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

lot of silly-ass Stephen King and Neil Gaiman crap on there

the existence of Feist on there signals that pretty much any old shit is go

first woman #18, first non-white writer is... uh ... back to you in a sec....

wait, I'm not kidding any more. I think every single book on here is by a white person.

Octavia Butler's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiised

ppl voted exclusively for white people in an NPR poll? NO WAY

tbf our list was pretty whitebread too

(also #18 is noted female author Patrick Rothfuss)

he's got a great ass what can i say

No Delany, no credibility

I presume they disqualified Earthsea for being YA, which is fucking garbage when there's Schmored of the Schmings on there, plus Watership Down, The Once and Future King, Pratchett, and fifty dozen facile happy fantasyland unicorns and rainbows la di da vomitbooks.

starting in on Lanark. This better be good! the illustrated plates in the edition I have are promising

oddly had just been re-reading some Irvine Welsh as well, had no idea Gray was Scottish

Don't forget James Kelman. I think there is an entire Kelman story buried in Lanark somewhere

the first book of lanark is absolutely brilliant but I got bogged down in the biographical section

love this doc on gray

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrSxH9RjBQc

Is it weird that I've never even heard of Gene Wolfe until this thread?

A little, yeah!

I have read about 80-90% of the top 60, too, but have never heard of Wolfe. Weird.
But I find it strange that some people don't know/don't care about Ted Chiang

I've just given up on Song of Ice & Fire, halfway through Book 2. I'm going to read this Gene Wolfe instead

What were your problems with it? I usually don't like epic fantasy but I was thinking of starting it.

I read the first book in conjunction with watching the HBO series, and can honestly say that although I enjoyed the book immensely, I felt the series was getting everything so right, appropriately condensing chapter-length 'reveals' into single scenes. Now, while reading Book 2, I feel like I'm reading a teleplay that needs editing.

read it very slowly - out loud if possible

wolfe, i mean

every time this thread is bumped the handful of formatting errors in the rundown posts eat away at me like acid

Bet nobody noticed them but you, Lamp, but that is how it goes.

Never really got into Gene Wolfe but he is such a favorite of everybody on ilx except ledge that I keep meaning to give him another chance.

Also never got a toehold on the oeuvre of that other local favorite Glen Cook, but that thing somebody posted about him complaining about the format of those Black Company collections was otm, those omnibuses are really clunky.

the second one is a big improvement on the first, actually, in terms of ugliness

It's an improvement in that it's more ugly or less ugly?

less ugly. matte printing; the digital painting fx on the cover are less .. bad; the lettering is no longer out of control. it's still not 'a good cover' but it's probably a little better than a lot of fantasy art. the spine design is pretty good. the next three are uniform with it, i think

I find Wolfe a bit impenetrable myself.

I heard recently that Damon Knight "grew him up like a bean" or something like that.

would anybody be interested if i started a book of the new sun reading club thread?

i am just startin the 4th book for the 3nd time and will soon be ready for the 4th go-round

YES

i just went looking for them all in the library the other day and no go u_u

ok

just finished canticle for leibowitz. didn't get it. meh.

Remember really liking the first third of that book, but would agree the rest was meh.

I love that book and its Luddism.

finished first book of Lanark... now on to the "Prologue". first book seemed very Lynchian to me, this dream state/purgatory world where things are only dimly understood and tangentially explained. Dunno if I'm gonna slog through all of this tbh

starting "book of the new sun" reading thread on ILB

so Lanark is suitably absorbing but I can't help but think it was a bit out of place here... I mean well over half of it is a completely straightforward biographical narrative, and the parts that aren't seem to fit more in the mold of Dante or something (granted I still have the last "book" to go)

it is in the british library science fiction 'OUT OF THIS WORLD' ergo it is science fiction

so is jane eyre

if only jane eyre were good it couldve had a spot in our countdown!

it's a thing

book 4 (and prologue too in retrospect) is more Kafka than Dante

despite enjoying the beginning i found lanark kind of a slog. frustrated man blah blah. i probably didn't 'get it'

reading Vladimir Sorokin's "Ice"... this is interesting on some levels, incomprehensible on others (I have already missed a bunch of references, I'm sure, as well as some jokes in German). On the fence about it.

I have gotten back to reading Dhalgren. It is... so good.