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

£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.

Read Lem's "His Master's Voice" (not in the results but in thomp's ballot). Pretty awesome. Wasn't sure about the 'preface', a potted psychological biography of the 'author', didn't really comprehend the purpose or the content, even. But once he moved away from psychology and on to sociology, anthropology, physics, philosophy, politics... damn. A whole heap of ideas to chew on in there, and a welcome if not exactly cheery antidote to the slew of works where humanity radiates brightly throughout the galaxy.

i'd forgotten the preface! the more you read of lem tho the more obvious it becomes that he would really have rather liked to have been borges

I looked up that delillo 'rewrite' you mentioned. ugh. where did we have a discussion about made-up scifi words?

Mainwaring edged his way to Billy's side.
"We used zorgs," he whispered"
"For what?"
"Identifying the mohole."
"Zorgs are useless."
"We used them," Mainwaring said.
"Practically nobody knows what they even are."
"Softly knows, doesn't he?"
"He's one of the few."
"Softly explained how we might use zorgs. I briefed my sylphing teams. Without zorgs we would never have found the mohole."
"Amazement."
"Except Softly wanted us to use them in tracking back the signal. But we didn't need them for that. We needed them for the mohole."

horrendous.

idno, that at least made me smirk

where did we have a discussion about made-up scifi words?

I brought it up on the nominations thread re: Delany, maybe that's what you're thinking of?

aye that was it.

I prob should try Solaris but my impression (not having seen the films either) has generally been that it's quite heavy on the psychology, which is not something that interests me greatly, cf. my comment on the HMV preface. Am I wrong?

Yes.

the book is waaaaaaaaay better than both versions of the movie, imho (*ducks* I know there are some serious Tarkovsky stans on this board). I don't think it's Lem's best by a long shot, but it is good.

Ok, I'm on it. Became a full-on Le Guin stan last year, maybe it's Lem's turn.

his ouevre is really broad - satire, po-mo experiments, hard science, political allegories, silly stories about robots. and unlike Moorcock his prose is always crisp and economical.

currently reading Jetse De Vries' Shine anthology... dunno how I feel about this yet, but I'm only on the first story. Never heard of any of the authors included before, except for Alisdair Gray

This thread got me into reading sci-fi novels for the first time in ages (I haven't really read novels at all for the last few years, mostly just science and other non-fixtion + comics)... It didn't place in the poll at all, but I picked up Sheri S. Tepper's Grass at the local library, because it sounded like the sort of novel I would enjoy - and I did. I've always been fascinated by sci-fi that focuses on the ecosystem of planets which are sorta like ours (i.e. they sound credible enough, not too far-fetched), but still inherently weird. And Grass had plenty of that (it sort of reminded me of the Aldebaran comic book series by Leo), but it also managed to include political commentary, philosophy, religion (it took religion much more seriously than sci-fi stereotypically does, which was interesting), hard science, and a large cast of well fleshed-out characters in the mix, so it definitely was a fascinating read. Plus her writing was often a joy to read, obviously she isn't one of those writers who'd put ideas before language.

I think I want to check out some more Tepper, but her bibliography seems to be quite large, what should I try next?

Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

lol