011 2:22 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark

http://images.wikia.com/simpsons/images/5/5a/Martin.jpg

From what I remember, here's how I'd rank the Narnia books

The Silver Chair
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
Prince Caspian
The Magician's Nephew
.
.
.
.
The Horse and His Boy
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
[about a bazillion more "."s]
The Last Battle

Hoo boy, Narnia. The Last Battle is srsly weird, in a bad way. I read them all again recently (was convalescing and there weren't any other books for a few days). Not sure I really liked them. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe taps into some great stuff, the rest, there's a lot of dubious race characterisation, well Turk/Christian stuff anyway, or so it seems to me. Wd go for his science fiction trilogy personally. Silver Chair is pretty weird tho. Very subterranean iirc.

I want it understood that my Dune vote at #20something was for the first book only...

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/7TheLeft.jpg?t=1302114074
07 Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
199 points/11 votes/2 #1 votes

you would hope people have moved beyond looking at le guin as a sci fi writer

― moonship journey to baja, Friday, July 17, 2009 5:43 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

When I was 14 I was Mr. Tumnus in a production of the musical version of Narnia. They made me, in all of my early adolescent awkward and chubby glory, wear white spandex with a cropped tuxedo jacket, a top hat and hooves made out of construction paper. It was so traumatizing that I don't think I've been able to think of anything even remotely related to CS Lewis fondly since then.

okay wait

(Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov), maybe they're not The Big Three any more.

Heinlein is mostly garbage. Clarke eh, I dunno - I would hope that Rendezvous with Rama or 2001 would place? Asimov is seminal but definitely archaic/outdated to read him now. I tried to re-read Foundation recently and couldn't really do it.

you heard me

Wd go for his science fiction trilogy personally.

^^^yes

that's a perfect storm of awful, E!

Yes Le Guin! Was my #7 vote too.

"you would hope people have moved beyond looking at le guin as a sci fi writer"

hahaha

x-post - Trust me, I know. I had a solo too. It was so mortifying.

huh didn't expect LHOD to place so high but I'm cool with that. LeGuin is great, book is phenomenal, etc.

a panpipe solo?

xp

I still haven't read that Le Guin, largely because my wife had to read it for a class in college and thoroughly detested it. (Then again, she also hated Snow Crash which I ended up loving; I don't remember why she was getting assigned all of these SF books but it was kind of severe bait-and-switch on the part of the professor, lol)

Actually re-read The Last Battle relatively recently to see if it was as insane as i remembered. Yeah, pretty much

http://i1224.photobucket.com/albums/ee366/lamp11/6HisDarkMaterials.jpg?t=1302114111
06 Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials
219 points/12 votes/2 #1 votes

I think this is a magnificent series. I expect they work beautifully as adventure stories for children, with the daemon idea being very charming, and intelligent polar bears in armour are another winner. However as an allegedly intellectual adult, I loved the richness of the underpinnings and thematic content, the radical ideas spun off from the fringes of modern physics, and the astounding central meaning: even if religion is 100% true (as it can be and is in this fantasy world) it is still a very bad thing, to be opposed. This is a daring and original theme, especially for a young audience.

I don't care about Harry Potter, and these aren't that market - they're much more in the Lord of the Rings sector, but I think they are superior in every way to that, and (urgent and key point) immensely more enjoyable to read.

― Martin Skidmore, Friday, July 19, 2002 7:00 PM (8 years ago) Bookmark