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

They'll never do that, I don't think? Because a "revision" comes out when sales start slacking and the editor thinks the backlist could be working a little harder with a minimum of expense.

In this case the two editions are from different publishers and the original was out of print, but yeah, the same idea still holds - bill it as something new and hope for a sales bump. Stupid anniversary edition of The Jerk.

Re: Ellison, I think most people were disinclined to nominate or vote for individual short stories (I nominated two and voted for one), and there's not really a consensus Ellison collection.

i probably would've voted for 'i have no mouth...'

I Must Vote, But I Have No Mouse

A+

Also scrap what I said about Ellison being the biggest surprise -- Bradbury! Can't believe at least the Martian Chronicles didn't make it.

After having witnessed the results of thinly attended jazz instrumentalist polls in which most of the cats nominated got zero votes, I'm never surprised by the results of any poll ever.

Right, have managed to get some info on the Crowley revisions now I'm not on a phone. Aegypt isn't heavily revised:

This is a great way to advertise the series and a few small changes have been made, with a a few more substantial ones to come in the later volumes, but your old hardbacks will do just fine. There are errors in the Latin and other things but if you don;t mind those just read on. I don't know why I'm saying this since I thereby lose my $1.60 on the pb you miht have bought, but ah well.

And on the later books:

The Overlook Love&Sleep isn't substantively different -- mostly I removed recap material intended to remind readers of what happened in Volume I, which appeared some years before. In the Ovelook Daemonomania I did that too, and also made other cuts, most small -- a paragraph, a sentence -- and some larger -- a couple of pages. One or two entire scenes are now gone, as being either redundant, or made redundant by their appearance in the last volume, or just not so hot. One entire brief new scene added. And throughout there are words altered, sentences recast, sentences added, etc., that perhaps a reader of both would not notice but which I think are decided improvements.

Excellent! Thanks for finding that.

always forgot john crowley was on livejournal. him and disch. that was weird, that whole thing.

Yeah, for a long time it felt (till the Fantasy Masterworks Little, Big, I guess) he was this mysterious writer who was almost entirely unavailable in Britain, & there didn't seem to be much info anywhere out there; it blew my mind a little when I first saw him on LJ.

I hadn't heard of him until that came out, but, then, I was fourteen.

I was 26, & had caught wind of him years before from references here and there, American friends primarily. Had had little luck finding much.

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master & Margarita

this is only £3 in hmv if any britishers wanna pick it up. excited to put it on my shelf to read after my book of checkov plays.

woof, major thankage for that info. It sounds like the changes he made to books 2-4 might be salutary (removing redundant mtrl which had been necessitated by the time gaps between books).

I have never cracked open Daemonomania let alone Endless Thingy. Someday...

£1.99 on amazon 8)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Master-Margarita-Wordsworth-Classics/dp/1840226579?qid=1302280724

those wordsworth classics are a recently discovered goldmine. picked up a couple and they seem fine. (they are cheap as they are out of copyright, but still, how you can print a 777 page book like the one i bought (dickens) and transport it and give the shop a slice and still turn a profit out of 1.99 is a bit of a mystery)

Have no idea. The copy I got is nicer than those though, glossy cover, don't know the pages will fall out*, nice little notes on the text and commentary bits at the back etc.

*goodbye copy of confessions of an english opium eater, i hardly knew thee.

I bought TIGANA today - pumped!

We should have a thread where we read all the books we are buying because of this wonderful thread and say what we think of them.

ok how about using this thread

well, there's already what's basically a rolling fantasy thread. an SF one could work.

rolling fantasy thread could use a title other than "fantasy sucks, but not all the time" or whatever

"HELP ME FIND SOME FANTASY THAT DOESN'T SUCK QUITE AS MUCH AS THE REST OF THE SUCKY GENRE" yeah, oh boy, can't wait to get to that.

Greg, I'm pumped that you're gonna read Tigana too!!!

I love the fantasy genre, lots, and I want it to stop sucking (OR: recommend me fantasy stuff that does not suck)

yeah, i don't really like searching 'fantasy sucking' when i look for it. maybe a mod could retitle it 'fantasy sucks, but not all the time: rolling fantasy and speculative lit thread'. or maybe someone could start that thread, and then we could retire the other thread; that would work, too.

I firmly & staunchly believe SF and F need to share the same rolling thread, btw, despite the very provable differences between the two.

Yeah, that was never meant to become the rolling fantasy thread, I wince every time I see it tbh.

