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

Also SO FUCKING APT that the DM's guide and The Dying Earth are tied for 61st, since D&D magic was totally inspired by those books.

This is a dope point imo.

Wait so how many pts was a #4 ballot placement worth? I am stung that Aegypt didn't even make the top 100

i think you may have been the only person to vote for it. but 22 points.

alex yeah part of what hurt the 'hard' sf books is that most of the non-ranked ballots were really sf-heavy. also for whatever reason so many of what i consider big, consensus sf books were placed really low on ranked ballots. i mean forever war got 7 votes! 'riverworld' got 4 votes & only 26 points &c &c

But Riverworld is terrible.

^^^ this. Don't try to write dialogue for Mark Twain, pro tip to Philip Jose Farmer.

I thought it was awfully cold and uncaring, tbh, and 100% based on perceived male needs & goals in a world that was tailored to favor aggressive, non-conformist men, which tbh is just some kind of circle-jerk for its audience.

Also wiki just reminded me that women were re-awakened as virgins, which is beyond creepy and disturbing in its implications.

uh

that sounds uncomfortable

wait Laurel which book are you talking about...?

haha ive never read riverworld i just thought it was a 'major work' or w/e, also i have a memory of seeing this cover every time i went to the bookstore:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_IoU3bEFUwWc/SaqfX3pN5TI/AAAAAAAAE9U/AhUWpc89Sas/s400/Strange+Relations.jpg

so he sorta stands out to me

Shakey: It must have been To Your Shattered Bodies Go which I inaccurately and maybe unfairly just think of as "Riverworld."

Scattered Bodies. See? My brain resists remembering anything up to and including the spelling of the title.

Lamp is a hero for doing this

(The poll, I mean--though posting that Farmer cover also)

& Yes, great poll! Thank you Lamp.

I nominate Lamp for running all ILX polls from here on out

ned ragget's post about hitcher's guide to the galaxy is amazing.

it's a shame LOTR won imo but there's still a lot of books i haven't read on this list and that i'm happy for.

All-Time Speculative Fiction You Haven't Read Before is a different poll imho

errr ok fine

i'm sure i'm not the only one approaching this as a way to find out abt classic books they haven't read yet?

No, me too

So glad Stranger In A Strange Land didn't make it, it seemed to be a student favourite for decades.

I am too I guess it's just that, well, worth discovering /= all-time best, really. Like, those are separate categories. This list would have been a lot different if people excluded things the majority of spec fiction readers are already very familiar with (no 1984, no LOTR, etc)

ha i can tell which books (apart from JRR obv) are fantasy ones cos i've never heard of the authors

I think The Past Through Tomorrow is a fantastic brick of nonstop sf ideas -- much of the best of the Golden Age between two covers.

Thanks for all the work you've put in on this, Lamp! Really good work.

Yeah Lamp this was an awesome and surprising joy of a results thread for me to read. Thank you!! I really sort of wish I'm made a ballot now. I will for your next one. :)

To Your Shattered Bodies Go

Sorry I didn't vote but Disch and Sturgeon winding up in the 90-100 zone is some straight bullshit.

Think a lot of you would enjoy reading the Tom Disch book about sci-fi that Elvis Telecom hipped us to, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of.

sturgeon's best stuff is his short stories, tho 'more than human' is really good.

Camp Concentration was my #2

thanks again to lamp for doing this! ha goddamn narnia i thought i was going to get by without a single top 50 thing OH WELL

Stuff I think of as universally loved that I was surprised didn't crack top 50: Ender's Game, Perdido Street Station, Ted Chiang (i voted only for Ender's Game of these)

ender's game is a bunch of fascist fantasy claptrap

wish i'd been around to see this unfold in real time.

lol @ dick
yay @ leguin (left hand was my #1, earthsea #6 - that's a childhood fave but I only read left hand last year and was blown away, as you can tell.) (banks is the only other author i gave two votes to, neither of which made the #50.)
smdh @ narnia
sad for wells, wyndham.

read 32 of the 50, 45 of the 100, voted for 9, 13. The bottom 50 is definitely crazier than the top.

this was a good thread and a very handy 'to read' list for the next while, thanks lamp.

Ted Chiang got a lot of lower ballot votes it seems like, which makes sense to me - it's easy to really like and hard to unreservedly love imo.

17 of the 51, exactly a third. and, tbh, there's not a lot in the other 2/3rds that particularly appeals.

(and reynolds was robbed.)

Have not even tried to follow these threads but Lamp thank you so much for getting all this together. I've grabbed the whole top 100 and will start pecking at the ones I've never read.

I didn't register in time to vote in this, but thanks for doing it, Lamp. A cool mix of stuff I haven't read and stuff I have strong feelings about.

Belated comments -

Laurel & Jon Lewis OTM about Riverworld. I think you're as well-served reading the back cover blurbs as the books.

DJP - I can't stand V, but Lot 49 is great. Just pretend V is written by Pynchon's dark half or something.

Jon Lewis - have you read the revised edition of Aegypt? Or the revised edition of The Solitudes, I forget which title refers to which edition. It's been on my to-read list for ages, but only one edition is available for the Kindle, and I'm not sure if it's the one I should read or not.

WAHT I know nothing about a revised edition of Aegypt!!!

revised Aegypt = The Solitudes right? The overlook press eds? I actually wasn't sure whether Aegypt meant the cycle or the renamed first book in the poll.

Sorry, 'the now-renamed first book'.

Wiki says it was originally published in 1987 under the name Aegypt "...despite Crowley's objections. Revised 2007..." and re-released as The Solitudes. Okay, Aegypt is the one available for Kindle.

I don't know anything about the nature of the revisions, but 2007 was recent enough that maybe there's something on Crowley's LiveJournal.

Why do I keep saying "Kindle" instead of "the Kindle"? THE Kindle. THE.

BAD KINDLE. BAD.

I like the Kindle so much more than I thought I would, but that's a whole nother thread.

So far I can't find any deets about whether the text has actually been revised, in addition to the title change and shift of the title Aegypt to refer to the four books as a whole.

I think it is revised - publisher says so.

Keep in mind "revised" might just mean it got a cover re-design. It's not a very accurate way to talk about something, because "revision" should require a certain amt of changed content. But it's prob just a new afterword or new cover des or something.