Staying on this thread for books we read because of it makes a lot of sense tbh.

Waiting for the cuddlez on this thread to degenerate into Tiptree-style xenobiologically-induced in-fighting.

Re: Ellison, I think most people were disinclined to nominate or vote for individual short stories (I nominated two and voted for one), and there's not really a consensus Ellison collection.

Feel like somebody should have nominated Robert Sheckley's "Zirn Left Unguarded, the Jenjik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead" which is the ultimate sci-fi story in three little pages.

Which you can heard read by our very own Tracer Hand here: http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/09/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-9/

OK I'm listening to the whole thing now and the Sluglords say it's five pages or, Sluglord Sinkah says, four and a half.

Awaiting the reports from the latest wave of Tigana readers. Looked at it in the bookstore but didn't want to pull the freaky trigger.

Just found this and only taken a quick look around, don't know how legit it is, but it looks like it has a ton of sci-fi classics in e-reader format (mostly epub, some pdf):

http://arthursbookshelf.com/sci-fi/index.html

those h beam piper short stories i've seen on gutenburg. a lot of those pulpy magazines are deemed to be public domain (mag out of business, writer sufficiently dead) but a lot come with the proviso "should you know better let us know and we'll take them down"

if i had voted i would have likely placed 'the forever war' at number 1 and given some love to alastair reynolds.

You know who else I feel kind of sad about getting no love? Avram Davidson. I've only dipped my toes in the water of his short story oeuvre but he does seem to be something of a genius.

Read Flatland, pretty underwhelmed. I wasn't expecting to learn anything new, given that I've already written code for a 4d rotating cube, but I was kinda taken aback by the style and atmosphere - all that stuff about feeble females and quelling underclass rebellions, wtf.

only 4d?

pff, academic. also it was in basic on a ps2 which was self-punishment enough.

I'm certain that reading Flatland as an adult is a very different experience from reading it as a kid; I don't even remember the stuff you're talking about

HEY someone put some Moorcock on the take-shelf last night, so now I have The Dreamthief's Daughter, The Skrayling Tree, and The White Wolf's Son. One of them has Nazis, which I could not be less interested in. But in general my first impression is that these ugly-ass "haggard-faced elves with wispy hair by wannabe Rackham/Canty fans" jacket illustrations are MASSIVELY unfair to the actual playfulness and tone of these books.

xp it's like half of the book! It could be ham-fisted victorian satire, either way I'm surprised it's still considered a fun read for teh youth.

I think for this whole thread I've been thinking of Flatland as Super Flat Times. Huh.

tbh all I really remember/cared about were the geometry sections

HEY someone put some Moorcock on the take-shelf last night, so now I have The Dreamthief's Daughter, The Skrayling Tree, and The White Wolf's Son.

I haven't read any of the books in this series, sorry to say

One of them has Nazis, which I could not be less interested in.

Moorcock is a huge European history nerd and nazis/hitler pop up in all kinds of weird places in his work. At one point in the Pyat novels, the narrator assumes the role of Hitler's tranny-dominatrix-lover as part of a Nazi high command scheme to maintain Hitler as a functional figurehead. so it's not all humorless...

But in general my first impression is that these ugly-ass "haggard-faced elves with wispy hair by wannabe Rackham/Canty fans" jacket illustrations are MASSIVELY unfair to the actual playfulness and tone of these books.

this is generally very true of his material, sadly. I think some of the 70s covers he had were great, but from the 80s on everything gets the half-assed Elric treatment when it comes to the jackets.

I was at a church basement the other day and they had a table of spiritual books laid out for a lent book-lend program

next to all the typical god-in-yr-life stuff there were three 70s paperbacks of the earthsea trilogy and for a brief moment I wished I was a god lover

Was under the impression that Moorcock was kind of a hack style-wise. Is that unfair?

he REALLY cranks out the material (or at least he did, he's slowed down a bit), and he's kind of all over the place style-wise, so I can see how that would give the appearance of hackery. Honestly, he's someone I appreciate more for the breadth and range of ideas than as a prose stylist - "playful" is very much an appropriate descriptor. y'know, one series will be all HG Wells homage, another will be cut-up po-mo WS Burroughs formal experimentation, and another will be straight-faced historical fiction. the versatility and his obvious love of various genres and subgenres is what appeals to me the most.

I did not really love where part of the story was told by a previously un-introduced third party who just showed up for one chapter to relate the tale to a nameless audience somewhere in Texas.